A year after posting my recording of Beppo, here is another brilliant comic work by Byron, his satire The Vision of Judgement. This poem was composed between 20 September and 4 October 1821 and was primarily a response to Robert Southey’s work of the same name, which was an apotheosis of George III, who had died in 1820. Byron’s poem all takes place at the “celestial gate”, where Satan, Saint Peter and the archangel Michael argue over the final destination of the king. The poem is written in the ottava rima stanzas which Byron had first used in Beppo and had then continued to use in masterly fashion in his ongoing comic epic, Don Juan. The Vision is more straightforwardly satirical than these other two works, and the publisher, John Hunt, was found guilty of defamation of the monarchy and fined (Byron paid the legal fees and the fine).
The main target of the satire is not so much the king (who manages to slip into heaven at the end of the poem) but the poet laureate, Southey, a long-standing enemy of Byron, whom Byron attacked not only for his mediocre poetry but also for the way he had renounced his youthful political ideals. Some of the satirical shafts may be obscure to a reader today but we are nonetheless swept along by the energy of the verse, the brilliance of the dialogue, and the wonderful inventiveness of the setting. The Romantics were all, to varying degrees, obsessed by Milton; but only Byron was able to give us a comic version of Paradise Lost.
Anyone wanting help with some of the allusions in the poem will find a very helpful on-line edition edited and annotated by the much-missed Byron scholar, Peter Cochran (who describes the work as Byron’s “finest finished poem”):
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