Byron: The Last Phase

In later years, it will be remembered, Byron told Medwin that, shortly after his arrival at Cambridge, he fell into habits of dissipation, in order to drown the remembrance of a hopeless passion for Mary Chaworth. That Mary Chaworth held his affections at that time is beyond question. She also had given Byron ‘a token,’ which was still in his possession when the ‘Thyrza’ poems were written; whereas Edleston’s gift had passed to other hands. The following anecdote, related by the Countess Guiccioli, may be accepted on Byron’s authority:

‘One day (while Byron and Musters were bathing in the Trent – a river that runs through the grounds of Colwick) Mr. Musters perceived a ring among Lord Byron’s clothes, left on the bank. To see and take possession of it was the affair of a moment. Musters had recognized it as having belonged to Miss Chaworth. Lord Byron claimed it, but Musters would not restore the ring. High words were exchanged. On returning to the house, Musters jumped on a horse, and galloped off to ask an explanation from Miss Chaworth, who, being forced to confess that Lord Byron wore the ring with her consent, felt obliged to make amends to Musters, by promising to declare immediately her engagement with him.’

It is therefore probable that the ‘dear simple gift,’ of the first draft, was the ring which Mary Chaworth had given to her boy lover in 1804, and that the words we have quoted had no connection whatever with young Edleston.

Assuming that the ‘Thyrza’ poems were addressed to a woman – and there is abundant proof of this – it is remarkable that, neither in the whole course of his correspondence with his friends, nor from any source whatever, can any traces be found of any other serious attachment which would account for the poems in question. Between the date of the marriage, in 1805, and the autumn of 1808, Byron and Mary Chaworth had not met. It will be remembered that in the autumn – only eight months before he left England with Hobhouse – Byron met Mary Chaworth at dinner in her own home. The effect of that meeting, which he has himself described, shows the depth of his feelings, and precludes the idea that he could at that time have been deeply interested in anyone else. After that meeting Byron remained three months in the neighbourhood of Annesley; and it may be inferred that an intimacy sprang up between them, which was broken off somewhat abruptly by Mary’s husband. There are traces of this in ‘Lara.’

At the end of November, 1808, Byron writes from Newstead to his sister:

‘I am living here alone, which suits my inclination better than society of any kind… I am a very unlucky fellow, for I think I had naturally not a bad heart; but it has been so bent, twisted, and trampled on, that it has now become as hard as a Highlander’s heelpiece.’

A fortnight later he writes to Hanson, his agent, and talks of either marrying for money or blowing his brains out. It was then that he wrote those verses addressed to Mary Chaworth:

‘When man, expell’d from Eden’s bowers,A moment linger’d near the gate,Each scene recall’d the vanish’d hours,And bade him curse his future fate.‘In flight I shall be surely wise,Escaping from temptation’s snare;I cannot view my ParadiseWithout the wish of dwelling there.’

On January 25, 1809, Byron returned to London. It is hard to believe that during those three months Byron did not often meet the lady of his love. It is more than probable that the old friendship between them had been renewed, since there is evidence to prove that, after Byron had taken his seat in the House of Lords on March 13, 1809, he confided his Parliamentary robes to Mary Chaworth’s safe-keeping, a circumstance which suggests a certain amount of neighbourly friendship.

In May, Byron again visited Newstead, where he entertained Matthews and some of his college friends. That sérénade indiscrète,

‘’Tis done – and shivering in the gale,’

which was addressed to Mary Chaworth from Falmouth on, or about, June 22, shows the state of his feelings towards her; but she does not seem to have given him any encouragement, and there was no correspondence between them during Byron’s absence from England. Between July 2, 1809, and July 15, 1811, Byron’s thoughts were fully occupied in other directions. His distractions, which may be traced in his writings, were, however, not sufficient to crush out the remembrance of that fatal infatuation. When, in 1811, he returned to England, it was without pleasure, and without the faintest hope of any renewal of an intimacy which Mary Chaworth had broken off for both their sakes. He was in no hurry to visit Newstead, where his mother anxiously awaited him, and dawdled about town, under various pretexts, until the first week in August, when he heard of his mother’s serious illness. Before Byron reached Newstead his mother had died. He seems to have heard of her illness one day, and of her death on the day following. Although there had long been a certain estrangement between them, all was now forgotten, and Byron felt his mother’s death acutely.

It was at this time that he wrote to his friend Scrope Davies:

‘Some curse hangs over me and mine. My mother lies a corpse in this house; one of my best friends (Charles Skinner Matthews) is drowned in a ditch. What can I say, or think, or do? I received a letter from him the day before yesterday… Come to me, Scrope; I am almost desolate – left almost alone in the world.’

