ABSTRACT
I The Dance of Death Text and publication. First publ., with The First-Born of Egypt, by Bertram Dobell, Cornhill xxxvi (1914) 4-8; repr. New Poems 3-12. Dobell's text derived from the only known copies, in a letter of 31 May 1827 written by Sarah Flower to W. J. Fox. (The date of this letter, about which there has been some debate, is clear from the postmark.) Do bell's transcript of the letter is now in the Library of the University of Toronto; the holograph MS of the letter itself is in ABL. Oxford reprints the Cornhill text; Penguin reprints Cornhill with some readings from Dobell's MS; neither refers to the Flower MS, the only text with any authority. Co"espondence (ii 349-50) reprints the Flower MS, with some errors. We print the Flower MS here in a modernized version, contrary to our usual practice in this edition, because Sarah Flower's text, despite her claim to have transcribed B.'s MS 'verbatim' (see below), cannot be taken as an equivalent of B.'s holograph, particularly with regard to spelling and punctuation. We give the original text in Appendix A, p. 779·
Date. In the Flower MS The First-Born of Egypt precedes The Dance of Death, but there is no indication why this order was chosen; on internal grounds, we would date The Dance of Death earlier than The First-Born of Egypt, which seems to us to be written with greater maturity and poetic skill, and we have therefore conjecturally reversed Sarah Flower's order. She introduces the poems as follows: 'shall I tell you whose MINE these gems come from?-and yet I wish they were mine with all my soul-and lm sure it would be worth all my soul if they were ... They are "the boy" Robert Browning's aet. [age] 14!!-and so they as well as he can speak for themselves'. In a postscript she adds: 'I must just say a little word about that boys poems. he is mad to publish them-you know there is a whole book full from which these two are extracted. What ought he to do? I have copied them verbatim.-I wonder what you will think of them'.
