SWINBURNE wrote: ‘Byron … was supreme in his turn — a king by truly divine right, but in a province outside the proper domain of absolute poetry’.
This is true of nearly all Byron’s poetry, yet what a wonder is ‘We’ll go no more a-roving’, — a wonder, surely, even in the ‘domain of absolute poetry’. And I do not know, of its own kind, a more superb monument of grief than the last five lines in the ultimate stanza of ‘And thou art dead, as young and fair’:
‘The all of thine that cannot die
Through dark and dread Eternity
Returns again to me,
And more thy buried love endears
Than aught except its living years.’
Is not this great poetry? I think that it is. There is no falsehood here.—And much of the rest of the poem is deeply moving, though not quite on that level. The two lines
‘We’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon’
are, again, wonderful poetry.