Through this paper, I will try to show how one poem can represent the end of a life’s period due to the inevitable fatigue of the mortal body and the boredom after a life full of scandals and eccentricities. This is what Byron is telling us in the short but beautiful piece outlined below and this is what I will try to argument in this essay. This rejection to enjoyment and love is transmitted to us through a beautiful metaphor of two lovers saying goodbye to their relationship.

 

 

Analysis of the poem:

 

So we'll go no more a-roving
George Gordon (Lord) Byron (1788-1824)

So we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul outwears the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.

 

First of all, I would like to start talking about the impression we receive from a first reading; that is to say, what the poem is about. This melancholic piece tells us the announcement of a goodbye between two lovers, a goodbye which is never welcome but that is necessary due to the author’s desire of resting. Love is still alive between the two protagonists but time has won the battle and the mortal bodies cannot bear such a vital way of life. The night, their loyal mediator, and its queen, the moon, as a symbol of sexuality and passion, will be waiting for them as ever; however, they will never see their meeting again.

 

The poem is full of ideas we can underline. First of all, the central point is the necessity of a break after a wild and polemic life as we can see in the sentence: “So we'll go no more a-roving” (line 1). “It evocatively describes the fatigue of age conquering the restlessness of youth” (Wikipedia: “We’ll go no more on a-roving).  It seems obvious that Lord Byron’s way of acting would have effects on his life sooner or later and this sudden “boredom” was not surprising at all. “Byron was notorious for his extravagant way of life, for his love affairs and for his poetry. He was a handsome and wealthy young man and he knew about it” (Plagiarist.com). After a tempestuous and highly controversial youth, he was no longer amused by his eccentricities. He was only twenty-nine and he had lived too fast; in other words, he had lived as a romantic, been unconscious of the danger, unworried about what society thought about him, not frightened by anything; nevertheless, everybody has a limit and the poem states that he found it.

 

Another important point in the poem is the failure of love due to the death of passion and the consequent arrival of monotony. As I have pointed before, love is still beating in the lover’s hearts but, as I see it, they have experienced all they had to live together and nothing joins them anymore. On the one hand, we can understand that this poem is addressed to a concrete person (to a lover, maybe a friend, or to his half- sister with whom he had an alleged affair, as many people claim); however, on the other hand, we could understand it as a general rejection of any love given his situation of “collapse”. “From 1817 to 1819, Byron was alleged to have had over two hundred love affairs.  In fact, in one letter to a friend, he mentioned quite a few of them by their names” (Ready togoebooks.com)

In addition, we can observe the reference to the night as the shelter of love in matters of the sexual intercourse. He writes: “Though the night was made for loving” (line 10) and it is evident he is making reference to the meaning of darkness, secrecy, wilderness, etc, that it represents. When the night arrives, the hidden part of each one comes to the surface and the person loses self-control during the sexual act. The repressed side begins to act and the deepest desires are fulfilled. When the day starts, the order is again established. The night, therefore, means here the freedom from rules, the individual not related to the society, but, as he insists on highlighting, there will be no more nights for them. Regarding the image of the moon, it appears as the eternal sign of love, the muse of any poet, sending out a golden light which covers them during the magic night. It is their night mate. It will still shine but not for them.

 

As regards ambiguity, the poem can present some possibilities while understanding it. Firstly, we have to draw attention to the subjects of the poems. We generally accept that it is Lord Byron himself the one who is speaking through the poem but, who are these sad verses addressed to? Is it only that he is making a poem about any of his affairs? Is it inspired in his half-sister Augusta Leigh with whom he was said to have an affair? Does Lord Byron mean he and Thomas Moore, the man who the letter is really addressed to? In this letter to Moore, the poem is preceded by the account of his situation:

 

"At present, I am on the invalid regimen myself. The Carnival--that is, the latter part of it, and sitting up late o' nights--had knocked me up a little. But it is over--and it is now Lent, with all its abstinence and sacred music... Though I did not dissipate much upon the whole, yet I find "the sword wearing out the scabbard," though I have but just turned the corner of twenty nine." (Wikipedia: “We’ll go no more on a-roving)

 

He visibly shows his weariness after the festival but he is confessing his friend that he starts to feel tired about his routines at the same time that he grows older. He is on “the corner of twenty nine” but we have to take into account that his age represents a higher age for us owing to the time we are talking about (beginning of the 19th century) and also to his frenetic style of living. The metaphor “"the sword wearing out the scabbard” in this fragment has an unmistakable correspondence with the metaphor of the poem “For the sword outwears its sheath”, both focusing on the wear he is suffering.

