This edition made to fit most pockets and formatted for a smaller page. Makes a great traveling companion. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a classic narrative poem in four parts. It describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands. Byron, through Childe Harold, regrets his wasted early youth and so re-designs himself on this pilgrimage, which takes him through Portugal, the Mediterranean and Aegean Sea between 1809 and 1811. Many of the events are said to be auto-biographical, with Byron himself initially hesitating to publish the first two cantos of the poem as he felt it revealed too much of himself.