“Blessings on his experience!” cried the poet. “Ask him these questions”:
Did he never play at Cricket or walk a mile in hot weather – did he never spill a dish of tea over his testicles in handing the cup to his charmer to the greater shame of his nankeen breeches? – did he never swim in the sea at Noonday with the Sun in his eyes and on his head – which all the foam of the ocean could not cool? did he never draw his foot out of a tub of too hot water damning his eyes and his valet's? did he never inject for a Gonorrhea? – or make water through an ulcerated Urethra? was he ever in a Turkish bath – that marble paradise of sherbet and sodomy? – was he ever in a cauldron of boiling oil like St John …
The poor “him” subjected to this patronizing interrogation was the scholarly Francis Cohen; the recipient was the publisher John Murray; and the poet was Lord Byron, the first two cantos of whose Don Juanhad just been published together on July 15, 1819. Cohen had read them at once and dared to suggest what Byron “should” have done instead:
Lord B. should have been grave & gay by turns; grave in one page & gay in the next; grave in one line, & gay in the next. And not grave & gay in the same page, or in the same stanza, or in the same line … we are never drenched & scorched at the same instant whilst standing in one spot.
Byron's view was that being simultaneously drenched and scorched would be nothing out of the ordinary to a true man of the world. And this was very much how he wanted Don Juan to be taken – as a piece of versified worldliness, free to rove where it wished, contradictory climates and all. What he “should” have done could sling its hifalutin hook. Now was no time, in Byron's short life, for creeping compromise.
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