ABSTRACT
Mary published this quatrain in the Fragments section of 1839. She made two trans-criptions of S.’s draft, in Mary Copybk 1 p. 96, and Mary Copybk 2 p. 157. The draft itself (Nbk 10 f. 37v rev.) is untitled and continues to a fifth line, which is cancelled, ‘Him have I met in savage woods as one’. The fragment gives poetic form to a topic that S. had developed earlier in the reverse direction of Nbk 10 (ff. 19r rev.-20r rev.) in a ‘Note on Shakespeare’ which he drafted in connection with the Preface to The Cenci (no. 209) but which he did not include in the published version. Remarking on the union of familiar language and depth of feeling in the greatest poets, he cites line 67 from Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, spoken early in the play by Oedipus himself to the suppliant Thebans, πολλὰς δ’ όδοὺς ἐλθόθντα φροντίδος πλάνοις. (‘I have travelled many roads in the wanderings of reflection’), which S. renders as ‘Coming to many [ways/paths] in the wanderings of careful thought’. He comments: ‘What a picture does this line suggest of the mind as a wilderness of intricate paths, wide as the universe which is here made its symbol, a world within a world which he, who seeks some rarer knowledge with respect to what he ought to do, searches throughout, as he would search the external universe for some valued thing which was hidden from him upon its surface’ (ff. 19r rev.— 20r rev.) Mary included a slightly modified version of this passage in her note on PU in 1839 (ii 136–7). The Preface to The Cenci was completed by mid-August 1819. In the reverse direction of the nbk it is followed by items drafted in autumn 1819 which precede the draft of He wanders. Following it are entries drafted in spring 1820, so that a date of composition in late 1819/early 1820 seems likely; the number and variety of nearby entries precludes a more precise dating.
