Byron’s Allusion to Plato’s Phaedo in “Lines Written Beneath an Elm, in the Churchyard of Harrow on the Hill”

Abstract

Byron’s reworking of Plato’s Phaedo in the earliest phase of his writing career during 1806–1807 has received little critical attention from literary scholarship, although it is substantiated in his Harrow poems and further explored in his later poems of the 1810s and 1820s. This article contends that the Greek philosopher’s key interlocking concepts of recollection, dream, and immortality of the human soul facilitate Byron’s formation of such entwined ideas in “Lines Written Beneath an Elm, in the Churchyard of Harrow on the Hill,” which appeared in the earliest public volume of 1807. The article argues that this poem reshapes the notions established by Plato’s work, which play a key role in enriching the speaker’s memory of past times, perceptions of truth, and resolve in the face of mortality and sadness by persevering with an indestructible and eternal soul.