Lord Byron WHEN WE TWO PARTED poem analysis | Accentual Verse, Rhythm & Form | ROMANTICISM POETRY

hello and welcome to close reading classic literature with me dr octavia cox today i'm going to be looking at a wonderful poem by lord byron called when we two parted is it a love poem is it a poem of hate is it a poem of jealousy certainly a bitter poem and i'd like to explore and analyze that in a little bit more detail today i'm going to start with a quick background of the poem to give some historical context particularly i'm going to focus on some of the biographical details so details about byron's life and the woman concerned in the poem who was she who is the poem about i'm then going to go through and close read the poem i'm then going to analyze byron's use of rhythm in the poem because i think that's particularly interesting and i'm going to focus especially on his use of accentual verse and what the effect of accentual verse is on the poem and i'm going to consider also the withdrawn stanza of the poem which mentions the the woman in particular explicitly mentions the woman concerned and i want to unpick that stanza and include it uh within analysis of the rest of the poem because i think it really is fundamental to understanding the tone of the poem the judgmental tone of the poem the condemnatory tone of the poem and i think a lot is left out when you take out that particular stanza so i'm going to start with some biographical context lord byron's poem when we two parted was written in august or september we think 1815 and it was published the next year in 1816 in his volume called poems it was an edited version of the poem however that anonymized the lady concerned the lady concerned was one lady francis caroline weddeburn webster quite a mouthful of a name with whom lord byron had had a brief apparently platonic but emotionally a tense affair in late 1813. lady francis was the wife of a long-term friend of byron's james webster also known as bold webster that was his nickname what prompted byron to write the poem was gossip about lady francis's subsequent apparent affair with the duke of wellington in paris in the duke of wellington had written to her on the morning of the 18th of june 1815 which is of course the day of the battle of waterloo the duke of wellington of course is the hero of waterloo at least from a british perspective in fact in 1816 the webster's brought a successful libel action against charles baldwin who was the editor of the newspaper the saint james's chronicle and london evening post which had repeatedly hinted at an affair between lady francis and the duke of wellington lady frances by the way was seven months pregnant when the affair was alleged to have taken place that is between may and june 1815 but whether or not this affair with the duke of wellington did actually happen the poem when we two parted was written as a response to byron hearing the very very public rumors of that affair and the poem itself as we'll get on to see is very much about hearing rumors and the difference between kind of public face so hearing rumors and private feeling when we two parted is a lyric poem and a lyric is a poem which expresses in a personal manner the thoughts and feelings of an individual speaker usually in the first person as here in lord byron's when we two parted so i'm now going to go through the poem itself now to start with the title when we two parted we should already see that something is a little bit off perhaps in the relationship between these two people because there is the the we which suggests unity and there is the two which suggests individuals so when we too parted that's a different emphasis from if it had just been when we parted because that would highlight or suggest a sense of unity but already in saying when we too parted it's already hinting at the idea that they are two individual people who are going their separate ways when we becomes two so you might say then it's sort of already their relationship is already in some sense contradictory from the the very beginning of the poem from the very title 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 our foretold sorrow to this so established in this opening chapter is a lot of sibilance which is uh s sounds so in silence you've got two s sounds just in that one word in silence and tears s there sever and going through kiss and sorrow there are a lot of s sounds even in just his first stanza and later in the poem in stanza 2 the the sibilance the sound will come to the fore again when i hear thy name spoken and share in its shame so the s sound there becomes a kind of whispering sound perhaps which we'll get on to when we get there half broken hearted we've got the slight repetition in half and hearted but the question is sort of brought up here which half is broken-hearted is he suggesting that she is not broken-hearted at all or are we already seeing here at the beginning of the poem that he is not perhaps quite as heartbroken as he might um present himself as being pale grew thy cheek and cold colder thy kiss so we've got consonants here which is a repetition of consonant sounds and the cheek cold cold kiss those are quite hard sounds and in fact we can see this is almost palindromic because we've got the k c c k cheek cold colder kiss and these hard sounds are kind of echoing the hardness that the speaker of the poem feels that he i'm going to assume is that he has been kind of treated with how this woman fanny has treated him and what he particularly seems to object to is her treating him with coldness and actually we know from barra's own letters that was one of the things that he really couldn't bear in the women that he had affairs