When We Two Parted

When We Two Parted by Lord Byron looks back on the end of a secret love affair. The speaker still feels hurt and betrayed, and now he hears other people gossiping about his former lover.

Byron wrote it in 1816. He was a Romantic poet, famous for his scandalous love life. The poem may be about Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster, a married woman later linked to another man. Because the affair was secret, the speaker can't grieve in public.

The poem has four eight-line stanzas with a regular ABAB rhyme and short, falling lines that sound like a lament.

It is cyclical: it begins with the couple parting ‘In silence and tears’ and ends imagining meeting again ‘With silence and tears’. He is stuck in his grief, going round in a circle.

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 lover's ‘Pale grew thy cheek and cold’ makes her seem already dead to him: the relationship died at the parting.

The speaker feels her shame as his own: ‘I hear thy name spoken, / And share in its shame.’ Others talk about her, not knowing about him, and her name rings like ‘A knell to mine ear’, a funeral bell.

The repeated sibilance in ‘In secret we met— / In silence I grieve’ sounds hushed, like the secret he must keep.

Themes: loss and separation; betrayal; secret love; memory.

Compares well with:

• Neutral Tones: another bitter memory of love ending, also cyclical.
• Love's Philosophy: unhappy love, but from a lover still trying to win someone.
• Winter Swans: a couple apart, but this time they come back together.