The Full Text of “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year”
1'Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
2 Since others it hath ceased to move:
3Yet though I cannot be beloved,
4 Still let me love!
5 My days are in the yellow leaf;
6 The flowers and fruits of Love are gone;
7The worm—the canker, and the grief
8 Are mine alone!
9 The fire that on my bosom preys
10 Is lone as some Volcanic Isle;
11No torch is kindled at its blaze
12 A funeral pile.
13 The hope, the fear, the jealous care,
14 The exalted portion of the pain
15And power of Love I cannot share,
16 But wear the chain.
17 But 'tis not thus—and 'tis not here
18 Such thoughts should shake my Soul, nor now,
19Where Glory decks the hero's bier,
20 Or binds his brow.
21 The Sword, the Banner, and the Field,
22 Glory and Greece around us see!
23The Spartan borne upon his shield
24 Was not more free.
25 Awake (not Greece—she is awake!)
26 Awake, my Spirit! Think through whom
27Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake
28 And then strike home!
29 Tread those reviving passions down
30 Unworthy Manhood—unto thee
31Indifferent should the smile or frown
32 Of beauty be.
33 If thou regret'st thy Youth, why live?
34 The land of honourable Death
35Is here:—up to the Field, and give
36 Away thy breath!
37 Seek out—less often sought than found—
38 A Soldier's Grave, for thee the best;
39Then look around, and choose thy Ground,
40 And take thy rest.
The Full Text of “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year”
1'Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
2 Since others it hath ceased to move:
3Yet though I cannot be beloved,
4 Still let me love!
5 My days are in the yellow leaf;
6 The flowers and fruits of Love are gone;
7The worm—the canker, and the grief
8 Are mine alone!
9 The fire that on my bosom preys
10 Is lone as some Volcanic Isle;
11No torch is kindled at its blaze
12 A funeral pile.
13 The hope, the fear, the jealous care,
14 The exalted portion of the pain
15And power of Love I cannot share,
16 But wear the chain.
17 But 'tis not thus—and 'tis not here
18 Such thoughts should shake my Soul, nor now,
19Where Glory decks the hero's bier,
20 Or binds his brow.
21 The Sword, the Banner, and the Field,
22 Glory and Greece around us see!
23The Spartan borne upon his shield
24 Was not more free.
25 Awake (not Greece—she is awake!)
26 Awake, my Spirit! Think through whom
27Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake
28 And then strike home!
29 Tread those reviving passions down
30 Unworthy Manhood—unto thee
31Indifferent should the smile or frown
32 Of beauty be.
33 If thou regret'st thy Youth, why live?
34 The land of honourable Death
35Is here:—up to the Field, and give
36 Away thy breath!
37 Seek out—less often sought than found—
38 A Soldier's Grave, for thee the best;
39Then look around, and choose thy Ground,
40 And take thy rest.
-
“On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year” Introduction
-
“On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year” is the final poem of George Gordon, Lord Byron, composed privately in his journal when he was preparing to join the Greek war of independence in 1824. Writing on his 36th birthday, Byron renounces the youthful joys of love for its mature pains, choosing self-sacrifice over self-indulgence. This turn is mirrored in his choice to go to war: he has lived long enough to seek a collective good over his personal satisfaction or safety (though he’s still got his eye on the honor that choice can provide). Maturity, the poem suggests, is the brave acceptance of change, pain, and death—and the ability to transform those frightening experiences into glory.
-
-
“On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year” Summary
-
It's high time I should stop falling in love, since no one's going to fall in love with me anymore. But though no one can love me back now, I still want to love!
I'm reaching the autumn of my life now. The fruitful springtime of love is over, and decay and pain are all that's left to me.
The fire in my heart is lonely as a remote volcanic island. No one lights a torch at this fire; it's a pyre for a dead body to burn on.
The hopes, fears, jealousy, and all the heightened, glorious pains and powers of love aren't for me anymore; I can only feel love as a chain.
