Don Juan
Page 64
20, 5–6 ship to be hove down… /… people to careen Lambro’s vessel needed repairs (19, 3). Hence he ordered it to be ‘hove down’, turned on one side by means of purchases attached to the masts, and the crew ‘to careen’, that is, after it was tilted, to scrape, clean, calk and repair the underwater parts of the ship.
23, 8 his Argus bites him by the breeches ‘I had one (half a wolf by the she-side) that doted on me at ten years old, and very nearly ate me at twenty. When I thought he was going to enact Argus, he bit away the backside of ray breeches, and never would consent to any kind of recognition, in despite of all kinds of bones which I offered him’ (LJ III 171–2). Argus, the loyal, venerable dog of Odysseus, upon his master’s return to Ithaca after an absence of nineteen years, recognized Odysseus, even though he was disguised, and then expired (Odyssey XVII).
24, 6 cavalier servente See note to Canto 1 148, 1.
25, 7–8 ] Yet for all that don’t stay away too long
A sofa, like a bed, may come by wrong
Not on PM or S, but cited in 1833 as a rejected couplet
25, 8 ] I’ve seen a friend betrayed four times a day
26, 1 Lanero The name and part of the character of Byron’s pirate were apparently taken from the Greek pirate Lambro Katzones, of whom Byron heard stories while he was in Greece in 1809–10. According to John Galt, Ali Pasha, the ruler of Albania and western Greece, was a ‘vivid likeness’ of Lambro (The Life of Lord Byron (1830), 265). In October 1809 Byron enjoyed the Pasha’s hospitality. Gait compares Ali’s comment on Byron’s small hands with the delicacy of Lambro’s hands (DJ IV 45, 3). Stanzas 41 and 47–8 are also reminiscent of Ali Pasha.
our sea-solicitor ] our Sea-
28, 2 Surprised ]
28, 3 music of the spheres According to the Pythagorean doctrine of harmony, those planets nearer the central cosmic fire travelled more slowly and made deeper sounds; those that were farther from the centre and orbited more rapidly rang higher notes. Allusions to the concert of celestial bodies were common in literature. Byron uses the image again in V 144, 3–4; XV 76, 5–6; in Cain III 182–3; and in other poems.
29, 7 Pyrrhic dance so martial This ancient military dance originated in Doris, an area south of Thessaly. It was part of the training of Spartan soldiers, became popular in festivals throughout Greece and persisted into late Roman times. Accompanied by rapid flute music, men in armour with sword and shield performed quick, vigorous acrobatics of attack and defence. As early as the fifth century BC women were dancing it (Xenophon, Anabasis, VI, ch. 1, trans. C L. Brownson (1947), 182–7). The violent Albanian dance that Byron’s friend Hobhouse described he refused to call Pyrrhic (A Journey Through Albania and other Provinces of Turkey… (2nd edn, ?1813), Letter 13, 1 152–5). Since Byron liked the work of E. D. Clarke and wrote to him, he probably read Clarke’s observation of the ‘Pyrrhica’ (Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa (1814), Part II, section 2, ch. 15, p. 641).
30, 2 her white kerchief waving According to Marchand, the kerchief danceor Romaika is still popular in Greece.
30, 6 ] That would have set Tom Moore, though married, raving. Not on PM. or S, but cited in 1833 as a rejected line.
31, 3 Pilaus A Persian and Turkish dish made of rice (or cracked wheat), boiled, with meat, fowl or fish, and spices.
34, 1–8 a dwarf buffoon stood telling tales /… Of rocks bewitched…… Of magic ladies who…/ Transformed their lords to beasts Circe transformed men into beasts in Homer’s Odyssey X. In ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ (The Book of a Thousand and One Nights) the words ‘Open sesame’ opened the rocky door to the robbers’ cave.
36, 1–3 Ah, what is man? What perils still environ…/ A day of gold from out an age of iron ‘Ah me! what perils do environ / The man that meddles with cold iron’ (Samuel Butler, Hudibras I 3, 1–2).
