ABSTRACT
S. inscribed this lyric in The Literary Pocket-Book (LPB) for 1819 which he presented to Sophia Stacey in Florence on 28 December of that year. The presentation to Sophia would suggest that the poem was written for her, between mid-November—when she arrived in Florence and first became acquainted with S.—and her departure on 29 December. It may be so; certainly it has elements in common with the other two poems he wrote out for her in the LPB, though it is decidedly the most melancholy of the three. See the headnotes to Thou art fair, and few are fairer (no. 271), to Goodnight (no. 277) and to Love's Philosophy (no. 264) for information about S.’s relations with Sophia Stacey. No other MS is known to survive. The poem was first printed in Rossetti 1870 from a copy supplied by the two sons of Sophia Stacey, who was by then 78 years old. Sophia's destination on leaving Florence was Rome. She will have heard while in Florence of William Shelley's death there on 7 June 1819 and so can hardly have failed to recognise the allusion to it in ll. 15–18. Nor can she have failed to be strongly impressed by the lyric's bringing together of erotic and filial love as alike apt to waste away—an emphatic recognition of our futile efforts to retain the liveliness of our attachments with passing time. It remains possible that S. originally composed the poem with his and Mary's relations in mind some time after William's death—which caused Mary deep and prolonged grief and severely strained their relations—and before Sophia's arrival in Florence. The first and third stanzas would be appropriate to his feelings for Mary during their estrangement, and there is some indication that another poem inscribed for Sophia in the LPB for 1819, On a Dead Violet: To —— (no. 274), may also have originally recorded regret for lost love between S. and Mary. But in the absence of a draft MS, and without knowing how much Sophia was told about S.’s and Mary's recent history, the connection to Mary and a composition date before mid-November 1819—while both are possible—cannot be firmly established.
