Byron's poem made him famous overnight; he awoke and found himself famous, as he put it. Harold, a young nobleman weary of pleasure, wanders through Europe, through Portugal and Spain and Greece, and Byron's descriptions of landscape and ruin established the archetype of the Byronic hero. The Spenserian stanzas move with melancholy grace. Byron himself became inseparable from his creation, and his death in Greece fighting for independence completed the legend. The poem is about exile, about the search for meaning in beauty, about the cost of being too alive for ordinary life.