The first, in B minor, is decidedly the more vigorous of the two, and
the more difficult. It is based upon the pathetically tragic story of
the Prisoner of Chillon, so ably told in Byron’s poem, which the player
should read with care, so as to familiarize himself thoroughly with its
incidents and moods. The poem tells of that nameless captive chained for
life to a pillar in a rock-hewn dungeon beneath the castle of Chillon,
on Lake Leman, below the surface of the lake, so that he listens day and
night to the dull thunder or mournful murmur of the changeful waves
above his head, as his only indication of the shifting moods of Nature
in the living world, her passing smiles and storms, her slowly circling
seasons as they come and go.
“A double dungeon, wall and wave
Have made—and like a living grave.
Below the surface of the lake
The dark vault lies, wherein we lay:
We heard its ripple night and day,
Sounding o’er our heads it knocked,
And then the very rock hath rocked,
And I have felt it shake unshocked:
Because I could have smiled to see
The death that would have set me free.”
Years drag themselves out to eternities. One by one his few companions
die of cold and hunger, leaving him alone in that living tomb, with his
endless, changeless, unutterable misery.
“I had no thought, no feeling—none.
Among the stones I stood a stone.
It was not night, it was not day,
For all was blank and bleak and gray:
A sea of stagnant idleness,
Blind, boundless, mute, and motionless.”
His only gleam of comfort were the occasional visits of an azure-winged
bird that came now and then and perched on the window ledge outside his
dungeon bars, a fair and gentle companion symbolizing for him all the
beauty and tenderness and sweetness in the life he has lost; and on
which he comes to concentrate the love and interest of his famished
heart.
“A lovely bird with azure wings,
And song that said a thousand things,
And seemed to say them all to me!
I never saw the like before,
I ne’er shall see its likeness more:
It seemed, like me, to want a mate,
But was not half so desolate;
And it was come to love me, when
None lived to love me so again.”
The opening movement of the ballade, representing the thunder of the
waves reverberating through the gloom of that cavern-like cell, and the
later lyric, which might be called the bird theme, suggesting his tender
communing with his little friend, are the best movements in the work.
The details of the story are not carried out, but its outlines, and
especially its moods, are clearly given.