ABSTRACT
WBY dated his inscription of the poem in AG's copy of P95 ‘July 12th, 1903’, adding ‘Written July 8th and 9th’. A single sheet of paper carries a draft of the poem in ink. There is no reason to look for any immediately biographical meaning in this lyric, and certainly it does not require one. Nevertheless, the poem's first-person voice inevitably establishes a certain resonance with WBY's experiences as a long-habituated writer of love poetry. The work's absence from several collections need not suggest any personal bashfulness on WBY's part; and this was in any case after 1922 a poem with its secure place in his poetic canon. The lines were set to music for Peter Pears by the composer Raymond Warren as part of a sequence of WBY settings, The Pity of Love.
