‘They die-the dead return not'

Lines 1–12 are drafted on ff. 47–46 of Nbk 1, and copied out on f. 46 with two additional lines and a cancellation. There is no authority in the MS for a repetition of lines 7–8 in the second stanza, which Mary S. evidently introduced in 1824 in order to complete the fragment. Under the title ‘Death’ Mary S. included the lines in 1839 among the poems of 1817; they are probably motivated by the suicides in October and December 1816 of Fanny Godwin and Harriet S. The ‘parent, friend, and lover’ of line 4 could apply to Mary Wollstonecraft, Fanny Godwin, and Harriet S. (the unadopted draft line 6 had a cancelled beginning: ‘Parent & sister’), but the fragment resists direct biographical interpretation.