In contrast to Blake’s compact ballad, Byron’s Don Juan is an epic poem that was written late in his life and left unfinished. It’s content is also different as it is a complete narrative as opposed to Blake who focuses on a particular moment. Its form is a series of eight line stanzas that complete their own semantic unit. The rhyme scheme is also quite simplistic, like Blake, following ABABCC. This rhyme scheme suits Byron’s purpose, as the rhyming couplets that close the stanza are useful for providing the punch line for the joke – an ottava rima. The persona that Byron supposes is that of a ‘family friend’ – someone who knows the family and individuals well enough to comment on their thoughts and behaviours. The narrative is written in the third person and this distances us from the feelings of the individual characters, but brings is closer to the narrator which Byron relies on for the strong element of humour in Don Juan. It also allows movement to break from the narrative and provides us with the narrator’s ironic and witty opinions through his many digressions. On remarking that Donna Inez’s ‘maids’ were ‘old’ and ‘a perfect fright’ the narrator advises, ‘I recommend as much to every wife’. The strength of Byron’s epic relies heavily on this ambiguity of meaning for the ironic content. We know that this is a satirical comment because of previous communications between narrator and reader.
Neither poets restrict themselves to a definite consistent metre, they both exploit this poetic device for their own means and to assist the meanings of each poem. Blake opens The Schoolboy with an iambic foot but changes this to a trochaic foot with the use of an anapest foot in the middle of the sentence.
x / x / x x / x /
‘I love / to rise / in a sum/mer morn,’
Blake switches his use of metrical feet but stays within the frame of the tetrameter. He exploits this poetic device with using other feet such as the spondee.
/ x / / x / x /
‘When the / birds sing / on eve/ry tree;’
The syllabic use in these opening lines is interesting as it allows us to concentrate on the content, specifically the imagery, without being drawn into a specific metrical pattern. It also has a natural child like element, rejecting many rigid forms of poetry and suggesting that Blake favoured the more natural use of verse.
Another element that contributes to the natural scenes of summer is Blake’s use of alliteration in the first stanza. The gentle ‘s’ sounds are repeated throughout presenting us with the sound reminiscent of a gentle summer breeze, ‘rise’, ‘summer’, birds sing’, ‘distant huntsman’, ‘skylark sings’, ‘sweet’. This is contrasted greatly with the harder vocal sounds in the last stanza which are suggestive of cruel and coarse winters, ‘gather’, ‘griefs’, ‘destroy’, ‘blasts of winter appear’.
Similarly, Byron does not force any particularly type of metrical feet upon Don Juan. Rather, the fluid, conversational style is maintained through his use of switching devices and not confining himself to just iambic pentameter, as he frequently changes to trochaic feet as well as Blake. He quite often changes from a ten-syllable line to an eleven-syllable line that again supports his discursive style.
x / x / x / x / x / x
‘Inez / became / sole guar/dian, / which was / fair,’
Blake’s use of imagery in The Schoolboy is greatly coloured with references to nature. Throughout the poem he seems to support the view that true learning is in the development of the imagination rather than in the detainment of the classroom. Blake himself did not have a formal education through childhood and he supposes that true development of the self can only be learnt through the development of one’s own mind. The poem moves from the persona of the child to the persona of the narrator in the fourth stanza with Blake’s own opinions becoming apparent.
There is heavy pagan element in the poem supporting the theme that the child’s world is an unfallen world with man and nature being bound together. Like flowers, children should be allowed to roam rather than ‘drooping’ in the classroom. The ambiguity of the word ‘bower’ is also exploited. In the third stanza Blake refers to ‘learning’s bower’, as though education forces children into solitude with a seal about them where they cannot expand their minds any more because of the ‘bower’s’ restrictions and shading from real life. Contrary to this the child would love to be sitting beneath a real ‘bower’ where he can explore his surroundings.
In the fifth stanza, Blake’s didactic message becomes clear with a direct reference to parents, ‘Oh, father and mother’. Like the natural growth of nature, children should be allowed to flourish without being ‘nipped’ and ‘stripped’. ‘Stripped’ is an intriguing word as it suggests unwanted exposure. Perhaps this is an allusion to religious ‘stripping’ of sin, a cleansing of the soul through confession and redemption. However, in Blake’s view, children were completely innocent and the only way we could re-build the foundations of our world was to see through the eye’s of a child, and children don’t have the experience of sin to have a need to be ‘stripped’ of it. The theme of restrictions and infringement is consistent through the poem and Blake suggests that by allowing freedom we allow true learning.
The education Don Juan has to suffer through in Byron’s poem is described with ironic references.
‘He learned the arts of riding, […]
And how to scale a fortress – or a nunnery.’
This is heavily satirical as Donna Inez thinks she is giving her son a highly moral education, however, Byron’s narrator points out that this education can also be used for devious purposes so to neglect ‘natural history’ is to neglect some of the more important
aspects of learning. Whereas Blake uses references to common aspects of nature, Byron in contrast makes specific allusions and references to the greater classical writers, ‘Ovid’, ‘Cattalus’, ‘Sappho’, ‘Virgil’. He uses the imagery of battle to emphasise young Juan’s struggle with these great classical authors, ‘They stand forth marshall’d in a handsome troop’. This suggests that the two Romantic poets had very different audiences. Byron seems to support the Wordsworth aristocratic tone though his sexual innuendoes and content are very unlike Wordsworth. Byron’s conception seems to be that of rejecting the highly moralistic notions of instruction that were coming forth with the Victorian opinions, basing it on the fact that sexual relations are a part of history and will continue to be so. Byron hated hypocrites and in Donna Inez he displayed this perfectly – through all her outwardly pious behaviour she was also having extra-marital affairs.
Overall, both Blake and Byron discuss the same theme but with very different opinions on the education process from outright rejection to a moderation of content. However, whereas Blake uses the language of persuasive pity and sorrow, Byron tries to encourage us to laugh with him at society’s prudish behaviour that in turn can have the consequence that the same society wouldn’t want to deal with. Through differing poetic devices it is possible to provoke thought in order to change the world we live in but through very different means!
TOTAL WORDS: 1541
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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WR Owens and Hamish Johnson (2001), Romantic Writings: An Anthology,
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Marilyn Butler (1981), Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries,
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Palgrave, Basingstoke
