Don Juan is a long, unfinished poem, written in ottava rima, a stanza written in iambic pentameter, consisting of three alternating couplets, rhyming ab, following by a rhyming couplet (cc). John Murray, who published the first two cantos in 1819, published the next three in 1821, before Byron changed publishers, moving to the more politically radical John Hunt, brother of Leigh Hunt. In 1823 John Hunt brought out, in three separate publications, cantos 6–8, 9–11, and 12–14; he published cantos 15–16 in 1824. In 1828, four years after Byron’s death, the first sixteen cantos were published. The remaining unfinished canto was published by E. H. Coleridge as part of his monumental edition, 1899–1904.1 The focus of this section is on the first four cantos, though passages from elsewhere in the work are also discussed.
The poem is a serio‐comic masterpiece, satirical yet in many ways generously understanding of human nature, mock‐epic in its subversions of seriousness, yet epic, too, in its range and sweep. The following stanza, cancelled from the opening canto, shows many of Byron’s favoured procedures:
I would to Heaven that I were so much Clay –
As I am blood – bone – marrow, passion – feeling –
Because at least the past were past away –
And for the future – (but I write this reeling
Having got drunk exceedingly to day
So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling)
I say – the future is a serious matter –
And so – for Godsake – Hock and Soda water.2
The stanza illustrates the ease and brilliance of the poem’s comic style. This style hinges on the use of ottava rima, a form whose confidently iambic rhythms, capacity for amusingly inventive rhyme, and clinching couplet suited Byron admirably. Each stanza, indeed, as here, seems to delight in a triadic structure; one thing is set against another before a resolution, of sorts, is attained.3 In the above stanza, Byron is able to knock one line of thought off its perch by another, as he leaves ‘the future’ hanging in the air. Cleverly, feminine rhymes undermine pretentiousness: the serious Romantic word ‘feeling’ is made to look silly when rhymed with ‘but I write this reeling’ and ridiculous when paired with ‘So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling’.
The wit serves as an exhilarating means of coping with despair. The effect of the final couplet, in which Byron calls out for his hangover remedy (‘Hock and Soda water’), is stylish and amusing but there is pain in the debunking humour, too. Awareness of contradiction informs the stanza, which oscillates between wanting to escape from painful feeling and realizing that to be human is to be condemned to feel. William Hazlitt, no uncomplicated admirer of Byron, a feeling reciprocated by the poet who wrote that Hazlitt ‘talks pimples’,4 was sensitive to Byron’s underlying sense of unrest. Singling out ‘Intensity’ as the ‘great and prominent distinction of Lord Byron’s writings’, Hazlitt helps define a quality which continually if urbanely surfaces in Don Juan as well as his more evidently serious works.5
Byron himself seems to vacillate in his view of the poem. At one level, its only end is ‘to giggle and make giggle’;6 at another, it is imbued with deadly satiric purpose. W. H. Auden writes in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, ‘You are the master of the airy manner’, praising him for ‘A style whose meaning does not need a spanner’,7 and it is Byron’s ‘airy manner’ that allows him to express different sides of a complicated poetic personality. An example occurs when Byron introduces Julia whose affair with Juan, the son of Donna Inez, the woman referred to in the first line, supplies the main plot‐line of the first canto:
Amongst her numerous acquaintance, all
Selected for discretion and devotion.
There was the Donna Julia, whom to call
Pretty were but to give a feeble notion
Of many charms in her as natural
As sweetness in the flower, or salt to ocean,
Her zone to Venus, or his bow to Cupid,
(But this last simile is trite and stupid.) (1.55.433–40)
Donna Inez serves as a means by which Byron can aim some leisurely digs at his estranged wife, but she also has independent life as a character in Byron’s often novel‐like poem. Yet we are aware of the narrator’s presence to a remarkable degree in the poem, delighting in the way in which, for all his show of respect, he is ironical about Inez’s hypocrisy. There is a flicker of mockery in the second line which suggests that ‘discretion and devotion’ are commensurate and comparable virtues. In the last line Byron lets his stanza trip over the booby‐trap of bathos he has laid; what is effective about the line is that, though we have sensed something comic in the offing (especially after the use of ‘Cupid’ as the rhyme prompt), Byron has beguiled us into thinking that he is going through the motions, dutifully idealizing his heroine. The last line, pulling the rug from under our feet, makes us conscious that this is a poet whose dealings with the hackneyed are continually critical.
