A Study Guide for Lord Byron's "When We Two Parted"

When We Two Parted

Lord George Gordon Byron

1816

Introduction

Lord George Gordon Byron's When We Two Parted is a short lyric poem written in the middle phase of Byron's poetic career. Like many of his poems, it contains biographical references, which the poet attempts to conceal. A key figure in the Romantic movement (an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophical, literary, and artistic movement with a variety of interpretations generally focusing on the love of nature, and the importance of individualism, independence, and imagination), Byron is often lauded more for his political satire and his longer narrative poems and plays than for poems such as When We Two Parted. Indeed, his short lyric verses are often either critically ignored or only briefly acknowledged as simplistic and intensely autobiographical. Originally published in 1816 in Poems, 1816 by John Murray (the reprinted volume is available through Woodstock Books, 1990), the poem is falsely attributed by Byron as having been written in 1808. Byron's later correspondence indicates that he made this false attribution in order to protect the name and reputation of the poem's subject, Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster. The poem is available in The Poetical Works of Byron, edited by Robert F. Gleckner, published in 1975, and more recently, in Lord Byron: The Major Works, edited by Jerome J. McGann, and published in 2000.

When We Two Parted recounts the narrator's feelings of grief, betrayal, and regret following the end of a clandestine romantic relationship. The poem exemplifies the typical romantic lyric prevalent at this point in Byron's career in that it is deeply introspective and expresses intense personal feelings. It is rooted in the pathos of human nature, rather than in the poet's experience with Nature. The latter is a common characteristic of the lyrical works of Byron's Romantic