When we two parted by George Byron

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

Sunk 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 to mine ear;

A shudder comes 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.

        In this poem, from the very first stanza we come to know that the poet is talking about partition. The poet expresses his feeling of being separate from someone and how he recalls the past. When poet has parted from his lover or we can also say friend, they have parted in silence and tears. There were not any harsh arguments or not any fight but they have parted very calmly and with understanding. In relation this thing is very important. People break up with harsh arguments and fight rather than understanding of love. Poet notices the effect of separation on both sides.

       

       In next stanza poet expresses the broken relationship’s effect in public life. Every moment he remembers the love and care of broken relation and when someone speaks the name of the lady or friend he used to feel the shame because they were unknown now. When any person recalls the name of lady, for poet it was like knelling to his ear. He was very broken because of separation and the name of lady reminds him all the good as well as bad memory he had with her.

     

      When a person ends up any relation, at that time normally s/he recalls the past memories and one question always come to the mind, and that is

“Why wert thou so dear?”

      We don’t understand what changes people’s mind, but once they change than we can never get them back. The same was also happened with the poet. People used to take lady’s name unknowingly, because they were not aware about the past relationship of poet with her. The relation was very secret.

   

     In last stanza poet asks that what if we meet after long years, how the poet would great the lady, and again the answer was,

“Silence and Tears”

     If we love a person and we have separated our self with the person, we separate with understanding. After long time the same person meets us, we cannot communicate easily as before. The best way to communicate is with feelings and poet also talks about it. Because when they will meet the will not able to speak to each other but they will cry definitely. Those feelings will be more valuable than words.

Themes:

Liberty

Several of Byron’s poems, particularly those based on his travels, raise the problem of oppression throughout Europe and defend the necessity of human liberty. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage often digresses into long tirades against oppressors. These poetic reflections bear witness to Byron' experience with battlefields of old, such as Waterloo, and present struggles such as the Greek struggle against Ottoman/Turkish occupation. Perhaps his most powerful statement against oppression is found in “The Prisoner of Chillon,” in which he traces the eventual mental oppression of a patriot who stood against the oppression of his people. To Byron, liberty is a right of all human beings, while the denial of liberty is one of mankind’s greatest failings.

The power of Nature

To Byron, Nature was a powerful complement to human emotion and civilization. Unlike Wordsworth, who idealized Nature and essentially deified it, Byron saw Nature more as a companion to humanity. Certainly, natural beauty was often preferable to human evil and the problems attendant upon civilization, but Byron also recognized Nature’s dangerous and harsh elements. “The Prisoner of Chillon” connects Nature to freedom, while at the same time showing Nature’s potentially deadly aspects in the harsh waves that seem to threaten to flood the dungeon. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage looks to Nature as a refuge from human conflict, but sees there, amid the avalanches and volcanoes, the seething fury of the natural world.

The folly of "love"

Throughout his life, Byron sought the perfect object of his affections, which paradoxically made him a fickle and unstable lover to many women (and men). His poetry reflects this tension, although usually with the weight being on the side of capricious love. He idealizes women he knows in his opening stanzas to the first three cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, turning them into muses who inspire their respective narratives. However, the fact that each canto has a different woman as its muse points to infidelity on the part of Byron’s creative genius. “She Walks in Beauty,” perhaps his most famous poem dedicated to an individual woman, extols the virtues of a woman with whom Byron was never romantically involved. This theme recurs throughout Byron’s poetry: the ideal love is that which is unattainable. Finally, in Don Juan Byron mocks the ideal of love even as his hapless protagonist falls into various women’s beds.

The value of classical culture

Byron was a staunch friend of the classical world who grieved what seemed to him the desecration of its cultural achievements and traditions. His journey through Greece showed him the dilapidated state of famous ruins, some of which had been turned to more mundane uses in the recent past. He also vilified Lord Elgin of England as the chief despoiler of ancient treasures due to Lord Elgin’s procurement of several marble statues from Greece to be displayed in England. Elgin became Byron’s primary target and a symbol of cultural oppression, just as Napoleon and Turkey became symbols for political oppression.

Realism in literature

Although he was a Romantic poet, Byron saw much of his best work as descriptions of reality as it exists, not how it is imagined. Thus, the subjects of many of his poems come from history and personal experience. “The Prisoner of Chillon” was inspired by the real-life imprisonment of Francois de Bonnivard, while Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is more biographical travelogue than adventure tale. Even the apocalyptic “Darkness” was written to reflect the mass hysteria that arose out of superstitious prophetic interpretations related to the natural disaster of a volcano’s eruption.

