The “fast-flowing” description gives a true sense of the graphic extremity of the scene: a man was slicked open in front of a flesh-hungry crowd, but everything else in the description works against this horror. The surgeon doesn’t suck another man’s blood he “Preferred a draught from the fast-flowing veins,” as if he is drinking life-giving manna from a long sought spring. The Sailors ate the rest of poor Pedrillo. Regaled two sharks, who followed o’er the billow – Part was divided, part thrown into the sea,Īnd such things as the entrails and the brains

Preferred a draught from the fast-flowing veins Had his first choice of morsels for his pains

The reader can swallow this murderous and bestial act, only because Byron uses the verse and his ironic tone: A handful of stanzas after the his tutor, Pedrillo, is gently put down by the surgeon, he is revealed as a cannibal concerned solely with his own welfare: he sucks the blood straight from Pedrillo’s open veins. The rhyme scheme ultimately diverts your attention from the savage account of the cannibalism and turns it into a fun, adventure tale. – (“Sufferings of the Crew of the Thomas,” Shipwrecks, etc.) He requested to be bled to death, the surgeonbeing with them, and have in his case of instruments in his pocket when he quitted the vessel. The use of ottava rima transforms the non-fiction account and Byron’s fictional verse. Lord Bryon appropriated true accounts of shipwrecks into the cannibalism episode of the boat section of Don Juan. Let’s compare sections of Watchmen and the ottava rima of the poem Don Juan, to see how these two adjuncts of the novel work on the material in different ways. The journey he takes is similar in many aspects to the boat section in the Second Canto of Don Juan, but the form is different and thus changes the inflection of the content. He must now make it back to his home before the pirates get there and do more damage. In the 1986/87 limited series comic book Watchmen there is a comic within the comic that relates the story of a shipwrecked man whose crew has been murdered by pirates. In fact, reading Don Juan as opposed to Childe Harolde is more enjoyable, because the visuals are concrete and rich, and are connected with a strong plot through lines. The poem is also highly visual and plot-driven. In his essay, “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel,” Bakhtin claimed that all forms of literature look forward to the novel and that in times when “the novel reigns supreme, almost all the remaining genres are to a greater or lesser extent novelized.” In drama, examples include Henrik Ibsen, Richard Hauptmann, the entirety of Naturalist drama, and epic poetry like Childe Harolde and Lord Byron’s Don Juan.”ĭon Juan is told in third person, and unlike lyric poetry that delves into the inner life of the protagonist, there is little concern for that. For a poem, Don Juan is a new approach to content, breadth, and action.

Don juan by lord byron