But this isn't the way or place such thoughts should trouble me, nor the time: not here where Glory decorates the hero's resting place, or ties the wreath of victory round his forehead.
The sword, the flag, the battlefield, Glory, and Greece are all around us! The dead Spartan carried on his shield was not more free than I.
Wake up (not Greece—Greece is already awake!)—wake up, my Spirit! Think back to those ancestors from whom your bloodline descends, and then strike a death-blow!
Push down all those stirring wants and desires, of which I am no longer worthy; you should be unmoved by either the love or the disdain of young beauties.
If you look back on your youth with regret, why bother living? This is the land of honorable death: go to the battlefield and die for the cause!
Search for a soldier's death (which is less often searched for than stumbled on), the best kind of death for you; then look around, and choose the spot where you'll fall, and rest.
-
-
“On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year” Themes
-
Love, Aging, and Maturity
The speaker of “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year,” writing on his birthday, renounces the youthful joys of love for its mature pains. Believing that he’s gone past the point of life when he can ever expect to be loved in return, the speaker nevertheless still wants to feel love, even if it can only bring him pain. His acceptance of the pain of love without love’s pleasures is a sign of a newfound maturity, one that will carry him into a more self-sacrificing phase of his life even as he regrets the springtime of his youth.
In the first half of the poem, the speaker comes to terms with the fact that, though he can no longer enjoy love’s pleasures, he’s still willing—and even eager—to bear its pains. The speaker feels he has lived too long to expect to be loved back by those he loves: he’s moved out of budding youth into the autumn of his life. (Keep in mind that Byron was writing in the early 19th century—36 certainly isn't considered over the hill today!)
His images of worms and decay suggest that he feels death itself is hanging over his shoulder. Requited love, the speaker suggests, belongs only to the spring and summer of life; love naturally fades and withers with age, the poem implies, just as summer turns to autumn.
But he’s not giving up altogether. He still wants to feel love, even if he can’t "be beloved," and he’s willing to “wear the chain” of unrequited love—to carry a weight unrelieved by pleasure. This willingness to suffer for love is both a burden of aging, the poem argues, and a sign of the strength the speaker has gained through aging. Love, for him, is no longer about the gratification of being loved back, but the experience of loving in itself, even when it hurts.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
-
Glory and Sacrifice
As the poem’s speaker reaches middle age and turns away from love, he seeks out a new ideal: a glorious death on the battlefield. Comparing himself to an ancient Greek soldier, the speaker imagines giving up his life for a revolutionary cause—and thus entering a grand tradition of heroic warriors. The speaker’s choice to embrace self-sacrifice and death is noble, but not completely humble. In seeking such a death, he’s also seeking an immortal legacy as a legendary hero. Death, here, becomes not merely the tragic and inevitable end of life, but an opportunity to become an undying part of history.
In the second half of the poem, the speaker turns away from love to embrace death on the battlefield for a revolutionary cause. Not coincidentally, the speaker leaves behind the pleasures of love and moves towards death right at the midpoint of the poem, mirroring his sense that requited love must end at middle age.
This second part of his life will instead be devoted to “Glory,” in the form of a self-sacrificing death on the battlefield. This kind of death will make him like a Spartan hero, he thinks: he’ll become part of an illustrious ancient Greek tradition. The speaker’s embrace of a glorious death thus offers him a new kind of freedom. In sacrificing his life for a greater good, he becomes part of something bigger than himself.
