‘'Twas the 20th of October’

This comic fragment, for Forman an ‘inscrutable curiosity’ (Huntington Nbks i 170), is written in pencil on f. 7^v rev. of Nbk 12. The first line would appear to fix the date of composition as 20 October 1819, though the draft may have been made on another day in the final third of the month. The pencil draft of the first three stanzas of Ode to the West Wind (no. 259) finishes on f. 6^r rev. of the same nbk; one version of The gentleness of rain is in the Wind (no. 229) is drafted on f 6^v rev., and on f. 8^r rev. S. has copied an Italian inscription from a fountain in the gardens of the Cascine where the former two were drafted. Embedded among such material,’Twas the 20^th of October was in all probability composed during the same late-October period as the three previous items appear to have been. Composition may even have taken place at the same time as the first three stanzas of the Ode and that may have been the day indicated in the first line. Forman recognised that the comparison of leaves to ghosts connects this fragment to the Ode, while Rogers (1967) took this common element as an indication that’Twas the 20^th marked an early stage in the play of S.’s mind on the autumn scene in the Cascine which issued in the Ode (221–2). Rogers's narrative of the Ode's composition is decidedly speculative, assuming as it does that’Twas the 20^th was drafted before its first three stanzas even though the fragment's position two pages further in the reverse direction of the nbk from the Ode draft would suggest the contrary. It is more likely that’Twas the 20^th re-uses the metaphor of leaves as ghosts from the Ode draft to create a distinct poem, a response to the same autumn scene but which S. casts in the quite different poetic idiom of popular gnomic verse. His lines seem clearly to work a variation on the refrain of a traditional drinking song: He that drinks and goes to bed sober, Falls as the leaves do, and dies in October.