Lord George Gordon Byron (1788 – 1824)—famously characterized as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”—was the quintessential Romantic figure. Lord Byron could be extremely Gothic, as is broadly evident in the major Gothic vein running through much of his poetry, and nowhere more evident than in the story of Byron’s skull cup and his early poem inspired by it.

Along with his peerage, Lord Byron inherited the grandly Gothic residence, Newstead Abbey, and when a sizeable and well-preserved skull was incidentally dug up in the garden, Byron explained, “a strange fancy seized me of having it set and mounted as a drinking cup.” The skull cup would serve as Byron’s own personal drinking vessel during the drunken revels he’d host at Newstead—the “Order of the Skull,” he called it—and Byron went on to compose a poem written from the perspective of the skull, who fashions himself as a memento mori, a grim reminder that the grave awaits, but, as such, an inspiration to live life to the fullest in the here-and-now—to drink life to the dregs.

https://youtu.be/zKitvPDhyKs

Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed from a Skull

Start not—nor deem my spirit fled:

In me behold the only skull

From which, unlike a living head,

Whatever flows is never dull.

I lived, I loved, I quaff’d, like thee:

I died: let earth my bones resign;

Fill up—thou canst not injure me;

The worm hath fouler lips than thine.

Better to hold the sparkling grape,

Than nurse the earth-worm’s slimy brood;

And circle in the goblet’s shape

The drink of Gods, than reptiles’ food.

Where once my wit, perchance, hath shone,

In aid of others’ let me shine;

And when, alas! our brains are gone,

What nobler substitute than wine?

Quaff while thou canst—another race,

When thou and thine like me are sped,

May rescue thee from earth’s embrace,

And rhyme and revel with the dead.

Why not? since through life’s little day

Our heads such sad effects produce;

Redeem’d from worms and wasting clay,

This chance is theirs, to be of use.

— Lord Byron, Newstead Abbey, 1808