Byron and Borgia: A Meditation on an Impossible Encounter

“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know” was my introduction to Lord Byron at the age of 16. In English class we were analyzing “So We’ll Go No More A Roving” and our teacher chose to focus on the eroticism of the line For the sword outwears its sheath. Byron, even in the classroom, was a byword for the infamous and erotic. This year is the bicentennial of Byron’s death. He died at 36 of a fever in Missonlonghi where he had arrived to fight for Greek freedom. Last year I was asked to be Poet in Residence at the Keats-Shelley House Museum in Rome, a house in the city center next to the Spanish steps, where Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats lived.

The house is situated next to the Piazza Di Spagna, and I recall the quiet of the museum each time I unlocked the heavy door, walking up the flights of stairs to my apartment on the third floor. I think of the coolness of the apartment and the high ceilings embossed with blue and gold; the chandelier above my bed and who else may have lay beneath it, remembering John Keats had died in the room below me. The museum and its staff honor the legacy of the Romantic poets beautifully. Had the building become a bank or a shoe shop, perhaps Keats’ ghost may have had reason to appear in protest.

George Gordon Byron was born on January 22nd, 1788, the only child of Captain John Byron and Catherine Gordon. He came from a long line of dysfunction and suffered abuse as a child, eventually becoming famous overnight for his poetry when his first two cantos of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” were published. He lived a sensuous life, exploring male and female lovers, but in reading his correspondences I found that he had a wonderful sense of humor, and was also clearly quite sensitive, despite his cruelty, and at times surprisingly passive.

His demeanor and countenance were the model for Mr. Darcy in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. He drank wine out of a monk’s skull at Newstead Abbey, reveling in his infamy and own gothic persona, and after his death was considered too evil to be buried at Westminster Abbey. But in Greece he was a hero and there are still roads and statues dedicated to him. His death galvanized Europe to rally in support of Greece. A heroic freedom fighter to many, a copy of Byron’s poetry was found with the possessions of one man guilty of taking part in the Decemberist Revolt, an attempted liberal uprising after the death of Tsar Alexander in Russia.

He left England, a self-imposed exile, after the disintegration of his marriage, during which he had continued an affair with his half-sister Augusta. A spurned lover, Lady Caroline Lamb (it was she, it is said, who uttered the now infamous quote “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know”) had not taken his winding down of their affair very well, and had been stalking him, breaking into his home, and now writing letters threateningly alluding to his incest and then-illegal bisexuality.

While Byron had reveled in his dangerous reputation, notoriety can’t be turned off, and with his personal life fraying, along with his mounting debts, Byron left the country, never to return. An exile for his sins. He went first to Switzerland, living under the same roof as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, where during a succession of rainy days they challenged each other to write ghosts stories, with Mary winning after presenting Frankenstein. Byron eventually went on to Venice and Rome.

On the first day of my residency, I gave a reading in the library surrounded by the collections of books and letters written by Lord Byron and Mary Shelley. For my role, I wanted to get an insight into him beyond the poetic caricature, and read and re-read biographies and reissues of his poetry delving deeper into the man behind the mask. In one such biography a small anecdote captured my imagination.

Byron had made a pilgrimage to the Ambrosiana Library in Milan, where he wanted to read the love letters of Lucrezia Borgia and Pietro Bembo. Lucrezia was the daughter of Pope Alexander VI and the patriarch of the infamous Borgia family, a Spanish clan that wielded huge power during the Italian Renaissance. Pietro was a poet, scholar and later a cardinal, and his correspondence with Lucrezia spanned 16 years. Byron memorized some of the letters, later calling them “the prettiest love letters in the world.”

At some point in their clandestine correspondence Lucrezia had sent a lock of her famous blonde hair to Pietro, he treasured it until his death. It is still displayed alongside the letters at the Ambrosiana Library. When the librarian left the room, Byron stole a strand of hair from the blonde lock calling it “the prettiest and fairest imaginable.” This strand of hair, a cord, a lifeline through time, through centuries and different societies, connected these two notorious beauties. A golden thread. Stealing it was an act both bold and tender.

I knew then, that this was the part of Byron I wanted to write a poem about: the day he made pilgrimage to Lucrezia’s letters. I found a second-hand copy of the translated love letters between Pietro and Lucrezia, and waited until I arrived in Rome to start reading it. Rome is a sensual, stately city, the divine feminine and masculine both palpable. Lucrezia inhabited Rome hundreds of years before Byron, and in history and popular culture Lucrezia has been cemented as a sacrilegious seductress, but she had a complex life. She was used as a pawn by her father, who arranged and dissolved her marriages to suit his political needs. She was able to harness her striking beauty and intelligence to her advantage, but was still vulnerable. She had 10 pregnancies, the last resulting in her early death at the age of 39.

I can’t help but wonder what Byron and Lucrezia would’ve made of each other. Two humans who have become mythical, their names adjectives for seduction and sin. Both had a power and a fragility, a fame and a vulnerability. And so, in this poem, standing in 2024 in our precious, fractured world, I look back, imagining the impossible: these two together; a fusion, an exchange of power, in an act of ownership and surrender.

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“I went out into the streets of Rome”

“I’ve plunged into an abyss of sensuality.” –Lord Byron
“Nothing can prevent me from ever adoring your name.” –Lucrezia Borgia

I went out
into the streets of Rome
found the city
glowing under the sun
in the ruins of an empire
long done
So, now a resurrection
from our view of constant death
a new Guernica raging
with no end in sight

and so become, and become

what remains of you? our wronged flesh
I can’t hear your words yet
but this golden thread,
that is seared in my mind
has bound us through time
phantom lovers: materialise
the curve of your breast
beneath hot breath,
imagined too wicked to repent,
burnished glorious by the eyes of others,
my tastes are singular
and vast
I devour all in my path
but am here to find
our hands intertwined
a momentary grasp through time
uncover all that is holy
and know
I was wounded
before the war stole me

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Byron 200 is a year of bicentenary celebrations at the Keats-Shelley House in Rome.