ABSTRACT
S.’s brief fragment on impending rain has a complex textual history. Four MS drafts exist, all written in pencil, none identical to any other. They probably all date from between late summer and late October 1819, though it is impossible to determine certainly the order in which they were set down. The version chosen as text here, the most legible and finished of the four, occurs on f. 4v rev. of Nbk 12 following the pencil draft of the first stanza of Ode to the West Wind (no. 259; see headnote). Pencil drafts of stanzas two and three of the Ode follow on the three succeeding pages. The inference that The gentleness of rain was drafted at the same time as the Ode has commonly been accepted. The relation between the two texts is developed in Huntington Nbks i 165 and in Rogers (1967) 222: 24both conclude that the present lines refer to the rain S. sensed in the air on the day he drafted stanzas 1–3 of the Ode in the wooded park of the Cascine on the Arno. He describes the circumstances in his note to the poem as ‘a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains’.
