An Analysis: When We Two Parted by Lord Byron

Context & Plot

• Byron’s fellow Romantic poet William Wordsworth once remarked that poetry was the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ and one notices that in this poem the speaker is certainly coming to terms with ‘powerful feelings’.
• Byron was known to be an especially licentious and promiscuous individual and thus it is no surprise to find him writing about having an affair with a woman. In fact, Byron claimed that he wrote the poem in 1808 and delayed its publication until 1816 in order to protect the identity of the woman in the poem who was married.
• It is possible that Byron was writing about Lady Frances Webster: it is rumoured that he had a relationship with her whilst she was married to one of Byron’s friends.
• What is the poem about? The speaker recalls the day that he and his lover parted and he considers whether or not the sadness he feels in the present day is connected to the sadness he felt then. Whilst time has passed the speaker still agonizes over the termination of their relationship and it has clearly affected him deeply.
• Thus, a past break-up has had an effect on the speaker’s present-life. 

First Stanza

• The use of ‘we’ both in the title and the first line of the poem immediately establishes that the poem is considering a relationship. Similarly, the past tense of ‘parted’ makes it clear that the speaker is recalling a memory. Perhaps, the fact that the first line is a repetition of the title suggests the importance of the event to be recalled. Clearly, this is a painful memory.
• Given the semantic field of grief, as found in words such as, ‘silence’, ‘tears’, and ‘sever’, the poem produces from the outset a melancholic tone.
• The lexical choice of ‘sever’ is especially noteworthy: it is a particularly violent and even aggressive word and is suggestive of the complete termination that is being described. It is not that the couple gradually grew apart, but rather that their attachment was ‘severed’.
• Whilst perhaps too much of an analytical stretch one might even pick up on the fact that the word is polysyllabic: just as the word phonetically contains within it a disjunction, a severance of syllables (sev-er), then so too has the relationship been ‘severed’.
• Byron then moves on to describe how his lover’s cheek ‘grew pale’ and her kiss was ‘cold’. In addition to presenting the lover as barren there is also a sense of her being lifeless. She is being described as almost corpse-like. Thus, just as she has physically grown cold so too has she emotionally grown cold.
• The death imagery could also connote how the end of the relationship was like a death to the speaker.
• However, one might consider to what extent the speaker is being reliable here. Perhaps, the narrative strategy of focalization is being utilised by Byron: she is not really cold, but that is how the speaker thinks of her. Thus, her description is focalized through the eyes of a person who now vehemently dislikes her. As this is the case, it stands to reason that he would look back on her and remember her as being cold.
• One might also notice that in this first stanza there is constructed an accumulative effect when considering the emotion of the speaker: the description moves from ‘silence’ to ‘tears’ to the much more violent ‘sever’ and finally to use of language that is reminiscent of a dead body (‘pale grew thy cheek and cold / colder thy kiss’. Perhaps, in the act of remembering the event the speaker’s sorrow increases.
• This is made apparent in the next two lines: ‘Truly that hour foretold / Sorrow to this’. The use of enjambment, here, reinforces how the past experience of a separation has shaped the speaker’s present experiences: just as one poetic line runs into another so too does the speaker’s past experiences run into and mould his present ones.

Second Stanza

• The second stanza continues the semantic field of coldness: ‘The dew of the morning / Sunk chill on my brow’. The speaker is recalling the morning of when he parted from his lover.
•  The lexical choice of ‘sunk’ adds a certain corporeality or physicality to the image. It is almost as if the pain that the speaker feels has been ingrained or embedded into him.
• That the pain is inescapable, as suggested by the above image, is again augmented by the following two lines: ‘It felt like the warning / Of what I feel now’. This links to the culminating lines of the first stanza and to the general preoccupation of how past experiences mould or dictate one’s present disposition.
• The description of the early morning dew as a ‘warning’ returns us to the narrative strategy of focalization, since we might question to what extent it appeared to be a warning at the time. Is it possible that the speaker interpreted a cold forehead as a sign for the impending dissolution of his relationship? Or, does he remember that fateful morning in this manner because of what subsequently came to pass? This is somewhat of a detour from the main idea of love and relationships, but the notion of how memories are created plays an interesting role in this poem.
• The following lines hint at why the lovers separated. ‘The vows are all broken’ could be read in two related, but different ways: 1) It refers to how the vows have been broken between the two lovers and this is why they have separated. This could refer to how one lover cheated on the other. 2) It could mean that one lover was married and so their relationship was illicit. In being together, they were breaking vows. The latter interpretation is the one supported by biographical information, since Byron’s lover was apparently married.
• The second interpretation is further supported by the following lines: ‘I hear thy name spoken / And share in its shame’. If the speaker and his lover separated because they were having an illicit affair and someone found out then this would explain why the speaker feels shameful.
• Notice, also, the use of sibilance and how this draws a phonetic link between the words ‘share’ and ‘shame’ thus underlining how they share the burden together, since they were both duplicitous.
• Furthermore, the specific ‘sh’ sound that is used links to the theme of ‘silence’ that has been established in the poem: silence is used to reflect how the relationship was secret and how the speaker must keep his grief to himself.

Third Stanza

• In the next stanza the poet describes how the lover’s name was a ‘knell in mine ear’. This metaphorical use of ‘knell’ here refers to a ‘death knell’, which was a bell used to mark someone’s death. Thus, when the speaker hears her name it reminds him of the death of their relationship.
• The poet then uses the rhetorical device of an ubi sunt (a question that signals longing or nostalgia) in the form of ‘Why wert thou so dear?’. The speaker is trying to understand, here, why he cannot shake his lover’s influence.
• The speaker appears at once to be both perplexed and aggravated by the love he once felt for her, but, in the of act questioning this, he also betrays that he does still, in some way, continue to love her. The ubi sunt reveals an interesting dynamic: he at once desires to forget and distance himself from her, but also recognises that such a movement is impossible. She will be forever imprinted onto his soul.
• This dynamic is further developed at the end of the stanza: ‘Long, long shall I rue thee, / Too deeply to tell’. He will never be able to forget her and it is because of this that he will always ‘rue’ her. He may regret his relationship with her, but as Byron makes clear there is no way to erase what has already occurred.
• One might also notice the repetition of ‘thee’: the frequent use of direct address underscores how the speaker is still preoccupied with his lover.

Fourth Stanza

• In the final stanza, Bryon returns to the theme of secrecy, both at the time they were lovers and subsequently: ‘In secret we met — / In silence I grieve’.
• The poem then concludes with a temporal jump as the speaker now looks to the future thus returning to the notion that one’s past experiences dictate one’s future feelings: ‘After long years, / How should I greet thee? — / With silence and tears.’
• Moreover, the repetition of the line ‘silence and tears’ from the beginning of the poet further highlights how the break-up has deeply affected him and now conditions his present life. There has been no alteration in his feelings and the poem seems to suggest nor will there ever be.
• Once might also connect this point to the strong ABAB rhyme scheme: just as the rhyme scheme is predictable and regular so too is it inevitable that the speaker will continue to feel pain.