Upsoaring wings: Get very drunk

George Gordon, Lord Byron, was one of the big guns of English Romantic poetry. I personally outgrew Romanticism probably some time in my 20s, when it started to seem turgid and overblown. But still, never hurts to pay a visit now and again. I like Romantic music just fine, but the literature—especially poetry—not so much.

As a human, Byron was someone I would not have suffered gladly—he was the model for every self-indulgent legend-in-his-own-mind male from actors to programmers. Again—this lost its charm for me in my 20s. Interestingly, his one legitimate child was Ada Lovelace, the extraordinary bluestocking, mathematician and first computer programmer. Like a lot of self-indulgent LIHOMs, Byron lived large on other folks’ money; he ran up huge debts swanning around Europe and having multiple affairs with men and women without much consideration for anyone but himself. In 1823 he became involved in the Greek war for independence against the Ottoman Turks. An illness turned to sepsis, and he died in Missolonghi in February of the following year.

Byron wrote a lot of epic, melodramatic poetry, but it turns out he had a puckish side. His “Don Juan” is a very long satire on the whole notion of the womanizing libertine. In most of the versions we know in poetry and opera, Don Juan (AKA Don Giovanni) seduces every woman he can, ruining them unrepentantly (because he’s young, good looking and a long way from death), until fate catches up with him after he kills the father of one of his victims.

In short—like Byron—Don Juan is mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Okay, but Byron’s take on Don Juan turns everything on its head. Across 17 cantos, his hero starts out as a seducer, but he is shipwrecked, captured by pirates, sold as a slave by the pirate daughter, disguised as a woman so one of the Sultan’s concubines can get him into the harem; he escapes, joins the Russian army, is invited by Catherine the Great to join her, ah, court, becomes ill, goes to England (supposedly better weather than Russia), has some adventures with British aristos, and The End.

I mean—it pretty much is every damsel in distress of Romantic literature, only with, you know, tackle.

No, I won’t make you read the whole thing, although if you want to, it’s on Project Gutenberg. No, I’ll just share this bit, from Canto II, because it seems pertinent to our experience in 2019:

Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,

Sermons and soda water the day after.

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk;

The best of life is but intoxication:

Glory, the grape, love, gold, in these are sunk

The hopes of all men, and of every nation;

Without their sap, how branchless were the trunk

Of life’s strange tree, so fruitful on occasion:

But to return—Get very drunk; and when

You wake with head-ache, you shall see what then.