Daniel Boone Tribute by Lord Byron in DON JUAN Canto 8

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Contents 1 Dedication 2 Tragically Bound in History Forever 3 Historic Figures, Introduction 4 Historic and Tragic Story and Events 5 Backstory: Boone’s International Fame 6 DON JUAN, Canto 8 7 Sources

Dedication

This Free Space profile is dedicated to Daniel Boone’s cousin and my muse, Juliet Wills. Her hours of tireless research and contributions are immensurable. Thank you for this inspiration.

Tragically Bound in History Forever

Daniel Boone, Lord Byron, the poet Percy Shelley, his wife Mary (Wollstonecraft) Shelley, (the mother of Frankenstein), her stepsister Clara Clairmont, and Don Juan, Canto 8, are inextricably and tragically bound in history forever.

Historic Figures, Introduction

George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron, the major English Romantic poet.

Mary (Wollstonecraft) Shelley is the author of Frankenstein. Mary became the 2nd wife of English Romantic Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary became a widow at age 25 when the poet drowned. On the 8th July 1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday, Percy drowned in his boat, the Don Juan, named after Lord Byron's poem by that name.

The major English Romantic Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley: Still married, Percy's first wife Harriet [Westbrooke-15], pregnant, depressed, drowned herself after Percy had eloped with his soon to be second wife Mary (Wollstonecraft) Shelley. After Harriet Westbrook [Westbrooke-15]'s death, Percy and Mary (Wollstonecraft) Shelley were soon married. On the 8th July 1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday, Percy drowned in a sudden storm on the Gulf of Spezia in his boat, the Don Juan named after Lord Byron's poem by that name.

Claire "Clara" Clairmont was the step-sister of Mary (Wollstonecraft) Shelley. Clara Clairmont was a lover of Lord Byron.

Clara Allegra Byron was the illegitimate daughter of Clara Clairmont and her lover Lord Byron. Clara Allegra Byron Byron-208, died at age 5 from a fever. The poet Shelley would die two months later.

Percy Florence Shelley, 3rd Baronet of Castle Goring, was the only child of Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley to survive childhood.

Percy Florence Shelley was buried in the family vault in the churchyard of St Peter's Church, Bournemouth, reputedly with the heart of his father Percy Shelley alongside him. In that vault, in addition to the patrilineal family, lie the remains of Percy Florence Shelley's maternal grandparents, namely Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Percy Florence Shelley and his wife were instrumental in moving their bones from St Pancras Old Church in London.

John William Polidori, MD, was Lord Byron's personal physician. Polidori subsequently poisoned himself and committed suicide. Polidori's story The Vampyre went on to inspire Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Historic and Tragic Story and Events

Mary Wollstonecraft and the poet Percy Shelley] had eloped. Mary was unmarried and pregnant by Shelley.

In the summer of 1816, Mary (Wollstonecraft) Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Mary's stepsister Clara Clairmont took a trip to visit Clara's lover, Lord Byron, in Geneva, Switzerland. During the visit, Lord Byron suggested that he, Mary, Percy, and Byron's personal physician, John Polidori, have a competition to write the best ghost story to pass time while stuck indoors during the bad weather. Polidori wrote The Vampyre. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote Frankenstein.

Subsequently, Percy Shelley's pregnant first wife drowned herself. The poet Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft were soon married.

Sometime shortly after March 1822, Clara Allegra Byron, the illegitimate daughter of Clara Clairmont and Lord Byron, died in a convent.

On the 8th July 1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday, the poet Shelley drowned in his boat, the Don Juan, named after Lord Byron's poem by that name.

In July-August 1822, Lord Byron, while living in Pisa, finished writing his "Don Juan, Canto 8 which included his tribute to Daniel Boone.

Subsequently 1822, Mary Shelley, while living in Pisa, completed the fair-copy of "Don Juan, Canto 8. (Definition: fair copy: a neat and exact copy especially of a corrected draft.)

On July 15, 1823 , after much tragedy and personal loss, Don Juan, Canto 8, was published. Don Juan, Canto 8 presented Byron's famous tribute to Daniel Boone to the literary universe.

Backstory: Boone’s International Fame

The fame of Daniel Boone diffused itself through the greater part of the world. The life and exploits of Daniel Boone were heard as far as Venice.

The imagination of Lord Byron was pervaded with the story of the American adventurer.

