SOURCE: Cooper, Andrew M. “Shipwreck and Skepticism: Don Juan Canto II.” Keats-Shelley Journal 32 (1983): 63-80.

In the following essay, Cooper argues that the shipwreck scenes in Don Juan Canto II symbolize the author's pessimistic view of the world at large.

“Life is, in itself and forever, shipwreck. To be shipwrecked is not to drown. … Consciousness of shipwreck, being the truth of life, constitutes salvation.”

Ortega y Gasset, “In Search of Goethe from Within”

Mazeppa, composed simultaneously with Don Juan Canto I during the late summer of 1818, constitutes in several respects a preliminary version of the shipwreck episode in Canto II. In both cases a youthful adulterer undergoes a kind of descent into Hell, finally awakens before a Nausicaa, and thereafter remains exiled from his homeland. More important, Byron's active juxtaposing of different historical contexts in Mazeppa sheds light on his considerably subtler manipulations of ottava rima in Don Juan...