One instance where the narrator of DJ "betrays" us is in the space between stanzas 133 and 134 of Canto I. After building up to a great Secret of Life revelation -- "and when/ The goal is gained, we die, you know -- and then --" the narrator departs from his philosophic digression and ends with a disappointing cliche -- "What then? I do not know, no more do you." Part of our displeasure comes from our Wordsworthian conditioning, that is, that wandering leads to divination of some truth when translated by the poet's discerning mind. Byron half mocks Wordsworth here in his pointless ramble and may even be thumbing his nose at Shelley by employing the conventional answer rather than striving to discover and express the "before unapprehended relations of things" -- yet does doing so make him wrong? Dismally, in his anti-surmise, Byron is the only one of the three who is definitely correct. (Is it the poet's vocation to tell the truth or to merely present an image of it? But I digress).

Within the story, we have Don Juan, doomed to wander over the world to no certain end (I do not know...) or fulfillment of a sort of moral, but we also have Donna Inez, who, like the narrator, seems to want to deny the possibility of surmise for Don Juan. In his education, she chooses "the languages (especially the dead),/ The sciences (and most of all the abstruse),/ The arts (at least all such as could be said/ To be the most remote from common use)" (I.40) -- leaving nothing a "mystery" except "natural science" (I.39). Of course, schooled in the most esoteric and arcane of arts and lacking mostly in the practical, Don Juan is left only to divine the obvious and discover the banal. Fortunately for the readers, Byron is the spinner of this tale, and he at least rejoices in the craft of the telling more than any necessary vision.

Irene Hsiao