One of his earlier works, The Bride of Abydos is considered to be one of his "Heroic Poems", along with The Giaour, Lara, The Siege of Corinth, The Corsair and Parisina.

Selim, wishing to kiss his love one last time, tarries to leave the cave and soon falls, dying on the beach, the fatal blow administered by Giaffir himself.

[3] In his personal Diary of 16 November 1813, Byron claims to have written The Bride "stans pede in uno"[4] (a direct quotation[i 1] from Horace's Satires 2.10,[6] decrying the rapid production of poor verse for commercial gain).

In another letter[7] Byron expresses his intent to concoct an illicit love affair between the true brother and sister, but he settled on its final format before actually penning the story.

[8] However, some declare this experiment to be a failure; Paul West, in Byron: The Spoiler's Art, notes the inherent awkwardness between the stresses of the speech and the counts of the line.

[9] He cites the following passage as an example of this inability of the stress to correctly align: Zuleika, mute and motionless, Stood like that statue of distress, When, her last hope for ever gone, The mother harden'd into stone; All in the maid that eye could see Was but a younger Niobé.

The voice records the drama and supplies the interior motives and monologues without pretense, explaining in a few cases exterior allusions, "but, generally within the body of the poem is sparing in offering truly informative commentary".

One author finds the refusal of Selim to heed Zuleika's pleas of love and his turn for vengeance against Giaffir to be "a consistent vision of man's low estate and the futility of Romantic optimism".

[13] Again, the initial reaction in reading The Bride of Abydos as a poem of revenge is to understand Selim's motives as they are given by the narrator, namely justice for his murdered father.

He ever went to war alone, And pent me here untried, unknown; To Haroun's care with women left, By hope unblest, of fame bereft, While thou—whose softness long endear'd, Though it unmann'd me, still had cheer'd— To Brusa's walls for safety sent, Awaitedst there the field's event.

Nevertheless, while using such a foreign setting to entertain tale of taboo, the poet also justifies Selim and Zuleika's relations with respect to knowledge of that culture: "[N]one else there could obtain that degree of intercourse leading to general affection".