Lord Byron's Poems Themes
Liberty
Several of Byron’s poems, particularly those based on his travels, raise the
problem of oppression throughout Europe and defend the necessity of
human liberty. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage often digresses into long
tirades against oppressors. These poetic reflections bear witness to Byron'
experience with battlefields of old, such as Waterloo, and present struggles
such as the Greek struggle against Ottoman/Turkish occupation. Perhaps his
most powerful statement against oppression is found in “The Prisoner of
Chillon,” in which he traces the eventual mental oppression of a patriot who
stood against the oppression of his people. To Byron, liberty is a right of all
human beings, while the denial of liberty is one of mankind’s greatest
failings.
The power of Nature
To Byron, Nature was a powerful complement to human emotion and
civilization. Unlike Wordsworth, who idealized Nature and essentially deified
it, Byron saw Nature more as a companion to humanity. Certainly, natural
beauty was often preferable to human evil and the problems attendant upon
civilization, but Byron also recognized Nature’s dangerous and harsh
elements. “The Prisoner of Chillon” connects Nature to freedom, while at the
same time showing Nature’s potentially deadly aspects in the harsh waves
that seem to threaten to flood the dungeon. Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage looks to Nature as a refuge from human conflict, but sees
there, amid the avalanches and volcanoes, the seething fury of the natural
world.
The folly of "love"
Throughout his life, Byron sought the perfect object of his affections, which
paradoxically made him a fickle and unstable lover to many women (and
men). His poetry reflects this tension, although usually with the weight being
on the side of capricious love. He idealizes women he knows in his opening
stanzas to the first three cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, turning
them into muses who inspire their respective narratives. However, the fact
that each canto has a different woman as its muse points to infidelity on the
part of Byron’s creative genius. “She Walks in Beauty,” perhaps his most
famous poem dedicated to an individual woman, extols the virtues of a
woman with whom Byron was never romantically involved. This theme recurs
throughout Byron’s poetry: the ideal love is that which is unattainable.
Finally, in Don Juan Byron mocks the ideal of love even as his hapless
protagonist falls into various women’s beds.
The value of classical culture
Byron was a staunch friend of the classical world who grieved what seemed
to him the desecration of its cultural achievements and traditions. His
journey through Greece showed him the dilapidated state of famous ruins,
some of which had been turned to more mundane uses in the recent past.
He also vilified Lord Elgin of England as the chief despoiler of ancient
treasures due to Lord Elgin’s procurement of several marble statues from
Greece to be displayed in England. Elgin became Byron’s primary target and
a symbol of cultural oppression, just as Napoleon and Turkey became
symbols for political oppression.
Realism in literature
Although he was a Romantic poet, Byron saw much of his best work as
descriptions of reality as it exists, not how it is imagined. Thus, the subjects
of many of his poems come from history and personal experience. “The
Prisoner of Chillon” was inspired by the real-life imprisonment of Francois
de Bonnivard, while Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is more biographical
travelogue than adventure tale. Even the apocalyptic “Darkness” was written
to reflect the mass hysteria that arose out of superstitious prophetic
interpretations related to the natural disaster of a volcano’s eruption.
The enduring power of art
Even as he bewailed the loss of classical culture through the despoiling of
Greek ruins, Byron saw permanence in the art created by these cultures and
by his own contemporaries. In the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage, Byron notes that even the greatest civilizations decline, yet
their art and literature remain. He also contrasted the destructive power of
oppressive nations (such as Napoleon’s France) with the creative power of
the artist to bring into being that which had not, until that point, existed. In
keeping with this theme, Byron used his poetry to demonstrate the
ephemeral nature of human civilization while creating works of art that
would survive long after any empire of his own day.
A day of reckoning
While Byron was by no means the prophet of apocalypse that his fellow
Romantic poet William Blake was, Byron’s poetry nonetheless returns time
and again to a “day of reckoning.” The most obvious example of this theme
is “Darkness,” a vision of a future earth nearly devoid of life and populated
by creatures no longer human. More subtly, Byron insisted that the leaders
of oppressive civilizations and the men who would destroy the works of the
past would face their own days of judgment. This day would be hastened by
Byron, who cast aspersions upon their characters in his writings, such as he
did with Lord Elgin and Napoleon.
Don Juan
BY Lord Byron
Don Juan (/ˈdʒuːən/ JOO-ən; see below) is a satiric poem[1] by Lord Byron, based on the legend of
Don Juan, which Byron reverses, portraying Juan not as a womaniser but as someone
easily seduced by women. It is a variation on the epic form. Byron himself called it an "Epic Satire"
(Don Juan, c. xiv, st. 99). Byron completed 16 cantos, leaving an unfinished 17th canto before his
death in 1824. Byron claimed that he had no ideas in his mind as to what would happen in
subsequent cantos as he wrote his work.
When the first two cantos were published anonymously in 1819, the poem was criticised for its
"immoral content", but it was also immensely popular.
Character List
Don Juan The son of an easygoing father and a strict mother who is doted on by
his parents. ...
Don José Juan's father, who is unfaithful to his wife and careless of his
reputation.
Donna Inez Juan's mother, a learned woman plagued by the infidelity of her
husband. ...
The Narrator A friend of Don Juan's family.
Summary and Analysis Canto I
Summary
The author begins by saying that since his own age cannot supply a
suitable hero for his poem, he will use an old friend, Don Juan. Don
Juan was born in Seville, Spain. His parents are Don José and Donna
Inez. Donna Inez is learned and has a good memory. Her favorite
science is mathematics. She has a smattering of Greek, Latin, French,
English, and Hebrew. Don José has no love for learning or the learned
and has a roving eye. As his wife is rigidly virtuous and as he is
incautious by nature, he is forever getting into scrapes. Consequently,
there are quarrels between the two. Donna Inez, with the help of
druggists and doctors, tries to prove that her husband is mad. She also
keeps a diary in which she notes all his faults and even searches
through his trunks of books and letters looking for evidence to use
against him. Their friends and relatives try to no avail to bring about a
reconciliation; their lawyers recommend a divorce. But before the
situation can reach a critical point, Don Jose dies.
Donna Inez makes herself responsible for the supervision of Don
Juan's education. He is taught riding, fencing, gunnery, how to scale a
fortress, languages, sciences, and arts. His education is to a certain
degree impractical, for he is taught nothing about life and studies the
classics from expurgated editions. In short, his mother sees to it that
he receives an education calculated to repress all his natural instincts
and keeps the facts of life from him.
Among Donna Inez's friends is Donna Julia, a beautiful, intelligent
young woman with Moorish blood in her veins. She is married to Don
Alfonso, a jealous man more than twice her age. Theirs is a loveless
marriage. It is rumored that Donna Inez and Don Alfonso had once
been lovers and that she cultivated the friendship of Donna Julia to
maintain the association with the husband. Donna Julia has always
been fond of Juan, but when he becomes a young man of sixteen, her
feelings toward him change and become a source of embarrassment to
both of them. Juan does not understand the change that is taking
place in him, but the more sophisticated Julia realizes that she is
falling in love with Juan. She resolves to fight her growing love and
never to see Juan again but the next day finds a reason for visiting his
mother. She then convinces herself that her love is only Platonic and
persuades herself that it will remain that way. Juan meantime cannot
understand why he is pensive and inclined to seek solitude.
One June evening Julia and Juan happen to be in a bower together.
One of Julia's hands happens to fall on one of Juan's. When the sun
sets and the moon rises, Juan's arm finds its way around Julia's waist.
Julia strives with herself a little, "And whispering 'I will ne'er consent'-
consented" (St. 117).
As Julia lies in her bed one November night, there arises a tremendous
clatter. Her maid Antonia warns her that Don Alfonso is coming up the
stairs with half the city at his back. The two women have barely
enough time to throw the bedclothes in a heap when Don Alfonso
enters the room. Julia indignantly asks Alfonso if he suspects her of
wrongdoing and invites him to search the room. Alfonso and his
followers do so and find nothing. While the search is going on, Donna
Julia protests her innocence with angry eloquence, giving numerous
examples of her virtue and pouring abuse upon her luckless husband.
When no lover is found, Don Alfonso tries to excuse his behavior but
only succeeds in drawing sobs and hysterics from his wife. Alfonso,
shamefaced, withdraws with his followers and Julia and Antonia bolt
the bedroom door.