The speaker’s association with legendary heroes suggests that part of maturity is seeing oneself as a small piece of a broader history, giving up the small individual pleasures of love in favor of the wider good of a nation or an ideal. Yet while the speaker ends his poem on a quiet note, seeking out “rest” in a common “soldier’s grave,” his renunciation of his own pleasures isn’t itself completely humble. His self-sacrificing embrace of death gives him a new energy and a new beauty, making him part of Greece’s grand tradition. In accepting the facts of aging, change, and death, and reaching out to a cause greater than his own personal pleasure, he hopes to gain an immortal legacy, redeeming himself from the indignity of decay.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
-
-
Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year”
-
Lines 1-4
'Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it hath ceased to move:
Yet though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!"On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year" begins with a sudden declaration: "'Tis time this heart should be unmoved, / Since others it has ceased to move." Alongside the poem's title, this first line gives the reader a sense that the speaker feels he's moving into a new epoch of his life. Something big is changing.
That big change seems to be both to do with age and with love. This speaker can no longer "move" other hearts: no one, he believes, is going to love him back anymore. To a modern-day reader, the idea of being too old for love at 36 sounds a little silly, but this speaker seems deadly serious: this is a big enough deal that he needs to write a poem to commemorate his life change. (Indeed, this is likely an autobiographical poem; its author, Lord Byron, was a major celebrity and heartbreaker in his day, and as such he might well have felt washed-up as he moved out of full-blown youth. More on that in the "Context" section.)
But this brooding speaker isn't giving up on love altogether. Rather, he's renouncing being loved back. Take a look at the parallel structure in these first lines:
'Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it hath ceased to move:
Yet though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!This stanza is all one sentence, and its grammatical structure reflects back over itself across the central colon. The speaker also uses polyptoton here, repeating the related words "unmoved" and "move," "beloved" and "love." These repetitions, the same gist but slightly different, suggest that this speaker is moving not away from love completely, but into a different experience of love. He may not be loved back, but he longs to go on loving anyway.
The ABAB rhyme scheme here also supports this idea of an evolving perspective on love. All the end rhymes here are slant, almost matches, but not perfect ones. Again, this reflects the speaker's new experience of love: he's no longer going to find a lover who can provide a perfect match, a perfect rhyme, for his feelings.
This speaker, reaching middle age, thus prepares to renounce an old life, but also to accept—and even embrace—a new one.
-
Lines 5-8
My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of Love are gone;
The worm—the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone! -
Lines 9-12
The fire that on my bosom preys
Is lone as some Volcanic Isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze
A funeral pile. -
Lines 13-16
The hope, the fear, the jealous care,
The exalted portion of the pain
And power of Love I cannot share,
But wear the chain. -
Lines 17-20
But 'tis not
thus
—and 'tis not
here
Such thoughts should shake my Soul, nor
now
,
Where Glory decks the hero's bier,
Or binds his brow. -
Lines 21-24
The Sword, the Banner, and the Field,
Glory and Greece around us see!
The Spartan borne upon his shield
Was not more free. -
Lines 25-28
Awake (not Greece—she is awake!)
Awake, my Spirit! Think through
whom
Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake
And then strike home! -
Lines 29-32
Tread those reviving passions down
Unworthy Manhood—unto thee
Indifferent should the smile or frown
Of beauty be. -
Lines 33-36
If thou regret'st thy Youth,
why live
?
The land of honourable Death
Is here:—up to the Field, and give
Away thy breath! -
Lines 37-40
Seek out—less often sought than found—
A Soldier's Grave, for thee the best;
Then look around, and choose thy Ground,
And take thy rest.
-
-
“On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year” Symbols
-
Autumn
Autumn, here, represents the speaker's own middle age, and the bodily and emotional decay that comes with it. Having in his youth experienced plenty of the "flowers and fruits of Love," he now feels himself to have moved into the time of "the yellow leaf," when the landscape of love begins to falter and wither. This image suggests not only the fading of possibilities for love, but also the fading of the body. When the speaker describes the "worm—the canker, and the grief" of unrequited love, he also evokes the physical degradation of age, or even the decay of the grave. These images prepare the speaker's later embrace of a heroic death; if he's got to go out, he's going to go out with a bang.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
-
Fire
Fire is often used as a symbol for love—think of people who say their hearts are on fire. Here, the fires of love are complicated by their links to death. The speaker seems to have been embroiled in some shared love-fires in his past. Now, his feelings burn dramatically, but all alone, like the magma of an isolated volcano. The image of the volcano also suggests that those feelings might have to burst out somewhere, even if they can't be consummated in shared love. The volcanic fire might be remote, but it's also powerful.
