‘Child of Despair and Desire’

This brief fragment is written loosely with a thick pen-point at the top of Nbk 10 f. 24^r. The 17th stanza (ll. 66–9) of MA (no. 231) is drafted at the bottom of the page; the middle is blank. The disposition of the two drafts leads Mary Quinn to conclude (MYRS iv 167) that Child of Despair and Desire must have been on the page before the MA stanza. If so, as that stanza will have been entered a few days before 23 September 1819, the date on which S. posted Mary's transcription of the completed MA to Leigh Hunt, the fragment will have been composed some time before that. The relative position of the two drafts, while a suggestive indication of date, is not conclusive, however. Not all of MA was drafted in Nbk 10 and the stanzas that were were not all composed in the order in which they appear in the finished poem. In the present case, the facing f. 23^v carries the stanza that would become the 6th at the top and what would be the 5th at the bottom of the page. So it is possible that S. drafted what was to become the 17th stanza at the bottom of the following f. 24^r, deliberately leaving the top and middle of the page blank to accommodate the stanza or two which (at that point in the composition) he judged would be necessary to bridge the gap between stanzas 6–5 and 17. The intervening MA stanzas 8–16 are missing from Nbk 10 and, S. having evidently drafted them elsewhere, Child of Despair and Desire may have been written in the space left for further MA drafts but not in the event needed for them, and so later than stanza 17.