ABSTRACT
Date of composition. In 1839 Mary placed SP first among the Poems Written in 1820; her notation at the end of the fair copy she transcribed into Harvard Nbk 1 is more precise: ‘Pisa—March—1820.’ This may record the month of composition or of her transcription or both. The evidence of the draft MSS, while it does not positively confirm March 1820 as the period of composition, is not inconsistent with it. Complete or nearly complete drafts have survived for fifty-six of the poem's seventy-eight stanzas, most of them in Nbk 11 where they are dispersed over some thirty pages among drafts and fair copies of other poems and prose in this nbk of notably miscellaneous contents. The Nbk 11 drafts continue, the stanzas not strictly in the order in which they appear in 1820, where SP was first published, up to Part Third ll. 70–3. The remainder of the poem appears to have been drafted in Nbk 12, although of these drafts only the final three stanzas of the Conclusion have survived. The few legible letters that remain on the stubs of several pages torn from that nbk, however, show that these pages carried the earlier stanzas of the Conclusion as well as some of the later stanzas of Part Third. Since a number of nearby pages are missing from Nbk 12, it is quite likely that it contained drafts of all the stanzas not present in Nbk 11. Both these nbks were in regular use during 1819 and both contain poems completed towards the end of that year. The SP drafts in Nbk 12 follow closely on, in the reverse direction of the nbk, from those for Act IV of PU (November–December 1819), while those for SP in Nbk 11 are scattered among the drafts of various poems dating from late 1819. See BSM xviii pp. xlviii–l; MYRS vi p. liii.
