ABSTRACT
There is an untitled draft of this poem on the ‘aziola’ (Otus scops, or scops owl) in S.’s hand in ink on one leaf of a bifolium in Box 1 f. 108 (BSM xxi 70–3). On the other leaf (f. 109) is Which like a crane its distant home pursuing (Longman v no. 413) which probably dates from autumn 1821. The recto of f. 108 includes the first of the two stanzas given, with the last two lines of the second stanza. An uncancelled line at the top of the otherwise blank verso, Bodiless voice, invisible complaint — perhaps continuous with the poem’s oblique invocation of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in ll. 14–15 (see note) — may be a rejected opening of the second stanza. There are three transcriptions by Mary. All may be based on the same, now missing holograph. The first, in Mary Copybk 1 pp. 105–6 (BSM ii 212–15), is of the opening stanza only. Although Donald H. Reiman states that ‘this partial text conforms to’ Box 1 (MYRS viii 321), it includes the word hear in l. 1 (lacking in Box 1), has the reading or rather than and in l. 9 and omits ll. 20–1. Such differences support Irving Massey’s view that the derivation of Mary Copybk 1 from Box 1 is ‘by no means certain’ (BSM ii 237). The second transcription in Mary Copybk 2 pp. 50–1 (Massey 126, 130) includes the unfinished second stanza as well as the first, and is entitled The Aziola. Alongside the title is a pencilled note in what appears to be Mary’s hand: ‘This elsewhere I believe, & somewhat different’, possibly a reference to Box 1. The third is a fair copy, now in the Morgan Library & Museum, MA 406.15 (Morgan). Its basis is likely to have been Mary Copybk 2. However, there is no authority in Box 1 or Mary Copybk 2 for the substitution of note with cry in the final line (see note to ll. 20–1). As GM remarks, ‘The poem was evidently unfinished, and Mary may have changed the last word so as to make a rhyme’. Morgan was the basis of the poem’s first publication in The Keepsake for 1829, ed. Frederic Mansel Reynolds (1828) where it appeared with It was a bright and cheerful afternoon (Longman iii, no 326) and The Tower of Famine (Longman iv, no. 370) under the heading ‘Fragments, by Percy Bysshe Shelley’. As noted in Taylor 78, 1834 was the source of one of the errors in the printing of the poem in 1839 iv 141 (see note to l. 4). There is a collation of the MS witnesses and early printings in Massey 129, 131.
