Fare thee well! and if for ever, Still for ever, fare thee well.

These lines come from Lord Byron’s lyric “When We Two Parted,” a poem of private grief and public restraint written in the aftermath of a secret, socially compromising separation. Byron composed it in 1808 (it was published later, in 1816), and it is commonly read against his turbulent romantic life and the culture of reputation in Regency Britain. The speaker addresses a former lover from whom he has been divided “in silence and tears,” suggesting an affair that cannot be openly acknowledged. The closing farewell—repeated and intensified—captures the finality of a parting that is both emotional and socially enforced.

The couplet compresses the poem’s central paradox: a farewell that must be spoken as if it were permanent, yet cannot be emotionally completed. “Fare thee well” is a conventional valediction, but Byron’s repetition (“and if for ever, / Still for ever”) turns convention into obsession, as though the speaker must rehearse the words to make the separation real. The line break after “ever” suspends the thought, mimicking hesitation and the shock of irrevocability. The effect is to frame parting not as a clean ending but as a wound that persists—an enforced goodbye that continues to echo long after the lovers have separated.