In that gloomy frame of mind, in the solitude of a ruin – for Newstead at that time was but little better than a ruin – Byron, on August 12, drew up some directions for his will, in which he desired to be buried in the garden at Newstead, by the side of his favourite dog Boatswain.

On the same day he wrote to Dallas, who was superintending the printing of the first and second cantos of ‘Childe Harold’:

‘Peace be with the dead! Regret cannot wake them. With a sigh to the departed, let us resume the dull business of life, in the certainty that we also shall have our repose. Besides her who gave me being, I have lost more than one who made that being tolerable. Matthews, a man of the first talents, and also not the worst of my narrow circle, has perished miserably in the muddy waves of the Cam, always fatal to genius; my poor schoolfellow, Wingfield, at Coimbra – within a month; and whilst I had heard from all three, but not seen one… But let this pass; we shall all one day pass along with the rest. The world is too full of such things, and our very sorrow is selfish… I am already too familiar with the dead. It is strange that I look on the skulls which stand beside me (I have always had four in my study) without emotion, but I cannot strip the features of those I have known of their fleshy covering, even in idea, without a hideous sensation; but the worms are less ceremonious. Surely, the Romans did well when they burned the dead.’

The writer of this letter was in his twenty-fourth year!

Ten days later Byron writes to Hodgson:

‘Indeed the blows followed each other so rapidly that I am yet stupid from the shock; and though I do eat, and drink, and talk, and even laugh at times, yet I can hardly persuade myself that I am awake, did not every morning convince me mournfully to the contrary. I shall now waive the subject, the dead are at rest, and none but the dead can be so… I am solitary, and I never felt solitude irksome before.’

At about the same date, in a letter to Dallas, Byron writes:

‘At three-and-twenty I am left alone, and what more can we be at seventy? It is true I am young enough to begin again, but with whom can I retrace the laughing part of my life? It is odd how few of my friends have died a quiet death – I mean, in their beds!

‘I cannot settle to anything, and my days pass, with the exception of bodily exercise to some extent, with uniform indolence and idle insipidity.’

The verses, ‘Oh! banish care,’ etc., were written at this time.

In the following lines we see that his grief at the losses he had sustained was deepened by the haunting memory of Mary Chaworth:

‘I’ve seen my bride another’s bride —Have seen her seated by his side —Have seen the infant which she boreWear the sweet smile the mother wore,When she and I in youth have smiledAs fond and faultless as her child;Have seen her eyes, in cold disdain,Ask if I felt no secret pain.And I have acted well my part,And made my cheek belie my heart,Returned the freezing glance she gave,Yet felt the while that woman’s slave;Have kissed, as if without design,The babe which ought to have been mine,And showed, alas! in each caressTime had not made me love the less.’

Moore, who knew more of the inner workings of Byron’s mind in later years than anyone else, has told us that the poems addressed to ‘Thyrza’ were merely ‘the abstract spirit of many griefs,’ and that the pseudonym was given to an ‘object of affection’ to whom he poured out the sorrows of his heart.

‘All these recollections,’ says Moore, ‘of the young and dead now came to mingle themselves in his mind with the image of her who, though living, was for him as much lost as they, and diffused that general feeling of sadness and fondness through his soul, which found a vent in these poems. No friendship, however warm, could have inspired sorrow so passionate; as no love, however pure, could have kept passion so chastened.

‘It was the blending of the two affections in his memory and imagination that thus gave birth to an ideal object combining the best features of both, and drew from him these saddest and tenderest of love-poems, in which we find all the depth and intensity of real feeling, touched over with such a light as no reality ever wore.’

Moore here expresses himself guardedly. He was one of the very few who knew the whole story of Mary Chaworth’s associations with Byron. He could not, of course, betray his full knowledge; but he has made it sufficiently clear that Byron, in writing the ‘Thyrza’ group of poems, was merely strewing the flowers of poetry on the grave of his love for Mary Chaworth.

The first of these poems was written on the day on which he heard of the death of Edleston. In a letter to Dallas he says:

‘I have been again shocked by a death, and have lost one very dear to me in happier times. I have become callous, nor have I a tear left for an event which, five years ago, would have bowed down my head to the earth. It seems as though I were to experience in my youth the greatest misery of age. My friends fall around me, and I shall be left a lonely tree before I am withered. Other men can always take refuge in their families; I have no resource but my own reflections, and they present no prospect here or hereafter, except the selfish satisfaction of surviving my betters. I am indeed very wretched, and you will excuse my saying so, as you know I am not apt to cant of sensibility.’32

Shortly after this letter was written Byron visited Cambridge, where, among the many memories which that place awakened, a remembrance of the young chorister and their ardent friendship was most vivid. Byron recollected the Cornelian that Edleston gave him as a token of friendship, and, now that the giver had passed away for ever, he regretted that he had parted with it. The following letter to Mrs. Pigot explains itself:

‘Cambridge,‘October 28, 1811.