No sooner has Alfonso gone than Juan emerges from beneath the pile
of bedclothes where he has been hidden. Knowing that Alfonso would
soon be back, Julia and Antonia advise Juan to go into a closet. Hardly
has Juan entered his new hiding place when Alfonso returns. Alfonso
makes various excuses for his conduct and begs Julia's pardon, which
she half gives and half withholds. The matter might have ended there
had Alfonso not stumbled over a pair of men's shoes. He promptly goes
to get his sword. Julia immediately urges Juan to leave the room and
make his exit by the garden gate, the key to which she gives him.
Unfortunately, on his way out he meets Alfonso and knocks him down.
In the scuffle Juan loses his only garment and flees naked into the
night.
Alfonso sues for divorce. Juan's mother decides that her son should
leave Seville and travel to various European countries for four years.
Julia is put in a convent from which she sends Juan a letter confessing
her love for him and expressing no regrets.
The first episode of Don Juan ends at this point, but before
concluding Canto I Byron adds twenty-two stanzas in which he
entertains himself by giving a mocking statement of his intentions in
regard to Don Juan, taunts his contemporaries Wordsworth, Coleridge,
and Southey, defends the morality of his story, confesses that at thirty
his hair is gray and his heart has lost its freshness, comments on the
evanescence of fame, and says goodbye to his readers.
Analysis
In the first few stanzas, Byron establishes the half-playful and mocking
and half-serious tone that is going to pervade Don Juan. When that is
done, he gives his readers as the chief characters in his first canto a
pair of married couples. They are both unhappily married. Don José
and Donna Inez are mismatched. Donna Inez is a cold and severe type
of woman, although she has evidently not always been so. It was
generally known that in her younger days she had had an affair with
Don Alfonso. Don José is a good-natured, easy-going kind of man
inclined to take his pleasures where he finds them. Byron's defense of
him is that he had been badly brought up and that he was amorous by
nature. In the character of Donna Inez, Byron was satirizing, against
the advice of his friends, his estranged wife, Lady Byron. Donna Julia
and Don Alfonso are mismatched by age as Donna Inez and Don José
are mismatched by incompatibility of character and personality. Don
Alfonso has nothing to offer Donna Julia except his name and station.
Theirs was a marriage of convenience. Byron does not bother to
devote much characterization to Don Alfonso. He merely says he was
neither very lovable nor very hateable. He had a more or less negative
personality, neither warm nor cold. Like any other husband, he did not
care to be cuckolded.
Byron is far more interested in the wives than in the husbands and
characterizes them rather extensively. Neither portrait is flattering.
Donna Inez's is clearly malicious; in her Byron was attacking his
estranged wife. She is not a faithless wife, but she is an intolerant and
rather frigid one. Donna Julia's portrait of woman as wife is likewise
unflattering; she deceives herself — and her husband. However, Byron
makes the reader feel sympathetic toward her in spite of his using her
to show up woman's wiles. Donna Julia and Don José, had they been
closer in age, might have made a compatible pair; Donna Julia finds in
Don José's son the warmth that was in the father. Donna Inez and Don
Alfonso, who had been lovers at one time, might have gotten along
well in marriage. Human nature and society, Byron seems to say, work
against a happy marriage.
Some of Byron's contemporaries found Byron's bedroom farce immoral.
It can be said in his defense that his mocking presentation neutralizes
any remote occasion of sin that there might be present in his story of
illicit love. Nor does he supply any provocative details. Lastly, both
Donna Julia and Don Juan are made to look ridiculous, and both are
punished for their guilt
The story in Canto I is told by an "I" persona who is said to be a
friend of Don Juan's family. Byron may have foreseen the difficulties
involved in making this persona a witness who would be present with
Don Juan in his various adventures and so decided to discard him. At
any rate the "I" narrator is discarded before the first canto ends, and
becomes Byron himself giving his opinions on various matters and
communicating more or less confidentially with the reader.
Canto I of Don Juan is without doubt the most interesting,
entertaining, and amusing of all the cantos. For anything of this kind
comparable in quality and liveliness in English verse, the reader has to
go all the way back to Chaucer.
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