Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a lengthy narrative poem written by the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron. It was published between 1812 and 1818 and is dedicated to "Ianthe", the term of endearment he used for Charlotte Harley (the artist Francis Bacon's great-great-grandmother). The poem describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands; in a wider sense, it is an expression of the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. The title comes from the term childe, a medieval title for a young man who was a candidate for knighthood.