Banuelos 1

Nioaka Banuelos
AP English 4
A2/ Larson
25 November 2012
Questioning Answers
Doubt is a necessity needed in everyone. It keeps people humble and teaches us how to strive
and form faith, knowledge. Lord Byrons doubt is in every one of us. The fleeting thoughts of
what-ifs tap at our faithful shoulders. But do we have the answers? In When Coldness Wraps
This Suffering Clay Byron uses repetition, metaphor, and daunting diction to reflect his life
experiences through the poem to reveal the helplessness he feels toward mankind but most of all
the afterlife.
His exploration of questions began at his rough start. George Gordon Lord Byron lived a
short tumultuous life that affected him greatly. It began when he was just an infant, born on
January 22, 1788 to unruly parents Catherine Gordon and Captain Mad Jack Byron in London
(George). His father was a gambling man and his mother a Scottish worn out diva of an heiress.
They squandered their money and when all the funds were depleted Captain Gordon abandoned
them, forcing young George and his mother to flee to Scotland from debtors in search of a new
life. Luckily, eight years later, they learned that he was to be a Baron and so their life really did
take a turn for the better (George). As Baron he gained knew advantages. He attended the best
schools, gained a nanny and a way to deal with his physical disability of a left clubfoot.

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Unfortunately, as more wealth and prestige rolled his way the first of his worries began
which shaped his life forever. At the age of ten his nanny had started an affair with him. Where
he was never able to fully recover (George). Around the same time his mother subjugated him to
torturous foot treatments that had him paralyzed on weeks on end. Even he admits later in a
journal entry that the incident took him to dark places (Byron). As a boy dealing with such crises
he turned to his mothers faith and the bible for salvation which altered his judgment and on look
on life forever.
The Bible taught him salvation but took it away from him as well. Since, he stuck to the more
cynical teachings. They fascinated and plagued him and thus he lived by the puritan conception
of wickedness (Sloan). He believed that he was the majority of the damned who were eternally
destined to damnation no matter the good or bad they did in their lives (Sloan). His constant
struggle for good and evil was well hidden as his friends did nothing to notice the melancholy
and questioning. To them he was fun loving and good natured and a master of persona. His
Character came off to some though as he searched for feeling through lovers and even incest. He
was a Don Juan among his peers seeking conquest after conquest and learning from each. Byron
would confess to a broken heart after all affairs leaving him where he began (George). He
searched for feeling through lust and misinterpreted love. Even in his life time he was a paradox.
George Gordons questioning contradicted his era of Romantics. Romanticism was a period
of an artistic and intellectual take on nature with emphasis on ones expression of emotion and
reliance on imaginations (Literary Research). It was a time where artists of craft and word
rebelled against formal societal rules and convention. Lord Byron differed from the formal
example of European Romanticism by rejecting imaginings and instead interjecting rationalism
in its place. Though he still stayed true to many of the standards of romantics by still laying his

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heart out on the paper. He concealed nothing as a true romantic would and definitely went
against the grain of society by calling everything he felt in it as he saw fit.
In this poem especially, you see the sardonic side of Byron through this era as well as the
tenderness of his speech. Society is the clay in which can be molded and manipulated and which
forgets what life is essentially about. He then uses what can be described as romantic diction
where he caresses the harsh words he delivers to only backlash society and mankind over again.
Not only does this era attribute to his passionate words but as does the way he grew and lived his
life.
In this poem especially we see hints of how his upsetting past effected his writing. The
meanings of the poem itself clearly acknowledges his past. The fact that it is questioning what
happens after one passes show how he endured the harsh realities of life. Throughout it he speaks
of death as a sort of salvation to life on earth but also the speaker seems confused as to where it
shall end up. This directly relates to Byron and his ethical and religious beliefs as he too was not
sure of where he was to end up. His mothers religion, he believed, would send him to hell but he
himself seeked more than that. He doubted and searched for answers. This poem also shows
where George Gordon left his religion and how that was in direct link to his past. For example,
the lines Each fainter trace that memory holdsIn one broad glance the soul beholds he
is speaking of his own past and how his faulty memories would live on within his soul for all to
see. Whether it be god or society is the question. Later, in the poem he states, Away, away
without a wing/Oer all, through all, its thought shall fly/A nameless and eternal thing/Forgetting
what it was to die. Byron is speaking of the spirit and where it shall go and how it is effected
after death. He uses this description as a way to communicate that perhaps when we die we are
just wanderers who eventually lose the meaning of death. This a very melancholy and depressing

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thought that may have resulted from his already detached way of thinking due to his tragedies in
life. Especially since at this point in his life he is divorced from his wife, basically exiled from
England, and binging on affairs and alcohol (George Gordon Byron). He lived a tumultuous life,
an artists life which guided his work. Just as many before him his attachments to things and
people and religion even effected the best of his writing.
Throughout the poem his cynicism is clearly seen as well as his questioning. His attachment
to religion is evident where he talks of a time where Creation peopled Earth. His agony in his
poem is most likely shaped by his experiences and confusion throughout his life. As in the words
the speaker is desperate for knowledge and depth. Though many who look at Byron do not
regard his past as much of anything in conjunction to his poems there are very insightful takes on
Byron regardless.
Those who have ventured into the realms of George Gordons works all have many views to
which they see his writing as but some may be inconclusive to what the crux of the poem is.
Edward E. Bostetter, a scholar of Byron, focuses on the more mind melding complexities of the
poem. He states that Gordon sees everything through the naked ego, defying, supplicating,
probing, always seeking some answer, as from an oracleto the mystery of his own identity
(Bostetter). This is a fundamental point to all of Byrons works but to this poem particularly it is
one of the main reasons that it is being written. Though, some others like Victor Hugo, writer of
Les Miserables, may say that Byron would get too caught up in his words stating that they may
provide vagueness to the reader as they travel with him to a place where they cannot picture
(Hugo). His ideas may be abstract and hi structure may not be up to par he still is the amster of
words. He encaptures the reader with beauty and morals.

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I believe all of these characteristics take part in what the poem is saying over all. Byron is
discussing the literal of when coldness wraps around clay. But underneath the surface he is
discussing the clay as man and coldness being death. Even beyond that I believe he is talking
about himself as the individual who is curious as to what happens after death. The poem begins
as the title states, When coldness wraps this suffering clay/Ah! whither strays the immortal
mind?. His first thought is thought provoking and insightful asking the reader exactly what the
crux of the poem is about. When death takes us, what happens to the immortal mind: the spirit?
The metaphor throughout this being that we are the clay. A being that can be manipulated and
toiled with throughout our life span without a care and without moral or rule until coldness
(which literally does dry out clay) reaches us. He goes on to describe the path that the immortal
mind can and cannot take explaining that it has one of two choices to stay on the realms of
space or to go along the planets heavenly way. In other words do we sit and survey the lands
of earth unseen by the living or travel to a heaven.
In the final stanza he comes to his final convoluted conclusion. Through the use of metaphor
and repetition he explains that perhaps the soul should stay for eternity wandering about. His
metaphor of the immortal mind travelling as a thought reiterates this fact. He asserts, its
thoughts shall fly/A nameless and eternal thing/ forgetting what it was to die. The soul is the
thought, the nameless and eternal thing who by Byron seems to be deemed a hopeless wander
without a name. Creating the sense of loss as the spirit no longer has a name therefore implying
that it no longer has a history or a past. The crux of the poem is in this one line and is believed to
be Byrons thought on afterlife as that though we may not know for sure our spirit is nevertheless
a thing, a thought, that meanders after death without a past nor a future. The last line comes in to
play here, Forgetting what it was to die. He could be saying that the immortal thing literally

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forgets what it was to pass or in metaphor he may be saying that death, if this nameless spirit is
the alternative, may be meaningless compared to life.
Life can and will be difficult. It has its up and downs. But what the true meaning of life is
death. What becomes of us when we die is the ultimate question. Some of us are lucky enough to
know for sure and others, the majority, cannot help but question. Byron enlightens us with fruit
for thought. Suggesting that we may or may not be significant when we pass or even when we
live. But what can be taken out of the poem is what the a song from Bob Fosse suggests, Life is
just a bowl of cherries/Dont take things too serious/Life is mysterious.

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Works Cited
Bostetter, Edward E. Masses and Solids: Byrons View of the External World. Modern
Language Quarterly 35.3 (Sept. 1974): 257-271. Rpt. In Poetry Criticism. Ed. Margaret
Haerens and Christine Slovey. Vol. 16. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997. Literature Resource
Center.
Byron, George Gordon Byron, and Leslie Alexis Marchand. Lord Byron: Selected Letters and
Journals. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard UP, 1982. Print.
George Gordon Byron Litfinder Contemporary Collection. Detroit Gale, 2007. Litfinder for
Schools.
Hugo, Victor. Lord Byron. Things Seen (Choses Vues): Essays. Victor Hugo. Estes and Layriat,
1824. 320-329. Rpt. In Ninteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Ed. Laurie Lanzen Harris.
Vol. 2. Detroit : Gale Research, 1982. Literature Research Center.
Literary Research: Strategies and Sources A. Literary Research Series. N.p., n.d. Web.
Sloan, Gary, Dr. "Lord Byron: The Demons of Calvinism." Http://www.eclectica.org. Eclectica,
July-Aug. 2002. Web.