'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: '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.' Now, while there was nothing whatever to connect the River Po with tender recollections, there was Byron's association in childhood with the River Trent, a memory inseparable from his boyish love for Mary Chaworth. 'But in his native stream, the Guadalquivir, Juan to lave his youthful limbs was wont; And having learnt to swim in that sweet river Had often turned the art to some account.' In the fourth stanza we perceive that the poet, while thinking of the Trent, 'betrays his thoughts' to the Po, a river as wild and as swift as his native stream.