when we two parted

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.