205, 4 The second drunk A reference to Coleridge’s opium addiction?
205, 4 the third so quaint and mouthey Byron seems to have delighted in this rhyme with Southey; see The Blues II 97–8, where he refers to ‘Words–words’ and ‘Mouthey, his friend’. OED, citing Byron’s DJ verse, defines mouthey as ranting and bombastic.
205, 5–6 Crabbe…/… Campbell’s Hippocrene See note to Dedication 7, 7. Hippocrene was a fountain on Mount Helicon in Boeotia. Its waters, which started to flow when Pegasus struck the ground with his hoof, were sacred to the Muses and could impart poetic inspiration.
205, 8 ] Commit adultery with Thomas Moore
206, 1 Mr Sotheby’s Muse Though William Sotheby was placed among the genuine sons of rhyme in EB & SR 818, Byron satirized him in Beppo, stanzas 72–6 and abused him in letters because he thought that Sotheby had sent him an anonymous note and a copy of The Prisoner of Chillon with unfavourable marginal criticism.
206, 2 ] His
Pegasus The name of this wingèd horse was probably derived from the Greek word πήναι (the sources of the ocean–river that encircled the earth). The horse had sprung from the blood of the Gorgon Medusa, when Perseus cut off her head. Later Athena helped young Bellerophon to tame Pegasus, who then aided him on several adventures. But when this hero tried to fly to heaven, he fell back to the earth, while the horse flew on and dwelt among the stars. In ancient myth he had little connection with the Muses or the arts, except for the earth–kicking episode mentioned in the note to 205, 5–6. From the Renaissance to modern times, authors have used him as a symbol of man’s divinely inspired imagination: verse writers had to ride him if they were to soar to poetic achievement.
206, 3–4 Thou shalt not bear false witness like the Blues / (There’s one at least is very fond of this) The one who is ‘very fond of this’ may be Lady Byron, who had ‘a slight shade of blue’ (see Canto I 12 and note and Canto XV 41 and note) and who Byron probably wanted others to believe had borne ‘false witness’ in the 1816 crisis of separation. For the Blues see note to Canto I 22, 1–7.
206, 4 ]
207, 2 This story is not moral Byron insisted in letters to Murray and others that Don Juan was not an immoral poem, though, as he says here, ‘gay’, and accused his accusers of prudery and hypocrisy.
209, 2 ] And beg they’ll wait with patience for the moral
209, 4 children cutting teeth receive a coral For centuries coral has been a name for the toy ring given infants to help them cut their teeth. It has been made of polished coral (usually red), bone or glass(OED).
209, 8 – 210, 8 I’ve bribed my grandmother’s review – the British. /… he had the money William Roberts, editor of the British Review, took Byron’s statements seriously and wrote a sober disclaimer in his magazine (XIV (1819), no. 17, 266–8). Byron’s answer, ‘Letter to the Editor of My Grandmother’s Review’, by ‘Wortley Clutterbuck’, was refused by Murray and was ultimately published in the Liberal, I (1822), 41–50.
211, 1 this holy new alliance For the political allusion that Byron frivolously applies to his defensive bribe, see note to Preface to Cantos VI–VIII, 76–7.
212, 1–2 ‘Non ego hoc ferrem calida juventa / Consuls Planco’ Horace, Ode III 14. The conclusion of this ode fits Byron’s present mood: ‘My whitening hair softens a disposition prone to strife and wanton brawling. I had not borne such insult in the heat of my youth when Plancus was consul’ (this is a modified version of the translation by C. E. Bennett (1919), 228–9). Horace wrote ‘calidus’ not ‘calida’.
212, 5 dating from the Brenta Byron’s parenthesis means long before he thought of living in Italy. The Brenta River flows into a Venetian lagoon. In November 1816, Byron settled in Venice, and in the following summer rented a villa at La Mira on the Brenta, several miles above its confluence with the lagoon.
213, 3 ] I thought of dyeing it the other day
216, 1–6 My days of love are over…/… claret is forbid too
Me nec femina, nec puer
Jam, nec spes animi credula mutui,
Nec certare juvat mero;
Nec vincire novis tempora floribus.
