The mind that broods o’er guilty woes
The mind that broods o’er guilty woes,
Is like the scorpion girt by fire;
In circle narrowing as it glows,
The flames around their captive close,
Till inly searched by thousand throes,
And maddening in her ire,
One sad and sole relief she knows,
The sting she nourished for her foes,
Whose venom never yet was vain,
Gives but one pang, and cures all pain,
So do the dark in soul expire,
Or live like scorpion girt by fire;
So writhes the mind remorse hath riven,
Unfit for earth, undoomed for heaven,
Darkness above, despair beneath,
Around it flame, within it death!
-excerpted from The Giaour, Lord Byron
I remember being awed by this simple, yet beautifully descriptive account of a scorpion self-stinging itself to avoid an encroaching ringlet of fire in which it had been placed by the cruel hopes of amusement. The metaphor is original: the conscience as a self-destructive agent upon the self to avoid pain. The final three lines give narrative drama to the scorpion sting, accumulating caesuras to burst like flames into the final judgement, “death!”
Byron’s own footnote surmised that the scorpion did not sting itself. Rather the enveloping heat expired the insect before the flames consumed it, the body lost all rigor, and the tail slumped into a natural position, flaccid on the head of the creature.
