George Gordon, Lord Byron
Possible Lines of Approach
Byron’s connection to first-generation Romantics
The personal and the poetic
The individual and the will
Byron and form
Byron and morality
Notes on Approaching Particular Works
Questions for Discussion
Critical Viewpoints/Reception History
Possible Lines of Approach
Byron’s connection to first-generation Romantics
•
Like all second-generation Romantics, Byron was acutely aware of those who came
before him. Byron’s awareness, however, had a personal tinge, for both Robert
Southey and William Wordsworth had treated or spoken of him poorly. A hallmark
of Don Juan is its open antagonism to the older Romantics.
The personal and the poetic
•
A number of our short selections are poems that Byron wrote to commemorate
specific events or relationships in his life. “She Walks in Beauty,” “Epistle to
Augusta,” and “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year” all offer excellent
entry into a discussion of the way Byron’s life became the subject of his poetry,
and the part he played in making it do so. The same is true of Don Juan, where
Byron seems to invite connection between himself and the narrator, although he
denied this.
The individual and the will
•
Poems such as “Darkness” and “Prometheus” appear to laud the power of the
isolated Individual, individual mind, and individual Will. Don Juan, on the other
hand, seems to celebrate passivity (Juan has almost no will at all). Instructors may
wish to discuss this issue, particularly since Byron is commonly seen as a poet who
celebrates the Will.
Byron and form
•
Byron was able to work in a number of different forms—lyric, blank verse,
narrative verse—using each for different purposes and effects. In addition, Byron
put ottava rima to a number of different uses. The instructor may wish to consider
both the effects Byron creates with his different forms and how it is that he is able
to deploy ottava rima to such varied emotional effect.
Byron and morality
•
Byron frequently averred, both inside the poem and out, that Don Juan was a moral
work (see, for example, Canto I, stanza 207, and, less directly, the letters on pages
609-11). These assertions raise the question of what precisely “morality” is, how it
may be defined, and what its purpose may be. In addition, Byron’s own reputation
in his lifetime and beyond makes for an interesting case study in morality and in
changing notions of the position of the writer.
Notes on Approaching Particular Works
Our selections begin with two lyrics from Byron’s Hebrew Melodies. Byron wrote these
poems to be set to music; in doing so he was not only capitalizing on a Romantic craze
for songs that were (or that purported to be) native to other lands (for more on this, see
page xxxvii of the anthology’s introduction), but also revealing himself as something of a
proto-Zionist, for the composer of the music was a Jew, Isaac Nathan, and a number of
the lyrics were based on the Old Testament. A number were more secular, however, and
one such is “She Walks in Beauty,” perhaps Byron’s most famous lyric. Byron composed
the poem after returning from a party; “she” is his cousin, Mrs. John Wilmot, whom he
had seen there wearing a spangled black dress. Because of its familiarity and its beauty,
this lyric is an excellent place to begin teaching Byron.
The instructor may wish to start by pointing out that the poem is written in iambic
tetrameter, an even meter (eight syllables, alternating unstressed and stressed), with an
ababab rhyme scheme: this calm, simple structure contributes to the sense of rumination
and loveliness. In the poem proper, one may begin by considering the opening
metaphors: what does it mean to “walk in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and
starry skies”? What effect is Byron trying to describe, and how does this metaphor
achieve it? What is “the tender light which heaven to gaudy day denies”? The instructor
can point out the subtle way in which Byron gives his readers a clear picture of what is
admirable in the woman he describes, not just with the opening image but also with the
words “mellowed” and “tender,” and with his dismissal of the “gaudiness” of day. This
subtle admiration finds frank expression in stanzas two and three, where Byron shows
that the woman’s beauty springs directly from her serenity, sweetness, and goodness.
Here the instructor may invite students to consider what this tells us about Byron’s ideal
of womanhood and, more largely, about Romantic notions of appropriate feminine
attributes.
