ABSTRACT
Date, MS evidence and circumstances of composition and publication. There is rough draft of most of the poem (though not the final stanza), mainly in ink but also in pencil, in Nbk 14 pp. 147 rev.–142 rev., 135 rev.–118 rev., 108 rev.–106 rev., 103 rev.–98 rev. Missing pages between p. 122 and p. 123 and p. 96 and p. 97 may have contained the final stanza and other portions of draft not extant (e.g. the remainder of stanza XII further to that portion on p. 98). The draft begins after notes on Davy's Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, made by S. during the second week of April 1820 (see L ii 182 and Claire Jnl 139–40), and drafts of Arethusa arose and Arethusa was a maiden which date from mid- to late April (see headnotes to nos. 311 and 312). Cameron (1974) 365 and 630–1 note 5 is mistaken to suggest that ll. 181–8 refer to the Neapolitan revolution and that the poem was therefore composed between 3 and 12 July. In fact it was probably begun c. 10 May, since part of the draft of the opening stanzas is written beneath a transcription on p. 144 rev. of two passages from Plato's Phaedo which was read by S. on 9 May (Mary Jnl i 317). It is likely to have been finished by 21 June at the latest, since it ends before To a Sky-Lark (p. 97 rev.) which was composed on, or soon after, 22 June (see headnote to no. 330), but probably before the move to Livorno on 15 June (see headnote to LMG, no. 325). The fair copy in Mary's hand of the opening 21 lines on p. 87 of Harvard Nbk 1 (reproduced in MYRS v 88) has stanza-headings in arabic numerals and does not include the epigraph from Byron. There is a single line down the centre of the page suggesting it was cancelled. Donald Reiman's speculative explanation is that Mary's copy may have continued over two further pages (88–9), now removed from the nbk, but was then aborted because she ‘realized that she lacked room to finish the transcription’ in the nbk (MYRS v p. xxiv). The intermediate fair copy of the poem, on which Harvard Nbk 1 must be assumed to be based, is not extant. Both copies must have been made by 12 July. OL was one of ‘two additional poems, to be added to those printed at the end of “Prometheus”’ enclosed in a letter of that date from Livorno to Peacock, who, S. had learned, probably from the Gisbornes, was overseeing the publication of PU. S. told him, ‘I send them to you, for fear Ollier might not know what to do in case he objected to some expressions in the fifteenth and sixteenth stanzas; and that you would do me the favour to insert an asterisk or asterisks, with as little expense of the sense as may be.’ (L ii 213–14) In the event, asterisks were inserted in l. 212 for the word ‘KING’, presumably to avoid prosecution for a printed version of high treason (defined as ‘compassing or imagining the king's death’), but not in l. 228 for ‘PRIEST’. The poem was published in 1820 in August 1820 (see headnote to 379 PU, no. 195). The four corrections in Hunt 1820 (to ll. 50, 51, 249, and 250), almost certainly in S.’s hand rather than Hunt's, are likely to have been done, Fraistat suggests, ‘just before he died in early July 1822, the only time he was ever again to see Hunt in person’ (BSM ix p. cxii), if so, probably from memory. These, along with three further corrections (in ll. 41, 42 and 113), were almost certainly on the list of Errata authorised by S. that Mary sent to Cyrus Redding and which were incorporated in 1829 (see Taylor 22 and 30).
