This April marked two hundred years
since Byron’s death in Missolonghi, Greece, where he had gone to fight for
Greek independence. I decided early in the month to read Byron’s long poem Don
Juan, and I finished it on the 19th, the date of his death.
Byron writes in iambic pentameter ottava rima stanzas rhyming
ABABABCC with frequent use of feminine rhyme where two, three, or even four
concluding syllables are rhymed. The effect is comic, and the concluding
couplet is often used for anticlimax, a shift in diction to the more mundane,
or other devices to undercut what came before and bring it down with a bump.
’Tis pity
learned virgins ever wed
With persons of no sort of education,
Or gentlemen, who, though well born and bred,
Grow tired of scientific conversation:
I don’t choose to say much upon this head,
I’m a plain man, and in a single station,
But—Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,
Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck’d you all?
His poem’s
epic, his narrator insists, and at first the idea seems to be to expose his
hero to as many different situations as possible: an early affair with an older
married woman that, discovered, leads to his having to leave Spain; shipwreck
and near starvation; an idyllic time on an Aegean island with the beautiful
daughter of a pirate; being sold into slavery in Constantinople when the pirate
discovers the lovers; an attempted seduction by the wife of the Sultan; escape
and blundering into the siege of Izmail, where Juan distinguishes himself in
combat; his seduction by Catherine the Great, who names him an ambassador to
England. As befits his hero, a lot of the adventures are amatory, but Byron’s
Don Juan is not the seducer of the legend in these encounters, but rather the
seduced. With the last six complete cantos and the uncompleted seventh, Byron
takes Juan to England and settles into an extended satire of the English ruling
class, its politics, social attitudes, and sexual mores in a comedy of manners.
It ends with Juan uncovering the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke, who’s been stalking
Juan in the disguise of the ghost who supposedly inhabits this country house,
and who gave him a pretty good scare the night before. Byron learned something
from that famous night when he, Shelley, John Polidori, and Mary Shelley read
each other ghost stories in their villa on Lake Geneva, and then made up some
themselves.
The ratio of
lines dealing with Juan’s actions (mostly reactions) to the number of lines
containing the narrator’s lucubrations is pretty low; I’d guess about one to
four. And his narrator, although holding many opinions we can be sure are
Byron’s, is not wholly identical to him, being older, for one example.
If I compare a
stanza of Don Juan to one from a Wordsworth poem, I have to admit that
the poet who most deserves the epithet of “a man talking to men” is not going
to be Wordsworth. Byron’s style is colloquial (“I rattle on exactly as I talk”)
and quite modern in its effect, and Juan is surprisingly easy to read as
a result. Then too, if Byron often errs on the side of the flippant and
offhand, it can be a welcome relief from the serious and sententious. He gets
in a good deal of comments on his fellow poets, and Wordsworth is a favorite
target, the longer poems being his particular aversion. His nickname for the
older poet, though he didn’t use it in print, was “turdsworth.” Byron didn’t
grasp Keats’s greatness, either. But with Don Juan, he did something no
one had done before, though someone did try something very like it again, when
Pushkin wrote Eugene Onegin as a verse novel imitating Byron.
Pushkin
started writing Onegin before Byron had even published the last complete cantos
of Don Juan, in 1823, and he finished in 1831, and the first book
publication was in 1833. The novel consists of eight cantos or chapters of
approximately fifty stanzas each “in the manner of Byron’s Don Juan,” but throughout an interplay juxtaposes the comic
commentary (and the verse form itself) with a tragic plot. Onegin retires to
the country in his twenties, worn out with his rakish life in St. Petersburg.
He visits the household where his friend Lensky has been accepted by the
younger daughter Olga. The older daughter, the innocent, retiring and bookish
Tatyana, falls in love with him and writes a letter expressing her love. He
lectures her about his time of love being over, her prospects for another,
happier love, and so on. Forced by Lensky to go to the house again, he is
overly attentive to Olga to make Lensky jealous. It works, Lensky challenges
him to a duel and is killed. Years later Onegin meets Tatyana in town, a
princess now and superbly poised. He falls in love, writes a letter expressing
it, and gets a lecture from her in his turn.
But
Pushkin is himself a character in the story, a friend of Onegin, a poet who
observes all of this from a distance, commenting on it, on his own Muse, on the
change of seasons, on the health of the country versus the dissipation of the
city, on the code of honor that traps people like Lensky and Onegin, and on
much more, very like Byron’s commentary, but with a cosmopolitan Russian point
of view.
The
book was Pushkin’s own favorite and is generally considered his best work. Its
iambic tetrameter lines are arranged in a distinctive sonnet-length stanza with
not only an intricate rhyme scheme but a correspondingly complicated pattern of
male and female rhymes. As in Byron’s poem, the female rhymes give to the verse
a comic and even cynical tone which plays against the romantic feelings aroused
in the course of the story and its tragic outcome.
