Don Juan (Byron) - Robert Southey Dedication

Robert Southey Dedication

The poem is dedicated, with some scorn, to Robert Southey, then Poet Laureate - You, Bob! are rather insolent, you know, / At being disappointed in your wish / To supersede all warblers here below, / And be the only Blackbird in the dish;. In its first publication, Byron cautions Murray: "As the Poem is to be published anonymously, omit the Dedication. I won't attack the dog in the dark. Such things are for scoundrels and renegadoes like himself". According to the editor of the 1833 Works of Lord Byron the existence of the Dedication "became notorious" in consequence of Hobhouse's article in the Westminster Review, 1824. He adds, for Southey's consolation and encouragement, that "for several years the verses have been selling in the streets as a broadside," and that "it would serve no purpose to exclude them on the present occasion." But Southey was not appeased. He tells Allan Cunningham that "the new edition of Byron's works is ... one of the very worst symptoms of these bad times" .

The dedication also takes issue with the Lake Poets generally - You—Gentlemen! by dint of long seclusion / From better company, have kept your own ... There is a narrowness in such a notion, / Which makes me wish you'd change your lakes for Ocean - and specifically - And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing, / But like a hawk encumbered with his hood,- / - Explaining Metaphysics to the nation — / I wish he would explain his Explanation; Wordsworth - T is poetry-at least by his assertion,; and Southey's predecessor as Laureate, Henry James Pye in the use of and pun on the old song Sing a Song of Sixpence, four and twenty Blackbirds in a pye.