Death

This lyric is drafted without title on pp. 199–200 of Nbk 15. Mary transcribed it into Mary Copybk 1 (ff. 23–4) and published it without date among the Miscellaneous Poems in 1824 (p. 204) where it is the second of two poems entitled Death. (For the first, see They die—the dead return not, no. 129). In 1839 she placed the present poem among those written in 1820. The location of the draft in Nbk 15, as BSM xiv points out (p. xxxi), suggests a date of composition in the period July—December 1820. S. first wrote eight lines of the draft on p. 199, then continued it in a different ink and with a different nib. His initial draft includes the phrases ‘I weep for thee’, ‘Tears for ye’, ‘With wild tears’. If these phrases indicate, as they seem to do, that the poem was originally conceived as a brief 544elegy in response to a particular death, then this may have been the death on June 10 1820 of Elena Adelaide Shelley, of which S. did not know on 2 July 1820 (L ii 208) but of which he informed the Gisbornes in a letter of?7 July (L ii 211). See headnote to I had two babes—a sister and a brother (no. 334). Composition of the poem is therefore likely to have begun with the personal address noted above earlier rather than later in the period 2 July to December 1820, perhaps as early as the first week of July. Then, the personal element removed, it could have been continued later within that range of dates, as a more general lament on the dominion of death.