Ode to the West Wind

Published as one of the Miscellaneous Poems in 1820. The first three stanzas are drafted in pencil on ff 4^r rev.–6^r rev. of Nbk 12. S. probably made this draft outdoors in the ‘wood that skirts the Arno’ which he identifies as the place where the ‘poem was conceived and chiefly written’ in his prose note to the title; that is, in the wooded park of the Cascine outside the city walls of Florence. He writes to the Gisbornes on 6 November of his liking for this place where ‘I often walk alone watching the leaves & the rising and falling of the Arno’ (L ii 150). The first three stanzas he transcribed with slight revisions into Nbk 11 63–5 beneath the date ‘Octr 25’. The greater part of stanza four is drafted on p. 155 of the same nbk, while all of that stanza and the final five lines of stanza five are found in a mixture of fair copy and draft in Nbk 14 137–8. What appears to be a rejected line is cancelled on p. 136. Two missing leaves between the present pp. 136 and 137 may well have carried draft, and perhaps fair copy, for the remaining lines of stanza five. S.’s prose note to the title is drafted on f. 108^v of the nbk that contains his uncompleted holograph of PVR (SC vi 1066–69).