"Maid of Athens, ere we part" is a poem by

Lord Byron George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824) was an English poet. He is one of the major figures of the Romantic movement, and is regarded as being among the greatest poets of the United Kingdom. Among his best-kno ...

, written in 1810 and dedicated to a young girl of

Athens Athens ( ) is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Greece, largest city of Greece. A significant coastal urban area in the Mediterranean, Athens is also the capital of the Attica (region), Attica region and is the southe ...

.English Poetry II: From Collins to Fitzgerald. The Harvard Classics (1909–1914) It begins: Each

stanza In poetry, a stanza (; from Italian ''stanza'', ; ) is a group of lines within a poem, usually set off from others by a blank line or indentation. Stanzas can have regular rhyme and metrical schemes, but they are not required to have either. ...

of the poem ends with the same

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

refrain, which Byron translated as "My life, I love you!". It may be viewed as an example of

macaronic Macaronic language is any expression using a mixture of languages, particularly bilingual puns or situations in which the languages are otherwise used in the same context (rather than simply discrete segments of a text being in different langua ...

verse, although it lacks the humorous intent typical of that genre.

History of the poem

According to C. G. Brouzas, the subject of Byron's "Maid of Athens" was Teresa Makri, the 12-year-old daughter of Tasia Makri, at whose house Byron lodged briefly in 1809 and in February 1810. Byron claimed to be in love with the child; in a letter to Henry Drury the poet declares to be "dying for love of three Greek Girls at Athens", "Teresa, Mariana, and Kattinka", and wrote the poem for her before departing for

Constantinople Constantinople (#Names of Constantinople, see other names) was a historical city located on the Bosporus that served as the capital of the Roman Empire, Roman, Byzantine Empire, Byzantine, Latin Empire, Latin, and Ottoman Empire, Ottoman empire ...

. On his way back from Turkey to the

Morea Morea ( or ) was the name of the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece during the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The name was used by the Principality of Achaea, the Byzantine province known as the Despotate of the Morea, by the O ...

, on 17 July 1810, he stayed at Makri's house for another ten days, during which time he offered her £500 for her daughter.C. G. Brouzas, "Byron's Maid of Athens: Her family and surroundings". Philological Papers v. 7, 65--??, West Virginia University Bulletin, Series 49, n. 12--VI, June 1949. Reviewed by H. Jenkins in The Journal of Hellenic Studies v. 73, p. 200 (1953) Byron never met Teresa again. She eventually married James Black (1803–1868) and died impoverished in 1875 in Athens, Greece.Richard Edgeumbe, letter to "The Times", 25 October 1875

Musical settings

The poem has been set to music by numerous composers, including

Charles Gounod Charles-François Gounod (; ; 17 June 181818 October 1893), usually known as Charles Gounod, was a French composer. He wrote twelve operas, of which the most popular has always been ''Faust (opera), Faust'' (1859); his ''Roméo et Juliette'' (18 ...

William Horsley William Horsley (18 November 177412 June 1858) was an English composer, organist and teacher. Career In 1790, Horsley became the pupil of the pianist and composer Theodore Smith (c. 1740–1810), who taught him sufficiently well to obtain the ...

,Philadelphia: Published at G. Willig's Musical Magazine, c. 1814. and Henry Robinson Allen. Isaac Nathan's rendition appears in an album "the best songs of the world".

References

External links

* The poem's full text at

Wikisource Wikisource is an online wiki-based digital library of free-content source text, textual sources operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole; it is also the name for each instance of that project, one f ...

* {{librivox book , title=Maid of Athens , author=George Gordon, Lord Byron Poetry by Lord Byron Works about Greece