‘Arethusa arose’

Composed probably in mid—late April 1820 for Mary's drama Proserpine, which she finished on 3 May (Mary Jnl i 363). The only complete, extant MS is Mary's fair copy in Mary Nbk ff.5^v–7^r, part of the text of Proserpine, which Mary marked with the marginal gloss ‘By Shelley’, to indicate authorship. S.’s first draft of lines 37–90 survives in Nbk 14 pp. 151–3 rev. It seems reasonable to infer that lines 1–36 were drafted on the two pages now missing between the current pp. 154 rev. and 155 rev. Metrically speaking, the extant part of S.’s Nbk 14 draft is very different from Mary's fair copy. In the draft, the lines are arranged as alternating tetrameters and trimeters, while the fair copy has pairs of dimeters followed by a trimeter (so, for example, the first two lines of the extant draft read O save me! O guide me, and bid the deep hide me/ For he grasps me now by the hair, while the corresponding lines (37–39) of Mary's fair copy read O save me! O guide me/ And bid the deep hide me/ For he grasps me now by the hair!). By extension, while in the draft each stanza has twelve lines, in the fair copy, each stanza has eighteen lines, the extra six lines resulting from the different metrical arrangement. The highly disrupted condition of the early part of the Nbk 14 draft, and the substantial textual variants between the draft and the fair copy at lines 40 and 59, suggest that Mary copied her text from a now-lost intermediate draft or fair-copy by S. While Adamson suggests (BSMv p.xlii) that it would be unusual for there to be such a pronounced metrical difference between a draft and a fair copy by S., it is impossible to say, on the basis of the available evidence, whether the 335metrical variants were introduced by S. into a now-lost intermediate draft or fair copy, or whether they were introduced by Mary into her fair copy with S.’s approval, or even whether Mary introduced them on her own authority, although that would seem unlikely. On balance, given the commissioned nature of the lines and Mary's indication of the authorship ‘By Shelley’, the present text follows Mary's fair copy.