ABSTRACT
Date of composition. Every word in this poem was composed in 1899, as part of WBY's TSW (1900), where the material constitutes lines 296–309. However, these lines from the verse drama became a poem on their own right when the poet decided to print them separately as the second of two sets of prefatory verses, in front of his completely revised version of the poetic drama which appeared first in P99–05 (1906). There is no evidence for when exactly WBY decided to use the lines as a poem (though of course this must have been at a point when he knew they would be excluded from the play itself, and therefore some time in summer 1905); but the decision had clearly been taken by c.23 Sep. 1905, when he contacted A.H. Bullen as the prospective publisher of P99–05 with both these lines and ‘I wandered in the seven woods of Coole’ (which immediately precedes this dedicatory poem in all editions), to say that ‘the verses about the Seven Woods come first’ (CL 4, 187).p
