Lord Byron’s revelry in impermanence: ‘lines inscribed upon a cup formed from a skull’

Hello readers,

A few weeks ago, I wrote a scribbling on the Percy Shelley poem ‘Mont Blanc’. Now, I would like to revisit the other poet upon whom I wrote my dissertation, Lord Byron. When considering the work of his on which to write, my mind jumped towards a lesser known, but no less affecting, poem that pits mirthful hedonism against the grim spectre of mortality. 

‘Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed from a Skull’ perhaps wins the prize for the most summatory Byron title, for the poem concerns exactly that. It is written from the perspective of the individual to whom the head once belonged— but in a rather macabre twist, he still seems to be enjoying the cause to which his cranium is being committed now. 

Indeed, where once there was grey matter there is now red wine, and in the first stanza Byron makes the morbidly entertaining point that as a result this is the ‘only skull’ from which ‘Whatever flows is never dull’. Unlike a ‘living head’, whose dome is beset by doom and gloom, this lingering spirit is delighted by the fact that now he is filled only by the merriest of beverages. As you may have already guessed, this is an ode to hedonistic revelry, almost Dionysian in its call to forego all worry and float through life on a grape-fuelled cloud.

‘I lived, I loved, I quaff’d, like thee’, the persistent spirit insists, and why should we not follow his example? As the repurposed skull in our hands reminds us, life is fleeting, and one does not possess enough time to spend spuriously on concerns about worries of immortality or ‘what comes next’. Better to do as our predecessors have done, and simply enjoy our time here, while we still have it. 

Byron seems to assert that there is almost something natural in using the material of our forefathers in such a manner; as they lent us their lives in order to lay down the groundwork to (hopefully) make our lives a little better than our own, they must also delight in lending us their skulls as wine goblets. After all, drinking from their caps cannot now ‘injure’ them— and ‘the worm hath fouler lips than’ ours. Byron would much prefer to save our ancestors from the ignominy of decay beneath the soil by inviting them to share in our ecstasies.

The poem, then, may at first appear an amusing piece rather lacking in substance, a tongue-in-cheek dismissal of the usual horror about the idea of our bodily vessels existing after our souls have exited them. And yet, this is still a Byron poem, and thus we do not escape the final stanza without a hint that there is some inescapable, existential sorrow lurking beneath this seemingly merry exterior.

Throughout the poem, though it is masked by an apparent glee at the idea of being literally filled with wine, Byron is revealing his own sadness at the impermanence of the human individual. This lends an ironic, almost spiteful tinge to the otherwise playful tone; instead of genuine excitement, ‘And when alas! Our brains are gone,/What nobler substitute than wine?’ becomes rueful sarcasm. Byron is, after all, far too complex and clever to bother merely writing a poem about how great it would be to become a beverage cup. 

That earlier reference to the worm’s foul lips is not the only mention he gives to the damage caused by detritus feeders. The following stanza digs into greater depth (pun intended) by arguing that it is ‘Better to hold the sparkling grape, / Than nurse the earth-worm’s slimy brood’ and that ‘the drink of gods’ is a better alternative to ‘reptile’s food’. Clearly, despite his apparent ambivalence towards the inviolability of a corpse as regarding drinking, Byron also possesses a deep disdain for what happens to the body once it is sealed sub-terra firma. 

The line at the beginning of the fourth stanza seems the most desperate in the work. Byron pleads that where once his ‘wit […] hath shone, / In aid of others let me shine’; entirely stripped of any agency he has over his own body, even of the wit so vital to Popean satirists such as himself, he can only beg future generations to allow him to partake in their love of life, and not consign him to an eternity of desolation.

Had Byron believed in some kind of afterlife, or a transcendental fate or purpose for our human souls separate to our corporeal forms, then the destiny of our bodies left behind would likely not have troubled him so. But without a faith in such fanciful hereafters, the notion of death would have left him with no solace but in the continued usage of his material being— the spirit dissolves into airy nothingness, and the corpse is the only sign that its bearer ever existed at all. 

As it happens, Byron has a continual fixation on memorials for the dead— for example in ‘Churchill’s Grave’ (not that Churchill) where he laments that a small stone is the only reminder of such a vivid and varied individual. Without the hope of an eternal afterlife, when the body fades to dust all trace of the previous owner vanishes with it. Thus, such markers of memory loom large as being especially precious and poignant. 

Therefore, Byron’s flippant enjoyment of life’s pleasures is inescapably tainted by his deep fear of the awaiting void. As he writes, ‘through life’s little day / Our heads such sad effects produce’— yet perhaps when that pesky, neurotic brain is finally removed, some kind of pleasure can at last be found in holding wine for the enjoyment of others. It is an odd optimism to find in the notion that one’s vacant skull could be ‘Redeem’d from worms and wasting clay’ to ‘be of use’ in such ways; but for a man so lacking in hope and optimism as Byron was in his lowest of moments, perhaps the idea of being ‘rescue[d]’ from ‘earth’s embrace’ to ‘rhyme and revel with the dead’ was the one chance he had of prevailing pleasure at last.

I do hope that those reading can enjoy a more optimistic view of their own purpose than that.

Thank you for reading,

The Watchful Scribe

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