ABSTRACT
The Cloud was published in the ‘Miscellaneous Poems’ section of 1820. No complete holograph MS is known to survive, but there are drafts of ll. 59–66 and 71–2 on p. 21 of Nbk 14, and of ll. 77–84 on p. 31; and there is a very clean and legible fair copy in S.’s hand of ll. 35–84 on pp. 35–7 of the same nbk. A missing leaf immediately preceding p. 35 no doubt carried the fair copy of the first thirty-four lines, as BSM v points out (xxxviii). The Cloud was not transcribed into Harvard Nbk 1, as were seven of the nine poems published with PU in 1820, probably because Nbk 14 already contained a fair copy. In 1839 Mary included The Cloud among the Poems Written in 1820, although in the Preface she indicates that it was composed in England at some earlier date:
the “Ode to the Sky Lark”, and “The Cloud” … were written as his mind prompted, listening to the carolling of the bird, aloft in the azure sky of Italy; or marking the cloud as it sped across the heavens, while he floated in his boat on the Thames.
(i p. xi) Her grouping of The Cloud with the poems of 1820 clearly contradicts this memory of its spontaneous composition, and there seems no entirely satisfactory way of reconciling the two assertions. It may be that she is confusing her recollection here with another — of S. writing L&C at Marlow in 1817 ‘in his boat, as it floated under the beech groves of Bisham’ (Note on The Revolt of Islam in 1839 i 376). Certainly, the various landscapes of L&C abound with cloud-effects. However that may be, MS and other evidence — Nbk 14 was manufactured in Italy (BSM v pp. xxvi — xxx) and contains the only MSS of the poem known to survive — support a period of composition between mid-April and mid-May 1820. The pencil draft for ll. 59–66 on p. 21 of Nbk 14 is overwritten by drafts in ink for God save the Queen! [A New National Anthem] — which appears to date from late April — so the draft lines for The Cloud must have preceded it on the page. Wasserman 244 identified S.’s revision of a couplet from the draft in Nbk 14 (22) of the first stanza of Song of Apollo for ll. 5–6 of The Cloud — ‘The Hours, when from their wings the dews are shaken/Whose silver sounds the dreaming flowers awaken’ (Song) becoming ‘From my wings are shaken the dews that waken/The sweet buds every one’. Song of Apollo was probably composed between late April and mid-May. On 14 May, S. wrote to Charles Ollier, ‘Mrs. Shelley is now transcribing for me the little poems to be printed at the end of Prometheus; they will be sent in a post or two’ (L ii 197). His fair copy of The Cloud, which is very likely to have been among the ‘little poems’ he mentions, must therefore have been completed on or before the date of the letter.