My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have wanted to read Byron and add a book of his to my collection for awhile now. But much of it never grabbed my heart when I browsed through it. Maybe it was my mood, maybe the time, or maybe I simply wasn’t a Byron fan. But, I was always drawn back, partly because of how he lived his life and partly the company he kept. I came to Mazeppa by a roundabout route. It wasn’t the title poem but “A Fragment”, a short piece included when it was first published in 1819. That was my hook. The title poem then exerted its power over me, and the deal was complete with “Ode”, a poem on Venice.

The title poem is a story recounted by a much older Mazeppa, a military commander with a Swedish king, retreating after the Battle of Poltava. He recounts how he learned his horse riding skills during his youth when he was a page in the Polish royal court. At that time, he fell in love with the wife of one of the Counts and they met secretly to make love. They were caught and he was strapped naked to a wild horse and set off into the country, presumably to die. Mazeppa survived the ordeal, but oh the writing as the horse flies through the countryside, forest and water. I felt like I was on the horse, with the language and flow of the meter. A very exciting poem that touches on many Romantic themes. I loved the descriptions of nature, the horse Mazeppa is on as well as a band of wild horses he encounters. Despair, wonder, excitement, passion, loss: all swirl round. Byron was also a vegetarian and his love of animals comes out in one section on the wild horse

With flowing tail, and flying mare, Wide nostrils– never stretched by pain, Mouths bloodless to the bit or rein And feet that iron never shod, And flanks unscarr’d by spur or rod” (lines 679-683)
“Ode” is an ode on Venice, lamenting the decay of Venice, the loss of freedom and the tyranny of rulers in a post Congress of Vienna world One section that stood out to me was:
“Ye men, who pour your blood for kings as water, What have they given your children in return? A heritage of servitude and woes, A blindfold bondage, where your hire is blows” (lines 67-70)
Finally, “A Fragment” is Byron’s contribution to the ghost writing contest from the summer of 1816 on Lake Geneva. The contest, conceived of by Byron, invited Mary and Percy Shelley, John Polidori and himself to write ghost stories to pass the time during a very rainy summer. Byron only wrote a tiny opening, just over 10 pages. The fragment is dated June 17, 1816 and is one of the first vampire stories. It features a narrator and his companion, Augustus Darvell, who are traveling to the East in the 1700s. The story starts off very slowly, but by the time they reach a cemetery in Turkey, it is flying and I was caught. And then, just as quickly, it ends. Byron never developed it afterwards, and intended the fragment to be published in a magazine, not appended to Mazeppa. John Polidori, inspired by Byron’s fragment, published his own vampire novel in 1819, entitled “The Vampyre.” The main character is modeled on Byron. Interestingly, when Polidori’s work was first published, it was erroneously attributed to Lord Byron.