ABSTRACT
Drafted roughly in pencil in Nbk 10, these lines appear to constitute a verse fragment in Italian by S. as opposed to a transcription from an Italian literary source. Immediately beneath them, in the same rough pencilled hand, is the beginning of a draft of A Vision of the Sea which was probably composed in April 1820 (see headnote to no. 321 and Mary Quinn, MYRS iv p. xxxiv). It seems likely there- fore that this fragment was composed at the same time. The opening two lines are regular, the first a settenario, the second an endecasillabo (hendecasyllable), the latter identified by Dante as the most noble line of Italian prosody in De vulgari eloquentia (1304). The third and fourth lines are irregular and suggest that S.’s experi- ment with Italian prosody had lost momentum by this point. The difficulties presented by the last two words may result from the nature of S.’s knowledge of Italian. Medwin commented, ‘I often asked Shelley if he had never attempted to write like Matthias, in Italian, and he showed me a sort of serenade [Buona notte] which I give as a curiosity,—but proving that he had not made a profound study of the language, which, like Spanish, he had acquired without a grammar,— trusting to his fine ear and memory, rather than to rules.’ (Medwin (1913) 351) The following is a literal English translation of the fragment: a green valley In which the mind loses itself Like the waves of a beautiful river which does not?[stay]?[still]