 

As another indicator of ambiguity, we can analyse the combination of the idea of finishing with the relationship and the presence of the feeling that is still remaining. This is contradictory because he is trying to end up with something that is still living, something that brings him back memories of pleasure and happiness. “This poem is very mysterious about the difference it registers, refusing to name this difference or specify it clearly. Everything turns on the word "still," which means the opposite of what it says: though the heart be still as loving, it is not still as loving - something in its capacity to love or express love is gone. […] He has suffered no difference in affect or perception, and the world is unchanged, but his relation to his own affects is changed: the will shrinks from them, an energy or commitment to them is lacking, although one is still "having" them, in some sense” (Romantic circles resource, Dalhousie University). What this fragment is pointing out is that the only thing that has changed in Byron’s behaviour is that he doesn’t feel strong enough to continue with his habits. He has the same preferences but he is feeling the passing of time since he is not as young as he was.

 

In reference to the mode and tone of the poem, Byron writes in a more pensive, melancholic mood, far removed from his usual sensuality. “The poem is full of soft sounds, for example “sword,” “sheath” and “rest,” which portray Byron’s weariness. He uses long vowel sounds to emphasise the lethargy which he feels” (Plagiarist.com). There is no humour either irony as it is just a statement of feelings. As a consequence of this unusual tone in Byron’s poetry, he has received some ironical critics as for example: “So far from being the Heathcliffean semi-devil of the nineteenth-century popular imagination, this seems to me to paint Byron in a rather sweetly bathetic light” (The Valve: A literary organ). However, this is a vulnerable but extraordinary piece from a man who was considered in his time as the symbol of corruption. “In this exquisite piece, he shows himself to be what all men are, created from weary flesh and tired bones, and, above all, merely human. And that even in the grips of the most powerful emotion, love, one still must pause for breath” (Oldpoetry.com). Byron still loves, he still wants to love, but he realizes that he is exhausted and that they “will go no more a-roving / By the light of the moon.”( line 11 and 12).

 

Talking about the structure of the poem, it is clear that we are analysing three quatrains, with the structure: abab, cdcd, efef. We can distinguish a feminine rhyme at the end of the verses 1, 3, 9 and 11 (‘roving-‘loving, ‘loving-‘roving) and the rest presents a tail rhyme. Making allusion to the rhetorical figures, we can mention the parallelism in almost all the poem; for instance: “Though the heart be still as loving /And the moon be still as bright” (conjunction + subject + auxiliary + complement of time + object), and also in the second quatrain where we can see as an enumeration of ideas with the use of the conjunctions “and” and “though” at the beginning of most verses which puts on view his present feelings but they inevitably drive us to the last two verses against which nobody can fight. There are some metaphors we can highlight but the most significant as well as the most controversial is the one in verse 5: “For the sword outwears its sheath”. According to the opinions of KT in Plagiarist.com, by sword, Byron means the soul, and by sheath, he means the body. Lord Byron is not at all old – he has just lived his life so wildly, so energetically, that he is already worn out. In fact, he dies at the young age of thirty-six. On the other hand, due his known active and promiscuous sexual life, some opinions have gone beyond this first interpretation referring to the sword as a phallocentric symbol: “The middle stanza characterizes the (male phallic) sword outwearing the (female, vaginal) sheath, which clearly implies that men are hard, durable, metallic, and women are soft, perishable, cloth-like; but which also – by paralleling the sword and the soul, the sheath and the body – tends to valorize the Sublime male as an eternal spiritual principle, and to denigrate the Beautiful female as ancillary, corporeal, secondary” (The Valve: A literary organ). “It is quite possible that the inspiration for the poem, and some of its meaning, are somewhat more pedestrian than the words imply. One of the accepted meanings of "roving" was the sexual act, which immediately makes understandable this otherwise mysterious line” (Wikipedia:  “We’ll go no more on a-roving). Whatever the interpretation was, we do identify the clear meaning of the metaphor has another beautiful allusion to the wear he is experimenting. To sum up with the rhetorical analysis, we can talk about a personification of the soul and the heart in lines 6 and 7: “And the soul outwears the breast /And the heart must pause to breathe”, representing human qualities, like breathing.

