‘It was a bright and cheerful afternoon’

Lines 1–10 of this fragmentary celebration of a summer day appeared in The Keepsake for 1829 as the first part of Summer and Winter, itself the first of three pieces of verse there grouped under the general title ‘Fragments, by Percy Bysshe Shelley’. Mary supplied a fair copy, now Harvard f MS. Eng. 822 f. 3^r (Harvard MSS), from which the Keepsake text was printed. S. initially drafted the lines in a mixture of ink and pencil in Nbk 15 344–343, 341. Mary transcribed (in order) ll. 1–8, 11–12, 9–10 into Mary Copybk 1 (20–1), and later in the same copybk (73–4) ll. 1–8, 11, 9–10. Later still, in Mary Copybk 2 (23), she retranscribed ll. 1–12, transposing ll. 11–12 and 9–10, combined them with the 7 lines of It was a winter such as when birds die (no. 284), separated the two parts by a rule, entitled the resulting text Summer and Winter, and dated it 1820. This arrangement of lines is preserved both in Harvard MSS and in The Keepsake, except for the exclusion of ll. 11–12; in the printed version the rule is replaced by a space. In both Harvard MSS and The Keepsake the Winter section concludes with an 8th line, apparently Mary's own contribution: see headnote to no. 284. Neither the draft of the present lines nor that of It was a winter (which appears to date from late 1819–early 1820) shows any sign that S. intended the two to be joined. On the evidence, Mary must have put together two separate fragments to make up Summer and Winter—as Forman suspected she had done even though he had not examined the MSS of the drafts (Huntington Nbks i 123). The two sections had probably been combined in Mary Copybk 2 by 1824, and Mary may have intended to publish them in 1824, but in the event did not do so. Their inclusion in The Keepsake, for which she will have received liberal payment, required a finished text (despite the designation of ‘Fragments’) for what was a lavishly produced, generously illustrated and expensive annual with a list of eminent contributors (see headnote to no. 284, and the facsimile of The Keepsake for 1829, ed. Paula R. Feldman (2006)).