By their examples of true Christianity:
In short, all know, or very soon may
know it;
And in this scene of all-confessed
inanity,
By Saint, by Sage, by Preacher, and by
Poet,
Must I restrain me, through the fear of
strife,
From holding up the nothingness of
Life?
(VII, vi)
Canto VII is of course one of the war cantos;
consequently its dominant tone is seriously satir-
ical. War is shown to be violent, and Don Juan,
at least for a while, fights violently beside the
best of the Russian troops. Yet the high serious-
ness of the tone and the subject matter is regu-
larly undermined. While monstrous war goes on
in Canto VII, in the next canto, after the Rus-
sians have besieged the city, the serious tone is
interrupted by levity. In the best Roman-Sabine
tradition, the raping begins:
Some odd mistakes, too, happened in
the dark,
Which showed a want of lanterns, or of
taste—
Indeed the smoke was such they scarce
could mark
Their friends from foes,—besides such
things from
haste Occur, though rarely, when there
is a spark
Of light to save the venerably chaste:
But six old damsels, each of seventy
years,
Were all deflowered by different
grenadiers!
(VII, cxxx)
The flippant couplet alone turns a sad sit-
uation into a comic episode. In the next stanza,
though, the narrator points out ‘‘that some dis-
appointment there ensued,’’ and the following
stanza tells why:
Some voices of the buxom middle-aged
Were also heard to wonder in the din
(Widows of forty were these birds long
caged)
‘‘Wherefore the ravishing did not
begin!’’
(VIII, cxxxii)
The nothingness which Byron holds up here
is not the fact of war, but the inane responses to
it. Against the cruelty of war and the subsequent
inanity which informs man’s response to war,
Byron protects himself with laughter. On the
whole, the war cantos reveal a depth of compas-
sion and sense of the sanctity of human life. But
to be only serious about such matters is again
to invite despair. Byron chooses to laugh, and
then to move on to the Court of Catherine the
Great. Rapid movement and laughter becomes
his defense against senseless cruelty and inane
human behavior.
That laughter and acceptance of nothing-
ness have replaced the earlier defense against
ruin which Byron found in the creative act is
reflected in his expressed attitude toward poetry
inDon Juan. At the beginning of Canto VII the
poet identifies his tale as a ‘‘versified Aurora
Borealis / Which flashes o’er a waste and icy
clime’’ (VII, ii). The light of his verse, though, is
not to redeem or to elevate, but to lay bare a
wasteland of a civilization that we may know it
for what it is. The following passage tells what
the Aurora Borealis elucidates:
When we know what all are, we must
bewail us,
But ne’erthless I hope it is no crime
To laugh at all things—for I wish to
know
What, after all, are all things—but a
show?
(VII, ii)
Poetry now induces laughter; no longer does
it allow its creator to participate in a better world
of art, rather to live with his lesser world of
factual nothingness—a ‘‘show.’’ Among myriad
possibilities, several stanzas from Canto XIV
reflect the persistency of Byron’s now casual
attitude toward poetry. In stanza viii ‘‘Poesy’’ is
‘‘a straw, borne on my human breath.’’ Whimsi-
cal by intent, it acts ‘‘according as the Mind
glows.’’ Like straw, poetry is essentially hollow,
lacking the passionate emotion which surfaced
so regularly inChilde Harold’s Pilgrimageand
Manfred.The couplet of stanza viii comments
further on poetry:
And mine’s a bubble, not blown up for
praise,
But just to play with, as an infant plays.
After admitting in stanza x that ‘‘I can’t help
scribbling once a week,’’ Byron expresses a defense
of poesy that must have shocked his friend,
Shelley:Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage