Byron did not give up the hope of winning Mary Chaworth’s love until her marriage in 1805. Two months later he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and from that time, until his departure with Hobhouse on his first foreign tour, those who were in constant intercourse with him never mentioned any other object of adoration who might fit in with the Thyrza of the poems. If such a person had really existed, Byron would certainly, either in conversation or in writing, have disclosed her identity. Moore makes it clear that the one passion of Byron’s life was Mary Chaworth. He tells us that there were many fleeting love-episodes, but only one passion strong enough to have inspired the poems in question. If Byron’s heart, during the two years that he passed abroad, had been overflowing with love for some incognita, it was not in his nature to have kept silence. From his well-known effusiveness, reticence under such circumstances is inconceivable.
Finally, as there were no poems, no letters, and no allusion to any such person in the first draft of ‘Childe Harold,’ we may confidently assume that the poet, in the loneliness of his heart, appealed to the only woman whom he ever really loved, and that the legendary Thyrza was a myth.
It will be remembered that the ninth stanza in the second canto of ‘Childe Harold’ was interpolated long after the manuscript had been given to Dallas. It was forwarded for that purpose, three days after the date of the poem ‘To Thyrza,’ and essentially belongs to that period of desolation which inspired those poems:
‘There, Thou! whose Love and Life, together fled,
Have left me here to love and live in vain—
Twined with my heart, and can I deem thee dead,
When busy Memory flashes on my brain?
Well—I will dream that we may meet again,
And woo the vision to my vacant breast:
If aught of young Remembrance then remain,
Be as it may Futurity’s behest,
Or seeing thee no more, to sink to sullen rest.’[36]
It is difficult to believe that this stanza was inspired by a memory of the dead. Are we not told that ‘Love and Life together fled’—in other words, when Mary withdrew her love, she was dead to him?
He tells her that in abandoning him she has left him to love and live in vain. And yet he will not give up the hope of meeting her again some day; this is now his sole consolation. Memory of the past (possibly those meetings which took place by stealth, shortly before his departure from England in 1809) feeds the hope that now sustains him. But he will leave everything to chance, and if fate decides that they shall be parted for ever, then will he sink to sullen apathy.
We may remind the reader that at this period (1811) Byron had no belief in any existence after death.
‘I will have nothing to do with your immortality,’ he writes to Hodgson in September; ‘we are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity of speculating upon another. If men are to live, why die at all? and if they die, why disturb the sweet and sound sleep that “knows no waking”?
‘“Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque Mors nihil ... quæris quo jaceas post obitum loco? Quo non Nata jacent.”’
Even when, in later years, Byron somewhat modified the views of his youth, he expressed an opinion that