In Don Juan, as his attacks on Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey bear witness, Byron puts into comedic practice his belief, expressed in a letter of September 1817, that ‘we are upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system’.8 A month later, Byron began work on Beppo, his first major poem in ottava rima. The poem is no mere dry run for Don Juan, but in its use of a magnetically captivating narrator, delighting in digression and leading his readership by the nose, and in its quicksilver switches of mood, Beppo anticipates aspects of Don Juan, as in these lines:
I fear I have a little turn for satire,
And yet methinks the older that one grows
Inclines us more to laugh than scold, though laughter
Leaves us so doubly serious shortly after. (Beppo 79.629–32)
The writing twists and turns. Byron admired Pope, but his syntax here overturns the shapeliness of the Augustan couplet, and the ‘doubly serious’ close manages to be coolly stage‐managed yet almost confessionally affecting. Don Juan is a satire on manners and morals. Charles Mahoney, noting that the poem’s first stanza involves rhymes on ‘cant’, persuasively discovers ‘a pronounced commitment to poetic and political liberty, behind the veil of giggling and acting mad’,9 and the various inflections adopted by Byron in the poem can be related to this ‘commitment’. At the same time, the poem’s sweep is not constricted by the limits usually associated with the genre of satire: it is capable, in a way consonant with epic as well as mock‐epic ambitions, of accommodating elegy, lyricism, narrative, pastoral, and other generic impulse.
Byron’s poem unsheathes its satirical claws in its savage ‘Dedication’, unpublished until 1832. Cantos 1 and 2 were originally published anonymously, and Byron felt it inappropriate to ‘attack the dog in the dark’,10 the ‘dog’ in question being the poet laureate Robert Southey. Byron saw in Southey a perfect symbol of political self‐interest. Having turned away from the radical politics of his youth, Southey was now for the younger poet an apostate: hence the Dedication signs off with a coolly questioning sneer of a couplet: ‘To keep one creed’s a task grown quite Herculean, / Is it not so, my Tory ultra‐Julian?’ (135–6). Southey had irked Byron for personal reasons; he suspected him of spreading rumours about having set up a ‘League of Incest’ with Shelley in 1816.11 But he is also as a Lake poet a type, for Byron, of staid conservatism, and the satire moves on to criticize Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge as a trio of self‐satisfied and insular writers, convinced of their special status.
Byron takes the fight to the three poets with gusto: ‘There is a narrowness in such a notion / Which makes me wish you’d change your lakes for ocean’ (39–40). The casual subjectivity of ‘makes me wish’ is at a studied distance from Popean appeals to abstractions, and yet a confidence about his scorn for ‘narrowness’ which is significantly a question of the writer’s demeanour, how it carries itself. This scorn links with downright contempt for Castlereagh, dismissed as an ‘intellectual eunuch’ (88), an insult that rhymes with a previous gibe at Southey for soaring ‘too high, Bob’ (23) and falling ‘for lack of moisture, quite adry, Bob!’ (24). The allusion to Southey’s supposed inability to ejaculate semen suggests a compulsion in both men to compensate for their sense of sexual failure by behaving with pert vanity in the poet’s case and obstinate cruelty in the politician’s.
If the Dedication is cool yet savage, Juvenalian, Byron can also entertain other modes, often doing so with a sense that every perspective, every style, every way of putting things involves performative self‐awareness. A stanza from canto 15 talks about and illustrates Byron’s manner and self‐conscious mental agility in Don Juan:
I perch upon an humbler promontory,
Amidst life’s infinite variety:
With no great care for what is nicknamed glory,
But speculating as I cast mine eye
On what may suit or may not suit my story,
And never straining hard to versify,
I rattle on exactly as I’d talk
With any body in a ride or walk. (15.19.145–52)
The art here lies in the writing’s witty disdain for art. Byron adopts a nonchalant, take‐it‐or‐leave‐it tone. He is not going to be caught in the act of ‘straining hard to versify’, his seemingly chanced‐on rhymes and regular iambic rhythms simulating an effortless, improvisatory air, as though he were guided by whims, casual inspirations. There is an urbane insolence about, say, ‘what may not suit’. If we want a poem that sticks to a story‐line, Byron seems to say, that’s just too bad; we’ll have to go elsewhere. Underpinning the insolence is great assurance; Byron knows that he can adopt this tone because his readers find it immensely winning. There is a hint, too, in the stanza’s second line of self‐justification: Byron implies that his style is suited to the real nature of existence, its contradictions and ‘infinite variety’.
