ABSTRACT
First publ. by R. Secor, SBHC ii (1974) 151. Composed between 16 Oct. 1867 (when Swinburne’s review of Arnold appeared: see below) and 8 Feb. 1868, when it was orally delivered to William Allingham at a lunch-party at B.’s home (19 Warwick Crescent). The verses were not, however, recorded in Allingham’s published Diary, which merely mentions the lunch-party onp. 173; their omission may be connected to the fact that Swinburne was still alive at the time of the first publication of the Diary in 1906, by Allingham’s widow, Helen. They are, though, included in the papers Violet Hunt assembled while working on her Wife of Rossetti (1932), presumably copied from Allingham’s original MS (whereabouts currently unknown). Hunt did not, however, include the lines in Wife of Rossetti, and the version in her papers (now at Cornell) therefore represents the only extant text of the poem. We are grateful to Philip Kelley for locating the page of typescript containing the poem at Princeton, ‘in the Ford Madox Ford Collection [Hunt was Ford’s mistress], in Box 63, folder 10–4th page of the folder, unnumbered and not related to pages before or afterwards’ (private communication). This text is, unfortunately, full of very obvious typographical and transcription errors (e.g. ‘sgrikes’ for ‘strikes’, and ‘tremb;ing’ for ‘trembling’). These errors have been corrected in our version; the typescript readings are given in the textual notes.
