Don Juan is widely considered Lord Byron's masterwork. It is comprised of 18 cantos and, in total, is one of the longest poems of any kind in English. Here is an essay that got an 18/20 in AP English that deals with whether or not Don Juan is nihilistic. Please do not copy it as I would not want to be involved in academic collusion. (Note, also, that Don Juan is pronounced in the English fashion "Don Jew-on" because of Byron's meter and, perhaps, to increase the satire).

The essence of nihilism is the absence of hope. That, despite all efforts to the contrary, life will remain in its present, horrid state. In Don Juan, Byron does imply that the present is, indeed, horrid; however, he does not imply that there is no hope. Instead, he simply states the problems of present day society and leaves improving them as an exercise for the reader.

The Ottava Rima structure of Don Juan lends itself spectacularly to satire; however, Byron does not use the form to eliminate hope--as a nihilist would--but instead uses it to point out the flaws of the present. Choosing Ottava Rima as the form for Don Juan was a brilliant move; the form well fits Byron's witty, carefree compositional style. While the sestet provides ample space for Byron's witticisms, it is the ending couplet that allows him to compose such lines as: "I say--the future is a serious matter--/And so--for Godsake--Hock and Soda water" and "He learn'd the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery,/And how to scale a fortress--or a nunnery." In Don Juan, Byron uses witticisms such as these to satire "all that was held sacred" in European Society. From marriage to the poetic theories of his contemporaries, almost nothing is safe from his satirical wit. However, this satire is not complete. If Don Juan was truly nihilistic, nothing would be safe from satire; true courage, true altruism, true prayer, all these "righteous" things would be satirized as well. However, this is not the case. For example, towards the end of Canto 3, Byron writes about prayer:

But set those persons down with me to play
And you shall see who has the properest notion
Of getting into Heaven the shortest way.

What Byron is satirizing is false prayer. Nowhere in Don Juan will you see him satire truly righteous things. Hypocrisy, avarice, lust, these things he attacks; truth is safe. For Byron, the hypocrisy described in Don Juan is, indeed, "life" but there is still hope for these, righteous, truths.

While many poetic techniques are used throughout Don Juan, the most resounding is Byron's use of parentheses and asides to point out faults; however, in pointing out these faults he does not label them insurmountable--as a nihilist would do--but, instead, merely identifies them as "abuses of the present state of society." For example, in Canto 1 he writes:

...in her as natural
As sweetness to the flower, or salt to ocean
Her zone to Venus, or his bow to Cupid,
(But this last simile is trite and stupid).

In these lines he uses the parentheses stylistically to demonstrate precisely the hypocrisy that Don Juan satirizes. Byron could easily have fixed the "trite and stupid" simile. Instead, he leaves the simile in to show that, yes, there are problems in todays society; however, just like this flawed line, these problems are not insurmountable--some are even trivially easy to overcome.
There is no explicit meaning to be found in the story of Don Juan; instead, the meaning of the poem lies in those--now fallen--ideals that Byron satirizes. Throughout the poem, Byron satirizes everything that he finds to be false, everything that has strayed from its original, true, intent and become hypocritical. He satirizes marriage:

Wedded she was...to a man
Of fifty...
And yet, I think, instead of such a ONE
'Twere better to have TWO of five and twenty.
He satirizes the overall fate of women:
...for man, to man so oft unjust,
Is always so to women...
...their bursting hearts despond
...till some wealthier lust
Buys them in marriage--and what rests beyond?
A thankless husband, next a faithless lover,
Then dressing nursing, praying, and all's over.

In each case he demonstrates that a former grand truth has degraded into hypocrisy. The true meaning of the poem is the antithesis of these hypocrisies: the truths themselves. If Byron was nihilistic, he would have declared the institutions themselves inherently false, for a nihilist believes in nothing. Instead, Byron makes Don Juan the "most moral of poems" by declaring the hypocrisies that the institutions have become as false, not the righteous institutions themselves.

At first ridiculed as completely immoral, then tossed aside as morally nihilistic, in the end it can easily be seen that Byron was at least partially correct in his assessment of Don Juan as the "most moral of poems." Whiler perhaps not the "most" moral, by ridiculing the hypocrisy of many "truths" Don Juan proposes that--sans the hypocrisy society has replaced them with--the truths themselves are still worthy. Essentially, in each case Byron satirizes the falsehood that had replaced the truth; he satirizes the hypocrisy but does not satirize the truth itself. Calling Don Juan morally nihilistic is to focus solely on the concept that Byron does satire and to ignore the hypocrisy that concept has become..

