XXII] Then one fled past, a Maniac maid And her name was Hope she said XXIII] My father Time is weak & gray XXIV] He has had child after child XXV] Then she lay down in the street XXVI] When between her & her foes XXVII] Till as clouds grow on the blast Like tower crowned giants striding fast And with their lightnings make night day XXVIII] It grew-a Form arrayed in mail 1 And is cancelled before But. XXXI] As flowers beneath Mays footstep waken Here, so far as the Draft is concerned, the splendour of the imagery breaks down, the mystery of the presence being discounted by the attribution of sex, scrupulously avoided in the finished poem, and the sense being still further wounded by the use of Hope as a common noun in a passage where Hope has already been personalized into one of the most radiant of Shelley's entities. The established text ends stanza XXXI with Thoughts sprung where'er that step did fall. In the draft Shelley had first written Hopes; but the s is carefully cancelled. The break-down of the imagery for the moment gives us an opportunity to pause at this point and examine the building of the ten glorious stanzas we have just been reading in a form not differing widely from that of the perfected poem. In stanza XXII the only cancellings are the two Ands at the beginning of lines 1 and 3; but for the astonishing stanza XXIII, the potent My father is quite a late afterthought. The final settlement of the stanza is on page II 7 v., at the top of which it stands thus Time is weak & old & gray With waiting for a better day Over line I Shelley wrote, without cancelling the original version, My father Time is weak; he then struck out the initial And of line 3 and left things to be settled by the copyist. But lower down on the page, between rejected draftings for other stanzas, is the uncancelled couplet, Time is grey & old & weak And his tongue can hardly speak and on page II 10 r., written between two lines of stanza XXVI, is the complementary couplet of this about Time Scarce will he have strength to tear In this poor couplet, with is struck out between he and have. After that splendid inspiration See how idiotlike he stands Fumbling with his palsied hands Shelley seems to have fallen afumbling himself; for this is how he began on the subject of the stanza about Time's dead children: Hope his lifeless child With the shroud of sons On the Over his dead daughter Hope Naked on a bier she lies Earth for her beloved son Weep [... All this is of course rejected; but there was more sickness of the poetic soul before the beauty of stanza XXIV was attained; for when he drafted it on page II 9 v. he wrote one line of astonishing inappropriateness. Having struck out a commencing W, he began rather too arithmetically with He has had a thous, but struck that out without finishing thousand, and wrote the child after child couplet. It must have been before writing that couplet that he set down the banal line And has buried all but me [; but there it stands struck through with the abandoned arithmetic, and what is left to be the eter nal and inalterable stanza XXIV is wellnigh as poignantly touching as the picture of Time itself. Stanza XXV is only altered in line 1, first written thus Then she sate down in the street sate being altered to lay, while over and under street are written way and road, of which words all three are cancelled. For stanza XXVI there are three cancelled openings, Between her, When between her and the, and And; and line 2 went through a good deal before arriving at its final splendour: A shape, like Day arose A shape, like Day dawn arose A shape, like the Angel of dawn arose A mist, a Form A mist, a shape, an image rose. The second couplet of XXVI is drafted on an earlier page (II 8 r.) in connexion with a different set of ideas expressed or understood Last Last came One, a Then a shape sprung from the earth Then a Shape Then Shape out of the Then a Prostrate [. . . |