ABSTRACT
Dated ‘Switzerland July-1816’ in Mary S.’s hand under her transcript in Harvard Nbk 2 — an impossible date for Peacock to have sent Ranunculus ficaria, a flower of early spring, but Mary S.’s memory was probably confused by the later reference in S.’s letter to Peacock initially dated 25 July concerning the Alpine plants he proposed to naturalize, ‘companions which the celandine, the classic celandine, need not despise; — They are as wild & more daring than he, & will tell him tales of things even as touching & as sublime as the gaze of a vernal poet’ (L i 501). The flower must have been sent immediately after S.’s arrival at Geneva, probably in response to S.’s first homesick letter to Peacock of 15 May: ‘So long as man is such as he now is … like Wordsworth he will never know what love subsisted between himself & [the country of his birth], until absence shall have made its beauty heartfelt’ (L i 475). Wordsworth had published three poems on the Lesser Celandine in Poems in Two Volumes (1807), one of which S. quoted to Peacock three years later (L ii 100): ‘To the Small Celandine’ (‘Pansies, Lilies, Kingcups, Daisies’, i 22), ‘To the Same Flower’ (‘Pleasures newly found are sweet’, i 27), and ‘The Small Celandine’ (‘There is a Flower, the Lesser Celandine’, ii 47), and S. adopts this evidently favourite flower as a symbol of the Poet himself (‘There’s a flower that shall be mine,/’Tis the little Celandine’; ‘To the Small Celandine’ 7–8). S. rediscovered Wordsworth’s poetry on his Swiss visit, and as Byron said, ‘used to dose me with Wordsworth physic even to nausea’ (Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron (1824) 237), but he regarded his later politics with contempt. ‘That such a man should be such a poet!’ (letter to Peacock, 25 July 1818, L ii 26). The transcript, in a notebook that had belonged to Claire Clairmont at Marlow, is the only text and is almost unpunctuated. The draft is in Nbk 1 with the poem ‘The billows on the beach’ superimposed.