I will not write of Lord Byron's life; mblase has done as much already, and there are scholars on the site far more suited to that task. I will also not attempt to explicate the epic poem itself, in much detail, as it would take a work of immense length to accomplish any thorough analysis.

I will say that Byron could no more write nearly sixteen thousand lines about a swinging Spanish cavalier and his pan-European sexual exploits than you could sit still long enough to read them; Don Juan is about a great deal more than that; it is complex, satirical, egomanical, and utterly self-involved, as one would expect, but it is also insightful, intelligent, and thought-provoking.

Bear with me, please--this writeup will be less about a poem than a prophecy--one in which this site has been embroiled for a long time--and I swear, it will be relatively brief.


When we think of Romanticism, we often think of William Wordsworth; we think of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of moonlight, nightingales, and Nature. We think of poets high on mountaintops awaiting the Apocalypse with open arms, looking forward to the world's regeneration in the aftermath. Beauty, love, impassioned optimism and hope ; the hearbeat of England, long unheard beneath the rumbling progress of the Enlightenment. The first generation of Romantic poets, writing in the last quarter of the 18th Century, might have believed it. They wrote through the War of American Independence and the French Revolution, they watched as nations rose against tyranny. Life, liberty, egalité, fraternité. Of course, it was inspiring.

But one movement did't take. Robespierre's Terror rose from the ashes of the Bastille, breaking the promise of 1789. A decade later, when Napoleon's armies were in Egypt under a French flag, Wordsworth and Coleridge saw England as the last line of defense against the spread of French Imperialism. Britain joined the European effort to halt Napoleon's progress, and restore the Bourbon dynasty to the throne.

Byron, and the "second generation" of Romantic poets, did not center their thoughts in the Terror, France's self-betrayal. They wrote from the turn of the century, and saw from that vantage a lengthening history of English leadership struggling to reestablish monarchical dominance on the Continent, a Continent Napoleon meant to restructure according to the Republican principles Byron identified as the basis of the Revolution in the first place. Britain, as he saw it, espoused the cause of freedom as justification for her actions abroad, but in truth only sought to position herself to the best possible advantage. He did not share Wordsworth's sense of hope. He saw an Apocalypse without a Resurrection, the decay of his nation. Byron's Romanticism was laced with cynicism and satire, political invectives and infuriated attacks on many of his contemporaries. He could not find a hero in Britain, which, in raising its own Imperial standard, lowered all its others.

Byron looked to the West as the new seat of liberty. Several times throughout Don Juan, Byron invokes the name of Washington as a paragon of all that Britain should have been, all that men like Horatio Nelson and the Duke of Wellington turned out not to be.

I am an American. And now, when I hear the name George Washington , I sneer.


I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one...

Neither of Byron's long poems, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage nor Don Juan, are about the United States. But in many ways, reductively, perhaps, or only upon superficial observation, this nation has inherited from its mother country the same degenerative condition. The chatterbox and many a node have said as much. Every week an article in The Onion reminds us, and every day, CNN affirms it. It is not a good time to be a conscientious American. Nationalism and Patriotism, at the best of times united in meaning, would seem to have separated, for those who express discontent or seek change. How can you be a good American in a bad America?

Byron did not stay in England. He became an expatriate and an ex-patriot, who, unable to find an English hero, for his greatest work borrowed a Spanish character. That character wandered through almost every Empire in Europe, past or present. No Empire ever rose but ultimately Fell; Byron speaks severally of Adam and Eve, of power and ambition, of decline.

The U.S. is not, may never have been, the U.S. of 1776 as we now think of it. It has arrived at a terrible maturity, and like so many individuals will do, it seems to have turned on the ideals of its youth. We have no heroes, any more. There are no Great Men, or, if there are, they go unnoticed, ignored. Where is our General Washington? Where is our Jefferson, our Franklin, our Abraham Lincoln? Has all they stood for been reduced to portraits on our currency? In a hundred years, whose will have been the voice of Common Sense?

Ask me in whom I believe, I can give you no answer. Byron may have believed in himself, but that belief wasn't enough to change the course of history. He abandoned the future for the past, gave hundreds of pages and eventually his health to restoring the independence of mankinds' ancient seats in Italy and Greece. We only find our heroes amongst the dead. We have to do better.


And then with tears, and sighs, and some slight kisses,
They parted for the present, these to await,
According to the artillery's hits or misses,
What Sages call Chance, Providence, or Fate--
Uncertainty is one of many blisses,
A mortgage on Humanity's estate--
While their beloved friends began to arm,
To burn a town which never did them harm.

Byron's lines in Canto VII refer to Ismail, a city on the Danube taken in 1790 by combined, but mainly Russian, forces. The town was under Turkish, read Muslim, control.