The enduring power of art

Even as he bewailed the loss of classical culture through the despoiling of Greek ruins, Byron saw permanence in the art created by these cultures and by his own contemporaries. In the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron notes that even the greatest civilizations decline, yet their art and literature remain. He also contrasted the destructive power of oppressive nations (such as Napoleon’s France) with the creative power of the artist to bring into being that which had not, until that point, existed. In keeping with this theme, Byron used his poetry to demonstrate the ephemeral nature of human civilization while creating works of art that would survive long after any empire of his own day.

A day of reckoning

While Byron was by no means the prophet of apocalypse that his fellow Romantic poet William Blake was, Byron’s poetry nonetheless returns time and again to a “day of reckoning.” The most obvious example of this theme is “Darkness,” a vision of a future earth nearly devoid of life and populated by creatures no longer human. More subtly, Byron insisted that the leaders of oppressive civilizations and the men who would destroy the works of the past would face their own days of judgment. This day would be hastened by Byron, who cast aspersions upon their characters in his writings, such as he did with Lord Elgin and Napoleon.

Characters:

Francois de Bonnivard

A sixteenth-century patriot imprisoned for his defense of the freedom of Geneva. Byron memorializes him and his sacrifice in "The Prisoner of Chillon," which describes his imprisonment in the Chateau de Chillon and his eventual--but much delayed--release.

Childe Harold

A young nobleman (as indicated by the title "Childe") coming of age to receive his due honors in British society. Although Byron insisted that Harold was not a stand-in for himself, Harold's "pilgrimage" parallels Byron's own journeys through western Europe. By the third canto of Childe Harold's Pilgirmage, Byron had given up claiming that Harold was merely an artistic device and admitted Harold's autobiographical connection.

Harold is mostly a figure devised to establish point of view for the reader. Although he begins the first canto as a proto-Byronic hero, complete with regret for some mysterious past folly and an exile to the European continent due to his errors, Harold often vanishes entirely from the narrative to be replaced by Byron's own narrative commentary on the situations described.

Don Juan

The comic hero of Byron's mock epic Don Juan, the young man is innocent without being completely naive and finds himself in a variety of compromising situations with women who pursue him for his good looks and vitality. Unlike the popular conception of "Don Juan," this character is not an aggressive, lascivious lover; instead, he is an accidental paramour to various women who seek his favors over those of their own husbands. By the end of the mock epic, Don Juan matures enough to care for an orphaned Muslim girl and establish her in the relative safety of England even as he flees his unintentional bad reputation.

Ali Pacha

A bandit lord infamous for his army of ruffians and their exploits throughout Albania. Byron commemorated him in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, wherein he descibes the man's charisma and positive leadership qualities along with his savagery and instability. Ali Pacha was in many ways a role model for Byron himself, who idealized his banditry as a form of struggle against oppressive forces.

Ianthe

Lady Charlotte Harley, daughter of Lady Oxford and a woman of amorous interest to Byron. Charlotte is made the muse who inspires Byron in the first canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; although only eleven years old when Byron first met her, she became for him an ideal of unreachable love. Her youthful beauty inspired him to optimism concerning his more prevalent belief that beauty--along with so many other pleasures--fades over time.

John Edleston

A choirboy at Harrow during Byron's time as a student there. Edleston is the subject of much sorrow on Byron's part, particularly in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Edleston and Byron began an intimate relationship at school which lasted until Byron took the peerage upon achieving his majority. Although Byron seems to have ignored Eldeston for many years following, after he learned of the younger man's early death he devoted several stanzas of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage to bidding farewell to his beloved choirboy.

Athena

The Greek goddess of wisdom and architecture. Byron invokes Athena as his muse in the second canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Her invocation there is particularly poignant, as that section of the poem describes his sense of outrage at the desecration of Athenian ruins and--by extension--classical Greek culture.

Ada Byron

Byron's young daughter, whom his estranged wife Annabella took with her when separating from Byron in London. After their departure, Byron never saw his daughter again. She is his muse in the third canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and embodies his frustration at being denied his paternal rights even as he struggled with his role as an absentee father and poor role model for the girl.

Annabella Byron

Byron's short-term wife, who eventually separated from him, citing abusiveness and possible insanity. Once she left hiim and made the separation legal, Byron left England to undertake self-imposed exile in Geneva. She is the basis for the foolish and overbearing Donna Inez, mother of the title character in Don Juan.

John Hobhouse

Byron's long-time schoolmate, friend, and fellow traveler. Hobhouse accompanied Byron on the journeys that made up the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Piligrimage and is himself the object of the dedication in the fourth canto of that work. Hobhouse was a constant companion to Byron and corroborates much of Byron's poetic travelogue in his own prose account of the journey.