Q: How does Byron criticize the trend and tendencies of the contemporary society?

Lord Byron, the most consistent satirist of the period and by far the best, has written the satiric piece Don Juan in a wholly fresh manner. His purpose is to expose the hypocrisy and the corruption of high society. However, he has used wit, humor and irony plentiful to satirize his objects effectively.
In the opening stanza we find a very explicit irony in the attempts and procedure of Juan’s education chosen for him by his mother Donna Inez. Juan always kept away from the company of other boys for fear of being corrupted. The subjects and texts of his study are taken from great authors’ works which have no even the slightest touch of sexual reference. For this sake, some of the classical literature is remained unknown to Juan. As a result, Juan is not becoming a pure learner. Through this irony Byron mocks at the society where “love is taught hypocrisy from youth.”
In the brilliant description of the characters of Donna Julia and Donna Inez, Byron satire upon the hypocrisy of women. Though Donna Inez is a devoted Christian, we find that she had relationship with Alfonso before her marriage. Even she had good terms with Alfonso’s mistress to show her love for Alfonso. Even Donna Inez had tried to convince the physicians to prove her husband, Don Jose, as an insane. In the case of Donna Julia; though she is married and fully conscious about social, moral and religious law, she made physical relationship with Don Juan. One day when Alfonso come to investigate but fails to discover Juan. At this Julia harshly rebukes her husband for his baseless suspicion. Even to prove her innocence she pretends of weeping and goes into a fainting fir to declare her own innocence.
Byron also deliberately criticizes Robert Southey for his poetic attitude to introduce a new taste in poetry for public which rejects the poetry of Pope and Dryden. He also mocks at Wordsworth for his dimness in his poems and Coleridge for his immature metaphysics, and Plato for his mystified fantasies.
Byron does not attack mankind, but behavior of man which lacks reason and morality. Byron has criticizes the brutality, immortality, hypocrisy in man. But everywhere he has used wit, humor, irony as his tools to satirize them.

Critical appreciation of “Locksley Hall”

This poem was first published in 1842.The idea of this poem came to Tennyson from Sir william Jones’s prose translation of Moallakat, The seven Arabic poems hanging up in the temple of Mecca.  

The speaker of Locksley Hall wishes to release himself from the limitations of his present life. He thinks over possibilities not only about his own future but about that of the world. He speaks those famous verses of prophecy which seem to predict the coming of the airplane, of aerial fighting and the world war, the League of Nations and the U.N.O. everything goes with a faith that ultimately all will be well and Future progress is not so far away. The lines spoken in “Locksley Hall” have a “ring and swing”; they are firm, short, concise and memorable.

The lines in “Locksley Hall” are spoken by a desperately unstable character where two voices are audible. One of the voices is heavy with doubt and unbelief; It is the voices of “palsied heart..The jaundiced eye”. Perhaps the progress of science will not bring happiness, Just as knowledge doesn’t always bring wisdom. For the speaker himself, happiness might even involve a reversal progress, with its machinery and its literature, its inhibitions and frustrations. This dark side of the speaker’s mind, desperate at having loved and lost at and he finds himself also the victim of money-ridden society.

Tennyson was annoyed when his readers gave a biographical interpretation of the poem. According to Tennyson “Locksley Hall is an imaginary place and the hero is also an imaginary. The whole poem represents young life, its good side, its lacks, and its desire”.

Tennyson gives what he calls a “dramatic impression”, that a man who has returned to the Hall Where he had spent his child hood. Now he recalls the hopes of his youth, his frustrated dating, social injustice, the materialism of the age, his disappointment. He considers the possibility of escape from this civilization. But finally accepts the progress established upon scientific discovery, trade and cooperation.

When Tennyson emphasized, that this is not an unbiased opinion of history, but events viewed by a highly characterized individual naïve passionate, rebellious, complex and annoyed. Changing mood, He moves through stages of anger, bluster, excitement, determination and so on. The portrait is of an unbalanced and fragmented personality.

“In Locksley Hall, we met an unconfident modern youth who is depressed and confused by his own inability to face busy competition of ordinary English life.

Restlessness, boredom, impatience of monotonous life, set him dreaming of something like a new odyssey. But the hero of Locksley Hall is no Ulysses. The bonds of culture and luxury are too strong for him. The plan of adventure is abandoned as quickly as it is formed. He remains to support himself with the march of mind (progress) and the wonders of scientific discovery. The great and lasting success of Locksley Hall shows the power of genius in presenting an ordinary situation poetically. It can kindle up and transform common emotion and deals boldly with the facts and feeling of everyday life.

Some of the Nature-pictures in the poem are remarkable. For example “Orion sloping slowly to the west” and “the Pleiades, rising thro’ the mellow shade”. There is a beautiful simile in the comparison of the Pleiades with “a swarm of fire flies tangled in a silver braid”. The picture of the spring which brings new color and new feathers to the robin and the dove is lovely. Another beautiful picture occurs when the speaker refers to the tropical land where he would like to settle down. The metaphors contained in lines 31-34 of the poem have justifiably been praised.

You can avoid the group of words which has been highlighted in red color.

Interesting Interpretation of “The lotos Eaters”

 

The poem talks about idle happiness. But the question is whether the author is supporting it or allowing it, or he keeps it neutral as debatable.

One can logically comment that the purpose of the poem is to criticize a life of do-nothing leisure. Tennyson himself and his father were both hard workers. When Tennyson wrote the poem, many of the upper class people in England and the rest of Europe lived a life of leisure and they used their inherited lands to earn money and expend these money for fashions , parties etc.

Although Tennyson himself belonged to a noble family but his father had been disinherited.As a result, he(Tennyson's father) had to manage money to maintain his large family because Alfred was one of twelve Tennyson children. While Alfred was joining Cambridge University, his father died and that's why he had to return to help out. It was not the time of his fame as a poet. He had to work hard for his family.

After reading his background, It's natural to seem that Tennyson would annoy on an unproductive life of leisure. He may also have anger on the use of drugs and alcohol as means to escape reality because his father started to drink heavily when Alfred was a teenager.

On the other hand, one can comment that Tennyson was approving a leisurely life as a way of working which indicates the profession of England's lower and middle classes. In the industrial age of the early nineteenth century, many workers were spending long hours in factories, shops and offices. Life was so fast. Industrial city like London were crowed and smoky. Everyone seemed busy to put a coin in his pocket. Life was just as busy at sea. Ships were sailing to the Americans, the East indies, and elsewhere to expand commerce and build the empire.

Ulysses' crewmen speak of melancholy and even death as their friend because of their distaste to a life of toil, tension, and sea travel and Perhaps Tennyson's dissatisfaction with the direction of the British Empire.

It is also possible that Tennyson was trying to keep balance and that is "Too much leisure is bad, and too much work is equally bad"