The prisoner of Chillon

The Prisoner of Chillon (English title: The Prisoner of Chillon ) is a 392 line long dramatic poem by Lord Byron , which was written and published in 1816. It is based on the incarceration of the Geneva freedom fighter François Bonivard at Chillon Castle on Lake Geneva in the years 1532 to 1536. Byron, the romantic narrative was described as "a fable".

Emergence

On June 22, 1816, Byron, who had left England for good as a result of a scandal on April 25, 1816 and had just moved into the Villa Diodati in Cologny , and Percy Bysshe Shelley visited Chillon Castle. This inspired Byron to write the poem The Sonnet of Chillon . Byron probably completed the longer work The Prisoner of Chillon in early July 1816. It was published in December 1816 by the publisher John Murray , together with other poems by Byron .

content

Eugène Delacroix, The Prisoner of Chillon

Bonivard's prison (depiction around 1900)

The protagonist of the poem is a lonely, imprisoned man with a strong will to survive who, after a long history of suffering after the death of two brothers imprisoned with him, seeks solace in nature, but in the end gains freedom.

Original text

Wikisource: The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) / Poetry / Volume 4 / The Prisoner of Chillon  - Sources and full texts (English)

Translations

Title page of the Reclam edition

• Lord Byron: The Prisoner of Chillon. A piece of fantasy. Mazeppa. Freely translated by Adolf Seubert: Leipzig: Philipp Reclam jun. , no year (before 1898)
• Lord Byron: Seals. The Siege of Corinth. The prisoner of Chillon. The island. German by Wilhelm Schäffer (Bibliothèque foreign classics in German transmission, Vol. 11). Hildburghausen 1865: Publishing house of the Bibliographisches Institut. The digital version is available in the Gutenberg-DE project at https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/byron/dichtun1/chap002.html .

Appreciation

"Especially in the ... last section (XIV) it becomes clear how Byron breaks through the cliché of an unreflected euphoria of freedom and depicts in impressive concrete terms the experience of liberation, which is paradoxical for the prisoner."

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Listed as available in the catalog of Reclam's Universal Library from 1898
2. ^ Raimund Borgmeier (ed.): The English literature in text and representation. Vol. 7: 19th century I; Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-15-007770-2 , p. 108