He was brilliant, impulsive and prone to wild mood swings. One day he was up. The next day he could be in the grip of melancholia. He was intensely passionate and completely reckless. He was dissolute, hyper and intrepid. Aside from possessing the personal characteristics of a human cauldron, Lord George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) was a master poet, and his works continue to inspire generations to experiment in a neglected and often misunderstood literary form..
In the film Dead Poets Society (1989), Robin Williams plays a private school English teacher named John Keating. In one of the more memorable scenes, Mr. Keating draws a graph on the blackboard to illustrate how the author of their poetry textbook, a certain Dr. Pritchard, measures the value of a poem based on a couple of arbitrary factors. After charting one poem using Pritchard's method, Keating looks at his class of young boys, calls the author's 'scientific' approach nonsense and implores the kids to rip out the introduction from the book. He was right. Poetry is not written for erudite scholars to over-intellectualize and systematize. It is written by and for human beings with disquieting compassion and an extraordinary sense of life and living.
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Most of our waking hours are devoted to extending careers, fulfilling personal responsibilities and the supreme task of managing relationships with calculated words. Poetry is the antithesis of these hours. Ultimately, we are not defined by our degree of education, our job title or even our friends. Rather, we are defined individually by what we have not said, what we cannot say, what we cannot have, what we cannot control and who we quietly miss at 3:25AM. It is this deeply concealed 'sacred' self that makes us unique as a human being in human history.
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Byron was nothing if not unique. While he had already developed strong feelings for at least two of his distant cousins even before the age of ten, his decision not to return to Harrow, an elite British prep school, to pursue a woman (Mary Chatsworth) was but a prelude to larger romantic campaigns in a life guided by pure passion and a penchant for living on the edge. From a tumultuous heart came tumultuous times. In his short thirty-six years, Byron had scores of intimate relationships with women, dabbled in homosexuality and may have engaged in an incestuous affair with his half-sister. By the end of his days, Byron was made a pariah by his own society. As an irrepressible libertine, however, he never backed down in love or in politics.
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In 1808 at age thirty, Byron wrote a poetic masterpiece entitled 'When We Two Parted'. Who did he pen these lines about? It does not actually matter. In the poem, Byron uses words to cultivate the human universals of loss, pain, regret and hope into a profoundly moving statement of unconquerable love and personal anguish. By savoring each word of each line, we are not only reading Byron and the experience of countless men and women throughout time, we are indeed reading ourselves.
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To celebrate National Poetry Month in the United States (April), the poem has been reproduced below.
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When We Two Parted - Lord Byron (1808)
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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 so well--
Long, long I shall 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.
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Thank you, George.
(Picture: Lord Byron)
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J Roquen