‘I want a hero: an uncommon want’ (1.1.1), begins the poem. Juan is at once charmingly unlike the predatory Don Juan of legend, and seemingly more acted‐upon than acting. Byron uses him with great skill to take the story to its different location, and intended, on one account at least, to have led him finally to the Revolution in France where he would die on a guillotine. Yet the poem’s ‘hero’ is less Juan than the wittily omnipresent narrator, commenting, qualifying, ironizing. Byron delights in blurring the boundaries between himself speaking ‘in propria persona’ and the narrator, and in teasing the reader, especially the reader who objected to the supposed immorality of the first two cantos: canto 3, stanza 12 is an instance:
Haidée and Juan were not married, but
The fault was theirs, not mine: it is not fair,
Chaste reader, then, in any way to put
The blame on me, unless you wish they were;
Then if you’d have them wedded, please to shut
The book which treats of this unlawful pair,
Before the consequences grow too awful;
’Tis dangerous to read of loves unlawful. (3.12.89–96)
The control of tone in this stanza is expert: deference to the ‘Chaste reader’ barely holds laughter and contempt at arm’s length. The suggestion that the reader ‘shut / The book’, with its reference to the fifth canto of the Inferno, in which Paolo and Francesca are hastened into adultery by reading a book, makes the reader wish to keep it open. Byron has his moral reader over a barrel; he has given us due warning – if we continue to read the poem, as we will, we risk being convicted of a hypocritical, not to say voyeuristic, fascination with ‘loves unlawful’.
Elsewhere, Byron pretends that the joke is at his own expense, that the subject‐matter with which he is dealing is growing too hot to handle. The developing physical intimacy between Juan and Julia in canto 1 gets the narrator into quite a tizzy, mimicking embarrassed confusion: ‘I can’t go on; / I’m almost sorry that I e’er begun’ (1.115.919–20). Byron is never more in control than when he affects to be losing control. In the later cantos, where the poem grows more sombre as it deals with war, ageing, and various recurrent philosophical conundrums about, for example, truth and inconsistency or soul and matter,12 Byron’s contempt for the easily shockable is more snarlingly brusque. In canto 12, stanza 40, he writes: ‘But now I’m going to be immoral; now / I mean to show things really as they are’ (12.40.313–14). There, Byron surrounds ‘immoral’ with imaginary quotation marks, suggesting that what others call immorality is, in fact, a form of authentic truth‐telling.
In other places, Byron fends off more lightly the charge of immorality. In canto 4, he notes that ‘Some have accused me of a strange design / Against the creed and morals of the land, / And trace it in this poem every line’ (4.5.33–5), archly brushing off the charge as ridiculous, even a misplaced compliment: ‘I don’t pretend that I quite understand / My own meaning when I would be very fine’ (4.5.36–7). The italics are Byron’s and capture a drolly dandified tone. The stanza is amusing with its new, post‐Childe Harold commitment to being ‘merry, / A novel word in my vocabulary’ (4.5.39–40), an ingenious rhyme that stages Byron’s comic self‐fashioning in full sight of the reader. But the stanza’s drollery needs to be seen in the perspective offered by its predecessor’s opening:
And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
’Tis that I may not weep; and if I weep,
’Tis that our nature cannot always bring
Itself to apathy … (4.4.25–8)
This stanza comes close to explaining Byron’s procedures in Don Juan, allowing us to understand his emotional ‘mobility’, to use his own term, to see a connection between the ‘Romantic’ and ‘satirical’ Byrons, between the idealist and the cynic. Laughter emerges as a defence against tears; tears, the many moments of pathos and sorrow in the poem, prove that the poet is still alive; ‘apathy’, the incapacity to feel, is a condition Byron at once fears and in some ways desires: the forgetfulness of ‘Lethe’ (4.4.32) has its attractions as the stanza goes on to observe.
