Don Juan - Lord Byron

In Don Juan (1819-1824), Byron has not so much adapted the legendary story of the eponymous character as turned it topsy-turvy. In place of the familiar, seducing libertine of Mozart's opera is an ineffectual "stripling of sixteen" with "average instincts and illusions," who, in each of his illicit love affairs, becomes the unwitting target of the women he encounters. Unlike the dark, brooding heroes of Byron's earlier poems, this protagonist is an Everyman, buffeted about by a confusing modern world as he suffers exile, shipwreck, and misadventures in Greece, Russia, and England.

In fact, it may be said that the poem's hero is not really Don Juan, but its narrator: a chatty, urbane aristocrat, cynical and world-weary, who frequently digresses from his storytelling--a thinly-veiled persona of Byron himself.

Algernon Charles Swinburne said of Don Juan that "Across the stanzas ... we swim forward as over the 'broad backs of the sea'; they break and glitter, hiss and laugh, murmur and move like waves that sound or that subside. There is in them a delicious resistance, an elastic motion, which salt water has and fresh water has not. There is about them a wide wholesome air, full of vivid light and constant wind, which is only felt at sea. Life undulates and Death palpitates in the splendid verse.... This gift of life and variety is the supreme quality of Byron's chief poem."

Recommended selections:

• Canto 1
• Canto 5
• Cantos 13-17

Don Juan:

• Kindle
• Gutenberg
• Archive
• Literature Network
• Librivox, Canto 1 1h24m
• Librivox, Canto 5 1h15m
• Librivox, Cantos 13-16 3h13m

Extracts:

• "Jack had read all the verses of Byron, and all the romances of Scott. He talked of Rob Roy, Don Juan, and Pelham; Macbeth and Ulysses; but, above all things, was an ardent admirer of Camoens." (White-Jacket, 4)

This meetup is part of a series on Fig Leaves and Fancy Pants.