ABSTRACT
S.’s seven lines on a harsh winter have a complex textual history. He drafted them on f. 7r of Nbk 12. Mary transcribed the draft into Mary Copybk 1 among a sequence of transcriptions of nearby items in Nbk 12, then transcribed it again into Mary Copybk 2 where it follows It was a bright and cheerful afternoon (no. 326)—on the same page, though separated from it by a rule. The two are given the combined title Summer and Winter and dated 1820. She published neither in 1824. Both appeared in print for the first time in The Keepsake for 1829, pp. 160–1. This collection of miscellaneous verse and prose included contributions by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Lockhart and Mary herself. The editor, Frederic Mansell Reynolds, acknowledges that he was ‘indebted to the kindness of the Author of Frankenstein’ (iv) for S.’s fragmentary essay On Love and for The Tower of Famine and The Aziola as well as for Summer and Winter. The three pieces of verse are grouped under the heading ‘Fragments, by Percy Bysshe Shelley’, the first of which, Summer and Winter as combined in Mary Copybk 2, includes the present lines as its second verse paragraph, though without a rule between it and the first. The fair copy that Mary prepared for The Keepsake (Harvard-MSS) and which served as press copy does have such a rule, which goes some way to suggest that the two parts of the poem should be regarded as separate fragments. However, under the general heading ‘Fragments, by Percy Bysshe Shelley’, Summer and Winter is numbered 1, The Tower of Famine 2 and The Aziola 3 (see MYRS vii 321–8), an arrangement which would naturally lead most readers to consider the paired sections of Summer and Winter as making up an intended, if unfinished, whole.
