As a sexually precocious adolescent boy, Juan has a love affair with a married friend of his mother. Premise ĭon Juan begins with the birth of the hero, Don Juan, in Seville, Spain. Don Juan, canto I, stanza 1, lines 3–6. Therefore Juan is spoken in English, as / ˈ dʒ uː ən/ JOO-ən, which is the recurring pattern of enunciation used for pronouncing foreign names and words in the orthography of English. In the example passage from Don Juan, canto I, stanza 1, lines 3–6, the Spanish name Juan is rhymed with the English sound for the words true one. The ottava rima uses the final rhyming couplet as a line of humour, to achieve a rhetorical anticlimax by way of an abrupt transition, from a lofty style of writing to a vulgar style of writing. The poetical narrative of Don Juan (1819–24) is told in sixteen thousand lines, arranged in seventeen cantos, written in ottava rima (eighth rhyme) each stanza is composed of eight iambic pentameters, with the couplet rhyme scheme of ab ab ab cc. Given the moralistic notoriety of the satirical, epic poem, John Murray refused to publish the latter cantos of Don Juan, which then were entrusted to John Hunt, who published the cantos over a period of months cantos VI, VII, and VIII, with a Preface, were published on 15 July 1823 cantos IX, X, and XI were published on 29 August 1823 cantos XII, XIII, and XIV were published on 17 December 1823 and cantos XV and XVI on 26 March 1824.

Cantos I and II were published on 15 July 1819, and cantos III, IV, and V were published on 8 August 1821.īyron began to write canto VI in June 1822, and had completed writing canto XVI in March 1823. Cantos III and IV were written in winter of 1819–1820 and canto V was written in October–November 1820. Canto I was written in September 1818, and canto II was written in December 1818 through January 1819. Lord Byron was a prolific writer for whom 'the composition of his great poem, Don Juan, was coextensive with a major part of his poetical life' he wrote the first canto in late 1818, and the seventeenth canto in early 1823. Frontispiece illustration of a bust of Lord Byron in the 1824 edition of Don Juan.

Lord byron don juan poem