Byron, George Gordon - Donna Julia's Eyes

Meeting between Don Juan and Donna Julia

This extract was taken by the First Canto of the "Don Juan" written by George Gordon Byron, an anti-lyrical poem composed by four stanzas which one is written in "ottava rima".

This extract narrates the meeting of Don Juan with Donna Julia. He has fallen in love with her. Moreover Donna Julia is married to an older noble man. Don Juan was tortured by conflicting feelings of desire and honour and thus he immerged himself in thinking solemn and profound thoughts.
It braves the problem of a complete or full illusioned in: Wordsworth (XC), Coleridge (XCI), his personal experience, in particular his philosophical problems (XCII) and ordindary language (XCIII).

Style and contrasts

The style is informal and conversational: it contrasts with the satirises of lyrical imaginings of the hero. himself.

Analysis of stanza XC

Young Juan wandered by the glassy brooks,
Thinking unutterable things; he threw
Himself at length within the leafy nooks
Where the wild branch of the cork forest grew;
There poets find materials for their books,
And every now and then we read them through,
So that their plan and prosody are eligible,
Unless, like Wordsworth, they prove unintelligible.

The stanza begins with the proper name of the man whose interiority is sought to be scrutinized, analyzed, and explored.
However, the enunciative power diminishes to make room for an image relating to fragility, the ephemeral, possibly even a maximum candor, now reached, which is destined to decay. This occurs not only because of the natural flow of human physiology but also because the character thinks unspeakable things, a sign that he has lost his innocence.

It isn't a coincidence that the passage from clear streams to leafy inlets takes place: the decadence has occurred, it is pathetic, yet it is described through the delicacy of nature.
A new theme is then enunciated: it is the fracture of that immobility given by maximum candor that generates pathos, and therefore poetry. Poetry is written in movement.
The final lines present a true poetic statement: poetry must be natural, comprehensible, crystalline, like the streams of the first line.

Analysis of stanza XCI

He, Juan (and not Wordsworth), so pursued
His self-communion with his own high soul,
Until his mighty heart, in its great mood,
Had mitigated part, though not the whole
Of its disease; he did the best he could
With things not very subject to control,
And turned, without perceiving his condition,
Like Coleridge, into a metaphysician.

The presence of anadiplosis (i.e., Wordsworth's repetition) and the stanza symmetrical to the first one, with the insertion of another Romantic poet (Coleridge) in the last line, suggests that the discussion of poetic theory is continuing.

Byron does so in a shrewd, ironic, and irreverent manner, to the point of revisiting the Christian sacrament of communion and humanizing it: it is no longer a feeding on the divinity but a self-absorption, because the soul, which by its nature is different from corporeal matter, is now itself an integral part of man. There is no outward thrust, but rather a withdrawal into one's own interior world in an attempt to tame the untameable and the disease.

One can thus note how the individual's experience becomes an embodiment of the crisis of Romantic poetry of those years.