ABSTRACT
Nbk 21 contains a draft and a fair copy of this sombre lyric, both untitled: the draft on pp. 1, 2 and the front (originally the back) pastedown, and the fair copy on p. 154. Page 1 also carries S.’s draft of the first eight lines of The Zucca (Longman v, no. 421) written crossways over the draft of the final stanza of The flower that smiles. As The Zucca dates from late December 1821 to January 1822, The flower that smiles must have been drafted earlier. Its position on pp. 1, 2 and the front pastedown is inapt to serve as evidence for assigning a date of composition early in the period when the notebook was in use (late summer 1821-January 1822). However (as Donald Reiman and Michael Neth point out in BSM xvi p. liv), because in some other instances S. left a small number of pages blank at either end when he began to write in a fresh notebook, he may have done so with Nbk 21. The fair copy, on the other hand, situated as it is in the midst of the drafts for Hellas, appears to have been entered towards the middle of October 1821, the month during which the lyric drama was composed. Mary transcribed the fair copy of The flower that smiles into Mary Copybk 1 pp. 18–19 (BSM ii 38–41) without giving it a title, and published it in 1824 as ‘Mutability’, the title that S. had assigned to the 16-line lyric We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon, which he included in 1816.