with was when they started to become cold he didn't like that at all he liked he liked hot women he would get bored with them quite easily but he liked them he liked them to be hot he didn't like it when they began to turn cold and kind of turn the other cheek on him he kind of resented if they turned cold on him which we can definitely see in this poem as we'll get on to i will when we get on to talk about accentuated verse i will highlight as well how there are two uh emphases here in the word cold so we have the sounds of the the cold the consonants of the cold sound and also the rhythm and how the rhythm is emphasizes the word cold too so moving on then to stanza two the jew 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 so at the beginning of the stanza we've got a kind of repetition of the k c sound sunk chill which is bringing in the idea again of the coldness cold colder and now chill we've also got a movement from the past to a reflection on the speaker's present feeling so it felt like the warning of what i feel now and the full stop then comes at the end of now and that's when we move into the present tense thy vowels are all broken that's moving in to the present tense the vowels here it's not clear whether the vowels refer to the marriage vows so she's broken her marriage vows because she's married and she's having an affair with him or he's talking about their vows together that she has now apparently broken as well and perhaps the plural suggests that he's talking about both of those things and we'll see uh later in the poem he talks about you know that she's faithless and um cheats many different people so the the way that byron moves between past present and future in the poem is quite interesting because it's quite cyclical and it's there's a it's a poem of repetitions quite often so repetitions of sound so i was talking about the palindromic sound so you've got a kind of sense of repetition there but also that you start with uh the speaker saying when we two parted in silence and tears and you come back to the idea of being uh in well with silence and tears at the end of the poem and also the final stanza of course you've got the consideration of the future if i should meet thee what should i do there's also a kind of sense of excess from the speaker here thy vowels are all broken you know every vowel you've ever made is broken he's saying i think also we can see that he's very much laying the blame at her thy vows are broken and yes of course we can say that's the marriage vows but if there is a sense that that the vowels also include the vowels that they may have made together then there's no mention of him saying you know our vows are all broken or something like that no it's thy thy vowels are broken she's the one to blame and light is thy fame again thy fame her and it's kind of ironic that byron would um chastise somebody for uh having a light reputation given that famously he is mad bad and dangerous to know as lady caroline lam called him she was another one of the women that he had an affair with so it seems a bit mocking here that he byron who by the time this poem is published is in his own words famous i woke up and found myself famous he said um not because of this poem but earlier because of child harold's child harold's pilgrimage but the point is that byron has a reputation at this point so to say light is thy fame seems as i've said mocking and almost perhaps deliberately sort of provocative i hear thy name spoken and share in its shame as i've said the sibilance here really comes into its own spoken share shame now stanza three they name thee before me a nell to mine ear a shudder comes ur me why what thou so dear they know not i knew thee who knew thee too well long long shall i rue thee too deeply to tell so again we've got the idea of a kind of sound echoing through the poem a nail to mine ear a nell is a bell you know a public bell that tolls at a funeral or at a death again we've got sibilance in shudder the rhetorical question why were thou so dear and that's a kind of a brutal question i mean you have to remember that byron published this poem he didn't explicitly publish a stanza that relates to fanny as he calls her but he still published this poem so he is being deliberately provocative in in sort of half putting it out there but half keeping it private and this seems to me a kind of bitter rhetorical question to be asking why wert thou so dear and you know to be shuddering at the memory of her or shuddering at the thought of her that's not a kind of feeling that you might have if you had been genuinely heartbroken it seems which goes back to the first stanza idea of being half broken-hearted that now the sort of um bitterness or sort of recrimination perhaps is coming out you know you don't have to publish a poem in which you say about somebody who you apparently loved i shudder to think about you and why on earth did i care about you they know not i knew thee who knew thee too well so there's a kind of pun here you could say or a play on words because um to know in its kind of biblical sense means to have sex with so in genesis uh chapter four verse one the text reads and adam knew eve his wife and she conceived adam knew eve his wife so to know uh has this kind of biblical uh sexual connotation but also i uh who knew thee too well so in using the word no here knew thee the speaker byron is again drawing on the idea of um the fact that fanny lady francis is married because you know adam knew eve his wife so it's reiterating the idea that she has broken her marriage vows because adam knew eve his wife and knowing should only be a part of a a marriage that that the use of the word no they're