‘Follow to the deep wood, sweetest’

This erotic lyric was included as no. 191 in Volume 2 where it is dated approximately to the time of S.’s arrival in Rome in early March 1819, a date that is here revised. Richard Garnett published seven of these eight lines in Relics (80) as no. xvii in the section Miscellaneous Fragments, dating them 1819. His text— particularly inaccurate—in which the last two words of l. 2 are given as ‘wood's weeds’, was followed by other eds until Forman corrected it in Huntington Nbks. A draft of the first stanza of Thou art fair, and few are fairer [To Sophia] (no. 271) is written above the present lines, on the same page of Nbk 10. Forman joined the two to form a draft lyric which he entitled An Anacreontic (borrowing the title given to Love's Philosophy (no. 264) in Harvard Nbk 1), Follow to the deep wood, sweetest making the second stanza. Forman's hypothesis, while possible, is unlikely. Although the first six lines of each draft show the same pattern of rhymes, there is no evident progression from one to the other, and the address to the lover in each is markedly different. That S. later developed Thou art fair, retaining the six-line stanza, on the rhetorical model of erotic praise rather than erotic invitation further weakens Forman's case.