ABSTRACT
Written in late June 1822, and perhaps S.’s last substantial poem. The sole source of Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven is a rough draft in Box 1, possibly copied in parts from draft elsewhere, written on a bifolium of the same paper on which most of the draft of TL is written. This paper, of Italian manufacture and watermarked ‘BENEDETTO PARODI’, consists of full sheets measuring approximately 255 x 390 mm, each folded once to create a pile of writing paper consisting of conjugate pairs of leaves each giving four pages. S. used the folded sheets with the hinged edge to his left so that the bifolium opened like a booklet (see headnote to TL). The draft of Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven covers all four pages of one bifolium, and is placed in the sequence of folded sheets containing the TL draft about halfway through it, on ff. 35r, 35v, 36r and 36v in Box 1. S. in fact began his draft on f. 36v with two cancelled attempts at a first line which now appear upside down and reverso relative to the order of bifolia in Box 1. The cancelled beginnings read She left me when the moon was and The moon was, and having cancelled them, he reversed the bifolium and wrote out what he then intended as the first line, She left me at the silent time, near the top of f. 35r (i.e. the top of the first page of the four-page booklet now became the bottom of the fourth page, containing the two cancelled attempts at an opening line upside down and reverso). The fact that S. left generous space above this line when beginning the draft possibly suggests that he was intending from the outset to compose further lines to make a different beginning. This, at any rate, is what he did, just squeezing in the six lines that begin the finished poem between the top of f. 35r and the original first line, which then became l. 7, although the sixth line of the new beginning is written all but overlapping the new l. 7, in small and cramped writing which is consequently difficult to read (and which apparently defeated Richard Garnett’s attempt to transcribe it; see below).
