when we two parted

In the case of the poem “When we two parted” written in 1808 and published in 1813 in “The poetical works of Lord Byron” is a poem of heart broken, expressing strong feelings in a simple

Name: Hoang Thi Huyen Trang

Class: 08CNA08

The Analysis of “When We Two Parted-

George Gordon Byron”

“When we two parted” is a poem of George Gordon Byron Byron was a

romantic poet, his writings develops a Romantic style as distinctive and as influential as Wordsworth’s works, one of the most representative romantic writers Byron’s romantic subjectivity defines itself in spectacular terms; this subjectivity has been criticized as too theatrical by John Keats But for other poets like Baudelaire, that theatrical style defined Byron’s greatness as a lyric poet Lord Byron has a wonderful collection of poetic works; he started writing in 1806 to his death in 1824 Through these years he made a lot of

famous works such as “Child Harold’s Pilgrimage”, “Don Juan” or

“Manfred” The main characteristic of Byron’s poems is its strength and

masculinity, combined in a lot of cases with irony In the case of the poem

“When we two parted” written in 1808 and published in 1813 in “The poetical works of Lord Byron” is a poem of heart broken, expressing strong

feelings in a simple but full of meaning vocabulary, such as in other poems

like “So we’ll no go more a roving” This poem is about the love, first, and

later the hate a man feels towards who was his beloved because she left him It’s a very typical Romantic poem, typical of a Romantic writer like Lord Byron, who expresses his feelings of love, a typical issue of Romanticism

When We Two Parted (1808)

When we two parted

In silence and tears

Half broken hearted

To sever for years

Pale grew thy cheek and cold

Colder thy kiss

Truly that hour foretold

Sorrow to this

The dew of the morning

Sunk chill on my brow

It felt like the warning

Of what I feel now Thy vow are all broken

And light is thy fame

I hear thy name spoken And share in its shame They name thee before me

A knell to my ear Shudder comes o’er me Why were thou so dear? They know not I knew thee

Who knew thee too well

Long, long shall I rue thee

Too deeply to tell

In secret we met

In silence I grieved

That thy heart could forget

Thy spirit deceived

If I should meet thee After long years How should I greet thee?

With silence and tear

With respect to the structure of the poem, When we two parted contains

four stanzas of eight verses each one There are, also, four kinds of rhyme

in each stanza In the first four verses of each stanza, odd verses have a rhyme, and even verses have another rhyme, and this method is used by the writer in the last four verses of each stanza with a rhyme for each pair

of verses as The vocabulary is easy to understand for everybody who studies the English language The first line of the poem, “When we two parted” is also the title of the poem which means that the writer could not

or did not want to find a title for the poem (maybe the damage he felt was

so strong that he was not able to find a good title for the poem) Or perhaps this is because the grief felt by the poet at parting was so intense that he chose to leave the words as they were and didn’t bother with thinking of a title The pronoun “we” is used by the poet to make the reader enter into the shoes of the character and share the same feelings of intense grief and sorrow experienced by the poet/character, as if it were his own The fact that they part in “silence and tears “ tells us that the grief they felt was so heavy that they themselves found words unworthy

of expressing it and the phrase “silence and tears” is used to express the depth of their grief as well They part with only half broken hearts as in the next line which is “with half hearts broken to sever for years” From this we see that they still have hope of meeting and reuniting even if it means after a long time The grief can be seen on their faces which have grown pale and cold as in the line “pale grew thy cheek cold” This is because of their grief and sorrow People also become cold when they lack emotion and it later becomes evident that though the poet was probably “cold” because of grief, the one he was parting with wasn’t so for the same reason The lady was actually betraying him The sorrow he felt at that time [when parting] was only a foretaste of what was to come later on as in the line “truly that hour foretold sorrow to this” The poet then further describes his feeling through the central image of cold which was formed in the previous stanza He says that the coolness of the morning which provides one with a feeling of goodness and “freshness”, made him feel otherwise as it reminded him of his grief and sorrow which

is once again expressed through the sensation of coldness [but that of the

dew] In the line “thy vows are all broken and light is thy fame”, we are told that the lady has broken all her promises and chosen “light” which is used as a pun By going after fame, the lady has chosen to stand out and

be in the “limelight” And, by preferring fame over love, she opted for something less valuable According to the poet, love compared to fame and money has a higher value but she has gone after fame and broken all her promises and by doing so she has revealed her true and greedy character

The poet now changes the tense from past to present to tell us what he feels like now, now that we know about her betrayal

The poet is so grieved by her betrayal that when he hears her name being spoken, a feeling of sadness along with shamefulness comes over him because he alone knew what she was really like and was also aware of her true character as in the line “I hear thy name spoken and share in its shame”

The poet uses the metaphor “a knell to my ear” to describe his feeling when they, the people mention her before him Everyone seems to know her as she is famous He says that he feels so extremely sad that her name sounds like a bell that’s played at someone’s funeral That’s how painful

it is for him In the line “a shudder comes o’er me, why wert thou so dear?”, where the word “shudder” implies “cold”, the poet uses the sensation of cold to convey the feelings of grief once more This agonized question asked by the poet himself tells us that the lady is no dearer to him He shudders at the thought of how dear she was

The people didn’t know that they had known each other as said by the poet in the line “they know not I knew thee who knew thee too well, long long shall I rue thee too deeply to tell” where the poet says that he knew her “well” [because of what she had done to him i.e betrayed him.] he would, for a very long time regret the fact that he had actually found her

to be good in the past, something which seemed so shameful now The poet then gives us the reason as to why no one knew about them They used to meet in secret as in the line “in secret we met, in silence I grieve”

As of now, he feels the sorrow and grief caused by her betrayal all by himself The poet then shifts to the future tense and tells us of how he would greet her if he was to meet her in the future as in the final part of the poem, “ if I shall meet thee after long long years, how shall I greet thee, In silence and tears.” The poet tells that even if meets her after a very long time he will greet her in the same way i.e with silence and tears but with a difference In the beginning, the grief which was at parting,

was shared by both of them, but now the man is alone in his grief which

is caused by the grief and sorrow at her betrayal

This poem perfectly can be described for people of nowadays, due to Byron expresses wonderfully what people feel when the person they love splits up with them or dies This is a feeling of all the epochs and centuries, the loneliness and pain provoked by the missing of the person who loves The poet has also a relation with today; Byron has returned as a figure of great consequence, this is an historical fate to be welcomed Now he is more appreciated than in his times, because unless in his time he was famous, he was perjudicated by his type of life, having problems with alcohol and women But now he was recognized as one of the most representative writers of the Romanticism