The instructor may wish to turn from “She Walks in Beauty” to the later “So, we’ll go no
more a roving” (1817), a poem of similarly simple structure but one with many more
interpretive possibilities. Into his straightforward ballad lament, however, Byron has
inserted a number of moments that make for fruitful discussion. The instructor can
elucidate these moments by moving through the poem progressively. Beginning with
stanza one, the instructor might first make certain that the students understand that the
speaker’s “roving” is sexual. He or she may then point out that Byron takes care to make
it plain that his reasons for cessation are not those the reader might expect: the heart is
still loving, and the moon is still bright. Thus, the first stanza ends with something of a
puzzle, a set-up for the rest of the poem. In the second stanza, Byron offers his reasons,
but they are extremely unclear. The instructor may want to point out that the image in the
first line of stanza two is a joke (the Latin word for sheath is “vagina”); the next three
images, however, are not. What does it mean for a soul to wear out its breast? How might
a heart pause to breathe? Why would love, surely the most positive of emotions, need to
have rest? These questions not only address a number of common human
experiences—that even the greatest pleasure cloys, that the wish for change is present no
matter how delightful a situation—but also bring forth a number of canonical Byronic
themes: apparently motive-less ennui and weariness, promiscuity, even bawdy humor.
The poem’s third stanza should, logically, resolve the puzzle Byron has set up. In fact, it
does no such thing. Rather, Byron apparently simply reverses the structure of his first
stanza, first offering the reasons why “roving” should still be possible, then reiterating his
remark that all such wandering is currently at an end. This is an excellent moment for the
instructor to invite the students to meditate on what point Byron is trying to make. Is it
that alteration in desire or yearning can occur without any outside motivation? That
weariness is a natural condition, returning no matter what? That sorrow comes despite
conditions that should engender its opposite (“Though the night was made for loving, /
And the day returns too soon”)? The instructor may also wish to point out the way in
which Byron here engages with the question of knowledge: something has changed, and
although the speaker cannot say what that is, the change has nonetheless decisively
occurred. Finally, the instructor may point out Byron’s enactment of his poem’s theme in
the final line, where the usual ending iamb becomes a spondee, so that the ear recognizes
a rhythmic change without being able to identify it, just as the speaker in the poem
recognizes a change in his situation but cannot explain it.
In a survey course or other course that can offer only a short introduction to Byron before
moving on to Don Juan, “So, we’ll go no more …” is an excellent text with which to
begin, for it introduces a number of maneuvers that will be repeated in Juan: punning, the
combination of humor and pathos, formal manipulation, engagement with larger
questions. If the instructor need not move on to Juan immediately, however, or if he or
she prefers to focus on longer pieces rather than short lyrics, Byron’s blank verse
narrative “Darkness” has much to offer.
“Darkness” is Byron’s take on a common Romantic theme, the end of the world and “the
last man.” In typical fashion, however, Byron puts his own distinctive stamp on this
motif. For one thing, Byron sets up his vision as a curious combination of imagination
and reality: what, the instructor may ask, does it mean if a dream “is not all a dream”?1
For another, he shows a remarkable ability to pinpoint which loss would be most
traumatic for mankind; Byron’s humans destroy everything in a desperate attempt to
produce light: “all hearts / Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light” (8-9). For a third,
Byron’s vision is uniformly bleak. The one moment where a reader may expect some sort
of sympathy or human connection—the meeting of the enemies in 55-67—ends rather in
1
If the instructor takes care to remind the student that the bleak and powerful vision of “Darkness” is in
fact in part the creation of a single mind—“I had a dream”—the poem works as a gateway into a discussion
of the Byronic Hero and the place of the Will in Byron’s works.
death and desolation (the instructor may wish to note that the only creature portrayed
positively in the poem is a dog [47-48], and even he is the exception). Reduced to our
essence, Byron suggests, humans are violent, selfish, wasteful brutes. To aid in
presenting this theme, the instructor can point out the progress of destruction in lines 1015—the people first destroy government (thrones), then basic civilization (huts and
cities), and finally themselves (their own homes)—and then the reactions of those left
alive in lines 24-32, who either do nothing, expend energy fruitlessly or suicidally (“fed /
Their funeral piles with fuel”), or decline into bestial madness.
Particularly in a course that deals with Romanticism and Ecology, or Romanticism and
Science, or a course that seeks to draw parallels between the Romantic period and our
own, it is worth drawing attention to the remarkable prescience of Byron’s vision in
“Darkness.” The second law of thermodynamics was not even suggested until 1824 (the
year Byron died), so no one yet knew that the sun would, in fact, die out. Moreover, the
vision of an earth, and a universe, that continues obdurately on after its population has
destroyed itself taps into concerns that are alive today. In any course, it is worth spending
some time on the formal manipulations in “Darkness.” Perhaps the most effective place
to begin is lines 70-73, where Byron begins by reducing two polysyllabic words
(“populous and powerful”) to a compelling onomatopoeiac monosyllable (“lump”), then
enacts the loss his poem describes in a repeated use of -less (“Seasonless, herbless,
treeless, manless, lifeless”) that ends with the denuded earth reduced to “a lump of
death,” four flat monosyllables. After parsing these lines, the instructor might ask
students themselves to locate moments when Byron’s formal manipulations influence the
poem’s effect.