36, 6 to flay alive ] to skin alive
39.7–8 ] All had been open heart, and open house
Ever since Juan served her for a spouse
Not on PM. or S, but cited in 1833 as a rejected couplet.
44, 4 he strove quite courteously ]
45, 1–4 ‘I know not,’…/… better fare Byron in the 1821 edition of this canto quoted a parallel passage from Pulci’s Margante Maggiore (XVIII 115), in which someone says he likes roast capon, butter, beer and dry wine.
46, 8 was ] were PM, S, 1821, 1822
47, 8 good to govern – almost as a Guelf Byron is referring ironically to the House of Hanover, who were descended from the German royal family of Guelph.
48.1 ] Not that
Not that
48, 4 ] He lay dark as the
48, 5 a word and blow Romeo and Juliet III i 43.
48, 8 ] And his blow
50, 5 ] former strife
50, 7–8 ]
Would
51, 5–7 To find…/… a deep grief To find… the ashes of our hopes lying around its (the hearthstone’s) once warm precincts is a deep grief.
54, 4 ]
54, 8 ] And made him not the pleasantest acquaintance
55, 2]
55, 3–4 ] Such as
It was to Colchis, a region east of the Black Sea and south of the Caucasus, that Jason, Hercules, Theseus and the other Argonauts sailed to fetch the golden fleece. ‘The Colchian days ‘of the text refers to the heroic age of mythical Greece, whose bold spirit flashed a few rays over Lambro’s soul.
55, 7 ] (He waged the war of hate to every nation
56, 6 the gentle stream ] the murmuring stream
57, 4 he had done and seen A contraction is feasible: he’d done and seen.
57, 7 milk of human kindness Macbeth I v 18.
57, 8 ] And send him forth like Samson – strong in blindness ]
And make him Samsonlike – more fierce with blindness
On MS 5 Byron wrote to his publisher: ‘Dr Murray choose one of the three.’ Byron’s alternatives consisted of the present text and the two others given above.
Cyclops Odysseus got Polyphemus, a Cyclops, into a drunken stupor and then blinded him (Odyssey IX).
58, 5–6 ]
More dangerous then to others> fragment ]
60, 2 (Provided they don’t come in after dinner) ‘” I said, I disliked the custom which some people had of bringing their children into company, because it in a manner forced us to pay foolish compliments to please their parents.” Johnson. “You are right, Sir. We may be excused for not caring much about other people’s children, for there are many who care very little about their own children” ’ (Boswell, entry for 10 April 1776, III 28–9).
61, 5–8 An ivory inlaid table spread with state I… I Mother of pearl and coral the less costly The food and furnishings in Lambro’s house derived from Byron’s own observation and from Miss Tully’s Narrative of a Ten Years’ Residence at Tripoli in Africa… (1816). See LJ V 346–7.
61, 7 ]
62, 5 ] Drest
65, 4 skulls at Memphian banquets Since Memphis for a long period was the chief city of ancient Egypt, ‘Memphian’ became synonymous with ‘Egyptian’. The macabre ‘monitor’ that Byron compared with the moral adages on Haidée’s tapestry has been reported by various writers: ‘At rich men’s banquets, after dinner a man carries round an image of a corpse in a coffin..… This he shows to each of the company, saying “D
rink and make merry, but look on this; for such, shalt thou be when thou art dead” ’ (Herodotus, Book II, section 78, trans. A. D. Godley (1921), I 364–5).
Plutarch, using a skeleton, was didactic about this Egyptian custom in ‘The Dinner of the Seven Wise Men’, section 2 (Moralia, trans. F. C Babbitt (1928), II 358–9). Montaigne briefly repeated the grim reminder of mortality in ‘That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die’, 60.
65, 5 mords which shook Belshazzar See the note on VIII 134, 2–7, Daniel v, and Vision 0/Belshazzar in Hebrew Melodies (1815): ‘The monarch saw, and shook, / And bade no more rejoice’ (3, 1–2).
