But now I’m going to be immoral; now
I mean to show things really as the are,
Not as they ought to be; for I avow,
That till we see what’s what in fact, we’re far
From much improvement with that virtuous plough
Which skims the surface, leaving scarce a scar
Upon the black loam long manured by Vice,
Only to keep its corn at the old price. – Canto XII, Stanza XL

The stock character of Don Juan represents the quintessential ladies man who enjoys spending his evenings seducing women, drinking heavy, partying, and dueling with the husbands of his sexual conquests. He can be found throughout literature and the arts, most famously perhaps in Mozart’s opera under the guise of his Italian name Don Giovanni.



Mozart captures the stock figure well in this aria, which portrays Don Giovanni directing his servant to bring cute women to his party so he can get them drunk and seduce them.

Lord Byron’s portrayal is a little less faithful to the traditional character. Byron’s Don Juan isn’t a cold-hearted amoral seducer of women, but a naive mild-tempered young man who finds himself attracting women without much effort on his part. Byron inverts the character, with the women attempting to seduce him, sometimes against his will. His character isn’t a flamboyant libertine, but is rather a modest and reserved youth, practically lacking a personality in the poem.

The narrative is constructed loosely around Don Juan’s various love affairs and adventures around the world. The first Canto begins when he is a boy who must leave Spain after his first love affair at sixteen with a married woman is discovered. On his journey away from Spain his ship sinks and he lives on a rescue boat where lack of food forces the survivors to engage in cannibalism in order to survive. Then he lands on Greece where a young woman named Haidee nurses him back to health in secret, which of course leads to them falling in love. The love blossoms while Haidee’s father who is a pirate is out at sea ransacking ships and selling the people onboard as slaves to the Ottoman Empire. He returns to find his household in disarray and his daughter in love with a strange young man. He fights with Don Juan, beats him, and then sells him into slavery. While in slavery, Don Juan captures the eye of young sultana, which leads to an amusing cross-dressing incident and whose jealousy threatens to kill him. He somehow escapes (between Cantos) and then ends up fighting for the Russia Empire against the Turks. He does so well in battle storming a major Turkish stronghold that the military leaders bring him along to see the Empress of Russia; Catherine the Great also falls in love with him when they meet. However, the harsh Russian weather makes Don Juan ill and she is forced to send him away on a diplomatic mission to England for the sake of his health. And in England, of course, he has more love affairs.

You would think this plot description would cover the bulk of poem, but in actuality the vast majority of the poem consists of the narrator’s rambling digressions. Despite the name of the poem, Don Juan almost seems a minor part of it, a kind of afterthought, which fact the narrator is playfully cognizant, apologizing frequently throughout the poem for going on long digressions and not getting back to the story of his hero. Sometimes incidents in the plot inspire the topic of the narrator’s digressions, but ultimately the narrator roams freely from topic to topic as he sees fit.

Tackling Byron’s main theme is difficult because in a way his theme is the ridiculousness of society and the world itself; major issues the poem addresses is love, how women and men think, British politics, Greek politics, Christianity, philosophy, sexuality, etc. Unfortunately Byron tries to discuss these issues through the criticizing voice of his rambling narrator rather than through a unified plot. Dante is another poet who scrutinizes the sins and mores of his society (covering politics, poetry, art, metaphysics, human foibles, sexuality, etc.) by setting the scope of the Divine Comedy as nothing less than the known universe, but Dante is far more successful because his poem is structured around the setting and characters found throughout the journey rather than a narrator’s ramblings and tangents that take us away from the main story.

I am not, however, calling Byron a bad poet. There are definitely moments in the poem where Byron shines. For example, I think the comparison between a river’s changing water levels to a widow’s grief is a wonderful metaphor, yet the metaphor extends further by providing an ironic twist and cynicism about the extent of our grief, complimented by the metaphor itself since a river refills its banks with the change of season, that I think truly defines Byron’s writing style.

But sighs subside, and tears (even widows’) shrink,
Like Arno in the summer, to a shallow,
So narrow as to shame their wintry brink,
Which threatens inundations deep and yellow!
Such difference doth a few months make. You’d think
Grief a rich field which never would lie fallow;
No more it doth, — its ploughs but change their boys,
Who furrow some new soil to sow for joys. – Canto X, Stanza VII

Another characteristics that can be both frustrating and amusing is the forced rhyme. It suggests Byron doesn’t take his poem seriously, while mocking the grandiose nature of long epic poems.

Don Juan grew, I fear, a little dissipated;
Which is a sad thing, and not only tramples
On our fresh feelings, but — as being participated
With all kinds of incorrigible samples
Of frail humanity — must make us selfish,
And shut our souls up in us like a shell-fish. – Canto X, Stanza XXIV

The ending is an example of those forced rhyme attempts that can be found throughout the poem. It is not just the rhyme itself that provides comedy, but also the image of souls being shut up inside our bodies like a shellfish’s body. However, while this can be funny in small doses it can also get old very quickly.

Another difficult and impressive quality of Byron’s work is the amount of allusions; the work is packed with them.

And Death, the sovereign’s Sovereign, though the great
Gracchus of all mortality, who levels
With his Agrarian Laws, the high estate
of him who feasts, and fights, and roars, and revels,
To one small grass-grown patch (which must await
Corruption for its crop) with the poor devils
Who never had a foot of land till now –
Death’s a reformer, all men must allow. – Canto X, Stanza XXV

These lines really struck me as powerful. Byron alludes to the Roman land Reformer, Grachhus, and employs the allusion as a metaphor for the equality of rich and poor before impartial death: the rich losing all their estates to one small patch of grass where they will be buried and those who never owned any land now possessing the elusive plot of dirt where they will be buried.

Despite liking many aspects of the poem, the general feeling I got while reading is that the whole composition could be tightened and cut. I tend not to like long poems anyway (as I see poetry’s strength in its ability to say a lot in a little) and I’m not really much of a fan of episodic plots. Certainly Byron was going for comedy rather than tragedy and some of the sloppiness in the lines, such as the forced rhymes, can be explained by this larger aesthetic goal, but often it left me as a reader feeling like he was just being careless and many of the jokes he was trying to make got old fast.

Although often identified as one of the big six English Romantic Poets (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron), Byron seems to envision his own epic poem at odds with his fellow Romantics. The opening “Dedication” attacks the poet Laureate of his time, Robert Southey, and other Romantic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. As the poem progresses Byron continually attacks these poets, especially Southey. He accuses them of being sell-outs, believing that they sold their liberal political ideals only to become conservative shills working for the government. His attacks extend not just to their politics, but to to the quality of their poetry itself, calling Southey untalented, complaining about Coleridge’s obfuscating metaphysics, and suggesting Wordsworth is unintelligible. Ironically, I think Wordsworth won this fight since most critics and myself included consider him the superior poet by a long shot.

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