When
We Two Parted
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
Sank chill on my brow -
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows 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 in mine ear;
A shudder come o'er me -
Why wert 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 grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee? -
With silence and tears.
George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron
Taken from http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poem=26659
|
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. 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 I said before. The vocabulary is easy to understand for everybody
who studies the English language. The first verse of the poem 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, as he writes at the end of the
third stanza (Long, long shall I rue
thee/ Too deeply to tell). As I said at the beginning of the commentary,
firstly the poem is about the end (the man probably does not know that it is
the end) of a love story between a man and a woman (the first four verses).
After the whole poem is an expression of feelings of hate from the man
towards the woman because she left him (To
sever for years: did the man go to fight in a war, for instance?). Also,
the whole poem, from the first line to the last one, is written in the first
person, in plural (When we two parted),
and in singular (I hear thy name spoken).
It means that this poem maybe autobiographical or not, maybe the woman was a
real woman or not, or simply the work is an ode to disappointed love. I would
like to emphasize the contrast between two verses (the second one and the
last one), seemingly equal in form but with different meanings, it depends on
what the previous line said. In the first pair of verses (When we two parted/ In silence and tears) the man feels
true love towards his beloved, but she, as we will see some verses later,
does not, and the last verse is the definitive confirmation of what he feels
is disgust and pity because of what could be and was not. The third verse of
the poem may have two different meanings too: Half broken-hearted: the man can have his heart broken because he
loves her completely and he would do anything for her, and can have his heart
broken because she has left him and he will never see her again. The cold is a very important metaphorical
element at the beginning of the second and the third stanzas: The dew of the morning/ Sunk chill
on my brow: here the cold is shown as a metaphor of the feelings that
the man has towards the woman, as it happens too in A knell to mine ear/A shudder comes o’er me: dew,
chill, knell and shudder are words that symbolize cold in many different
ways. Here the man would not already break himself his heart for her. The
verses They name thee before me and
They know not I knew thee give to
understand that maybe more men were in love to the woman he got for some
time. In the last stanza, the two first verses have
two words that may be synonyms, but they mean a totally different thing, they
are the contrast of the poem: In secret
we met, here Byron wants to transmit the passion of two lovers in their
first secret encounter. And In silence
I grieve symbolizes that nobody can help this man to come back to smile
after having been left by the woman he loved. The two following verses, That thy heart could forget/ Thy spirit
deceive say what she made him: she forgot him and she deceived him. |
WEBGRAPHY
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