The poet Byron, in the year 1822, put into his longest production no less than seven stanzas of as fine personal analysis and poetic praise as may be found in his lordship’s writings respecting any other character, excepting only Bonaparte.

DON JUAN, Canto 8

DON JUAN, Canto 8

Writing finished, Pisa, July/August 1822

Fair-copied by Mary (Wollstonecraft) Shelley, Pisa 1822

Published by John Hunt, with Cantos 6 and 7, July 15th 1823

Manuscripts: Rough draft: Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas, Austin

Fair copy by Mary (Wollstonecraft) Shelley: National Library of Scotland Acc.12604 / 04056

61.

Of all men, saving Sylla the Man-slayer, 98

Who passes for in life and death most lucky,

Of the Great Names which in our faces stare,

The General Boone, back-woodsman of Kentucky, 99

Was happiest amongst mortals any where; 485

For killing nothing but a bear or buck, he

Enjoyed the lonely, vigorous, harmless days

Of his old age in Wilds of deepest Maze.

98: Sylla the Man-slayer: Lucius Cornelius Sulla, Roman general and politician (138-78 B.C.) foe of Gaius Marius, and notorious for the proscription and murder of thousands of his opponents. B. refers to him as most lucky because he enjoyed the fruits both of power and of retirement, and died in his bed (albeit of a perforated ulcer – see Plutarch’s Life).

99: The General Boone, back-woodsman of Kentucky: Daniel Boone (1735-1820) is to be contrasted with Wellington, and paralleled with Suvorov, as well as with Cincinnatus, Epaminondas, Washington and Pitt – all referred to below, at IX sts.7 and 8 – as types of the simple and puritanical patriot / soldier. See also the section below on Rapp the Harmonist, XV, sts.35-7, and B.’s note. The Boone Stanzas (61-7) brought into Canto VIII with willful incongruity, represent an earlier and more sincere pastoral reflection, contrasting misanthropically with the civilized violence surrounding them. Editors have differing opinions as to where B. obtained his information on Boone. John Wright quotes Morris Birkbeck’s Notes on America (which B. owned: see CMP 246) and a Quarterly Review article, Vol. XXIX p.14 – although the latter was not published until April 1823. E.H.Coleridge refers to Boone’s supposed autobiography, appendix to Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America (1793) by Gilbert Imlay, lover of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of her daughter Fanny. DJV refers to a conversation B. had with “An American” in Florence in 1821 (Museum [New York] XXVII December 1835 p.593) and to Henry Marie Brackenridge’s Views of Louisiana (1814). DJP changes the 1835 reference to the The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal for October and November. CPW refers merely to John Clubbe’s 1980 monograph Byron’s Natural Man. Daniel Boone and Kentucky. Clubbe dismisses the 1823 Quarterly and 1835 New York articles, and plumps for Birkbeck and Brackenridge, the latter mediated through Views of Society and Manners in America (1821) by Frances Wright, the radical Scots friend of Bentham and Lafayette. MSYR Byron XI tells the story of a siege in which Boone commanded the town of Boonesborough (named after him). He asked the attacking Indians for two days’ truce, but used it to prepare the place more thoroughly. Suvorov played the same game on the Moslem defenders of Ismail. It is not clear that B. knew either story.

62.

Crime came not near him – She is not the Child

Of Solitude; Health shrank not from him – for 490

Her home is in the rarely-trodden Wild,

Where if men seek her not, and death be more

Their Choice than life, forgive them, as beguiled

By habit to what their own hearts abhor –

In cities Caged; the present case in point I 495

Cite, is that Boone lived hunting up to Ninety; 100

100: Ninety: Boone was eighty-five when he died.

63. 101

And what’s still stranger, left behind a Name

For which Men vainly decimate the throng,

Not only famous, but of that good fame,

Without which Glory’s but a tavern Song – 500

Simple, serene, the Antipodes of Shame,

Which Hate nor Envy e’er could tinge with wrong;

An active Hermit, even in age the Child

Of Nature – or the Man of Ross run wild. 102

101 Sources for the Boone Stanzas (i): The fine periods of the “autobiography” of Boone appendixed to the second (1793) edition of Gilbert Imlay’s Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America are unlikely to be by Boone, who was only partially literate, and may not be by Imlay either: but they do contain the following: Thus I was surrounded with plenty in the midst of want. I was happy in the midst of danger and inconveniences. In such a diversity it was impossible I should be disposed to melancholy. No populous city, with all the varieties of commerce and stately structures, could afford so much pleasure to my mind, as the beauties of nature I found here. (p.332). It is tempting to see some germ in this picture of the Pantisocratic Ideal of Southey and Coleridge; but neither man’s letters (nor B.’s) contain any reference to Imlay’s book.