The speaker's comparison between the blaze of his love and a "funeral pile," a pyre upon which a body is burned, also suggests that the painful love he feels will be his last. This love will be the death of him, and the death of love for him.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
-
Chains
The "chain" the speaker refers to here is a symbol of the entangling heaviness of unrequited love. The speaker willingly accepts this chain, glad to carry the weight of love even if he can't take part in its "exalted" pleasures. But it's worth noting that he's also come to Greece specifically to fight against another kind of symbolic "chain": the chains of political oppression. Chains are made to be broken; they're an image of imprisonment, but also of potential liberation. Like the earlier volcano (see the Symbols entry on "Fire"), these chains carry a lot of potential energy: the speaker, in turning from love as an outlet, will instead devote his passion to a grander cause.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
-
The Spartan
Sparta was a Greek city-state famous for its unbeatable warriors, and the Spartan who appears here symbolizes warlike Greek virtue itself. The speaker associates himself with this Spartan, who has died dramatically on the battlefield—and become "free" in doing so. The dead Spartan's prowess, independence, and self-sacrifice stand for all the virtues the speaker reaches out for, having turned at last from the pleasures of love.
The Spartan also suggests how the speaker's resolve to die for Greek independence might connect him to the broader sweep of time. Spartans are not merely historical, but almost legendary. The speaker, in following this Spartan, wishes his death to be more than useful. He wants glory, and the Spartan provides an example and an image of just that.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
-
-
“On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
-
Alliteration
Alliteration is one of the most common devices in poetry. Alliteration often helps a poem to sound elevated and poetic, different from and more musical than everyday speech. It can also subtly support a poem's themes, as it does here.
For a good example, take a look at the alliteration on /b/ sounds in lines 19-20:
Where Glory decks the hero's bier,
Or binds his brow.That repeating /b/ is a strong, percussive sound, and it links significant words at an important moment. In this stanza, the speaker is turning away from rueful thoughts of love and moving toward the glory of war. Discouraging himself from brooding on the death of romance, he uses those forceful /b/s to think of both death and glory: a "bier" is a platform for a dead body to lie on, and Glory might "bind" a heroic "brow" with the laurel wreath of victory. The connected sounds help the reader to feel the import of these ideas. The thought of death and glory intertwined makes a big impression on the speaker—an impression that might strike him with a thump, like a blow.
Alliteration links important words in similar ways all through the poem; many examples are highlighted here. For example, the hard /g/ of "Glory" and "Greece" in line 22 reflects the fact that these two things are closely connected in the speaker's mind; to him, Greece represents glory itself.
At its end, the poem also uses sibilance to come to a rest: the softer /s/s of "seek out," "sought," and "Soldier" suggest the eventual quiet of death after the noisy glory of battle.
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
Allusion
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
Apostrophe
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
Assonance
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
Asyndeton
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
Caesura
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
Enjambment
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
Juxtaposition
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
Metaphor
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
Synecdoche
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
Repetition
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
Rhetorical Question
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
-
"On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Beloved
- Canker
- Bosom
- Lone
- Kindled
- Funeral pile
- Exalted
- 'Tis
- Thus
- Bier
- Spartan
- Borne
- Thee, thou, thy
- Indifferent
- Regret'st
- Sought
-
Loved.
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
-
Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year”
-
Form
"On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year" is made up of 10 quatrains (four-line stanzas). This shape gives the poem's ideas room to build up. In the morose first four stanzas, the speaker laments his lost youth and the end of love. Then, right at the middle of the poem, he pointedly turns from these concerns, moving his attention from love to war. The last five stanzas gain energy and zeal as the speaker explores his new commitment to glory, honor, and self-sacrifice on the battlefield.
