‘Cold are the blasts'

Probably written July 1810, the date appended to the poem in V&C The version in Esd, however, which must be the latest and which furnishes the present text, is headed ‘1808’. This is impossibly early, and may represent a kind of title rather than a composition date; Harriet Grove may have visited Field Place in 1808 (see headnote to No. 14). Despite the ‘Gothic’ narrative, the theme of perjured love links the poem with others concerning Harriet G., and the names Henry and Louisa (left blank in V&C) are those of Harriet’s brother and sister (cp. No. 7). Besides the V&C and Esd texts, S. wrote out this poem, together with parts of Nos. 24 and 25, for Hogg, probably in November 1810, as similar notepaper was used for letters written in November (SC ii 630), in the cause of promoting an alliance between Hogg and S.’s sister Elizabeth. ‘Bysshe wrote down these verses for me at Oxford from memory. I was to have a complete and more correct copy of them some day. They were the composition of his sister Elizabeth…’ (Hogg i 201). The inclusion of ‘Cold are the blasts’ in the Esdaile Notebook, however, shows that S. meant to publish it as his own work, so as Cameron says (Esd Nbk 259), ‘it is more likely… that S. was simply pulling Hogg’s leg on all occasions and that none of these poems or any part of them was by Elizabeth. ‘The text of the MS given to Hogg, which is almost identical with that of V&C, is printed below at the end of the notes. The metre of the poem, and some of its phrasing, derives from Scott’s ‘Hellvellyn’ (1805), ‘a poem he greatly admired’ (Medwin (1913) 52). Lines 1–8, 21–4 show that S.’s liking for repetitive structures, used in mature poems such as ‘Ode to the West Wind’, ‘Indian Serenade’, and ‘Remembrance’, is not wholly due to Calderòn’s influence. Punctuation in Esd is almost entirely lacking.