66, 1–2 A beauty…/ A genius Byron may be thinking of the hectic Lady Caroline Lamb and of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who drank a great deal and died in 1816 from a brain disease.
66, 3–4 methodistic or eclectic / (For that’s the name they like to pray beneath) The Eclectic Review wrote that Byron deliberately preferred evil ‘with a proud malignity’. His pathos was the ‘Sentimentalism of the drunkard… the relenting softness of the courtesan, who the next moment resumes the bad boldness of her degraded character’ (XII (August 1819), 150).
pray ] cant ] preach ] lurk
66.7 that late hours ] that
67, 1 ] Haidée and (her beloved hid> their feet
67, 5 ]
67, 8] (The Upholsterer’s ‘fiat Lux’ had bade to> issue ]
With great magnificence were seen to issue
69, 1 was 1822 ] were PM, S, 1821
69, 6 ]
70, 2 two jelicks ] two
jelicks A vest or bodice worn by Turkish women.
70, 3 Of azure, pink ]
70, 4 ]
70, 7–8 ]… white gauze baracan
Like fleecy clouds that veil the full Moon bound her.>
A baracan is a coarse woolly garment worn in Spain and Morocco. OED states that European writers misused it to refer to a fine cloth of silk or other delicate material and quotes Don Juan .
71, 1 – 72, 3 One large gold bracelet…/… gold bar…/ Announced her rank ‘This dress is Moorish, and the bracelets and bar are worn in the manner described. The reader will perceive hereafter, that as the mother of Haidée was of Fez, her daughter wore the garb of the country. The bar of gold above the instep is a mark of sovereign rank in the women of the families of the deys, and is worn as such by their female relatives’ (Byron, 1821).
73, 1–4 Her hair’s long auburn waves down to her heel /… if allowed at large to run ‘This is no exaggeration; there were four women whom I remember to have seen, who possessed their hair in this profusion; of these, three were English, the other a Levantine’ (Byron, 1821).
73, 6 ] The silken fillet’s
73, 8 ] To offer
74, 5 pure as Psyche A princess, beloved by Cupid, aroused the jealousy of Venus, but was finally reunited with him and immortalized.
74, 7–8 ] presence made ye feel
<’Twas treason to behold her and not kneel>
75, 4 mocked ]
76, 6–8 ] When dazzled with her aspect I
[variant] Edmund Burke (1729–97), Irish-born orator and political theorist, was active in Parliament for thirty years after 1765. Byron was probably attracted to him by Burke’s efforts on behalf of India and the American colonies, his passionate lack of restraint, his lifelong support of the traditional order and of free parliamentary processes, and especially by his formal eloquence.
[variant] Antonio Canova (1757–1822), Italian neoclassical sculptor, began his career in Venice, where Byron saw his Helen. Canova early favoured dramatic mythical subjects (Daedalus and Icarus, Theseus and the Minotaur), and also won commissions for papal monuments. His later work included Perseus and huge nude figures of Napoleon. Byron praised his artistry in a letter to Murray, in a few verses on the Helen, in his second reply to Bowles (LJ IV 14–15; V 550), in CH IV 55 and Beppo 46.
‘To gild refinéd gold or paint the lily’ King John IV ii 11.
77, 6 aigrette A spray of feathers of the egret or of other birds, or a similar ornament of gems, worn on the head
78, 8 ‘inditing a good matter’ Psalm xlv 1. According to OED, ‘inditing’ in the King James version of this Psalm means ‘putting into words or giving a literary form to a subject’.
79, 3 An Eastern Anti-Jacobin The Anti-Jacobins combated the subversive principles brought into England after the French Revolution and exhorted their country men to maintain the old English institutions.
79, 8 ]
Believed like Southey – and perused like Crashaw
verse like Crashaw Byron had probably not read Crashaw’s Steps to the Temple but seen only excerpts from his translation of Sospetto d’Herode, the first canto of Marino’s La Strage degl’ Innocenti, that were quoted in a letter to Blackwood’s in May 1817, with a comment on Crashaw’s ‘general bad taste’. Byron may also have read Thomas Campbell’s remarks on Crashaw’s ‘harshness and strained expression’ in Specimens of the British Poets, 1819 (F. L. Beaty, ‘With Verse like Crashaw’, NQ, XIX (August 1972), 290–92). Byron, along with Dr Johnson and others, disliked the imagery of the metaphysical poets.