102: ... the Child / Of Nature - or the Man of Ross run wild: makes Boone into a poorer and rougher version John Kyrle, the Herefordshire landowner celebrated for his philanthropy and modest living at ll.249-97 of Pope’s Moral Essay III. To Allen Lord Bathurst: Whose Cause-way parts the vale with shady rows? Whose seats the weary Traveller repose? Who taught that heav’n-directed spire to rise? THE MAN OF ROSS, each lisping babe replies. Behold the Market-place with poor o’erspread! THE MAN OF ROSS divides the weekly bread: Behold yon Alms-house, neat, but void of state, Where Age and Want sit smiling at the gate: Him portion’d maids, apprentic’d orphans blest, The young who labour, and the old who rest. Is any sick? The MAN OF ROSS relieves, Prescribes, attends, the med’cine makes, and gives. Is there a variance? Enter but his door, Balk’d are the Courts, and contest is no more. Despairing Quacks with curses fled the place, And vile Attornies, now an useless race … and so on.

64. 103

’Tis true, he shrank from Men even of his Nation; 505

When they built up into his darling trees,

He moved some hundred miles off, for a Station

Where there were fewer houses, and more ease; 104

The Inconvenience of Civilization

Is, that you neither can be pleased nor please; 510

But where he met the Individual Man

He shewed himself as kind as Mortal can.

103 Sources for the Boone Stanzas (ii): a single paragraph from Morris Birkbeck’s Notes on a Journey in America (CMP 246) may have been another source for B.’s idea of Boone’s constant removals: The wildest solitudes are to the taste of some people. General Boon, who was chiefly instrumental in the first settlement of Kentucky, is of this turn. It is said, that he is now, at the age of seventy, pursuing the daily chase, two hundred miles to the westward of the last abode of civilized man. He had retired to a chosen spot, beyond the Missouri, which, after him is named Boon’s Lick, out of the reach, as he flattered himself, of intrusion; but white men, even there, encroached upon him, and two years ago, he went back two hundred miles further (1818 edition, p.62). In fact, Boone had bad luck registering his properties, and constant ejectment [sic] suits and land title voidments [sic] were part, at least, of the cause of his seeming restlessness.

104: As a portrait of the real Daniel Boone this is insulting nonsense. Boone was not just a frontiersman, but a citizen, three times a member of the Virginia General Assembly. “Nothing embitters my old age,” he said, like “the circulation of absurd stories that I retire as civilization advances”. John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone, The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (1992), p.328.

65. 105

He was not all alone; around him grew

A Sylvan tribe of Children of the chace,

Whose young, unwakened World was ever new; 106 515

Nor Sword, nor Sorrow yet had left a trace

On her unwrinkled brow, nor could you view

A frown on Nature’s, or on human face;

The free-born Forest found and kept them free, 107

And fresh as is a torrent or a tree. 520

105 Sources for the Boone Stanzas (iii): The following, quoted from Henry Marie Brackenridge’s 1814 Views of Louisiana in Frances Wright’s Views of Society and Manners in America, is reckoned by John Clubbe to be the most likely source for the Boone Stanzas: ... in this territory there are many sterling characters. Among others I mention, with pleasure, that brave and adventurous North Carolinian, who makes so distinguished a figure in the history of Kentucky, the venerable Col. Boone. This respectable old man, in the eighty-fifth year of his age, resides on Salt River, up the Missouri. He is surrounded by about forty families, who respect him as a father, and who live under a kind of patriarchal government, ruled by his advice and example. They are not necessitous persons, who have fled for their crimes or misfortunes, like those that gathered unto David in the cave of Adullam: they all live well, and possess the necessaries and comforts of life as they could wish. They retired through choice. Perhaps they acted wisely in placing themselves at a distance from the deceit and turbulence of the world. They enjoy an uninterrupted quiet, and a real comfort in their little society, beyond the sphere of that larger society where government is necessary. Here they are truly free; exempt from the impositions and duties even of the best governments, they are assailed neither by the madness of ambition, nor tortured by the poison of party spirit. Is not this one of the most powerful incentives which impels the Anglo-American to bury himself in the midst of the wilderness? (Quoted Clubbe pp.12-13.)