(Horace, Ode IV I, 29–32; quoted by Byron, 1819)
‘Now neither a woman nor a boy delights me, nor confident hope of love returned, nor drinking bouts, nor binding my temples with fresh flowers’ (this is a modified version of the translation by C. E. Bennett (1919), 284–5).
216, 6 ] I find that wine or brandy is forbid too
217, 5–6 Friar Bacon’s…/… Time’s past’
THE BRAZEN HEAD: Time is!… Time was!… Time is past!…
BACON: ’Tis past indeed. Ah villain! time is past:
My life, my fame, my glory, all are past. –
Bacon, the turrets of thy hope are ruin’d down,
Thy seven years’ study lieth in the dust.
(Robert Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay xi 59 ff.)
217, 7–8 ]
Of which we are lavish first and then rapacious)
218, 3–4 ] It matters not much how by good or ill –
Since after all the consequence is vapour –
218, 8 ] A book – a damned bad picture – and worse bust.
Thorwaldsen’s bust of Byron was commissioned by Byron for Hobhouse, and executed in 1817. Upon seeing it, Byron is said to have remarked: ‘It is not at all like me; my expression is more unhappy.’ Hobhouse, however, called it a perfect likeness.
218, 219 Byron may have at one time thought of using a cancelled stanza after stanza 218. It was first printed in 1833 as a headpiece to the whole poem. There is no evidence that Byron intended it to be so used. The following transcription of the manuscript retains Byron’s spelling, punctuation and capitalization:
As I am blood – bone – marrow, passion – feeling –
Because at least the past were past away –
And for the future – (but I write this reeling
Having got drunk exceedingly to day
So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling)
I say – the future is a serious matter –
And so – for Godsake – Hock and Soda water.)
219, 1–8 Since not a pinch of dust remains of Cheops See Shelley’s handling of the same theme in Ozymandias, which Byron may have read in Hunt’s Examiner, January 1818.
221, 3 ] Must
221, 5 We meet again Byron follows Casti and Pulci here. In their burlesques, they concluded cantos with a farewell to the reader and with the assurance that they would resume writing if the present canto pleased the audience.
222, 1–4 ‘Go, little book,… The world will find thee…’ Byron quotes from Southey’s ‘Epilogue to the Lay of the Laureate’, Poetical Works (1838) X, 174. Such literary farewells were traditional. See Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (1786) V: ‘Go litel bok, go…’; and Spenser’s dedication of The Shepheardes Calender: ‘Goe little booke…’ which the poet repeats in the last six lines of his modest but hopeful postscript: ‘Goe, lyttle Calender… Goe but a lowly gate…’
CANTO II
Byron began the first draft (PM)of Canto II in Venice, 13 December 1818, and announced its completion on 19 January 1819. By 3 March he had started the fair copy (M), which he sent to London on 3 April. It was published by Murray with Canto I on 15 July. The following stanzas were added at various times: 10, 21, 83, 87–90, 95, 201, 205–7, 214–15
1, 8 ] Lost that most precious stone of stones – his Modesty
2, 8 Puzzled his tutors ]
5, 4 Peru learned to rebel After nearly three centuries of Spanish control, Peru in 1821 won independence.
5, 8 ]
6, 1 barb A horse of a stock native to the Barbary states alon
g the coast of north Africa.
6, 2]
cameleopard Usually spelled ‘camelopard’, a Greek derivative, now an uncommon name for a giraffe.
7, 6–7 ] To
A Mode so beautiful & so unholy>
7, 8 Venetian fazzioli ‘… little handkerchiefs – the veils most availing of St Mark’ This note, which was printed in 1833, might have been written by Byron.
10, 7–8 ] Their manners mending and their morals curing
She taught them to suppress their vice and urine
16, 1–2 as wept the captive Jews /… remembering Sion ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion’ (Psalm cxxxvii). Byron used this psalm in two lyrical versions in Hebrew Melodies: (1) By the Rivers of Babylon We Sat Down and Wept, beginning ‘We sate down and wept by the waters’; (2) By the Waters of Babylon, beginning ‘In the valley of waters we wept on the day’.
