Dedicated to "Ianthe", it describes the travels and reflections of a young man disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry and looking for distraction in foreign lands.

The youthful Harold, cloyed with the pleasures of the world and reckless of life, wanders about Europe, making his feelings and ideas the subjects of the poem.

Some stanzas of Canto II are dedicated to Harold's journey in Albania, describing its natural and manmade beauties, its history, and the traditions of the Albanians.

In 'Canto IV' Harold starts from Venice on a journey through Italy, lamenting the vanished heroic and artistic past, and the subject status of its various regions.

The poem contains elements thought to be autobiographical, as Byron generated some of the storyline from experience gained during his travels through Portugal, the Mediterranean and Aegean Sea between 1809 and 1811.

Throughout the poem, Byron, in character of Childe Harold, regretted his wasted early youth, hence re-evaluating his life choices and re-designing himself through going on the pilgrimage, during which he lamented various historical events including the Iberian Peninsular War.

where the Giant on the mountain stands, His blood-red tresses deep'ning in the sun, With death-shot glowing in his fiery hands, And eye that scorcheth all it glares upon,— Restless it rolls, now fix'd, and now anon Flashing afar,—and at his iron feet Destruction cowers to mark what deeds are done; For on this morn three potent Nations meet, To shed before his Shrine the blood he deems most sweet.

For the long poem he was envisaging, Byron chose not only the Spenserian stanza but also the archaising dialect in which The Faerie Queene was written, possibly following the example of Spenser's 18th-century imitators.

[7] Thus in the Pilgrimage's first three stanzas we find mote (as past tense of the verb might); whilome (once upon a time) and ne (not); hight (named) and losel (good-for-nothing).

If such stylistic artificiality was meant to create a distance between hero and author, it failed – protest though Byron might in the preface that his protagonist was purely fictitious.

No sooner had Walter Scott read the work than he was commenting in a private letter to Joanna Baillie that "the hero, notwithstanding the affected antiquity of the style in some parts, is a modern man of fashion and fortune, worn out and satiated with the pursuits of dissipation, and although there is a caution against it in the preface, you cannot for your soul avoid concluding that the author, as he gives an account of his own travels, is also doing so in his own character.

Lord Byron avows the intent of this hero's introduction to be the "giving some connection to the piece"; but we cannot, for the life of us, discover how the piece is more connected, by assigning the sentiments which it conveys to a fictitious personage, who takes no part in any of the scenes described, who achieves no deeds, and who, in short, has no one province to perform, than it would have been had Lord Byron spoken in his own person, and been the "hero of his own tale".

This too deplored the land's Turkish enslavement and mourned its decline, although pausing to admire the occasion in the past when "woman mingled with your warrior band" (stanza 50) in resisting invasion.

Where the author diverged to take direct issue with Byron was on the controversy over the Elgin Marbles, championing instead their removal to a land that can still cherish their inspiration.

There the Byronic outcast of the title poem relates a catalogue of sins through thirty pages of irregular couplets, wound up by a call to last minute repentance.

[15] By 1820 the habit of imitation had crossed to the US, where five Spenserian stanzas dependent on the Pilgrimage's Canto II were published under the title "Childe Harold in Boetia" in The Galaxy.

These were written in the same form as Byron's poem and, forgiving the bitter insults that had passed between them in the course of a public controversy, now paid a magnanimous tribute to the manner of his dying.

[20] There was also a crop of French imitations on this occasion, of which the foremost was Alphonse de Lamartine's Le Dernier Chant du Pélerinage d'Harold (Paris, 1825).

"[27] The type was caricatured as the melancholy Mr Cypress in Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, published in 1818, following the appearance of the Pilgrimage's Canto IV.

Our life is a false nature; it is not in the harmony of things; it is an all-blasting upas whose root is earth, and whose leaves are the skies which rain their poison dews upon mankind.

We wither from our youth; we gasp with unslaked thirst for unattainable good; lured from the first to the last by phantoms – love, fame, ambition, avarice – all idle, and all ill – one meteor of many names, that vanishes in the smoke of death."

Onegin shares the hero's melancholy that cannot be pleased (1.38) and his dreaminess (4.44); but perhaps his mixture of behaviours are only so many masks, and in this respect he is likened to Melmoth the Wanderer as well as to Childe Harold (8.8).

Hector Berlioz recorded in his memoires that, in composing Harold en Italie (1834), he wished to draw on memories of his wanderings in the Abruzzi, making of the solo for viola at its start "a sort of melancholic reverie in the manner of Byron's Childe Harold" (une sorte de rêveur mélancolique dans le genre du Child-Harold de Byron).

[40] Several of Franz Liszt's transcriptions of Swiss natural scenery in his Années de pèlerinage (composed during the 1830s) were accompanied by epigraphs from Canto III of Byron's poem, but while the quotations fit the emotional tone of the music, they are sometimes contextually different.

Then in 1832 he exhibited a painting referencing Byron's poem in its title, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage - Italy (1832), accompanied by lines reflecting on the passing of imperial might from Canto IV, stanza 26.

[46] So too was his series of paintings The Course of Empire (1833–6), in reference to which he quoted the lines on the rise of cultures through civilisation to barbarism, from the Pilgrimage's Canto IV, stanza 108.