 
 

“So, we'll go no more a roving” is a poem, written by George Gordon Lord Byron (1788–1824), and included in a letter to Thomas Moore on February 28, 1817 (Wikipedia: “We’ll go no more on a-roving). As Moore published the poem in 1830 after Byron’s death as part of “Letters and Journals of Lord Byron”, we cannot classify it into the works of the author but we can draw attention to the importance of the correspondence as a another characteristic of the Romantic poets: a method to exchange impressions and sensations. Thanks to this continuous necessity of sharing their feelings, we can make a biographical approach to many authors. In the case of this poem, with the previous information the letter provides us, we can undoubtedly speak about a situation he cannot tolerate anymore. Another important fact is the location where the poet wrote the poem. He was in Venice as we know by the allusions to the carnival but, why is he there? Is it only a pleasure trip? Byron’s situation in England was impossible to bear. Some years before, he had reached a privileged position as a respected poet. “He had become an adored character of London society; he spoke in the House of Lords effectively on liberal themes, and had a hectic love-affair with Lady Caroline Lamb. Byron's The Corsair (1814) sold 10,000 copies on the first day of publication. He married Anne Isabella Milbanke in 1815, and their daughter Ada was born in the same year. The marriage was unhappy, and they obtained legal separation next year. When the rumours started to rise of his incest and debts were accumulating, Byron left England in 1816, never to return” (Online-literature.com).

According to the article “Byron at Venice 1818” at cursormundi.com, Byron was at Venice eighteen months, having a thoroughly good time. He had quite a reputation in the city. He had more lovers than most men even dream of, an enviable life style where he did not get out of bed until midday at the earliest, and a strange habit of diving into the Grand Canal for a swim - at night he carried a torch in one hand in order not to get run down by passing gondoliers. “In 1817, Byron was living in the Palazzo Mocenigo. It was described by one of his friends as a cross between a brothel and a menagerie, since, as well as numerous prostitutes, Byron kept for company a number of peacocks and a monkey which were allowed to roam around the staircase to look ornamental. Downstairs he kept a wolf, a fox and other large beasties. He had grown fat and dressed in lavish clothing with many rings. Sometimes the other occupants of his palace disturbed his sleep with their squawking and quarrelling to the extent that he slept the night in his gondola on the lagoon. It was during the famous Carnivale of Venice, when people roam the streets in masks and party for four days, that Byron wrote this charming poem” (Plagiarist.com). Consequently, we can extract the conclusion that his poem, apart from being the end of a love relation, is also a call to the order that his life needed at that time since it was becoming a tremendous chaos.

It is also interesting to comment that the famous verse of the poem “we’ll go no more on a-roving” appeared previously to Byron’s publication in another two texts and this detail caused he was accused by some people of plagiarism. According to the analysis in the Wikipedia of “We’ll go no more on a-roving, the poem seems to have been suggested in part by the refrain of a Scottish song known as "The Jolly Beggar." The Jolly Beggar was published in Herd's "Scots Songs" in 1776, 41 years before Byron's letter, and goes partially thus:

He took the lassie in his arms, and to bed he ran,
O hooly, hooly wi' me, Sir, ye'll waken our goodman!
And we'll go no more a roving
Sae late into the night,
And we'll gang nae mair a roving, boys,
Let the moon shine ne'er sae bright.
And we'll gang nae mair a roving.

As well as “The Jolly Beggar”, there is also a traditional sea shanty called "The Maid of Amsterdam" that precedes Byron's poem by about 200 years, first appearing in 1608 in a London play by Robert Heywood called “The Rape of Lucrece”. It includes verses and chorus such as:

She placed her hand upon my knee,
Mark well what I do say!
She placed her hand upon my knee,
I said "Young miss, you're rather free."
I'll go no more a roving with you fair maid!

A rovin', a rovin',
Since rovin's been my ru-i-in,
I'll go no more a roving
With you fair maid!

 

 