‘Dear Madam,

‘I am about to write to you on a silly subject, and yet I cannot well do otherwise. You may remember a cornelian which some years ago I consigned to Miss Pigot – indeed I gave to her – and now I am going to make the most selfish and rude of requests. The person who gave it to me, when I was very young, is dead, and though a long time has elapsed since we met, as it was the only memorial I possessed of that person (in whom I was very much interested), it has acquired a value by this event I could have wished it never to have borne in my eyes. If, therefore, Miss Pigot should have preserved it, I must, under these circumstances, beg her to excuse my requesting it to be transmitted to me at No. 8, St. James’ Street, London, and I will replace it by something she may remember me by equally well. As she was always so kind as to feel interested in the fate of him that formed the subject of our conversation, you may tell her that the giver of that cornelian died in May last of a consumption at the age of twenty-one, making the sixth, within four months, of friends and relatives that I have lost between May and the end of August.

‘Believe me, dear madam,‘Yours very sincerely,‘Byron.’

The cornelian when found, was returned to Byron, but apparently in a broken condition.

‘Ill-fated Heart! and can it be,That thou shouldst thus be rent in twain?’

It was through the depressing influence of solitude that the idea entered Byron’s mind to depict his (possibly eternal) separation from Mary Chaworth in terms synonymous with death. With a deep feeling of desolation he recalled every incident of his boyish love. We have seen how the image of his lost Mary, now the wife of his rival, deepened the gloom caused by the sudden death of his mother, and of some of his college friends. It was to Mary, whom he dared not name, that he cried in his agony:

‘By many a shore and many a seaDivided, yet beloved in vain;The Past, the Future fled to thee,To bid us meet – no, ne’er again!’

Her absence from Annesley, where he had hoped to find her on his return home, was a great disappointment to him.

‘Thou too art gone, thou loved and lovely one!Whom Youth and Youth’s affections bound to me;Who did for me what none beside have done,Nor shrank from one albeit unworthy thee.What is my Being! thou hast ceased to be!Nor staid to welcome here thy wanderer home,Who mourns o’er hours which we no more shall see —Would they had never been, or were to come!Would he had ne’er returned to find fresh cause to roam!‘Oh I ever loving, lovely, and beloved!How selfish Sorrow ponders on the past,And clings to thoughts now better far removed!But Time shall tear thy shadow from me last.All thou couldst have of mine, stern Death! thou hast;The Parent, Friend, and now the more than Friend:Ne’er yet for one thine arrows flew so fast,And grief with grief continuing still to blend,Hath snatch’d the little joy that Life hath yet to lend.********‘What is the worst of woes that wait on Age?What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow?To view each loved one blotted from Life’s page,And be alone on earth, as I am now.Before the Chastener humbly let me bow,O’er Hearts divided and o’er Hopes destroyed:Roll on, vain days! full reckless may ye flow,Since Time hath reft whate’er my soul enjoyed,And with the ills of Eld mine earlier years alloyed.’

These stanzas were attached to the second canto of ‘Childe Harold,’ after that poem was in the press. Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, who so ably edited the latest edition of the poetry of Byron, states that they were sent to Dallas on the same day that Byron composed the poem ‘To Thyrza.’ This is significant, as also his attempt to mystify Dallas by telling him that he had again (October 11, 1811) been shocked by a death. This was true enough, for he had on that day heard of the death of Edleston; but it was not true that the stanzas we have quoted had any connection with that event. Mr. Coleridge in a note says:

‘In connection with this subject, it may be noted that the lines 6 and 7 of Stanza XCV.,

‘“Nor staid to welcome here thy wanderer home,Who mourns o’er hours which we no more shall see,”

do not bear out Byron’s contention to Dallas (Letters, October 14 and 31, 1811) that in these three in memoriam stanzas (IX., XCV., XCVI.) he is bewailing an event which took place after he returned to Newstead.33 The “more than friend” had “ceased to be” before the “wanderer” returned. It is evident that Byron did not take Dallas into his confidence.’

Assuredly he did not. The ‘more than friend’ was not dead; she had merely absented herself, and did not stay to welcome the ‘wanderer’ on his return from his travels. She was, however, dead to him in a sense far deeper than mere absence at such a time.

‘The absent are the dead – for they are cold,And ne’er can be what once we did behold.’34

Mary Chaworth’s presence would have consoled him at a time when he felt alone in the world. He feared that she was lost to him for ever. He knew her too well to suppose that she could ever be more to him than a friend; and yet it was just that female sympathy and friendship for which he so ardently yearned. In his unreasonableness, he was both hurt and disappointed that this companion of his earlier days should have kept away from her home at that particular time, and of course misconstrued the cause. With the feeling that this parting must be eternal, he wished that they could have met once more.

‘Could this have been – a word, a look,That softly said, “We part in peace,”Had taught my bosom how to brook,With fainter sighs, thy soul’s release.’

In the bitterness of his desolation he recalled the days when they were at Newstead together – probably stolen interviews, which find no place in history – when

‘many a dayIn these, to me, deserted towers,Ere called but for a time away,Affection’s mingling tears were ours?Ours, too, the glance none saw beside;The smile none else might understand;The whispered thought: the walks aside;The pressure of the thrilling hand;The kiss so guiltless and relined,That Love each warmer wish forbore;Those eyes proclaimed so pure a mind,Ev’n Passion blushed to plead for more.The tone that taught me to rejoice,When prone, unlike thee, to repine;The song, celestial from thy voice,But sweet to me from none but thine;The pledge we wore —I wear it still,But where is thine? Ah! where art thou?Oft have I borne the weight of ill,But never bent beneath till now!’

Six days after these lines were written Byron left Newstead. Writing to Hodgson from his lodgings in St. James’s Street, he enclosed some stanzas which he had written a day or two before, ‘on hearing a song of former days.’ The lady, whose singing now so deeply impressed Byron, was the Hon. Mrs. George Lamb, whom he had met at Melbourne House.

In this, the second of the ‘Thyrza’ poems, the allusions to Mary Chaworth are even more marked. Byron says the songs of Mrs. George Lamb ‘speak to him of brighter days,’ and that he hopes to hear those strains no more:

‘For now, alas!I must not think, I may not gaze,On what I am– on what I was.The voice that made those sounds more sweetIs hush’d, and all their charms are fled.******‘On my earThe well-remembered echoes thrill;I hear a voice I would not hear,A voice that now might well be still.******‘Sweet Thyrza! waking as in sleep,Thou art but now a lovely dream;A Star that trembled o’er the deep,Then turned from earth its tender beam.But he who through Life’s dreary wayMust pass, when Heaven is veiled in wrath,Will long lament the vanished rayThat scattered gladness o’er his path.’

In Byron’s imagination Mary Chaworth was always hovering over him like a star. She was the ‘starlight of his boyhood,’ the ‘star of his destiny,’ and three years later the poet, in his unpublished fragment ‘Harmodia,’ speaks of Mary as his

‘melancholy starWhose tearful beam shoots trembling from afar.’

The third and last of the ‘Thyrza’ poems must have been written at about the same time as the other two. It appeared with ‘Childe Harold’ in 1812. Byron, weary of the gloom of solitude, and tortured by ‘pangs that rent his heart in twain,’ now determined to break away and seek inspiration for that mental energy which formed part of his nature. Man, he says, was not made to live alone.

‘I’ll be that light unmeaning thingThat smiles with all, and weeps with none.It was not thus in days more dear,It never would have been, but thouHast fled, and left me lonely here.’

Byron’s thoughts went back to the days when he was sailing over the bright waters of the blue Ægean, in the Salsette frigate, commanded by ‘good old Bathurst’35– those halcyon days when he was weaving his visions into stanzas for ‘Childe Harold.’

‘On many a lone and lovely nightIt soothed to gaze upon the sky;For then I deemed the heavenly lightShone sweetly on thy pensive eye:And oft I thought at Cynthia’s noon,When sailing o’er the Ægean wave,“Now Thyrza gazes on that moon” —Alas! it gleamed upon her grave!‘When stretched on Fever’s sleepless bed,And sickness shrunk my throbbing veins,“’Tis comfort still,” I faintly said,“That Thyrza cannot know my pains.”Like freedom to the timeworn slave —A boon ’tis idle then to give —Relenting Nature vainly gaveMy life, when Thyrza ceased to live!‘My Thyrza’s pledge in better days,When Love and Life alike were new!How different now thou meet’st my gaze!How tinged by time with Sorrow’s hue!The heart that gave itself with theeIs silent – ah, were mine as still!Though cold as e’en the dead can be,It feels, it sickens with the chill.’

Byron here suggests that the pledge in question was given with the giver’s heart. Lovers are apt to interpret such gifts as ‘love-tokens,’ without suspicion that they may possibly have been due to a feeling far less flattering to their hopes.

‘Thou bitter pledge! thou mournful token!Though painful, welcome to my breast!Still, still, preserve that love unbroken,Or break the heart to which thou’rt pressed.Time tempers Love, but not removes,More hallowed when its Hope is fled.’

These three pieces comprise the so-called ‘Thyrza’ poems, and, in the absence of proof to the contrary, we may reasonably suppose that their subject was Mary Chaworth. This is the more likely because the original manuscripts were the property of Byron’s sister, to whom they were probably given by Mary Chaworth, when, in later years, she destroyed or parted with all the letters and documents which she had received from Byron since the days of their childhood.

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.