Allegra Byron - in Poetry

In Poetry

Percy Bysshe Shelley, remembering his 1818 visit to Byron, when he rolled billiard balls with Allegra, immortalized the toddler as Count Maddalo's child in his 1819 poem Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation:

“ A lovelier toy sweet Nature never made;

A serious, subtle, wild, yet gentle being;
Graceful without design, and unforeseeing;
With eyes -- O speak not of her eyes! which seem
Twin mirrors of Italian heaven, yet gleam
With such deep meaning as we never see
But in the human countenance.

 ”

In the next stanza he imagines her grown to a woman: "A wonder of this earth ... Like one of Shakespeare's women."

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