16, 8 Perhaps it may be lined with this my canto Byron liked to play with the sardonic tradition that cooks, tradesmen and others used bad poetry as wrapping or lining paper. See Preface to Cantos I and II 46–8 and note; IV 108, 5–6; XIV 14, 7. In The Blues II 63, Inkel said that Wordsworth’s poems may be had at Grange’s pastry shop in Piccadilly. (Cooks lined their pie pans with paper.) See also Diary: ‘I have met with most poetry upon trunks; so that I am apt to consider the trunk–maker as the sexton of authorship’ (LJ V 149). William Gifford in The Maeviad (1795) had turned this common jest against Edward Jerningham, a prolific mediocrity, whose recent plays though favourably reviewed had ‘gone to the pastry–cooks’ (6th edn (1800), 77). Most readers of Gifford and Byron, however, would have regarded Dryden’s use of the same joke as indecorous: ‘From dusty shops neglected authors come, / Martyrs of pies and relics of the bum’ (Mac Flecknoe 100–101).
17, 3 ‘sweets to the sweet’ Hamlet V i 265.
18, 1 – 20, 8 ‘Farewell, my Spain… he cried, /… with retching.) E. R. Wasserman found an analogue at the beginning of Book IV of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy where Don Diego in Slawkenbergius’s tale meditates on his forsaken Julia. Sterne’s broken sentence structure, and his alternation of opposite moods, are similar to Byron’s technique (‘Byron and Sterne’, MLN, LXX (1955), 25).
18, 3–4 ] But
19, 7 A mind diseased no remedy can physic Jump (NQ, 302) compared Macbeth V iii 40: ‘Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased’.
20, 4 Battista See note to Canto II 56, 7, on Byron’s servant, Battista.
20, 6 ] Oh! Julia (
20, 8 with retching 1819 and later editions For the sake of a rhyme with ‘beseeching’ in line 7, Byron in line 8 on his manuscripts wrote ‘reaching’, an acceptable eighteenth–century variant spelling of ‘retching’.
23, 3 Love, who heroically breathes a vein Medwin tells a story of Baron Lutzerode, whose child, dangerously ill, the physicians thought might be saved by bleeding, ‘but blood would not follow the lancet, and the Baron breathed the vein with his mouth’ (226).
23, 4 Shrinks from the application ]
23, 6 ] Sea Sickness death;
23, 8 ]
24, 3 the Spanish family Moncada Byron is apparently referring to one of the dukes of Osuna who was a Moncada: Pedro Téllez y Girón (1579–1624) was viceroy of Sicily (1611–15) and of Naples (1616–20).
25, 1 three servants Byron may be recalling his own setting out from England in 1809 with Fletcher, Joe Murray and Robert Rushton.
25, 2 the licentiate Pedrillo This reverend tutor (stanza 36), master of several languages, and Juan’s pastor (stanza 78), to whom men came for absolution (stanza 44), was a licentiate in either or both of two ways: he could have been granted a degree by the University of Salamanca (stanza 37), higher than a bachelor’s but lower than a doctor’s degree; and he could also have been licensed by the university to teach and to perform certain religious rituals.
25, 4 speechless on his pillow ] gasping on his pillow
25, 8 berth ] birth PM, M 1819 and other early editions This spelling was common in Byron’s time.
27, 4 Started the sternpost Displaced or loosened the upright beam at the stern of a vessel, that extended from keel to deck and supported the rudder.
27, 7– 32, 8 ’Twas time to sound / The pumps… /… the old ship righted In writing this Canto, Byron made extensive use of Sir John Graham Dalyell’s Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea, 3 vols. (1812), William Bligh’s Mutiny of theBounty (1790), and other seafaring accounts. For this passage and others relating to the shipwreck scene, see Poetry VI 88 ff., and Var . IV 61 passim. When the Monthly Magazine (August–September 1821) accused him of plagiarism, Byron replied that Dalyell’s book had merely supplied him with essential facts.
