August 15, 2021
From Gerald R. Lucas
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So we’ll[2] go no more a roving |
notes and commentary
- ↑ Written during the carnival in Venice, February 18, 1819, and sent in a letter to Thomas Moore, Byron was suffering from a fever and complained: “I find the ‘sword wearing out the scabbard,’ though I have but just turned the corner of twenty-nine.”
- ↑ The poet speaks to a third party, maybe a lover in particular, or lovers he has had in his life, in general. Maybe we, the readers, are included here, if we seek a universality to the verse. While a universal reading certainly lends more poignancy to the poem, it could be as simple as the narrator breaking up with a girlfriend.
- ↑ “Loving” is echoed below by the personification of “Love” in line 8. It seems that the latter, Cupid-like, has retired, leaving a residue of love in the heart—a memory of passion that is fading, like the old sheath below.
- ↑ Perhaps this metaphor is a bit tongue-and-cheek but wholly appropriate for Byron: here the sheath could be interest in intercourse. The humor lies in the fact that there’s nothing wrong with the sword (😂) but what it is stored in. Perhaps this is party being addressed in the poem.
- ↑ As I approach my 52nd birthday, the melancholy of this verse strikes a chord. Here is time catching up with the lover and his hair turns grey, and he comes to the realization that his youthful days of carousing have come to an end—maybe they have a while ago, but he is just now realizing it. Byron wrote this at 29; I can imaging his precocious life and all that he did before then—he won’t do much after, as he dies in 1824.
