Byron’s Being-Towards-Death

In commemorating the 200th anniversary of Byron’s death, it seems fitting to contemplate his own writing on what philosopher Martin Heidegger called ‘being-towards-death’. Murder, suicide, and battlefield deaths appear across the poet’s entire oeuvre. Ghosts and memorials, farewells and last breaths frame death and its remembrance as key ways of understanding lives lived. Byron seems, as Tom Mole claims, to have been interested in a ‘phenomenology of death’, 1 a first-person understanding of the experience of dying, but he was also interested in the ways that facing death as unavoidable endows life with possibilities for self-definition. Although Byron dallies with the idea that choosing one’s time and manner of death might be a desirable assertion of human will, he ultimately confirms that facing life requires more courage. Facing possibilities of life or death, individual will manifests itself most fully, for Byron, by confronting the unknown. He champions a soldier’s willingness to die, but the ease with which some of his characters assert this form of bravery undermines the grandeur he elsewhere associates with facing death, especially in his metaphysical dramas Manfred and Cain . It seems, for Byron, there is something brave in choosing not to have a choice over the circumstances of one’s own demise because doing so demands embracing the indeterminacy of death itself.