Finished Canto VI of Don Juan tonight, and one of my biggest impressions was that this canto felt particularly metaphor-dense, just metaphor after metaphor in rapid succession. Byron even calls himself out for this at one point, after an amusingly frantic and varied clustering of attempts at describing a sleeping harem girl: “My similes are gathered in a heap, / So pick and choose…” (6/LXVIII). (I thought the most interesting of those images was “the snow minaret on an Alpine steep” — what a fascinating blend of Switzerland and Turkey!)
And then there’s this one, where he gets carried away and has to correct himself mid-metaphor:
6/XXXIII. […] …As I said, this goodly row Of ladies of all countries at the will Of one good man, with stately march and slow, Like water-lilies floating down a rill — Or rather lake — for rills do not run slowly, — Paced on most maiden-like and melancholy.
I kept thinking of Ogden Nash’s poem “Very like a whale”:
…No, no, Lord Byron, before I'll believe that this Assyrian was actually like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;
Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red mouth and big white teeth and did he say Woof Woof?
Frankly I think it is very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say, at the very most,
Was that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian cohorts about to destroy the Hebrew host.
But that wasn't fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he had to invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate them,
With the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers to people they say Oh yes, they're the ones that a lot of wolves dressed up in gold and purple ate them…