English Literature / Unit 13 ENL 1243 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Byron's Satiric Voice
The idea
Byron writes in two voices, and the exam may set them side by side. The Byronic voice of Childe Harold and Manfred is brooding, solitary and defiant. The satiric voice of Don Juan is conversational, worldly and mocking. To recognize the satiric voice, first notice the narrator's asides: he digresses, addresses the reader and comments on his own poem. Second, watch the ottava rima's final couplet, where Byron often deflates the stanza's serious build-up with a joke or a rhyme. Third, notice the targets: hypocrisy, cant, social pretension and public figures of his day. Fourth, notice the tone shifts, from feeling to irony within a few lines. A passage that sets up emotion and then laughs at it in a rhyming couplet points to Don Juan.
In practice
Asides, the deflating couplet, targets, tone shifts.
Where people slip
Do not read every Byron passage as Byronic gloom. In Don Juan the narrator mocks the very feelings his heroes indulge.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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