‘Swifter far than summer's flight’/Remembrance [A Lament]

Four manuscript versions of this plangent lyric are known to have survived, each one different from the others; together they form the basis of a textual history that is tangled and elusive. S. drafted the three stanzas in pencil over five pages in Nbk 22 (ff. 6^r, 7^r, 8^r-8^v, 9^r), then made some revisions to them in ink. The draft is without title: its position in the notebook is consistent with a date of composition from late December 1821 (the year assigned to the poem by Mary in 1839) to early 1822. S. made a clean transcription, also untitled, on the verso of the final printed page and the recto of the following blank page of a copy of the 1821 edition of Adonais, which is now in the Robert H. Taylor Collection of English and American Literature, Rare Book Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library (Princeton). This version of the poem (Text A) clearly derives from the revised draft, showing only such minor variations as might well have been made in transcribing. Text B, also in S.’s autograph, is written on both sides of a single sheet of paper, which was donated in 1907 to Eton College Library by Edward Trelawny’s daughter Mrs Charles F. Call (Eton). Entitled Remembrance, the poem was given or sent by S. to Jane Williams, as an undated note below the third stanza, reproduced with a transcription in MYRS viii 358–9, indicates: Dear Jane — if this melancholy old song suits any of your tunes or any that humour of the moment may dictate you are welcome to it. — Do not say it is mine to any one even if you think so; — indeed it is from the torn leaf of a book out of date. How are you to day? & how is Williams? Tell him that I dreamed of nothing but sailing & fishing up coral. Your ever affectionate PBS. —