ABSTRACT
Published Nineteenth Century, Sept. 1882; then 1885. T. wrote to Knowles, Aug. 1882: ‘you can put To Virgil if you like — I don’t think it matters much. I am not quite satisfied with the VIth — but the thing must go’ (Letters iii). The letter of request from the Vergilian Academy of Mantua was dated 23 June 1882: ‘One verse of yours, one writing however small, that could be published in the Vergilian Album will be agreeable, not only to us …’ (Mat. iv 26–7). The poem was acknowledged 10 Sept. Cp. To Dante (II 691). D. Bush points out that the ‘rolling trochaic lines suggest something of the sound of the Virgilian hexameter’ (Major British Writers, 1959, ii 463). J. B. Trapp reproduces the MS from the Academy’s files (TLS, 18 Sept. 1981); he notes the variants, of which the most important is that ‘the lay-out of the manuscript poem differs from all the published versions, which print it in ten numbered stanzas of two lines each, broken at the caesura, so that they look like twice two … When he sent it to Mantua, T. clearly intended it as a single unit of twenty long trochaic lines, rhyming in couplets’.
