‘I loved thee—I will not say how,
Since things like these are best forgot.’
Byron alludes to ‘the curse of blood,’ with, ‘many a bar and many a feud,’ which ‘rolled like a wide river between them’:
‘Alas! how many things have been
Since we were friends; for I alone
Feel more for thee than can be shown.’
In the so-called ‘Stanzas to the Po,’ we find the same prolonged note of suffering. Writing to Murray (May 8, 1820), Byron says:
‘I sent a copy of verses to Mr. Kinnaird (they were written last year on crossing the Po) which must not be published. Pray recollect this, as they were mere verses of society, and written from private feelings and passions.’
In view of the secrecy which Byron consistently observed, respecting his later intimacy with Mary Chaworth, the publication of these verses would have been highly indiscreet. They were written in June, 1819, after Mary had for some time been reconciled to her husband. She was then living with him at Colwick Hall, near Nottingham.
Ostensibly these stanzas form an apostrophe to the River Po, and the ‘lady of the land’ was, of course, the Guiccioli. Medwin, to whom Byron gave the poem, believed that the river apostrophized by the poet was the River Po, whose ‘deep and ample stream’ was ‘the mirror of his heart.’ But it seems perfectly clear that, if this poem referred only to the Countess Guiccioli, there could have been no objection to its publication in England. The reading public in those days knew nothing of Byron’s liaisons abroad, and his mystic allusion to foreign rivers and foreign ladies would have left the British public cold.
A scrutiny of these perplexing stanzas suggests that they were adapted, from a fragment written in early life, to meet the conditions of 1819. Evidently Mary Chaworth was once more ‘the ocean to the river of his thoughts,’ and the stream indicated in the opening stanza was not the Po, but the River Trent, which flows close to the ancient walls of Colwick, where ‘the lady of his love’ was then residing. To assist the reader, we insert the poem, having merely transposed three stanzas to make its purport clearer
I.
‘River, that rollest by the ancient walls,
Where dwells the Lady of my love, when she
Walks by the brink, and there perchance recalls
A faint and fleeting memory of me:
II.
‘She will look on thee—I have looked on thee,
Full of that thought: and from that moment ne’er
Thy waters could I dream of, name, or see
Without the inseparable sigh for her!
III.
‘But that which keepeth us apart is not
Distance, nor depth of wave, nor space of earth,
But the distraction of a various lot,
As various the climates of our birth.
IV.
‘What if thy deep and ample stream should be
A mirror of my heart, where she may read
The thousand thoughts I now betray to thee,
Wild as thy wave, and headlong as thy speed!
V.
‘What do I say—a mirror of my heart?
Are not thy waters sweeping, dark, and strong?
Such as my feelings were and are, thou art;
And such as thou art were my passions long.
VI.
‘Time may have somewhat tamed them—not for ever;
Thou overflowest thy banks, and not for aye
Thy bosom overboils, congenial river!
Thy floods subside, and mine have sunk away:
VII.
‘But left long wrecks behind, and now again,
Borne on our old unchanged career, we move:
Thou tendest wildly onwards to the main,
And I,—to loving one I should not love.
VIII.
‘My blood is all meridian; were it not,
I had not left my clime, nor should I be,
In spite of tortures, ne’er to be forgot,
A slave again to Love—at least of thee.
IX.
‘The current I behold will sweep beneath
Her native walls,[55] and murmur at her feet;
Her eyes will look on thee, when she shall breathe
The twilight air, unharmed by summer’s heat.
X.
‘Her bright eyes will be imaged in thy stream.
Yes, they will meet the wave I gaze on now:
Mine cannot witness, even in a dream,
That happy wave repass me in its flow!
XI.
‘The wave that bears my tears returns no more:
Will she return by whom that wave shall sweep?
Both tread thy banks, both wander on thy shore,
I near thy source, she by the dark-blue deep.[56]
XII.
‘A stranger loves the Lady of the land,
Born far beyond the mountains, but his blood
Is all meridian, as if never fanned
By the bleak wind that chills the polar flood.
XIII.
‘’Tis vain to struggle—let me perish young—
Live as I lived, and love as I have loved;
To dust if I return, from dust I sprung,
And then, at least, my heart can ne’er be moved.’
In the first stanza, Byron says that when his lady-love walks by the river’s brink ‘she may perchance recall a faint and fleeting memory’ of him. Those words, which might have been applicable to Mary Chaworth, whom he had not seen for at least three years, could not possibly refer to a woman from whom he had been parted but two short months, and with whom he had since been in constant correspondence. Only a few days before these verses were written, Countess Guiccioli had told him by letter that she had prepared all her relatives and friends to expect him at Ravenna. There must surely have been something more than ‘a faint and fleeting’ memory of Byron in the mind of the ardent Guiccioli. In the second stanza, Byron, in allusion to the river he had in his thoughts, says: