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Lord Byron, When We Two Parted (1816)
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Love and Relationships (AQA Poetry Anthology)
In this course, Professor John McRae (University of Nottingham) explores the fifteen poems that make up the ‘Love and Relationships’ cluster for GCSE English Literature (AQA). Each poem is read in full, with a short commentary highlighting aspects of language, style, themes, motif, and so on. In the case of Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, for example, we think about the genre of dramatic monologue and the themes of possession and domination. When we come to ‘The Farmer’s Bride’, we focus on the literary heritage of wives who have been trapped/imprisoned by their husbands, and the wife’s relationship with nature. And so on for the whole collection.
The poems discussed in this course are:
1. Lord Byron, When We Two Parted (1816)
2. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Love’s Philosophy (1820)
3. Robert Browning, Porphyria’s Lover (1836)
4. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet 29 (‘I think of thee’) (1845-46)
5. Thomas Hardy, Neutral Tones (1898)
6. Charlotte Mew, The Farmer’s Bride (1912)
7. Cecil Day-Lewis, Walking Away (1962)
8. Maura Dooley, Letters from Yorkshire (2002)
9. Charles Causley, Eden Rock (1988)
10. Seamus Heaney, Follower (1966)
11. Simon Armitage, Mother, Any Distance (1993)
12. Carol Ann Duffy, Before You Were Mine (1993)
13. Owen Sheers, Winter Swans (2005)
14. Daljit Nagra, Singh Song! (2007)
15. Andrew Waterhouse, Climbing My Grandfather (2000)
Lord Byron, When We Two Parted (1816)
In this module, we read through Lord Byron’s ‘When We Two Parted’, focusing in particular on: (i) the concept of Romanticism and what it means to call Lord Byron a ‘Romantic’ poet; (ii) the relationship between the past and present; and (iii) the question of who is being addressed in the poem.
Hello, I'm John McCrae,
00:00:03and we're starting off on a group of poems
00:00:04about love and relationships.
00:00:07Now, of course, love poetry is as old as humanity.
00:00:09And we could start with Shakespeare.
00:00:14We could go all the way back to Latin and Greek.
00:00:17We could start with Robert Burns and some
00:00:19of the earlier romantics.
00:00:21Where we have chosen to start this program
00:00:23is with one of the romantic, Lord Byron.
00:00:26And we're going to read, "When We Two Parted".
00:00:30But before we do that, I need to warn you
00:00:35about this whole idea of romantic,
00:00:38especially with a capital R. Because there's
00:00:42quite a big difference between romanticism, the capital R,
00:00:45in the rest of Europe and romanticism as we know it
00:00:50in English literature.
00:00:54This word, romantic, was not applied to the poets whom
00:00:57we normally consider romantics.
00:01:02That is Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.
00:01:04It wasn't applied to them until the late 1840s,
00:01:11the Victorian era.
00:01:18Because in their own lifetimes, all these five poets
00:01:20were outsiders.
00:01:24They weren't successful, they weren't--
00:01:26well, Byron was successful, I'll come to that in a minute.
00:01:28They weren't successful in the standard way.
00:01:31The poet laureate during the Napoleonic Wars
00:01:35was a guy you've never heard of, Robert Southey.
00:01:39Don't rush off and check him out, it's not worth it.
00:01:43But we now have this group of poets
00:01:46as if they were a group under a name, romantic.
00:01:51In their own lifetimes, they were
00:01:58considered rebels, outsiders, Jacobins,
00:02:00which was the worst possible thing that could be said.
00:02:04Because you have to remember that during what we now
00:02:06call the Romantic period, most of the time,
00:02:08Britain was at war with France.
00:02:12And it's quite important that until 1815, they
00:02:18couldn't travel, they couldn't go outside of Britain,
00:02:20and they were not mainstream London literary culture people.
00:02:23We're looking at a text by Byron.
00:02:30Now, Byron was mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
00:02:32You got to like him.
00:02:35He was the poet as pop star.
00:02:36He was the guy who woke up to find himself famous overnight,
00:02:39the first great overnight popular success
00:02:44due to printing presses printing vast numbers of his big poem,
00:02:48"Child Harold" "Child Harold's Pilgrimage".
00:02:52And Byron loved Europe.
00:02:56He died in Europe, he spent a lot
00:02:59of time traveling in Europe.
00:03:01He also very much love sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
00:03:03He had many lovers of all genders.
00:03:08And he writes about love with an ironic
00:03:13rather than what you might want to call romantic
00:03:19with a smaller r tone.
00:03:22And one of his most famous ones is,
00:03:25"So We'll Go No More A'roving", about how relationships end.
00:03:28And I'm afraid quite a lot of the poems in this anthology
00:03:36are about endings and unhappy relationships, rather
00:03:39than the joys of love.
00:03:44But you can go and find the joys of love everywhere.
00:03:46Look out Robert Burns' "My Love Is like a Red, Red Rose"
00:03:48or some of Keat's poems.
00:03:52But with Keats, there's always the shadow
00:03:54of parting, the shadow of death.
00:03:57So naturally, "When We Two Parted" by Lord Byron
00:03:59published in about 1816.
00:04:06When we two parted in silence and tears,
00:04:10half broken-hearted to sever for years.
00:04:14Pale grew thy cheek and cold, colder thy kiss.
00:04:17Truly, that hour foretold sorrow to this.
00:04:22The dew of the morning, such chill on my brow,
00:04:28it felt like the warning of what I feel now.
00:04:30Thy vows are all broken, and light is thy fame.
00:04:35I hear thy name spoken and share in its shame.
00:04:38They named thee before me, a knell to my ear.
00:04:44A shudder comes o'er me, why wert thou so dear?
00:04:47They know not I knew thee, who knew thee too well.
00:04:51Long, long shall I rue thee too deeply to tell.
00:04:56In secret, we met.
00:05:02In silence, I grieve that thy heart could forget,
00:05:04thy spirit deceive.
00:05:08If I should meet thee after long years, how should I greet thee?
00:05:12With silence and tears.
00:05:18That's pretty sad, isn't it?
00:05:22And the thing about it is it's not just
00:05:25an ending of a relationship, it's
00:05:29a regret about the relationship and about the consequences.
00:05:32It's full of regret and sadness, as well as that loss.
00:05:36And it's looking, the time contrast between then and now,
00:05:44is part of the binary of this poem.
00:05:47But it's also who the beloved is because the beloved,
00:05:51this particular relationship doesn't seem to have
00:05:57become public knowledge.
00:06:00And a lot of Byron's relationships
00:06:02did become public knowledge.
00:06:04And his lover, lady Caroline Lamb in particular,
00:06:05were the object of scandal.
00:06:11In this one, he's trying to keep it quiet,
00:06:14and it's all very personal and very deep.
00:06:17Notice, the very careful rhyming and the shape of the stanza.
00:06:20Byron is one of the great, technically accomplished poets.
00:06:26His model was Alexander Pope.
00:06:31He formulated the poem very, very, very carefully.
00:06:34And this is a lyric of regret, time, love.
00:06:39We're going to see these themes again and again
00:06:45in various shapes and forms.
00:06:47And you'll want to look back to this one,
00:06:49it's quite a simple poem but quite profound
00:06:51in how time, and regret, and passion are thought of,
00:06:54remembered, repeated, relived.
00:07:01
Cite this Lecture
APA style
McRae, J. (2019, March 04). Love and Relationships (AQA Poetry Anthology) - Lord Byron, When We Two Parted (1816) [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/love-and-relationships-aqa-poetry-anthology/robert-browning-porphyria-s-lover-1842
MLA style
McRae, J. "Love and Relationships (AQA Poetry Anthology) – Lord Byron, When We Two Parted (1816)." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 04 Mar 2019, https://massolit.io/courses/love-and-relationships-aqa-poetry-anthology/robert-browning-porphyria-s-lover-1842