106: around him grew / A Sylvan tribe of Children of the chace, / Whose young, awakened World was ever new: Brackenridge (quoted opposite) makes clear that these were not Boone’s natural children, as B.’s phrasing might imply. Two of Boone’s sons were killed in battle; a daughter was kidnapped – though he rescued her.

107: The free-born forest found and kept them free: an unavoidable echo of the words of Duke Senior at As You Like It, II i 1-11: Now, my co-mates and partners in exile, Hath not old custom made these woods more sweet Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods More free from peril than the envious court? Here feel we not the penalty of Adam, The season’s difference, as the icy fang And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind, Which, when it bites and blows upon my body, Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say ‘This is no falttery [sic]; these are counsellors That feelingly persuade me who I am …’ and so on.

66. 108

And tall and strong and swift of foot were they

Beyond the dwarfing City’s pale abortions,

Because their thoughts had never been the prey

Of care or gain; the Green Woods were their portions;

No sinking Spirits told them they grew grey, 525

No Fashion made them Apes of her distortions;

Simple they were, not savage; and their rifles,

Though very true, were not yet used for trifles.

108 Sources for the Boone Stanzas (iv): one last immediate American source for B.’s thought in the Boone Stanzas may be this, suffixed by Frances Wright to her quotation from Brackenridge, quoted above:

The lord of the wilderness, Daniel Boone, though his eye is now dimmed and his limbs enfeebled by a long life of adventure, can still hit the wild fowl on the wing with that dexterity which in his early years excited the envy of Indian hunters, and he now looks upon the “famous river” with feelings scarce less ardent than when he surveyed with clearer vision “the famous river Ohio.” The grave of this worshipper of nature, wild adventure, and unrestrained liberty will be visited by the feebler children of future generations with such awe as the Greeks might regard those of their earlier demigods. The mind of his singular man seems best portrayed by his own simple words: “No populous city, with all the varieties of commerce and stately structure, could afford so much pleasure to my mind as the beauties of nature I found here.” (Quoted Clubbe, p.13; last quotation already quoted above, from Gilbert Imlay’s 1793 appendix). Wright subsequently admitted that she had viewed America at first “under a claude-lorraine tint” (Views, ed. Baker, Harvard 1963, p.xi.)

William Parry – B.’s fire-master at Missolonghi – had not been impressed by Wright’s book, and had caused offence to Jeremy Bentham by criticizing it: In the course of the conversation at Mr. Bentham’s, he enquired of me if I had ever visited America in my travels? – I said, Yes, I had resided there for some time. – Have you read Miss Wright’s book on that country? – Yes. – What do you think of it; does it give a good description of America? Here I committed another fault. “She knows no more of America,” I replied, “than a cow does of a case of instruments.” Such a reply was complete damper to Mr. Bentham’s eloquence on the subject ... Miss Wright spoke what Mr. Jeremy Bentham and his friends wished to be true and ... she was in an especial manner a favourite of his. It was not till I was informed of these things, by Lord Byron I believe, that I discovered how very rude I had been, and how much reason Mr. Bentham would have to find fault with my want of manners (The Last Days of Lord Byron, pp.202-3). Clubbe (p.10) takes this as evidence that B. had read Wright; but all Parry “believes” is that B. corrected his understanding of Bentham’s attitude to Wright, not of Wright’s book.

67.

Motion was in their days, Rest in their slumbers,

And Cheerfulness the Handmaid of their toil; 530

Nor yet too many nor too few their numbers;

Corruption could not make their hearts her soil;

The Lust which stings, the Splendour which encumbers,

With the free foresters divide no Spoil;

Serene, not sullen, were the Solitudes 535

Of this unsighing people of the Woods. 109

109: The Lust which stings, the Splendour which encumbers, / With the free foresters divide no Spoil; / Serene, not sullen, were the Solitudes / Of this unsighing people of the Woods: further echoes of As You Like It.

Sources

• https://petercochran.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/don_juan_canto_83.pdf
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Florence_Shelley
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claire_Clairmont
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Polidori
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Godwin
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wollstonecraft
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_Hogg
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein