has changed drastically from when the sonnets
were written to when Byron penned ‘‘When We
Two Parted.’’ She has traded her innocence for a
reputation as an adulteress; she has transferred
her affections from one man to another. It is this
transformation that so shocks and dismays the
poet of ‘‘When We Two Parted.’’
Byron himself was well-known for his affairs
with married women, and once he was married,
he certainly participated in his own indiscretions,
including scandalous homosexual relationships
as well as his affair with his half-sister. It may
well be argued that it was unreasonable of Lord
Byron to presume that Lady Frances would
remain physically faithful to her husband, and
emotionally faithful to Byron. Despite the hypoc-
risy of Byron’s apparent expectations, the love he
expresses for Lady Frances in the Genevra poems
and the pain at having truly lost her—his ideal-
ized notion of her—in ‘‘When We Two Parted’’
areconveyedwithbothinsightandsincerity.His
pessimism about the future is more easily under-
stood when one has analyzed the poet’s feelings
toward Lady Frances in the Genevra poems and
the sorrow and pain he feels now that she has
become involved with someone else. He presumes
that a meeting with her again, even after still
more time has passed, would only result in more
sadness. In a sense, he remains faithful to her.
Despite the grief she has caused him, he continues
to keep their affair confidential. Indeed, when the
poem was published in 1816, shortly after Byron
had learned from his publisher about Sir Wed-
derburn Webster’s successful lawsuit, Byron
included a false date of 1808, in order to remain
true to the secret he and Lady Frances shared.
Byron was rumored to often be callous in his
treatment of his lovers, but Lady Frances was
treated like a lady, at least in this regard.
Source:Catherine Dominic, Critical Essay on ‘‘When We
Two Parted,’’ inPoetry for Students, Gale, Cengage
Learning, 2009.
Mark Phillipson
In the following excerpt, Phillipson notes that
some critics feel that Byron’s later poetry rejects
the modes of his earlier works. However, Phillip-
son feels that Byron’s late poems and early poems
actually exhibit an underappreciated continuity.
Before he left England in a flurry of scandal,
and before he created that most disillusioned of
expatriates, Childe Harold, Lord Byron was
irresistibly drawn to self-exile. In particular he
paid close attention to the example of Shake-
speare’s misanthropic exile, Timon of Athens.
Not only did Byron fashion Harold in the mold
of Timon, arranging for his character to escape,
like the disillusioned Athenian, from the ‘‘heart-
less parasites of present cheer’’ (Canto I, line 75);
three years before the splashy publication of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Cantos I & II
(1812), the young Lord Byron was looking in
the mirror and seeing Timon. ‘‘Weary of love,
of life, devour’d with spleen, / I rest a perfect
Timon, not nineteen,’’ Byron wrote in Childish
Recollections (1806)—though, perhaps to his
credit, he later canceled the line. Thanks to the
tumultuous events of his life, Byron, like Timon,
indeed became an ‘‘archetype of all towering
persons whose stature forces a severance from
their community.’’ But years before his actual
departure from England, Byron’s verse followed
Shakespeare’s king in discovering, within the
process of self-exile, displaced relics of the past.
Timon, digging for roots in the woods, instead
unearths gold, which he hails ironically as the
‘‘visible god, / That solder’st close impossibilities /
And mak’st them kiss’’ (Timon, of Athens
IV.iii.391–93). As an improbable reminder of the
powerandcorruptionhefledfrominAthens,
Timon’s new gold is a glitteringly paradoxical dis-
covery: a disruptive presence, at once a return of
the past and a measure of its displacement. As
such, it acts as a ghostly incarnation of Timon’s
past, a ‘‘revenant’’ as defined by Jacques Derrida in
his study of ‘hauntology’; ‘‘There is something dis-
appeared, departed in the apparition itself as reap-
parition of the departed.’’ Byron’s verse likewise
embraces departure only to be haunted by ghosts,
who recall the past even as they embody its
disruption.AS SUCH, BYRON’S CANON, HOWEVER IT MAY
SEEM TO REPUDIATE ITSELF, STAYS FAITHFUL TO HIS
EARLY INSIGHT THAT THE UNSETTLING PASSAGE AWAY
FROM THE FAMILIAR, FROM A POINT OF ORIGIN, GIVES
RISE TO UNCANNY EMERGENCE OF WHAT HAS BEEN
LEFT BEHIND.’’When We Two Parted