ABSTRACT
Drafts for twenty-six stanzas of S.’s ballad on the theme of the unjust hardships of the poor survive, untitled, in Nbk 14 where they occupy 11 pages in the reverse direction of the nbk. Under the title of A Ballad, S. later transcribed 15 of the Nbk 14 stanzas into a fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1. To these he added six stanzas, the first four and the final two of the text below, which are not now present in the Nbk 14 draft, although they might originally have been. Pages now missing from the nbk immediately preceding the draft of stanza 5 on p. 136 rev. and immediately following the draft of two rejected stanzas (ll. 39–46 in the Appendix) on p. 96 rev. could have accommodated them. It is possible, however, that S. drafted these stanzas elsewhere or even composed them directly into the fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1. Persuasive evidence for either of these latter possibilities is lacking, although in the Harvard fair copy the relatively large number of revisions to the final two stanzas of the text below—no fewer than in several of the draft stanzas that survive in Nbk 14—could plausibly be those of a first and only version. When transcribing the fair copy S. rejected 11 486stanzas of his earlier draft, which also contains several unused fragments of interest. These are given in the Appendix to the 21 stanzas of A Ballad, which he evidently intended as the final, or nearly final, form of the poem. Following stanza 21 a few lines towards a rhetorical conclusion, which was not completed, seem clearly to indicate his intention to leave at least the narrative of the ballad without further development: see note to l. 84.
