‘?[Oh] Music, thou art not “the food of Love”’

These three lines are cleanly written in ink on f. 4^r of Nbk 12. Rather than a fragment, they appear to be an epigram complete in itself. Their position in the nbk makes a date of composition in summer or autumn 1819 likely, as MYRS vi points out (86), though it must remain at least possible that they were written at any time from mid-1819 to mid-1821, the range of dates within which S. used the nbk. Mary transcribed the draft into Mary Copybk 1 without title, giving the first line as ‘No, Music, thou art not the “God of Love”’. She later included it, without the quotation marks round the final three words, in 1839 within the Note on Poems of 1817, thereby implying, if not stating, that it was composed in that year, and indicating that she had found it in the same nbk as To Constantia (no. 155); that is, in Nbk 5. None of the surviving leaves of Nbk 5 carries these lines, however; and while it is possible that they were drafted, in the form in which she transcribes them in Mary Copybk 1, on one of its seven leaves that are now missing (see BSM iii p. xi) this seems very unlikely. Moreover, as Mary's transcription in Mary Copybk 1 falls in the midst of a sequence of brief items garnered from Nbk 12 in the order in which they there appear, it is all but certain that Nbk 12 is the source of her text and that the differences in her transcription result from her misreading of S.’s draft. Rossetti 1870 printed the 1839 text among the fragments written in 1817. Forman 1876–7 altered the final three words of l. 1 to “food of Love” because, having been shown the transcription of the lines that Mary gave to Charles Cowden Clark in 1823–4 (see headnote to To Music (no. 329)) in which “God of Love” is within double inverted commas, his previous suspicions that Mary had mistranscribed a quotation from Shakespeare (see note to l. 1) seemed to be confirmed. He was able to corroborate these suspicions in his transcription of Nbk 12 in Huntington Nbks (i 118–19), where he said he was ‘disposed’ to date the lines ‘a little later’ than 1817. Rossetti 1878 and subsequent eds, while incorporating Forman's emendation, continued to accept the 1817 dating implied by Mary's inclusion of the fragment in the Note on Poems of 1817 in 1839.