ABSTRACT
S.’s fifteen lines recounting the onset of war between Hell and Heaven were first published as no. X in the Fragments section of Rossetti 1870 (299) without title or date but among fragments dated 1817. Eds have reprinted the Rossetti text under various titles (see Published in below), and the date 1817 has become accepted. No provenance for the lines is given by Rossetti, but Forman 1876–7 notes that they were ‘deciphered by Mr. Garnett from the rough draft in Sir Percy Shelley's collection’ (iii 404). This rough draft is not known to have survived, though Mary's copy in Mary Copybk 1 is in all probability also based upon it. Mary does not date her transcription, nor does its position in the copybk provide any secure basis for doing so. Titles transcribed on nearby pages either side of A golden-wingèd 157Angel can be assigned to 1817, 1818, 1819 and 1820, and were extracted from several MS sources. In the absence of S.’s draft one must rely on the two transcriptions from it, Mary's and Garnett's, which differ in some particulars. Neither of them is a consistently reliable transcriber—each fairly frequently misreads S.’s drafts or prints them with various kinds of editorial intervention—but in this case Mary's copy appears to be more faithful to the original: see notes to ll. 3, 5, 11. Although the rhymes are identical in each transcription, Mary indents no lines while Garnett, or Rossetti, indents ll. 2, 4 and 12 two spaces, l. 11 four spaces, and begins l. 5 with three suspension points (see note thereto).
