Like Rupert Brooke, Lord Byron died in ‘some corner of a foreign field’ in Greece, but, unlike Brooke, had gone there to fight for that country, against the Ottomans, having become estranged from England. The story can be told through his final poem, ‘On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year’, which he wrote into his journal and dated 22 January 1824, Missolonghi. He begins with the self-pity of the unrequited lover:
’Tis time this heart should be unmoved, Since others it hath ceased to move: Yet though I cannot be beloved, Still let me love! (1–4)
In the fifth stanza he shakes himself back to the present and the heroic:
But ’tis not thus—and ’tis not here Such thoughts should shake my Soul, nor now Where Glory decks the hero’s bier, Or binds his brow. (17–20)
Seize the day, in other words. (Byron was actually the first English writer to employ the Horatian aphorism carpe diem.) He had gone to Greece to fight for freedom and against tyranny; and, unlike Brooke, who said ‘If I should die’, perhaps at some level wanted to. Particularly after the deaths of Keats and Shelley, he probably invested something in the idea that the good die young. The poem ends,
Seek out—less often sought than found— A Soldier’s Grave, for thee the best; Then look around, and choose thy Ground, And take thy Rest! (37–40)
About three weeks later, Byron collapsed in a violent convulsion. ‘[T]o terminate my wearisome existence I came to Greece’, he told his doctor. Two days more and he was dead.
If you seek a Byronic hero in Byron Court, look, in the words of Thomas Babington Macaulay, for ‘a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection’.