On My Thirty-Third Birthday

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Title:     On My Thirty-Third Birthday
Author: Lord Byron [More Titles by Byron]

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] ["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.]

[The end]
Lord Byron's poem: On My Thirty-Third Birthday

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