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The TextOne of the initial questions for CHP concerns its title, and how it qualifies as a‘pilgrimage’ when no particular shrine is sought. The narrative begins with Harolddeparting from his ancestral home, and the reason given for the departure is hisdissatisfaction with the life of dissoluteness, a dissatisfaction figured as a rejection ofthe religious rigour of the anchorite:He felt the fulness of satiety:Then loath’d he in his native land to dwell,Which seem’d to him more lone than Eremite’s sad cell.[…]And now Childe Harold was sore sick at heart,And from his fellow bacchanals would flee (1.4.34-6, 6.46-7).From there, Harold becomes a pilgrim in search of something different, somethingbetter: he is reacting against dissatisfaction, and thus is seeking the happiness whichhe lost. Rather than making his way towards any predetermined shrine, Haroldmeanders across Europe in an apparently aimless fashion. This ‘lack of direction’ onthe part of the central character is, in the views of some critics, true for the poem as awhole. Thus, for example, William H Marshall comments that “neither English Bardsand Scotch Reviewers nor the first Childe Harold [Cantos I and II] reveals a sustainedstructure, either intellectual or dramatic.” 80 In this, he follows the view of Byron’scontemporary, William Roberts, who describes Canto IV in particular as being“without integrity of plan, or progress of action, with no development of the leadingidea, without point”, 81 a complaint also issued against Don Juan.The poem’s self-representation contributes to this appearance of aimlessness,repeatedly suggesting an absence of any firm goal. In the prefatory piece ‘To Ianthe’,the poet refers to “straying” in other climes (McGann 2.6:1), neither mentioning norimplying any specific destination. Similarly, in Canto I, Harold is described not as80 Marshall, The Structure of Byron's Major Poems (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,1962), p.27.81 Roberts, British Review, XII (August 1818), 1-34, RR, I, 459-475: p.469 (p.22).37