In relation to the historical moment, Byron lived in a country which was the richest and most powerful nation in the world at that moment. “During the 19th century, Britain was transformed by the Industrial Revolution. In 1801, at the time of the first census, only about 20% of the population lived in towns. By 1851 the figure had risen to over 50%. By 1881 about two thirds of the population lived in towns” (Localhistories.org). “He also suffered the impact of the French Revolution, which supposed a radical change to forms based on Enlightenment principles of republic, citizenship, and inalienable rights” (Wikipedia: French Revolution) and was a direct witness of the beginning of the British Empire’s fall. He, as well as the other romantic poets, was living the wake-up of his society, the era of changing and a new view of life. The modernization and the new technologies were bringing up the improvement in the way of living; the low classes, however, were suffering a huge exploitation in the factories. At the same time, a new movement called Romanticism started to gain power. “It was partly a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature in art and literature” (Wikipedia: Romanticism). In this context, Lord Byron was a rich and attractive poet who had a gift for writing. He rebelled against everything: society, neoclassic structures in literature, sexual conventions, etc. His main worry was himself, being him the centre of the world and he never cared of what people thought about him. His sexual life brought him many scandals but, as his only income was his poetry, being such a famous figure helped him to make money. “Byron was the ideal of the Romantic poet, gaining notoriety for his scandalous private life and being described by one contemporary as 'mad, bad and dangerous to know” (bbc.co.uk; Historic figures: Lord Byron). Romantics thought that the best method for learning was exposing you to other cultures and experiences. Byron’s scandals in England were expanding more and more and he took the firm decision of leaving his country to never return. After visiting some countries, he settled in Italy and it was here where he wrote some of his most important works, such as the two cantos of “Childe Harold”  "The Prisoner of Chillon” or “Don Juan”, his satiric masterpiece (ideas based on the biography in Online-literature.com). It seems as if he found abroad the peace that he had lost in England.

 

 

In order to relate this poem to our days, we can firstly say that it has been made song in several occasions. “The poem appears as "Go No More A-Roving" on the 2004 Leonard Cohen album, Dear Heather. It is also recorded by Joan Baez on her 1964 Joan Baez/5 album, and by Mike Westbrook on his 1998 The Orchestra of Smith's Academy album. Richard Dyer-Bennet recorded his own setting, with slightly altered text, on the 1955 album "Richard Dyer-Bennet 1". The poem is also a centerpiece of "...And The Moon Be Still As Bright" from Ray Bradbury's novel, The Martian Chronicles” (Wikipedia: “We’ll go no more on a-roving). It is a very lyrical poem thanks to the musicality of the meter and repetition. Aside from that, the content is beautiful and romantic and people can feel identified with it. A surprising detail has been how people relate the poem to very different experiences: the end of a relationship, the goodbye to some friends, the necessity of bringing back the excitement of the night, the arrival of boredom and monotony after a long relationship, etc. I think the most fabulous aspect about this poem is its timelessness as any reader could find in it a door that brings back a sweet memory of good times. It is not one of the Byron’s most important poems but the person who reads it never forgets its taste.

 

 

When I started looking for a poem to do this paper, I read many which could have provided me with an extraordinary amount of information about them. To tell the truth, most were impossible to read for me as poetry uses a rich and elevated vocabulary as well as some old forms, for example in pronouns and past endings. Therefore, I tried to find an easy poem to read which transmitted me something and I found this poem. I think it is the sweetest way I have ever seen to say that something has ceased. Its beauty resides in the strong confirmation of love no matter what is going to happen. I love the use of the word “a-roving” as a way of wandering or walking without any fixed direction, as a consequence of the love’s spell. To sum up, we can say the poem is short but powerful, focusing on a universal feeling: love.  

 
Bibliography:
 

-         “We’ll go no more on a-roving; 25 Nov. 2007. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia; 25/11/07: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So,_we'll_go_no_more_a_roving>

-         Comments about “We’ll go no more on a-roving”, added by KT and Maddy (anonymous). Plagiarist.com. 25/11/07: <http://plagiarist.com/poetry/5950/comments/>

-         Text and comments on Lord Byron’s “So we’ll go no more a roving”, Amelia Cooke’s web page. Ready to go ebooks.com. 25/11/07: <http://readytogoebooks.com/LB-NMR-P58.html>

-         "Byron, Shelley and the Attrition of Consciousness”, Laura Quinney, 1st June 1999; A romantic circles resource, Dalhousie University. 25/11/07: <http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/misc/confarchive/7d.html>

-         Byron’s vagina, Adam Roberts, 5th Dec. 2006; thevalve.org: A literary organ; 25/11/07:  http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/byrons_vagina/

-         Lord George Gordon Byron; 2000-2007; Online-literature.com; The literature network. 25/11/07: <http://www.online-literature.com/byron/>

-         England in the 19th century, Tim Lambert; localhistories.org. 25/11/07: <http://www.localhistories.org/19thcentengland.html>

-         French Revolution; 25 Nov. 2007; Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 25/11/07. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution>

-         Romanticism; 28 Nov. 2007; Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 25/11/07. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism >

-         Historic figures: Lord Byron; bbc.co.uk. 25/11/07. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/byron_lord.shtml

-         Notes taken during the theoretical classes.