kind of a hints at or suggests long long shall i rue thee and roux here means kind of regret no long long am i going to regret what we did and you know long long shallow ruthie it's almost as though the speaker is is perhaps in some sense sort of enjoying the feeling of ruining fanny or regretting fanny or bringing bringing further bringing further hurt to fanny for becoming cold towards him so now stanza 4 which is the withdrawn stanza so this is a stanza that wasn't published in the 1816 volume poems then fairly well fanny now doubly undone to prove false unto many as faithless to one thou art past all recalling even would i recall for the woman once falling forever must fall and i really like the the the doubly undone it's it sort of the way in which it's structured makes it kind of doubly cruel in a way because again we've got this palindromic sound so d u u d d doubly undone and the sort of repetition of the sound dub duh um and it really emphasizes the sense that fanny is undone and again that has a sexual connotation to it so a woman undone is a a woman who has been ruined by uh engaging in sexual relations that she shouldn't outside of marriage basically so undone means open unfastened and so on so i think you can see the um the sort of derivation and the connotations of that word but also to be undone means to be ruined in many other ways and so the doubly here seems to suggest that fanny has been undone uh because she has had sex with various men but also undone because that has now got out and the rumor has got out so she was undone in the first place and now she's doubly undone because everybody knows about it and because there's a rumor about her so she's been ruined twice over to prove false unto many as faithless to one uh the we've got the alliteration there of the f sound false faithless thou art and this is i think a particularly nasty line a pair of lines thou art past all recalling even would i recall so that's essentially saying you're beyond your reputation now is beyond recalling to recall means to restore a person or figuratively a thing to a former position or occupation or place so thou art past all recalling there's no way back for you now you're past it all even would i recall but i don't even want you anyway and then the final pair of lines for the woman once falling forever must fall and again so we've got faith faithless falling forever full the alliteration there of the f sound and i think again we can see here there's a kind of hint back to the idea of eve so i was talking about adam new eve his wife and that's where kind of sexual relationship should happen and then you've got the idea of woman once falling forever must fall you know once eve once woman has eaten from the tree of knowledge then she is forever falling and there's absolutely no way back into eden into the garden of eden and just very quickly we've got the f sound of fanny as well the alliteration of fanny fanny false faithless falling forever for so she's linked in explicitly through um through that alliteration through the f sound in her name and then the rest of the words that describe her and now moving on to the final stanza 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 so in the opening pair of lines we have anaphora so in secret we met in silence i grieve and the first thing you can see is in the past tense and the second line then is in the present tense so again we've got this movement between past and present as if he's kind of constantly going over it again and again in his head and remembering his kind of bitterness um so in secret in silence that's the anaphra the repetition of the same um beginning of a section and you can see here in the opening of the final stanza we've got a kind of repetition of the same form that we had in the opening line and in the title when we too parted and here in secret we met in silence i grieve so it's that movement between the united we to the two separate individuals and here he's just thinking about his own grief in silence i grieve and again we've got the sibilance which i was talking about so secret and silence and again the idea of silence is going to be picked up in the final line as well we've got the repetition um in the form at the end of the stanza as well if i should meet thee how should i greet thee so the should meet e sound um and then d and this stanza in the manuscript version at least comes just after the stanza that explicitly mentions fanny and i think we can see the the bitterness which is clearer i think when you see the harshness of the stanza that is um removed in the public in the published version because he's talking about his own grief and her deception that's his real focus i grieve thy heart could forget thy spirit deceive and again we've got sibilance spirit deceive he's really condemning her here that she has deceived him and really fundamentally you know it's in her spirit that she is a deceiver so i'm now going to analyze in closer detail the poems rhythm which i think is a really important way of understanding kind of one of the fundamental meanings of the poem which is as i've said about this difference between public and private so the form of the poem fundamentally is accentual verse that's the rhythm of the poem so accentual verse as defined in the oxford dictionary of literary terms is verse in which the meter is based on counting only the number of stressed syllables in a line and in which the number of unstressed syllables in the line may therefore vary most verse in germanic languages including old english is accentual and much english poetry of later periods has been written in accentual verse especially in the popular tradition of songs ballads nursery