Lady Caroline Lamb

Rating:
Summary: poems
Review: Caroline's affair with Byron was in many respects one of the most important episodes in her life. Her account of it is worth quoting:

"Rogers said "you should know the new poet", and he offered me the MS of Childe Harold to read. I read it, and that was enough. Rogers said, "He has a club foot, and bites his nails". I said, "If he was ugly as Aesop, I must know him".

The affair began in March 1812 and ended in November, but it would cast a shadow over the rest of her life. Byron concluded in a particular brutal manner, sending her a letter bearing the seal of his new conquest, Lady Oxford. Her revenge was literary, but her poems sometimes seem a bit too bitter, as in "William Lamb's Return from Paris, Asking Me my Wish," etc:

"Should thou spend thy days in grieving,
What is past there's no retrieving;
Once the hour of passion over,
Tear nor frown recalls a lover."