Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is a fascinating portrait of 19th-century Europe, disillusioned and ravaged by the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The protagonist, whose breathtaking journey echoes Byron’s own life story, plunges into the exciting unknown: the nature of humanity and the transformative effects of travel burst through the pages in four powerful cantos of Spenserian stanzas. Here is the poem that set Byron on his meteoric rise to fame in London society.