115 But by superior science?penance?daring? And length of watching?strength of mind?and skill In knowledge of our fathers?when the earth Saw men and spirits walking side by side, And gave ye no supremacy: I stand
120 Upon my strength?I do defy?deny? Spurn back, and scorn ye! ? SPIRIT But thy many crimes
Have made thee?
MANFRED What are they to such as thee? Must crimes be punish'd but by other crimes, And greater criminals??Back to thy hell!
125 Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel; Thou never shalt possess me, that I know: What I have done is done; I bear within A torture which could nothing gain from thine: The mind which is immortal makes itself
130 Requital for its good or evil thoughts? Is its own origin of ill and end? And its own place and time5?its innate sense, When stripp'd of this mortality, derives No colour from the fleeting things without,
135 But is absorb'd in sufferance or in joy, Born from the knowledge of its own desert. Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me; I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey? But was my own destroyer, and will be
140 My own hereafter.?Back, ye baffled fiends! The hand of death is on me?but not yours!
[The Demons disappear. ]
ABBOT Alas! how pale thou art?thy lips are white? And thy breast heaves?and in thy gasping throat The accents rattle?Give thy prayers to Heaven?
145 Pray?albeit but in thought,?but die not thus.
MANFRED 'Tis over?my dull eyes can fix thee not; But all things swim around me, and the earth Heaves as it were beneath me. Fare thee well? Give me thy hand.
ABBOT Cold?cold?even to the heart? iso But yet one prayer?alas! how fares it with thee?? MANFRED Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die.6
5. The last of several echoes by Manfred of Satan's 6. When this line was dropped in the printing of claim that 'The mind is its own place, and in itself the first edition, Byron wrote angrily to his pub/ Can make a Heaven of Hell, and a Hell of lisher: 'You have destroyed the whole effect and Heaven' (Paradise Lost 1.254?55). See also mora! of the poem by omitting the last line of Man1.1.251 and 3.1.73, above. fred's speaking.'
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DON JUAN / 669
[MANFRED expires.] ABBOT He's gone?his soul hath ta'en its earthless flight- Whither? I dread to think?but he is gone.
1816-17 1817
Don juan Byron began his masterpiece (pronounced in the English fashion, Don Joo-nn) in July 1818, published it in installments beginning with cantos 1 and 2 in 1819, and continued working on it almost until his death. Initially he improvised the poem from episode to episode. 'I have no plan,' he said, 'I had no plan; but I had or have materials.' The work was composed with remarkable speed (the 888 lines of canto 13, for example, were dashed off within a week), and it aims at the effect of improvisation rather than of artful compression; it asks to be read rapidly, at a conversational pace.
The poem breaks off with the sixteenth canto, but even in its unfinished state Don Juan is the longest satirical poem, and indeed one of the longest poems of any kind, in English. Its hero, the Spanish libertine, had in the original legend been superhuman in his sexual energy and wickedness. Throughout Byron's version the unspoken but persistent joke is that this archetypal lady-killer of European legend is in fact more acted upon than active. Unfailingly amiable and well intentioned, he is guilty largely of youth, charm, and a courteous and compliant spirit. The women do all the rest.
The chief models for the poem were the Italian seriocomic versions of medieval chivalric romances; the genre had been introduced by Pulci in the fifteenth century and was adopted by Ariosto in his Orlando Furioso (1532). From these writers Byron caught the mixed moods and violent oscillations between the sublime and the ridiculous as well as the colloquial management of the complex ottava rima?an eight- line stanza in which the initial interlaced rhymes (ahahab) build up to the comic turn in the final couplet (cc). Byron was influenced in the English use of this Italian form by a mildly amusing poem published in 1817, under the pseudonym of 'Whistlecraft,' by his friend John Hookham Frere. Other recognizable antecedents of Don Juan are Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, both of which had employed the naive traveler as a satiric device, and Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy, with its comic exploitation of a narrative medium blatantly subject to the whimsy of the author. But even the most original literary works play variations on inherited conventions. Shelley at once recognized his friend's poem as 'something wholly new and relative to the age.'
Byron's literary advisers thought the poem unacceptably immoral, and John Murray took the precaution of printing the first two installments (cantos 1?2, then 3?5) without identifying Byron as the author or himself as the publisher. The eleven completed cantos that followed were, because of Murray's continuing jitters, brought out in 1823?24 by the radical publisher John Hunt. In those cantos Byron's purpose deepened. He set out to create a comic yet devastatingly critical history of the Europe of his own age, sending the impressionable Juan from West to East and back again, from his native Spain to a Russian court (by way of a primitive Greek island and the 1790 siege of the Turkish town of Ismail) and then into the English gentry's country manors. These journeys, which facilitated Byron's satire on almost all existing forms of political organization, would, according to the scheme that he projected for the poem as a whole, ultimately have taken Juan to a death by guillotining in Revolutionary France.
Yet the controlling element of Don Juan is not the narrative but the narrator. His running commentary on Juan's misadventures, his reminiscences, and his opinionated remarks on the epoch of political reaction in which he is actually telling Juan's
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67 0 / GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON
story together add another level to the poem's engagement with history. The narrator's reflections also at the same time lend unity to Don Juan's effervescent variety. Tellingly, the poem opens with the first-person pronoun and immediately lets us into the storyteller's predicament: 'I want a hero. . . .' The voice then goes on, for almost
