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Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

  "Oh, ye immortal gods! what is theogony? 
  Oh, thou too, mortal man! what is philanthropy? 
  Oh, world! which was and is, what is cosmogony? 
  Some people have accused me of misanthropy; 
  And yet I know no more than the mahogany 
  That forms this desk, of what they mean; Lykanthropy 
  I comprehend, for without transformation 
  Men become wolves on any slight occasion."

Byron, Don Juan, Canto XX

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I (knowing nothing about literature) really like this poem, the way it sounds and flows. What does it mean though? Is he just saying that despite man's intellectual achievements, at the end of the day we're just brutal beastial animals?

The narrator Don Juan is saying he's not an intellectual, and doesn't really understand the big words he's studied, but he does have life experience and has observed a lot of cruelty, which to him validates the old proverb "Man is wolf to man."

There is an additional joke in that the narrator's exhortations peripheral to each word all relate to that word's meaning. I don't know the poem, so can't say whether that is the narrator's joke or the author's, but it's not there by accident in any case.

I would have understood it on first pass if it said philosophy or philology instead of philanthropy.

The author uses the words "theogony," "cosmogony" and "philanthropy" because these are all high-minded topics whose aims in practice are to explain and justify things as they are; Byron is ironically suggesting that morality in this world is confined to academic discourse, without any application in real life, where things remain dog-eat-dog.

I know. I just think philanthropy does not fit with those topiphilology like philosophy/philology would.

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