As in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the poet‐narrator’s confessions and comments quicken our interest. Although such passages come thick and fast in the more reflective later cantos, one of the most impressive occurs towards the end of the first canto (stanzas 213–15), a passage that participates in the lamentation for change and disillusion often expressed in Romantic poetry (Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’ is a famous example). Byron is amusing and touchingly down to earth about ageing, flirting with wearing a wig, for instance: ‘But now at thirty years my hair is gray— / (I wonder what it will be like at forty? / I thought of a peruke the other day) / My heart is not much greener’ (1.213.1697–1700). He strikes a fine balance between lamenting the loss of youth and accepting the scanty consolations of maturity, managing not to be pompous about the ‘judgement’ (1.215.1719) he has gained, ‘Though heaven knows it ever found a lodgement’ (1.215.1720). The style mirrors the theme, Byron seems genuinely to experience a sense of sorrow, yet to send it up as well.
A judgement of the poem’s worth depends on what is made of the poem’s veering between comedy and seriousness, gravity and flippancy. Hazlitt puts the case against Byron’s seesawing tones and attitudes with some force: ‘He hallows in order to desecrate; takes a pleasure in defacing the images his hands have wrought … It is not that Lord Byron is sometimes serious and sometimes trifling, sometimes profligate and sometimes moral—’ (Hazlitt’s own reversal of expectations in those couplings reflecting what he finds in Byron) ‘but when he is most serious and most moral, he is only preparing to mortify the unsuspecting reader by putting a pitiful hoax upon him.’13 Certainly there are many moments when Byron, true to his poem’s Sternean genealogy (‘a TRISTRAM SHANDY in rhyme’ is Hazlitt’s description of the way the poem has been seen by some),14 does ‘mortify the unsuspecting reader’. After the affecting stanzas in canto 4 depicting the tragic conclusion of the relationship between Juan and Haidee, Byron shifts into another gear:
But let me change this theme, which grows too sad,
And lay this sheet of sorrows on the shelf;
I don’t much like describing people mad,
For fear of seeming rather touch’d myself –
Besides I’ve no more on this head to add;
And as my Muse is a capricious elf,
We’ll put about, and try another tack
With Juan, left half‐kill’d some stanzas back. (4.74.585–92)
Byron’s flip tone comes close to taking ‘a pleasure in defacing the images his hands have wrought’, in Hazlitt’s phrase. But it does not take anything from the sadness of what precedes it (the account of Haidee’s final illness and death). It marks off that sadness, admits that pathos cannot be sustained indefinitely without turning into rhetorical indulgence. Byron is being tactless but honest when he says, ‘Besides I’ve no more on this head to add’ and frankly, jokily, admits that we are reading a work of fiction whose hero was ‘left half‐killed some stanzas back’. Don Juan is always reminding its reader that no one view of life exhausts its meaning. It strains away from closure. There is, too, the more personal note struck in the fourth line: ‘For fear of seeming rather touch’d myself’, where the slangy ‘touch’d’ behaves as though it conceals real anxiety.
Some passages from the first four cantos that develop preceding observations include a stanza from canto 1, which is part of Julia’s love letter and ‘the account of its being written’, as Shelley put it. ‘Where did you learn all these secrets?’, Shelley goes on to ask: ‘I should like to go to school there.’15 Julia and Juan’s relationship has come to light and Julia has been packed off to a convent. Byron goes to some pains to show her carrying out her romantic role with some care: ‘This note was written upon gilt‐edged paper / With a neat crow‐quill, rather hard, but new … And yet she did not let one tear escape her; / The seal a sunflower; “Elle vous suit partout”’ (1.198.1577–8, 1581–2). Byron does not merely poke fun at her. He may be wryly observant about the complexity of human behaviour, noting how this heart‐broken woman is still composed enough to attend to the rituals of experience. But his humour does not merely debunk; often in the poem irony or humour is less reductive than inclusive, aware of different ways of viewing experience.
