ABSTRACT

These seven lines and part of an eighth are drafted, largely in pencil, on p. 113 of Nbk 15. The title is added in ink, as are l. 7 (apart from the first word) and the incomplete l. 8, suggesting that there were at least two stages of composition. BSM xiv p. xxx tentatively dates the draft to March 1820, conjecturing that it is to this fragment that S. refers in a postscript to Mary's letter to Sophia Stacey of 7 March in which he says ‘I promised you what I cannot perform; a poem on singing’ (Mary L i 131). The present incomplete poem may represent his failed attempt to keep his promise, though as it stands neither title nor text makes any reference to singing. A somewhat later date might be suggested by its position in Nbk 15, on the second of three otherwise blank pages that separate the draft of the final lines of LMG (no. 325) from the draft of ll. 233–50 of that poem, an afterthought which S. later interpolated. LMG can be dated confidently to 465the latter half of June 1820. S. may have placed the interpolation for it where he did because To Music was already present in the nbk, but if he wrote ll. 233–50 before reaching what became the final lines of LMG he may also have overestimated the space he needed to complete it, so leaving three superfluous pages, and only after completing the poem drafted the present lines on the one superfluous recto page between the end of LMG and the interpolated ll. 233–50. To Music might, then, either pre- or post-date the second half of June, or it might have been written in that period. That the ink in the draft and in that of LMG appear to be the same suggests at least that S. revised his pencil draft during or just after composing LMG. On this evidence, To Music is conjecturally assigned to the latter half of June 1820 here, though the remote possibility must be allowed that the pencil draft at least might have been written at any time between autumn 1819 and autumn 1821, the probable range of dates within which S. used the nbk (BSM xiv p. xvi).