Poem: Don Juan

Overview
Lord Byron’s Don Juan, begun in 1819 and left unfinished at his death in 1824, reshapes the legendary libertine into a handsome, impressionable protagonist who is more often seduced than seducing. Cast as a sprawling mock-epic and picaresque, the poem follows Juan across Europe and the Near East while Byron’s narrator turns every episode into a lens on love, war, politics, and literary culture. The result is both a worldly adventure and a sparkling satire of early nineteenth-century society.

Plot and episodes
The poem opens in Seville with Juan’s scholarly mother, Donna Inez, and his fervent, married admirer, Donna Julia. Their clandestine affair is exposed in a comic scandal that forces Juan’s exile. Sent abroad to reform, he is shipwrecked and washes ashore on a Greek island, where Haidée, the daughter of a pirate, nurses him back to health. Their idyllic romance is shattered by her father’s return; Juan is seized and sold into slavery. Disguised as a girl to enter the Sultan’s harem at Constantinople, he resists the advances of the Sultana Gulbeyaz and escapes with fellow captives.

Juan next appears in the Russo-Turkish war, fighting at the storming of Ismail. Here Byron drops the masque to describe siege warfare with harrowing particularity, and Juan’s heroism is marked by his rescue of a young orphan, Leila. Summoned to St. Petersburg, he becomes a favorite of Catherine the Great, who rewards him with rank and sends him on a diplomatic mission to England.

In the English cantos, Juan moves through the drawing rooms and hunting parties of the landed elite, lodging with the refined Lady Adeline Amundeville and her politically ambitious husband. He becomes the focus of gossip, temptation, and moral panic; Byron plays off Juan’s genuine feeling for the devout Aurora Raby against flirtations and scandals swirling around him, including a masked-ball intrigue and various insinuations about his conduct. The poem breaks off midstream, Canto 16 published, Canto 17 fragmentary, leaving Juan’s fate in England unresolved.

Narrative voice and form
Byron tells the story in ottava rima, an eight-line stanza whose nimble, often anticlimactic rhymes enable sudden comic turns, asides, and pointed epigrams. The narrator is an intrusive, worldly presence: digressive, self-mocking, and conversational, pausing to deride contemporary poets and politicians, to recount love affairs of his own, and to shrug off epic pretensions. This living voice knits together a tale that roams from bedroom to battlefield, from salon to senate, without losing momentum.

Themes and targets
Don Juan inverts the myth to examine sexual double standards: Juan’s susceptibility exposes the predatory or hypocritical behavior of those around him, especially within respectable marriage and court society. The poem satirizes nationalism and war’s theater; the sack of Ismail undercuts heroic rhetoric with scenes of indiscriminate slaughter. Byron skewers Romantic solemnity, evangelical moralism, financial and imperial swagger, and the culture of scandal, arguing that appetite and self-interest often masquerade as virtue. Amid the cynicism runs a countercurrent of tenderness, toward Haidée, the orphan Leila, and Aurora Raby, that measures what a corrupt world endangers.

Publication and reception
Issued in installments beginning with two scandalous cantos in 1819, the poem drew censure for its sexual candor and political irreverence even as it became a sensation. Byron’s dedication excoriating Robert Southey and his running attacks on literary rivals heightened the notoriety. Unfinished yet capacious, Don Juan stands as Byron’s most ambitious work: a comic-epic panorama where levity does the work of critique, and where a hero’s adventures become a brilliant excuse to anatomize his age.