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Comment 2 of 2, added on April 16th, 2007 at 4:52 PM.
Just in case this is helpful, here is an excerpt from Byron's letter to Thomas Moore-- he included a copy of this poem with the letter. It was sent from Venice, February 1817: "The Carnival...has knocked me up a little. But it is over--and it is now Lent, with all its abstinence and sacred music....Though I did not dissipate much upon the whole, yet I find "the sword wearing out the scabbard," though I have but turned the corner of twenty nine."
And the name of the ballad I mentioned is "The Jolly Beggar" There seem to be many versions of it, some of them rougher than others.
Liz Rosenberg from United States
Comment 1 of 2, added on April 16th, 2007 at 4:29 PM.
This is a beautifully bewildering poem, and since nearly 1000 people have visited this site, apparently it feels that way to others as well. One thing I notice is just how many slow O sounds there are in that first line-- it's very daring: So we'll go no more a roving. But the second stanza seems to be both mystery and key to the rest of the poem. I've read opinions that "the sword outwears its sheath" refers to the soul wearing out the body--but since Byron basically says that outright in the next line, I think we have to assume something else is going on here as well. On one hand it seems to suggest that the sword will outlast the sheath-- that's the modern sense of to outwear something. But Byron wrote in a letter to his friend that he had lived a life of not excessive dissapation (probably untrue, even in his late 20s) and yet he felt his sword was wearing out its sheath. That implies that the sheath is wearing out before the sword-- a strange notion. So there's some sexual imagery, obviously, in the sword and the sheath. But it feels like there is something even beyond the sexual imagery and also beyond the soul wearing out the body. The question is, what? And what, besides its loping rhythms and long drawn out vowels is giving this poem that intense beauty and melancholy that makes it haunt us hundreds of years later? I don't know the answer. The poem has many puzzles. The heart pausing to breathe-- that's literally a heart-stopping moment, not a logical one. But metaphorically, do we need to pull back from loving sometimes to find a moment's peace? Does "love itself" actually need to rest? Maybe we need to remember that this is a moonlit poem, a night-time poem, so the "sense" of it is also that shadowy sense one gets at night. There was a bawdy ballad with a smiliar refrain popular about 200 years before Byron wrote this, so that also haunts this poem, the way background bar music might haunt a poignant moment. I'd be glad to hear other opinions. Especially on that central stanza.
Liz Rosenberg from United States
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Just in case this is helpful, here is an excerpt from Byron's letter to Thomas Moore-- he included a copy of this poem with the letter. It was sent from Venice, February 1817: "The Carnival...has knocked me up a little. But it is over--and it is now Lent, with all its abstinence and sacred music....Though I did not dissipate much upon the whole, yet I find "the sword wearing out the scabbard," though I have but turned the corner of twenty nine."
And the name of the ballad I mentioned is "The Jolly Beggar" There seem to be many versions of it, some of them rougher than others.
Liz Rosenberg from United States