rhymes and hymns so byron uses accentual verse in when we two parted and the poems lines vary in terms of the syllables between four and seven syllables but in accordance with accentual first each line has two stressed syllables within it so i'm just going to read through a couple of stanzas now to to to show the accentual verse in action and you can see the importance of the stressed words so the the the words that have the accent on them just pay attention to those because those really are the important ones and in fact the poem almost makes sense without the kind of intervening words just with the the stressed words the jew 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 and it's shame so you can see that the the the importance of the kind of stressed of the emphasized words there particularly for example in that last couple of lines i hear thy name spoken and share in its shame share and shame are the words that are really emphasized there in the rhythm and that's true so that stanza the the lines are fairly uh rhythmical in that it's six syllables and then five syllables and there's six syllables and then five syllables but this accent of two per line is also true in the lines of seven syllables in the lines of four syllables so i'm just going to read through the final two stanzas so you can see what i mean then fairly well fanny now doubly undone to prove false unto many as faithless to one thou art past all recalling even would i recall for the woman once falling forever must fall in secret we met in silence i grieve that thy heart could forget and thy spirit deceive if i should meet thee after long years how should i greet thee with silence and tears so you can see that in the lines which only have four kind of syllables to them after long years after long years that still has two accented beats in it as to the lines that are made up of seven syllables so thou art past all recalling thou art past all recalling still has two and that's a big difference four syllables and seven syllables so as i've said within the poem the established accentual verse is two stressed beats per line but having said that this is broken at two moments in the poem where there seem to be three stressed beats in the line and it's interesting perhaps when you first read the poem you felt this too that there's a kind of oddity in the rhythm that you seem to be it seems to be established and then it gets broken and that kind of break in the established rhythm means that those sections kind of draw more attention to them because there's that difference and it also it draws attention but it also draws a sense of in the in the reader or the reader aloud of the poem too of that moment being slightly awkward and difficult to negotiate and that often suggests that it's an emotional moment that's difficult to negotiate two so if i look now at uh stands for one and stats of three so the other stanzas where these two kind of odd moments happen when we two parted in silence and tears half-broken-hearted to sever for years pale grew thy cheek and cold so pale grew thy cheek and cold are we supposed to accent the cold too it's not quite clear colder thy kiss truly that our foretold sorrow to this and then in the third stanza they name thee before me and knelt and my ear a shudder comes on me why what thou so dear they know not i knew thee who knew thee too well long long like are those both supposed to be kind of emphasized long long shall i rudy too deeply to tell what's interesting i think is that both these moments of kind of rhythmical uncertainty or this rhythmical break come at moments of repetition so i've already said that repetition uh is very important within this poem the idea that you know the speaker is kind of going over things over and over and over again in his head and as i've said explicitly these moments of repetition are also highlighted by the uncertainty in the rhythmical stress ii in long long that's an example of episeuxis as it's called an epiduxis is a kind of immediate repetition of the same word without any intervening words so long long and it's often as here used for emphasis and it stretches it out the word long and the idea of it being a long time is stretched out because there's a repetition of the word exactly and because it's emphasized it's got this kind of double emphasis because it's got the rhythmical uncertainty about the stress too long long shall i read thee you know this is a poem in which it's perfectly fine to have five syllables in a line and he doesn't bite the speaker byron doesn't choose to just say long shall i root thee which would fit in with the fact that many of the lines in this poem do just have five syllables in them so it's a deliberate choice to put in this extra long to emphasize to emphasize their length also in this poem we've got another kind of example of repetition which is polyton and polypton is defined by the oxford dictionary of literary terms as a figure of speech in which a partial repetition arises from the use in close proximity of two related words having different forms in other words it's a repetition of words which have the same root so blood and bleed something like that and in here and here in this poem we've got cold and colder and as with long long the repetition kind of emphasizes the sense of coldness and the fact that we've got this rhythmical emphasis in the extra accented verse and then we've got the repetition of the word cold colder so it goes from being cold and then it gets even colder and as i've said that's particularly something that byron felt very resentful of in any of the women that he had affairs with is is them growing colder towards him politicon also plays an important