Damoetas, a short fragment of truculent characterization, may be a morbid bit of self-portraiture, but is more probably a cynical sketch of some acquaintance. The description is excessively bitter:—
“From every sense of shame and virtue wean’d,
In lies an adept, in deceit a fiend;—
Damoetas ran through all the maze of sin,
And found the goal, when others just begin.”
The poems so far mentioned as composed by Byron before 1809 have been formal exercises in the manner of Pope, tentative efforts in the genre of which English Bards was to be Byron’s best example. Even in this early period, however, another phase of his satiric spirit appears, which hints of the future Don Juan; it trifles in a lighter vein, with less of invective and more of banter, and the style is lent a humorous touch by the use of odd and uncommon rhymes. The half-genial playfulness of these poems is decidedly different from the earnestness and intensity of Damoetas, and makes them akin to the familiar verse of Prior, Cowper, and Praed. One of the cleverer specimens is the poem with the elaborate title Lines to a Lady Who Presented to the Author a Lock of Her Hair Braided with His Own, and Appointed a Night in December to Meet Him in the Garden, in which thirteen rhymes out of twenty-two are double. These verses, printed first in Fugitive Pieces, are possibly the earliest in which evidence may be found of a sportive mood in Byron’s work. Their tone is both ironic and comic, and possible romance is turned into something ridiculous by a satiric use of realism. The poem is also one of the few examples of Byron’s employment of octosyllabic couplets for satiric purposes.
To Eliza (October 9, 1806), written to Elizabeth Pigot, Byron’s early correspondent and confidante, contains some cynical observations on marriage, with at least one line that might have fitted into Don Juan:
“Though women are angels, yet wedlock’s the devil.”
It is composed in stanzas made up of four anapestic lines. Granta, a Medley, written October 28, 1806, in one of the bursts of rhyming not uncommon with him at that period, treats, in a jocular fashion, of college life at Cambridge. Its chief interest lies in some of its peculiar rhymes, such as triangle-wrangle, historic use-hypothenuse, before him-tore ’em, crude enough in themselves, but prophetic of better skill to come, and in the fact that it uses the common quatrain of four-stressed lines, with alternate rhymes, a measure seldom found in Byron’s satire. To the Sighing Strephon, in a six-line stanza, while occasionally serious, is actually the reflection of a frivolous mood, and contains light satire. The trivial nature of these poems as contrasted with the vehemence of some other of his early satires, indicates that Byron’s satiric spirit even at that time was fickle and changeable, dependent often on his environment and varying constantly in response to alterations in his own temper. It is noticeable too that he was experimenting with several metrical forms, and trying his hand at extraordinary rhymes.
Byron’s path as an aspiring author was not always a smooth one, even before his name became generally known. Fugitive Pieces had been harshly criticised by several of his acquaintances, and, as we have seen, the objections of the hypercritical Becher had led to the destruction of the entire edition. But the proud young lord was not always tamely submissive to correction. In December, 1806, he wrote in Hudibrastic couplets the verses To a Knot of Ungenerous Critics, which express the same sort of injured pride and resentment that he afterwards showed toward Jeffrey and the Edinburgh reviewers: