(in memory of John Edleston, 1790-1811)
Ever, Byron will mourn you, lovely John
(whom he called "Thyrza"), now to Heaven gone.
You sang, high tenor, in a local choir;
and on your youthful beauty, his desire
thrived. You were taken at just twenty-one,
(old prudes will be glad of that legal age
old farts and haters, whom we gladly shun,
and leave to seethe in impotence of rage),
welcomed into the Kingdom of God's Son,
and elegized even upon this page:
shirtless and shoeless, with long, soft-curled locks,
clad in pinstriped trousers and fawn-gray socks,
you glide through visions that comfort one's soul;
John Edleston---young, shy, and beautiful.
Starward
Author's Notes/Comments:
John Edleston, subject of the elegy above, was Lord Byron's young boyfriend, a choirboy, who died of consumption at the age of twenty-one, while Byron was out of England. John had given the poet a carnelian stone shaped like a heart; they were, apparently, actually in love. Like Cavafy's imaginging of Kaisarion in his eponymous poem, I have imagined John Edleston in my own terms, as no portrait of him (in that age before photography) exists---or, at least, is known to exist.
I confess that, until I just recently learned about John Edleston and Byron's intense feeling toward him, I did not have much respect for Byron---preferring to believe unproven slanders about him. I must admit to a couple of errors: I have long believed that Byron attempted to seduce Mary Godwin, in Geneva, either just prior to, or during the time, that she was beginning to compose the manuscript that became her novel, Frankenstein, even though she, herself, recorded nothing about that (to my knowledge) and she remained on friendly terms with him, subsequently; and it is to Byron's suggestion of the ghost story contest to which we owe both Mary Shelley's novel, and John Polidori's novella, The Vampyre, which became the basis of the more wildly successful Dracula, by Bram Stoker.
I hope that in writing this poem about John Edleston, and of attempting to convey some impression of his beauty to my readers, I can, in some small way, atone for my previous disrespect toward his lover, Lord Byron.