81, 1–2 ] But he had Genius – many a Scoundrel has it –
And when a Scoundrel has it – he takes care
vates irritabilis S. T. Coleridge discusses the ‘supposed irritability of men of genius’ (Biographia Literaria (1817), ch. 2).
82, 1 Their poet, a sad trimmer ] Their poet – a damned rascal PM ] Their poet – a sad
trimmer One who (1) adjusts his sails as the wind shifts, or (2) balances the cargo or ballast of a ship so it floats evenly; hence, either one who expediently changes his policy to suit a present power or one who steers a middle course and profitably seems to favour two opposing powers.
82, 5 ]
82, 8 ] Of which the causers never know the Cause
83, 7 as he sung in his warm youth Possibly Byron alluded to Southey’s drama Wat Tyler, which had been inspired by the French Revolution and written in his ‘warm youth’ (about 1794–5), but was not printed until 1817, when Richard Carlile, a radical publisher, obtained the manuscript and pirated it, embarrassing Southey, who had become poet laureate in 1813 and was by that time politically conservative.
84, 1–2 ]
Of Freedom that this now inspired Tyrtaeus>
Franks In the Levant foreigners, especially Western Europeans, were called Franks. See also Canto III, Lyric 14, 1; Canto IV 47, 8.
85, 4 ‘Ça ira’ ‘It will succeed ‘, a hymn of the French Revolution.
85, 7 Pindar sang horse races The first of Pindar’s Olympian Odes celebrates the victory of Hieron of Syracuse, winner in a horse race, 476 BC. Several Pythian Odes also acclaim the winners of chariot races.
86, 1 In France… he would write a chanson Byron may refer to the lyrics of Pierre-Jean de Béranger, first published in 1815. Some of his songs were passionately personal; some were strongly nationalistic; others were scornful of social rank and wealth.
86, 2 a six canto quarto tale Probably a reference to one of Southey’s quarto epics which, according to Byron, ‘cram the creaking shelves’.
86, 6 (see what says de Staël) She wrote that ‘Goethe will be able to represen
t [embody] the whole of German literature’ (’ Goethe pourrait représenter la littérature allemande toute entiére’). De l’Allemagne (1818), I 227.
86, 7 the Trecentisti the poets of the fourteenth century.
THE ISLES OF GREECE
1, 1–2 The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece! / Where burning Sappho loved and sung ]
The isles of Greece – The Isles of Greece –
The Lesbian Sappho and the blind old man)
Byron kept the metre of the ottava rima in his first version of the opening lines of the lyric. He did not think of his epithet ‘burning’ for Sappho until he wrote his fair copy. Sappho lived on Lesbos.
1, 4 Delos The legendary birthplace of Phoebus Apollo was called out of the deep by the trident of Poseidon.
2, 1–2 ]
2, 1 Scian Homer, who used the hero’s harp, was born in Scio (Chios),
Teian Anacreon, who played the lover’s lute, was born at Teos, a town on the western coast of Asia Minor on the peninsula of Smyrna.
2, 5 ] To sounds which
2, 6 ‘Islands of the Blest’ According to Hesiod in Works and Days 167–9, Zeus gave to some favoured men an abode apart from others at the ends of earth. ‘And they live untouched by sorrow in the islands of the blessed along the shore of the deep swirling ocean, happy heroes for whom the grain-giving earth bears honey-sweet fruit flourishing thrice a year… and Cronos rules over them.’ This Hesiod passage resembles another on the Golden Age (109–20), also ruled by Cronos, when men were untroubled by grief, toil or decrepitude, and the earth yielded them abundant fruit, and death was only a sleep (trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (1914), 10–11, 14–15). The blessed isles may have been the Cape Verde islands or the Canaries.