The poem is often sympathetic to the predicaments of its female characters. One of the jokes of the poem is that the hero is so unlike the traditional Don Juan, usually a licentious Lothario. Byron may annoy some readers by having Julia write to Juan: ‘Man’s love is of his life a thing apart, / ’Tis woman’s whole existence’ (1.194.1545–6). Yet his point is not that this is how things are immutably, but rather that it holds for the society he is delineating. Two stanzas from the close of canto 2 (199–200) are relevant in this context. The first stanza seems to trot out a stereotype, but to do so knowingly: ‘Alas! the love of women! it is known / To be a lovely and a fearful thing’ (2.199.1585–6). Yet the pity turns out to be neither patronizing nor undercut by mockery: ‘yet, as real / Torture is theirs, what they inflict they feel’ (2.199.1591–2). The last phrase is suddenly quite serious. The following stanza may exaggerate, but its dismal generalizations show an awareness of the unromantic realities in wait for women in Byron’s society, after marriage: ‘what rests beyond? / A thankless husband, next a faithless lover, / Then dressing, nursing, praying, and all’s over’ (2.200.1598–1600).
These stanzas occur straight after the description of Juan and Haidee together. Byron presents their idyllic but star‐crossed love as a contrast to the usual relations between men and women. He presents their love as pure, more moral, for its spontaneity and naturalness, its freedom from hypocrisy. Haidee is ‘Nature’s bride’ (2.202.1609): ‘never having dreamt of falsehood, she / Had not one word to say of constancy’ (2.190.1519–20). Yet, though idealized, the love is depicted credibly by Byron, partly because he implies, quite touchingly, his own distance from the raptures of first love: ‘Alas! for Juan and Haidee! they were / So loving and so lovely—till then never, / Excepting our first parents, such a pair / Had run the risk of being damn’d for ever’ (2.193.1537–40). Byron mocks and grimly concedes the idea that their love could lead to damnation. Throughout Don Juan, first love is a paradisal experience which inevitably brings about a fall into disillusion. Only Haidee’s death prevents such disillusion in this case. The love is also credible because of the ease and tenderness of the writing: ‘She sits upon his knee, and drinks his sighs, / He hers, until they end in broken gasps’ (2.194.1549–50).16
This passage shows Byron at his most archetypally Romantic, yet it is a Romanticism that has its feet on the ground and its eye on familiar experience, as when he describes Haidee watching over the sleeping Juan (see stanza 197). Byron is detached enough to raise questions of constancy in relation to Juan and wittily confront or evade them (stanza 209). And, true to the poem’s many‐angled perspective, the romantic idyll follows the earlier account of the shipwreck in the same canto, one of the most powerful and controversial sections of the poem. Byron extracts grim humour from the fact that the immediate survivors are obsessed by food: ‘They grieved for those who perish’d with the cutter, / And also for the biscuit casks and butter’ (2.61.487–8). The reviewer for the British Critic was severe on this kind of thing: ‘The poverty of a man’s wit is never so conspicuous, as when he is driven to a joke upon human misery.’17 But Byron’s tone is that of a writer determined to make us see that from which we might wish to avert our eyes. The effect is less cynicism than savage realism, coloured by irony at the expense of our squeamishness as when the descent into cannibalism claims a Dantean precedent (via the story of Ugolino): ‘if foes be food in hell, at sea / ’Tis surely fair to dine upon our friends, / When shipwreck’s short allowance grows too scanty, / Without being much more horrible than Dante’ (2.83.661–4). If, later, Byron praises nature as offering an ideal, here he sees it as force which makes a mockery of human taboos, as when he writes, of the drawing of lots to decide who should be eaten, ‘None in particular had sought or plann’d it, / ’Twas nature gnaw’d them to this resolution’ (597–8). Again, Byron does not deny that human beings are incapable of dignity in extremis.
The section demonstrates the poem’s range of tones and inclusiveness of vision.18 Throughout, though Byron comments, he rarely preaches. In the English cantos he is offering ‘a satire on abuses of the present state of society’, but he achieves much more, a recreation of aristocratic Regency England.19 Don Juan is a poem which respects, even delights in, the muddle of experience. It is also a work given coherence by the attempt of its central narratorial consciousness to understand how social and individual histories mesh. Among the multitude of self‐definitions and would‐be explanatory images pervading the poem, the following from canto 7 comes as close as any to describing its overall impact: ‘A non‐descript and ever varying rhyme, / A versified Aurora Borealis, / Which flashes o’er a waste and icy clime’ (7.2.10–12).