By Lord Byron (1816)
Though the day of my destiny’s over,
And the star of my fate hath declined,
Thy soft heart refused to discover
The faults which so many could find;
Though thy soul with my grief was acquainted,
It shrunk not to share it with me,
And the love which my spirit hath painted
It never hath found but in thee.
…
I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
I have not flatter’d its rank breath, nor bow’d
To its idolatries a patient knee —
Nor coin’d my cheek to smiles — nor cried aloud
In worship of an echo; in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such; I stood
Among them, but not of them — in a shroud
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts — and still could,
Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued.
Originally published in Poems (1816) by Lord Byron. Public domain.
Analysis
Addressed to his half-sister Augusta, these stanzas recast scandal as sanctuary. Byron writes exile into a creed of apartness, yet he allows one intimate exception — a loyalty that neither judges nor flatters. The rhetoric of the lone spirit “among them, but not of them” becomes bearable because a single witness understands.
The poem’s dignity comes from its controlled self-portraiture. Byron turns reputation into theme, not complaint, defending principle without pleading innocence. The result is a lyric of tempered pride, where kinship provides the only court of appeal against the world’s breathless verdicts.