Passages: Pegasus "Sprains a Wing"? Not Hardly

Here is the opening to Lord Byron's fourth canto of his marvelous, seemingly miscellaneous masterpiece Don Juan. I love the narrative voice; the ease of speech, allusion, and rhyming; and the deceptive defense, hardly--and yet completely--serious. Playing games in earnest: that's my Lord Byron.

Canto IV

Nothing so difficult as a beginning
In poesy, unless perhaps the end;
For oftentimes when Pegasus seems winning
The race, he sprains a wing and down we tend,
Like Lucifer when hurled from heaven for sinning.
Our sin the same, and hard as his to mend,
Being pride, which leads the mind to soar too far,
Till our own weakness shows us what we are.

But time, which brings all beings to their level,
And sharp adversity will teach at last
Man and as we would hope, perhaps the devil
That neither of their intellects are vast.
While youth's hot wishes in our red veins revel,
We know not this--the blood flows on too fast;
But as the torrent widens towards the ocean,
We ponder deeply on each past emotion.

As boy, I thought myself a clever fellow
And wished that others held the same opinion;
They took it up when my days grew more mellow,
And other minds acknowledged my dominion.
Now my sere fancy 'falls into the yellow
Leaf', and imagination droops her pinion;
And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk
Turns what was once romantic to burlesque.

And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
'Tis that I may not weep; and if I weep,
'Tis that our nature cannot always bring
Itself to apathy, for we must steep
Our hearts first in the depth of Lethe's spring,
Ere what we least wish to behold will sleep.
Thetis baptized her mortal son in Styx;
A mortal mother would on Lethe fix.

Some have accused me of a strange design
Against the creed and morals of the land
And trace it in this poem every line.
I don't pretend that I quite understand
My own meaning when I would be very fine;
But the fact is that I have nothing planned,
Unless it were to be a moment merry,
A novel word in my vocabulary.

To the kind reader of our sober clime
This way of writing will appear exotic.
Pulci was sire of the half-serious rhyme,
Who sang when chivalry was more quixotic,
And revelled in the fancies of the time--
True knights, chaste dames, huge giants, kings despotic.
But these, save the last, being obsolete,
I chose a modern subject as more meet.

How I have treated it, I do not know;
Perhaps no better than they have treated me
Who have imputed such designs as show
Not what they saw, but what they wished to see.
But if it gives them pleasure, be it so;
This is a liberal age, and thoughts are free.
Meantime Apollo plucks me by the ear
And tells me to resume my story here.


And resume his story he does.

I hope I have awakened some curiosity or have reminded some of you what a joy--what an absolute and absolutely resonant joy--Byron's poetry can be.