Whether or not instructors choose to teach any of the shorter Byron selections we have
included, many will choose to teach Don Juan. This poem is deservedly considered
Byron’s masterpiece, and the extracts we include here offer stimulation for a number of
different discussions. The easiest topic to broach is undoubtedly the connection between
Byron, his hero, and his narrator. Most obviously, the description of Donna Inez is a
parody of Byron’s own wife and the description of her marriage a parody of Byron’s
own, but other examples of the connection include the narrator’s meditation on the fate of
sons brought up by single mothers (stanza 37), the description of the Greek bard in Canto
III, stanza 84 (he has “traveled ’mongst the Arabs, Turks, and Franks,” like Byron
himself), the narrator’s description of his career in Canto 11.55-59, and the character of
Juan, a Byronically “curly-headed, good-for-nothing” whose repeated erotic
entanglements echo Byron’s own busy sexual life. However obvious these connections
may seem, though, none of them is exactly straightforward. The instructor may ask
students to consider why Byron would make these allusions, and why he would make
them in this indirect way. In a more advanced course, a good topic to broach is the
complex interplay of fact and fiction here. If a writer inserts fact into his fiction, is he still
writing fiction? And if he mixes his fact in with a fully-realized fictional world, is it still
fact? Moreover, the allusions Byron made to his life in Don Juan were shocking in his
time (see Critical Viewpoints/Reception History below), and the instructor may wish to
examine why this was so, and why Byron might have made these allusions knowing what
the fallout would be.
Having considered the connection between Don Juan and Byron’s biography, the
instructor can turn to a discussion of the cultural commentary Byron includes in the
poem. Both the Dedication and the first canto (included in the Broadview Anthology in
their entirety) explicitly and repeatedly engage with the members of the so-called “Lake
Group,” their works, and their opinions. The Dedication is one long insult to the thenpoet laureate Robert Southey, Byron’s greatest literary enemy, again abused at the end of
Canto I. In that canto, Byron also insults Coleridge (91), and Wordsworth (90, 91, 205,
and 222—although the gibe in 91 shows a remarkably perspicacious understanding of
Wordsworth’s poetry). Byron loathed the Lakers not merely because they loathed him,
nor because they were all revolutionaries turned reactionaries, but also because their
obsessive insularity was the very opposite of the cosmopolitan liberalism he valued.
Nonetheless, it is worth noting that Byron’s decision to deride these English poets some
three years after he left England bespeaks a continuing attachment to a country—to its
interests, its mores, its public figures—that Byron elsewhere claimed to despise.
This attachment is further illustrated in our excerpt from Canto 11, where Byron details
the life and habits of English upper classes, painted as bored, avaricious, and dissipated.
In stanzas 76 to 85, Byron offers a vision of the English society he knew that is half
contemptuous, half nostalgic. The instructor may wish to ask students to parse this
passage: does Byron dismiss the society of which he was a part? Mock it? Long for it?
Some combination of all three? He or she may also wish to compare this attitude toward
England with that of Byron’s fellow Romantic “exile,” Shelley. Finally, the instructor can
use this passage to stimulate a broader discussion about the poet as observer: Byron
observes the English upper classes from without, but in order to mock them as he does, or
even comment on them at all, he must have inside knowledge of their ways.
A number of other discussions may also arise out of reading Don Juan. There are too
many potential topics to cover here; we will consider only two more. First, the instructor
may wish to discuss the position of women in the poem. Our excerpts offer views of three
women central to Don Juan: Inez, Julia, and Haidee. Can the reader draw any
conclusions about what the poem is trying to say about women from its depictions of
these three? Are they treated sympathetically? Are they mocked? Does Byron appear to
treat women differently, or think of them differently, than other male Romantic writers
do? Although the natural tendency is to point out the ways in which Byron portrays
Juan’s women with contempt, or at the very least as stereotypical nurturers and
seductresses, there is also evidence to suggest he has great sympathy for them: Julia is
trapped in an inappropriate marriage, and her punishment for attempting to get some
relief is all out of proportion to the offense; the innocent Haidee and her even more
innocent unborn child die as a result of one transgression.
Also worth considering is Byron’s attitude toward human beings, and his beliefs about
their essential nature. Like those in “Darkness,” Don Juan’s characters are not very
pleasant. They are fundamentally selfish and hypocritical (Inez and Alfonso), animalistic
(the storm-tossed sailors), and they produce elaborate explanations to justify their actions
(Julia). The instructor may wish to closely examine the scenes in which Julia slides into
her affair with Juan, a gradual slipping rationalized and excused at each step (a
rationalization to which the narrator draws attention when he urges other “young ladies to
make trial”), and the scene in which she seduces Juan, where Byron not only rejects the
notion that intellect has power over desire (stanza 116 is an explicit dismissal of Plato’s
assertion that the mind is a charioteer holding in check the horses of emotion), but also
makes plain the hypocrisy at work in Julia’s capitulation. “A little still she strove, and
much repented” (117): why not strive much and repent little? In conjunction with this, the
instructor may draw attention to the scene of cannibalism (one of the most famous in the
poem)—not to the lines where the men draw lots, or to the actual bleeding (although the
instructor may want to point out that this is a parody of holy communion), but rather to
the moment in which Byron excuses the sailors’ behavior by explaining that “’Twas
nature gnawed them to this resolution.” Both this remark and those on Plato suggest that
for Byron man’s nature is instinctive, sexual, and on some level animalistic. When left to
our own devices we are not, he suggests, very pleasant.
Another potential discussion topic is Don Juan’s form. Here, the best place to begin is the
poem’s ending couplets, many of which the students will undoubtedly have enjoyed.
Ottava rima, with its abababcc structure, is in fact designed to use its ending couplets to
“close” each stanza, whether by concluding, commenting on, or subverting the previous
six lines. Byron tends to favor the last two. In addition, the hudibrastic (three-syllable)
rhymes he frequently uses in the couplets increase their comic effect. The instructor may
wish to start with perhaps the most famous of these lines, Canto 1.22’s “intellectual / henpeck’d you all.” Part of the pleasure of these lines comes from the unexpectedness of the
rhyme phrase (“henpeck’d you all”), but part of the pleasure comes from the way in
which the query they pose definitively, albeit comically, lays out the issue at hand in Inez
and Jose’s marriage. The instructor can lead students to a number of closing couplets that
repeat this maneuver, closing their stanzas with a witty snap: 1.117, 1.184, 2.92. He or
she should also lead them, however, to moments when the hudibrastic rhymes do not
work as a comic device—indeed, to passages when Byron turns swiftly from comedy to
sorrow. Two such are 1.122-27, where the narrator meditates on the delights of first love
in a passage that mingles the sentimental, the elegiac, the ironic, and the comic; and
1.215, where in moving from his sestet to his couplet Byron moves from sorrow to mirth
in the blink of an eye. The instructor should encourage students to discuss how Byron
achieves these effects and, more importantly, why. What does Don Juan, in these
passages and elsewhere, suggest to the reader? That comedy and tragedy exist side by
side? That all tragic situations have a mirthful component, or vice versa? Or something
else entirely?
Questions for Discussion
1.
Does Byron’s supposed immorality make his works more or less interesting? How
and why? Should knowledge of his private behavior and beliefs affect opinions
about and readings of his works?
2.
Is Don Juan a moral poem? How or how not?
3.
Based on the evidence of Don Juan, how does Byron feel about women? About
sex? About romantic love?
4.
In the short poem, “When a Man Hath No Freedom,” Byron mocks martial fantasy
and martial ambition. Yet he died while financing the Greek revolution. How can
one reconcile this cynicism and this idealism?
5.
At the end of “Darkness,” Byron specifically assigns the female gender to darkness.
Doesn’t it seem more logical, given Byron and symbolism, that such a force would
be male? Why do you think he chose to make this overpowering, obdurate force
female?
Critical Viewpoints/Reception History
Reviewing Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos I & II, Francis Jeffrey wrote in The
Edinburgh Review that the poem had “no ordinary merit … we have little doubt that it
will find favor,” then objected to the “dark, and yet not tender spirit which breathes
through almost every part of it.” Allowing for variations in wording, these remarks were
echoed by almost all the critics of Byron’s own time; perhaps Elizabeth, Duchess of
Devonshire, summed it up best when she wrote in a letter, “however odious his character,
he is a great poet.” Reviews of most of Byron’s works, especially those written after his
separation, usually come to a similar conclusion. Don Juan, however, was in its time
considered scandalous and nearly obscene: the Blackwood’s Magazine reviewer wrote
that “the moral strain of the whole poem is pitched in the lowest key—and if the genius
of the author lifts him now and then out of his pollution, it seems as if he regretted the
elevation”; reviewing Cantos III to V, the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany
asserted, “Here is my Lord Byron … again enacting the part of DON JUAN again, and
with impunity, poisoning the current of fine poetry, by the intermixture of ribaldry and
blasphemy such as no man of pure taste can read a second time, and such as no woman of
correct principles can read the first.” For supporters amongst the critics, Juan had to be
content with Byron’s acquaintance Leigh Hunt, who recognized in his review of Cantos I
and II that Byron’s revelation of the absurdities and hypocrisies of human behavior was
designed to make a moral point.
After his death, Byron did not fare much better. Painting the poet as the symbol of useless
self-pity in Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle urged readers to “Close thy Byron; open thy
Goethe”: George Eliot wrote in 1869, “He seems to me the most vulgar-minded genius
that ever produced a great effect in literature.” Nonetheless, Byron had supporters: the
Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini believed that the “day will come when
Democracy will remember all that it owes Byron,” while among the laboring classes and
those involved in movements such as Chartism he became a hero for his democratic
beliefs.
In the mid-twentieth century, Byron criticism experienced a resurgence, led by Leslie
Marchand and Jerome McGann. Marchand wrote Byron (London: John Murray, 1957),
the three-volume biography that is still the richest and most scholarly of Byron’s
biographies; he also produced an excellent, although by now somewhat dated,
introduction to Byron’s works, Byron’s Poetry: A Critical Introduction (Boston:
Houghton, 1965). The late 1960s saw something of a surge in Byron criticism, with
excellent thorough studies by W. Paul Elledge (Byron and the Dynamics of Metaphor,
Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1968), Michael G. Cooke (The Blind Man Traces the Circle:
On the Patterns and Philosophy of Byron’s Poetry, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969), and
Robert Gleckner (Byron and the Ruins of Paradise, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1967).
First among equals is McGann’s Fiery Dust (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1968), which
traces the development of Byron’s poetry from Childe Harold I & II onward. More recent
general book-length studies include Frederick Garber’s Self, Text, and Romantic Irony:
The Example of Byron ( Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988), Frederick Shilstone’s Byron and
the Myth of Tradition (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998), Jerome Christensen’s Lord
Byron’s Strength (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), considered a seminal theoretical
study of Byron, and two more recent works, Stephen Cheeke’s Byron and Place: History,
Translation, and Nostalgia (London: Palgrave, 2003), which considers Byron’s poetic
responses to travel and place, and Tom Mole’s Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial
Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (London: Palgrave, 2007), which considers
Byron’s role in the construction of celebrity.
Since many instructors are likely to spend a good deal of time on Don Juan, it seems
sensible to offer some useful studies of that poem. Here the main source is undoubtedly
McGann’s Don Juan in Context (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976), which considers the
poem both in light of Byron’s other works and with reference to other literary forms and
precursors. There are also Alvin Kernan’s chapter in The Plot of Satire (New Haven:
Yale UP, 1965) and Bernard Beatty’s more recent Byron’s Don Juan (Totowa: Barnes,
1985). Shorter studies include Peter Manning’s excellent “Don Juan and Byron’s
Imperceptiveness to the English Word” (Studies in Romanticism 18.2 [1979]: 207-33)
and “Don Juan and the Revisionary Self” (in Romantic Revisions, Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1992), Moyra Haslett’s background study, Byron’s Don Juan and the Don Juan
Legend (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), and more recently, Cynthia Whissel’s “’Tis More
than What Is Called Mobility’: Structure and a Development Towards Understanding in
Byron’s Don Juan” (Romanticism on the Net, February, 1999), Eric Strand’s “Byron’s
Don Juan as a Global Allegory” (Studies in Romanticism 43.4 [2004]:503-36), and
Hadley J. Mozer’s “‘I WANT a Hero’: Advertising for an Epic Hero in Don Juan”
(Studies in Romanticism 44.2 [2005]: 239-60).
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Emily Bernhard Jackson of the
University of Arkansas for the preparation of the draft material.