‘Is not today enough? [why do I peer]’

This all but complete ottava rima stanza is roughly drafted in the reverse direction on the pastedown inside the back cover of Nbk 14, which is otherwise covered with calculations and columns of figures. The nbk appears to have been in intermittent use between summer 1818 and late summer/early autumn 1820 (BSM v p. xxxi). Carlene Adamson relates the figures inside the back cover to the financial difficulties of the Shelley household in early 1820 and, as they appear to have been entered after the poetic draft, concludes that it can have been written no later than the spring of that year (BSM v 423). Garnett assigns a date of 1819 to the inaccurate text he published in Relics. The draft's sombre development of Christ's words in the Sermon on the Mount, ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof (Matthew vi 34), has obvious affinities with Why would you overlive your life again? (no. 270) and Where art thou, beloved Tomorrow? (no. 339). All three adopt a rhetorical mode of plaintive interrogation in the face of an apparently interminable succession of afflictions. Such a tone would be appropriate to the period from the death of Clara Shelley on 24 September 1818 to the birth of Percy Florence Shelley on 12 November 1819. The prevailing gloom of the Shelley household in this interval was embittered from December 1818 by the complex and painful affair of S.’s ‘Neapolitan charge’ Elena Adelaide Shelley, while the death of William Shelley on 7 June 1819 provoked a crisis in the Shelleys’ marriage and occasioned the heavy depression that weighed on Mary's spirits through summer 1819 in Leghorn during the middle months of her pregnancy. These events and their consequences find expression in a series of poems written during the fourteen-month period, including Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October 1818 (no. 183), Stanzas written in dejection—December 1818, near Naples (no. 187), and Misery.—A Fragment (no. 202) which was probably composed in June 1819 or later that summer. Other fragments, especially The world is dreary (no. 203) and My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone (no. 205), also probably dating from summer 1819, variously record S.’s consternation and dismay at Mary's estrangement from him. The draft of Is not today enough? shows that S. began in the first person before shifting to the second person in l. 4 and cancelling the latter half of l. 1, the last word of which does not in any case fit the rhyme-scheme of the rest of the stanza. The second person plural in l. 6 would no doubt have been revised. The identity of the ‘thee’ addressed, or whether S. is addressing himself, is impossible to determine confidently from the draft MS, but a cancelled beginning of l. 8, ‘Lady with that’, reveals that, at least at first, he intended to address a woman, actual or fictional. The location of the draft inside the back cover of Nbk 14 offers no secure indication of the date of composition. It might seem that S. had recourse to the back pastedown because the early pages in the reverse direction were already occupied by his reading notes on Humphry Davy's Elements of Agricultural Chemistry which he made in the first half of April 1820 (BSM v pp. xlvi–xlvii). But the back pastedown is a convenient place for working through a rough draft and may have been used from any time from autumn 1818. And, while the great bulk of the entries, those from 1818 apart, were made in early 1820 to August of that year, in October 1819 S. made drafts on pp. 138–7 rev for the 4th and 5th stanzas of Ode to the West Wind (no. 259). The 24 September 1818–12 November 1819 period described above 214may be further narrowed if l. 8 alludes to Mary's pregnancy and l. 5 was inspired by the time of year, following the onset of the autumn rains in Florence (L ii 132, 150). Three days before giving birth to Percy Florence, Mary, her low spirits further weighed down by Godwin's acute financial distress, wrote to Maria Gisborne, ‘for my part, I see nothing but despair … but while I have life, I expect nothing but misery’ (Mary L i 112). The circumstantial case for a date of c. 9 November 1819 is therefore not inconsiderable and that date is assigned to the fragment here, though a conclusion based on such evidence must remain provisional.