There's something poignant about the way this poem moves. The speaker feels he has reached middle age, and the shape of the poem, breaking in the middle, suggests the way that he's given the first half of his life to love. The second part of his poem is longer than the first; the second part of his life, however, seems likely to be considerably shorter. If all goes as he expects it to, his thirty-sixth year will be his last. Thus, this poem might be considered an elegy of a sort: a lament for a great man dead too soon, written by the man himself.
-
Meter
Each stanza of "On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year" uses a pattern of three lines of iambic tetrameter, ending in a line of iambic dimeter. An iamb is the metrical foot that goes da-DUM; tetrameter means there are four da-DUM beats per line, and dimeter means there are two. Here's how that looks in context in the first stanza:
'Tis time | this heart | should be | unmoved,
Since oth- | ers it | hath ceased | to move:
Yet though | I can- | not be | beloved,
Still let | me love!This pattern isn't totally regular throughout the poem. Sometimes the second line in a stanza gets a little more complicated, as in line 14, where one of the stresses is submerged: one probably wouldn't say "the exalted portion of the pain," but rather "the exalted portion of the pain." But this is just part of the speaker's conversational rhythm: the slight irregularity allows the line to flow naturally within a pretty rigorous structure. The reader might also see a thematic connection here; just as the speaker redirects the sweeter passion of love into the stern, idealistic passion of war, he fits an intuitive rhythmic pattern into a stylized form.
This poem's metrical scheme is fittingly Greek: it resembles (though it doesn't exactly imitate) the complex Sapphic stanza form, named after the great Greek poet Sappho. Sappho's own intense, passionate love poetry might well have been on Byron's mind as he composed.
-
Rhyme Scheme
"On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year" uses a regular ABAB rhyme scheme throughout. That means that the first line of a stanza always rhymes with the third, and the second line always rhymes with the fourth. This regular, balanced rhyme scheme is musical and propulsive, giving the poem a swinging energy.
But the first two stanzas do something slightly different. Where most of the rest of poem uses perfectly matched rhymes—"preys" and "blaze," "isle" and "pile"—the first two stanzas use slant rhyme. The words' concluding consonant sounds match, but the vowel sounds are different. So, for instance, the speaker pairs the long /oo/ of "move" with the short /uh/ of "love," and the /aw/ of "gone" with the /oh/ of "alone."
This fits right in with the point these first stanzas are making. The speaker finds himself no longer quite "fitted" to his beloved, or to the world of love in general. He can't find a perfect reflection of his love in the world anymore, and his rhymes, reflecting this, fall out of true.
Slant rhyme comes up once more in lines 26 and 28, when the speaker pairs "whom" and "home." Here, again, the slant rhyme thematically fits in with what the speaker is saying. Rousing his spirit to "awake," he connects the "whom" of his ancestry to striking "home"—a complicated relationship. To "strike home" is to strike a death blow, but it could also connect to finding a new kind of "home" in the world as a Greek hero—a role that the speaker doesn't just take on naturally, but has to encourage his "Spirit" to embrace. Here, the slightly mismatched rhyme gives the reader a sense that the speaker is rising to a new and unfamiliar occasion.
-
-
“On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year” Speaker
-
It wouldn't be a stretch to say that this poem's speaker is Byron himself, working out his own thoughts about mortality and love as he prepares to go to war and potentially meet his end. At the very least, this speaker is Byronic: a passionate soul concerned with love, glory, and honor.
Clearly a fellow with more than a few intense love affairs in his past, the speaker is also no longer a young man—feeling no longer worthy of the passions of his youth. He has entered the waning autumn of his life, a time he views as filled with decay. Though he feels himself to no longer be lovable at this point, he still longs to experience love. At the same time, he scolds himself, believing that he should tamp down his passions and lustful desires.
