ABSTRACT
The poem has a complex textual history, and by 1907 it had already been through the process of major revision at least once. Most recently, it had appeared in PW06 as ‘The Lover Mourns Because of his Wanderings’, with a text identical to that of its publication in The Wind Among the Reeds. This version of the poem was itself a revision from 1897 of a poem first publ. in 1892: this version was used also in the Secret Rose, where it formed a part of the story ‘The Twisting of the Rope and Hanrahan the Red’. Although ‘Maid Quiet’ is certainly a revision, it is a revision that undoes its previous version, and comes back, though with added concentration, to something much closer to the poem's very first form: it is in this sense a revision that undoes a revision.