The obvious parallel to the U.S. is Baghdad. In reading the passages, I cannot help but make connections, and each one disheartens me further. There is enough on this site and in the air about the current War, and all our current wars, that I need add nothing more. Support it or don't, there it is; happening again.

In Byron's lifetime, England was under Hanoverian royalty. George III, by 1811, was generally recognized as insane. His son, the Prince Regent, in 1820 George IV, from the onset, was generally recognized as an imbecile. In Don Juan, he gets no good review.

Of course, we have our own dubious George. He came to the throne in an unsavory manner, by large acknowledgment enitirely undeserving. He does not rule by majority consent, but with the help of his brother, usurped the throne. If that's what you believe. There are none who can say that all proceedings were beyond reproach. And there is nothing all who say as much could do about it.


I say, Don Juan, wrapt in contemplation,
Walked on behind his carriage, o'er the summit,
And lost in wonder of so great a nation,
Gave way to to't, since he could not overcome it.
'And here,' he cried, 'is Freedom's chosen station;
Here peals the people's voice, nor can entomb it
Racks, prisons, inquisitions; resurrection
Awaits it, each new meeting or election.

Thus does Don Juan greet England. But his description sounds very much like that now typically reserved for the U.S. We are, or hold ourselves to be, Freedom's chosen station; our democratically elected leaders hearken to us, our spirit is indomitable. Such words as appear in Stanza 9 of Canto XI are now overwhelmingly associated with America. But Byron is satirizing them. In the next stanza, Don Juan's praise of England is literally interrupted, mid-line, by his being robbed at knifepoint.

Byron no longer believed. Many of us here no longer believe. But in large measure, I no longer even have the will to lampoon. I don't know where to start, or how to proceed. I don't want to lend my voice to what I think are mindless America-bashers, choosing the most obvious target. But the most obvious also seems the most deserving, and all my attempts at defense seem poor excuses. "Yes,'' I say, it's true, we do these things, but...we've still the best system, the best quality of life, we still believe..."

It feels as though our margin is narrowing, that the cost is closing in on our benefit. We must become worse to keep our edge, sacrifice our integrity to our comfort. Our fingerprints are at too many crime scenes. We lie, cheat, and steal; we have become a nation of highwaymen.


I have no great cause to love that spot of earth,
Which holds what might have been the noblest nation;
But though I owe it little but my birth,
I feel a mixed regret and veneration
For its decaying fame and former worth.
Seven years (the usual term of transportation)
Of absence lay one's old resentments level,
When a man's country's going to the devil.

Alas! could She but fully, truly, know
How her great name is now throughout abhorred;
How eager all the earth is for the blow
Which shall lay bare her bosom to the sword;
How all the nations deem her their worst foe,
That worse than worst of foes, the once adored
False friend, who held out freedom to mankind,
And now would chain them, to the very mind;--

Byron didn't see an England at its end; he saw it on its way, recognized the path. Ascent, summit, decline. Britain in 1820 was not yet at its height. The sun would never set on Victoria's Empire, and only the end of another century would witness in appreciable qualities the fulfillment of Byron's fears. He felt the tremors early and wrote down his warnings. We have them. It has happened to every Empire before our own. We know what's coming. What are we supposed to do? Why can't we seem to stop it?

The last ten years have left me scared and isolated. The anger I feel on behalf of my country--this country--is decaying into a numbing sort of sadness. I want a hero--but do not want to be one. I do not want to be the Great Man who gives his life to restore America. Nothing I have seen, or done, or been, has bred that in me, and I wonder too often if that desire can flourish anywhere anymore, or if, like Byron's England, we are beyond a Resurrection.

I do not want to help--this is the most terrible thing, I think, this failure of my character, this urge I feel, like a rat, to flee a sinking ship. I should have been better, would have thought I'd be better, had hoped America would have made me--better. We somehow failed each other.

Is this what Byron felt, I wonder--this what he saw, but could not stem? Perhaps, and perhaps--or course--I'm a pretentious fuck; long-winded and arrogant, I've heard. I don't think I'd fight for anyone's independence but my own. I am part of the problem. I'm the first to admit it. But there are moments when I want to fight for something, even if I don't know what it is. Why shouldn't it be this, my country? One cause should be enough.

At least Byron bled for Greece.


Stanzas

When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home,
Let him combat for that of his neighbors;
Let him think of the glories of Greece and Rome,
And get knock'd on the head for his labors.

To do good to mankind is the chivalrous plan,
And is always as nobly requited;
Then battle for freedom wherever you can,
And, if not shot or hang'd, you'll get knighted.



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