He still feels deeply, however, associating himself with Spartan warriors and volcanic fires. Yet he's not a dreamer lost in images and ideals, but a man of action. The war he's preparing for is very real, and he's courageously committed to the cause of freedom and independence, willing to put his life on the line for his grand principles. This is a person who believes that death in battle is noble and heroic, the kind of thing that casts a favorable glow on one's legacy.
-
-
“On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year” Setting
-
This poem doesn't spend too much time evoking its environment, but from its context and references, the reader can establish that it's set in Greece. This Greece isn't merely a country to the speaker, but a land with legendary associations. In comparing himself to a Spartan warrior on an archetypal battlefield, the speaker suggests that Greece carries symbolic weight as a place of individual liberty and bravery—a country for heroes to live (and die) in. The Greece of this poem marries historic grandeur to contemporary revolutionary idealism; its terrain, for this speaker, is both a dreamlike, epic backdrop for his emotional life, and a place for genuine life-or-death courage and sacrifice.
-
-
Literary and Historical Context of “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year”
-
Literary Context
The dashing, mercurial George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) was the very picture of the Romantic hero—though he himself was a reluctant Romantic. Born in the age of Wordsworth and Coleridge, when the poetic winds blew toward introspective soul-searching and quiet contemplation of nature, Byron saw himself as the inheritor of the earlier Enlightenment-era tradition of Alexander Pope: withering, comic, satirical, and emphatically public. He originated a whole kind of person, the "Byronic hero," a tormented figure, torn between melancholy and passion, idealism and self-destruction. One of Byron's many lovers, Caroline Lamb, famously described him as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know."
Born into a titled family, Byron became a celebrity—indeed, perhaps the first celebrity in the modern sense—through his flamboyant public persona, dramatic love affairs, and scandalous poetry. His best-known work, the long comic poem Don Juan, mocks everyone it can get its hands on, from fellow poets to contemporary politicians to its own author.
But Byron was also a man of conviction. He was good friends with Mary and Percy Shelley, and shared their revolutionary fervor. "On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year" records a real episode in his life—indeed, its final episode: he went to war at the age of 36, fighting for Greek independence, and died in Greece not long after he wrote this poem.
Wildly famous in his own lifetime, Byron was a major influence on any number of artists who followed him, from Alexander Pushkin to Emily Brontë—and not only writers. Composers like Tchaikovsky and Verdi wrote music, and artists like Turner and Delacroix painted pictures, based on Byron's work.
Historical Context
"On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year" comes straight out of the heart of the Greek War of Independence (1821-1830). This bloody conflict, in which the Greeks successfully took back control of their country from the oppressive Ottoman Empire, was inspired by Enlightenment and Romantic ideals of liberty and democracy, and caught the imagination of many fervent revolutionary thinkers across Europe.
As this poem demonstrates, Greece already played a symbolic role in the European imagination as the cradle of philosophy and classical virtue, and Byron's passionate commitment to the Greek cause was as idealistic as it was practical. Byron's involvement in the War of Independence was a boon to Greece: his fame brought even more attention and sympathy to the fight, and when he died in the war (albeit of a fever rather than on the battlefield), he became a Greek national hero, just as he presages in this final poem.
-
-
More “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year” Resources
-
External Resources
-
More of Byron's Poetry — Byron's Poetry Foundation page, including a biography and links to more of his poems.
-
Portraits of Byron — Some of the many portraits of Lord Byron, in which he poses as the quintessential Romantic hero: brooding, melancholy, and passionate.
-
A Reading of the Poem — Hear "On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year" performed aloud.
-
A Short Introduction to Byron — An overview of Byron's life and works by the scholar Germaine Greer.
-
The Poem in Manuscript Form — See the poem in Byron's own handwriting.
-
-
LitCharts on Other Poems by Lord Byron
-
