The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero)/Poetry/Volume 7/On my Thirty-third Birthday
(Redirected from On my Thirty-third Birthday)
ON MY THIRTY-THIRD BIRTHDAY.
January 22, 1821.[1]
Through Life's dull road, so dim and dirty,
I have dragged to three-and-thirty.
What have these years left to me?
Nothing—except thirty-three.
[First published, Letters and Journals, 1850, ii. 414.]
- ↑ ["To-morrow is my birthday—that is to say, at twelve o' the clock, midnight; i.e. in twelve minutes I shall have completed thirty and three years of age!!! and I go to my bed with a heaviness of heart at having lived so long, and to so little purpose. * * * It is three minutes past twelve—''Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,' and I am now thirty-three!—
'Eheu, fugaces, Posthume, Posthume,
Labuntur anni;'—but I don't regret them so much for what I have done, as for what I might have done."—Extracts from a Diary, January 21, 1821, Letters, 1901, v. 182.
In a letter to Moore, dated January 22, 1821, he gives another version—
"Through Life's road, so dim and dirty,
I have dragged to three-and-thirty.
What have these years left to me?
Nothing—except thirty-three."Ibid., p. 229.]