Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Lord Byron, George Gordon Byron, to be more precise.

He lived from 1788 to 1824 and is absolutely one of the most well-known English poets and a leading figure in the

Romantic movement. He wrote a couple of lengthy narrative poems, including Don Juan, which I recommend

you look out for if you are interested in that. I think I read a Byron poem back in the

first week or so of this show.

So the poem that I'm going to read today is called So, We'll Go No More, a Roving.

And this is how it goes.

So we'll go no more a roving so late into the night.

Though the heart be still as loving and the moon be still as bright, for the sword out wears

its sheath, and the soul wears out the breast, and the heart must pause to breathe

and love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving and the day returns too soon, yet will go no more

roving by the light of the moon. So this poem is only

three stanzas, 12 lines long, not very long. Good one to memorize, if you can get through

that first line there, a little tough sometimes. But Byron was not even 30 when he wrote this,

this poem. And this was a poem that was written during

Lent, actually, after a period of what the Norton anthology calls a period of late night

carousing during the carnival season in Venice. And then he wrote a letter to his friend,

a friend named Thomas Moore, saying, I find the sword wearing out the scabbard,

though I have but just turned the corner of 29.

It's a poem about how he's going to stop living the life he'd been living.

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