In the poem, "The Dream," he refers to the irony of fate that married each of them unhappily, and he describes his grief because he never wed her. When the poem was published her husband was annoyed and cut down some trees to which reference was made in the poem,--"the diadem of trees" arranged in a circle.
There are nearly fifty lyrics in which she appears beyond doubt, not mentioning the bigger poems where she often is present.
The last lines that Byron wrote in 1824, "I watched thee when the foe was at my side," refer to her:
"To thee--to thee--e'en in the grasp of death My spirit turned, oh! oftener than it might. Thus much and more; and yet thou lov'st me not And never wilt! Love dwells not in our will Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot To strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still."
The word "wrongly" shows that Mary was married.
She is referred to by him in his last letters.
The "Last Words to Greece," published posthumously, refer to Mary, and contain the same sentiment of his famous poem, "Oh talk to me not of a name great in story," written in 1821, and also posthumously published. He cares more about Mary's love than for the honours he would attain as hero in the Grecian War. He exclaims he is a fool of passion, and that the maddening fascination of Mary can depress him low if she frowns.
The celebrated poem to the Po River, sent May 8, 1820, to Murray, was inspired by "private feelings and passions"; he wrote Murray that it must not be published. The river Po in the poem really refers to the river Trent, in England, with memories of which Mary was bound to him.
There is no doubt about the fact that most of the early love poems of Byron relate to Mary. Critics have, however, failed to note her influence after the "The Dream," written in the summer of 1816, a half a year after his wife left him. But the reader of the later cantos of _Childe Harold_ and _Don Juan_ does not have to search too closely between the lines to detect Mary's presence.
I think we may dispense with the theory that Byron was a poseur and that his passion was unreal and rhetorical. Those lugubrious moods were unfortunately sincere. He suffered from hysteria, and this was connected with the lack of affection in infancy between him and his mother. He is the hero and Mary is the heroine of all his work. She made a neurotic out of him, and she is the cause of his moods when he wrote "I have not loved the world, nor the world me" in _Childe Harold_, or "From my youth upwards my spirit walked not with the souls of men," in _Manfred_. This seems strange to us who recognise that faithful love is often a pose, and that in real life men do not, as a rule, brood about lost sweethearts when these are married to others, and that they straightway marry themselves and smile over their past loves, in whom in many cases they could not again find interest.