ABSTRACT
Date of composition unknown. The lines are written out almost fair in ink in S.’s Swiss notebook, on the verso of a note on Plato’s Symposium belonging perhaps to summer 1817, and preceding the pencil draft of the Celandine poem (May 1816) over which ‘To William Shelley’ is drafted in palimpsest (July 1817). They could therefore be a nostalgic fragment of 1817 (Garnett’s speculative date in Relics) or a jotting of summer 1816; in either case their origin seems to be the Geneva experience. The lines echo Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘On Poetry, and our Relish for the Beauties of Nature’, Posthumous Works (1798) iv 165:
When a hero [in ancient poetry] is to be transported from one place to another, across pathless wastes, is any vehicle so natural, as one of the fleecy clouds on which the poet has often gazed, scarcely conscious that he wished to make it his chariot?