role i think in the withdrawn stanza so stanza four because the words are repeated slightly differently at the end of the line so they're rhyming we have recalling recall falling full so it's really kind of emphasizing that she is passed all recalling because she has fallen so far and the politon of recalling recall and then the kind of internal rhyme of falling fall really really emphasizes his seeming distaste for her now essentially saying oh you've fallen so far i just wouldn't even want to touch you anymore and in a sense in part i think this this emphasis on this quite nasty section of the poem i think just brings out the kind of mockery and um sarcastic tone of for example then fairly well fanny you know he doesn't mean that at all and you can see that because of the nasty bits that are emphasized later in that stanza he's almost enjoying that she has been doubly undone and that it's been proved that what he felt which is that she's false and faithless has been proved because she's done it to other people now you know proved false unto many as faithless to one he seems to forget that she's already been faithless to her husband if they had had an affair anyway so perhaps he you know shouldn't be one to talk about that i think there's also another interesting use of polypton in they know not i knew thee who knew thee too well so there's an interesting mixture i think here of past and present they know present not i knew past v and then you've got the the the pun the double meaning of new who knew thee too well as i've said we've got the sexual connotation but it's kind of building from the difference between knowing they know not i knew thee so kind of moving from knowing in sense of knowledge of i i knew of her too new in the sexual sense this kind of joking and this kind of word play and you know they know not i knew thee does suggest that the person writing the poem is not wholly heartbroken because you you can't it's a sort of jokey kind of a word play you know knew thee too well it's not you know i knew thee with my heart and my soul and so on it's a it's a sexual joke so it's kind of making a a bit of a joke there at her expense or at the expense of whatever it was that they had together so what's the effect then of lord byron using accentual verse why does it matter what does it add to our understanding of the poem's meaning well for me i think it's a beautiful way of showing how the form and the kind of our quality of poetry can really add to the way that we understand what is going on within the poem itself so as i've said this is a poem about reputation i think rather than a kind of broken-hearted love poem it's about fame and shame you know a light is thy fame i hear thy name spoken and share and it's shame this is about a public public falling of reputation and in using accentual verse the poem has a ballad-like form it's in the oral tradition so ballads traditionally spread from person to person that was the point of them you said them aloud you sung them aloud and one person would start and then everybody else would join in and they might take it with them to another occasion where they would sing the similar ballad and that itself is is is like a rumor the idea of saying things out loud and passing it on in the poem's form then in having this ballad like uh oral out loud kind of public you could say traditional form byron is playing on the idea of potential public exposure and potential public scrutiny and condemnation that privately at the moment in secret and in silence the speaker shares in her shame but because there's the the form which is sort of public facing this idea of of the way having a form in this in a similar way to the way that room is spread there's a kind of constant threat that the sharing and the shame might become more public for the speaker so the the public is associated with fanny so the hearing and the shame are associated with her the end of stanza 2 in the beginning of stanza 3. i hear thy name spoken and share in its shame they name thee before me and nell to mine ear nell here as i said it's a public bell to mark something it says this idea of sound and you know his ear so he's hearing all these rumors this public kind of sound that's reaching him and this is kind of contrasted with the private silence and secret you know in secret we met in silence i grieve and he's continuing on that sense of the secrecy and the fact that they met and also with keeping it private with not telling long long shall i rue thee too deeply to tell he's not going to tell he's not going to share even more in her shame he's going to keep it a secret the poem's rhythmical form then of when we two parted encompasses the tension between the public and the private and the constant threat of public exposure for the speaker which would mean that the speaker would share even more in fanny's shame and i think it seems to me that the speaker partially delights in walking that tightrope between public shame of fanny and the kind of private knowledge that the speaker has and the kind of it seems to me unkind delight that the speaker has in apparently wishing fanny well almost reveling in on one hand apparently wishing her well fairly well fanny but kind of enjoying her what the speaker seems to see as her getting her comeuppance thank you very much indeed for watching remember if you like what i do here on my channel where i analyze classic literature then do subscribe and if you have liked the video then do press the like button it does help me out as i've said many times before in youtube's algorithm and i'd love to know your thoughts about this poem what do you think byron's tone is let me know your thoughts in the comments below