ABSTRACT
These six lines are written legibly on the otherwise blank f. 13v rev. of Nbk 12. They develop a single topic to a concluding question and so are likely to have been intended as a complete stanza, perhaps as a complete poem. The position of the lines in the nbk, between drafts for Ode to the West Wind (no. 259) made in October 1819 and those for PU Act IV, made between late summer and the end of the year, suggests a date of composition in that period, and more likely, as the first line would indicate, in the autumn. Mary made a fair copy of the lines (Mary Copybk 1 28) but did not publish them in 1824, 1839 or 1840. They first appeared in Rossetti 1870 among the poems of 1821 in a transcription supplied by Richard Garnett which differs in several particulars both from the draft in Nbk 12 and from the text offered here; however, as no other holograph is recorded, Garnett in all probability derived his text from that draft (see Introduction to vol i pp. xvi–xvii). The Garnett text has been reproduced from Rossetti 1870 in all subsequent eds, apart from the transcriptions directly from Nbk 12 in Huntington Nbks i 186 and in MYRS vi 328–9.
