Don Juan
1819
Byron wrote Don Juan as a deliberate middle finger to the moralizing epics of his age. The legendary seducer becomes a mark instead of a player: Juan is young, innocent, and hilariously unable to resist the women who pursue him. Born in Seville to a mother determined to engineer a paragon of virtue, he stumbles from one scandal into another, each affair giving Byron fresh fuel for his vicious, dazzling satire. What elevates the poem beyond mere ribaldry is its voice. Byron interrupts his own narrative to drag contemporary poets, mock social hypocrisy, defend his scandalous reputation, and complain bitterly about his critics. The result reads less like an epic than a brilliant, dangerous conversation. Through Juan's travels from Spain to a Turkish slave market to the courts of England, Byron dissects everything from gender and religion to war and politics with sharpened wit. It's picaresque structure married to metafictional play, and it changed what satire could do in verse.
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“All who joy would winMust share it -- Happiness was born a twin.””
— George Gordon Byron, Baron Byron
“Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange;Stranger than fiction: if it could be told,How much would novels gain by the exchange!How differently the world would men behold!””
— George Gordon Byron, Baron Byron
“Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,Sermons and soda-water the day after.””
— George Gordon Byron, Baron Byron
“My heart in passion, and my head on rhymes.””
— George Gordon Byron, Baron Byron
“But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think; ’T is strange, the shortest letter which man uses Instead of speech, may form a lasting link Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces Frail man, when paper”
— George Gordon Byron, Baron Byron
“Why do they call me misanthrope? Because They hate me, not I them.””
— George Gordon Byron, Baron Byron
“This is the age of oddities let loose.””
— George Gordon Byron, Baron Byron
“Let us have wine and woman, mirth and laughter,Sermons and soda water the day after.Man, being reasonable, must get drunk;The best of life is but intoxication:Glory, the grape, love, gold, in these are sunkThe hopes of all men, and of every nation;Without their sap, how branchless were the trunkOf life's strange tree, so fruitful on occasion:But to return--Get very drunk; and whenYou wake with head-ache, you shall see what then.””
— George Gordon Byron, Baron Byron
“Between two worlds life hovers like a star,'Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon's verge.How little do we know that which we are!How less what we may be! The eternal surgeOf time and tide rolls on, and bears afarOur bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge,Lash'd from the foam of ages; while the gravesOf Empires heave but like some passing waves.””
— George Gordon Byron, Baron Byron
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George Gordon Byron, Baron Byron. Don Juan. Lex, lex-books.com/book/don-juan-002c0bee-07d8-439e-9798-2c014cf1225b.George Gordon Byron, B. B. (1819). Don Juan. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/don-juan-002c0bee-07d8-439e-9798-2c014cf1225bGeorge Gordon Byron, Baron Byron. Don Juan. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/don-juan-002c0bee-07d8-439e-9798-2c014cf1225b.