29, 8 Mr Mann, of London In ‘Loss of the American ship Hercules ’, one of Dalyell’s narratives (III 317), Byron had read that the pumps on the Hercules ‘were made by Mr Mann of London’.
30, 1–3 ]… weather seemed to
A little> – And the Leak
A little but not much – for> three feet yet
32, 4 ] As if old Ocean baffled
In stanza 28 Byron had twice changed first person pronouns to the third person. Here and in line 6 and later in stanzas 42 and 95 he joins the passengers on the Trinidada . In stanzas 68 and 93 (our crew, our seamen) the pronouns may be a literary convention (as in ‘our hero’). Since Juan alone reaches shore alive, Byron should have completely detached himself from the narrative. In Canto XVI 81, he becomes a guest at Norman Abbey and sits at the dinner table next to Parson Peter Pith.
33, 5 ]
Byron used this deletion in the next stanza.
33, 4–5 ]
The dashing Waves filled up> – Fright cured the qualms
35, 1 ] Perhaps
Perhaps
37, 7 classic Salamanca This Spanish university, founded in the thirteenth century, was a leading centre of learning until the end of the sixteenth century.
38, 8 – 39, 2 thrummed a sail . /… it had some effect The men on the Trinidada fastened pieces or bunches of rope yarn to the sail and thereby made the surface of the cloth shaggy to prevent chafing. Usually the canvas was so treated to keep the rigging from wearing out the sail; but now since the masts had been ripped away in the storm, the desperate sailors passed the fortified sail under the keel to reduce the leak.
39, 8 ’Tis not so pleasant in the Gulf] ’Tis
40, 6 jury mast One provided for temporary or emergency use.
43, 8 ]
45, 8 Unless with breakers close beneath her lee The lee is that side of a boat opposite to the point from which the wind blows. A boat will ‘live in a rough sea’ unless there are breakers on one side and the wind is blowing against the other side, thus driving the boat towards the breakers. OED cites Byron’s usage here.
46, 5 ] Men will
46, 8 – 48, 1 cutter … longboat…… yawl and pinnace These were small boats attached to large merchant vessels like the Trinidada . They were equipped for sailing or rowing and were used for carrying provisions and passengers to and from the main ship. Of these the longboat was the largest.
47, 4 Six flasks of wine ]
48, 6 ] Threw in by
49, 4–7 PM, M and 1819 have the following in which the rhyme pattern is defe
ctive:
Of one who hates us, so the Night was shown,
And grimly darkled oer their faces pale,
And hopeless eyes, which on the deep alone
Gazed dim and desolate; twelve days had Fear
49, 8 their familiar their companion.
50, 2 ]
51, 6 ] The boats pulled off with their half naked crews
52, 7 Like one who grapples ] Like one who wrestles
53, 7 ] A
56, 7 Battista, though (a name called shortly Tita) Giovanni Battista Falcieri (1798–1874), Byron’s gondolier, nicknamed ‘Tita’, came into his service from the Mocenigo family at Venice and remained with him until his death at Missolonghi. Later in England, Battista was a servant in the Disraeli family, and he appears in Benjamin Disraeli’s Contarini Fleming (1832).
56, 8 aqua vita Usually ‘aqua vitae’, formerly alcohol; later brandy or other alcoholic drinks.
58, 7 ] And Juan
59, 7 ] And thinking there
62, 6 Were served 1822 and thereafter ] Was served PM, M and 1821
63, 6–7 tertian / Ague See note to Canto I 34, 7.
64, 5 ] Because they
64, 6 Atropos One of the three Greek Fates: Clotho spun the thread of life; Lachesis measured its length; and Atropos (the inflexible one) cut it off.
65, 5–8 Of any creditors the worst a Jew it is, /… troublesome to pay The difficulties over Byron’s debts to Jewish moneylenders which he incurred during his Oxford days plagued him for years.
66, 7 ]
66, 8 the Argo The ship in which Jason sailed to Colchis seeking the Golden Fleece.
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