Fragmented Thoughts

Okay, so like a broken mirror reflecting the times- I feel I have a shattered comprehension of this tale.

Thoughts:
Religion: Hassan, even though he has taken a life will be in a Paradise in the afterlife. Doesn't quite equal out to what awaits the Giaour.
The monk and Hassan stereotypes of religion-Christian/Muslim

The butterfly: This butterfly is Leila and Greece... once too many fingers have stained it, it becomes a shade of its former glory, not even really recognizable as the brilliant object it once was. Also very fragile.

The vampire curse: I can't help but feeling like the Christian infidel/Giaour is sucking the life out of everything, leaving nothing but death and destruction in his wake.

So, Leila has died, the Giaour has a vampire curse, and is also likened to having the forehead of a Gorgon because of it's wild wreathing round, it seems to me, that our Christian Giaour is assuming mythological aspects of Greece-becoming a weird hybrid, a liminal being.

Towards the end, in the Giaour's confession, it seems that the love he had or shared with Leila is like religion.
 "Love indeed is light from heaven" (1131)

I like that at the very last bit of the poem, there is a foot note detailing a story of some twelve women accused of infidelity and were thrown into the river in sacks. It was completely acceptable (culturally) for Hassan to implement such a punishment. At first I wondered why not put the foot note with Leila's death, but I think it fits the ending better. As a reader along on this fragmented journey, how are we to know the customs of foreigners?

I feel much like a Giaour myself by the end- waiting to confess that I wish death (or at least the end of this poem) and the calm that waits after the final thought.

Eugene Delacroix; The Giaour contemplating the dead Hassan (circa 1829)