ABSTRACT
First publ. M & W, 10 Nov. 1855; repr. 1863 (when it was placed in ‘Romances’: see Appendix D, p. 747), 18652, 1868, 1872, 1888. Our text is 1855. The date of composition is not known. B. enjoyed riding and kept a horse when he lived with his parents in Camberwell and New Cross in the 1830s and 1840s, but after his marriage he did not feel able to afford a horse in Italy until 1857, when John Kenyon’s legacy gave him and EBB. financial security. The poem echoes the language of some of the courtship letters, esp. those in which B. imagines how he would have behaved had EBB. rejected him: ‘had you given me once a “refusal” … had this come upon me, whether slowly but inevitably in the course of events, or suddenly as precipitated by any step of mine,—I should, believing you, have never again renewed directly or indirectly such solicitation,—I should have begun to count how many other ways were yet open to serve you and devote myself to you’ (6–7 Jan. 1846, Correspondence xi 291). There are affinities of theme and vocabulary with two poems from the 1840s about riding, Through the Metidja (II 154), in which all the rhymes are in ‘—ide’, and How They Brought the Good News (II 241); the term ‘mistress’ is also more characteristic of this period, e.g. Song (II 335): ‘Is she not pure gold, my mistress?’ (l. 2). On the other hand there are lines and images which are reminiscent of poems from the main period of composition of M & W, 1853–4, e.g. ll. 32–3 and ll. 45–6 (see notes), and the theme of rejection is treated in One Way of Love (p. 675). The poem articulates ideas about art and love which are found throughout B.’s work. The one concrete indication comes at ll. 64–5 with the allusion to the burial of a soldier in Westminster Abbey, which may refer to the Duke of Wellington in 1852. We conjecturally date the poem to 1853.
