In the finished manuscript the preposition in line 32 is to; but in the printed edition for. Instead of the present lines 33 to 42 Keats first wrote the following:

No those times are flown and past.

What if Robin should be cast
Sudden from his turfed grave?

How would Marian behave

In the forest now a days?

She would weep and he would craze.

But after finishing the poem he wrote on the other side of the paper the delightful lines as they now stand, except that line 37 is

All are gone and all is past!

and in line 39 tufted stands in place of turfed. In the finished copy the words should be and should have in lines 38 and 40 are underlined.

(44) In the draft

Fallen beneath the Woodma[n]'s strokes...

(49) In the draft, then stands cancelled in favour of yet; and there is an unfin. ished line struck out immediately afterwards, Though the Glories...

Honour to maid Marian,

And to all the Sherwood-clan!

Though their days have hurried by
Let us two a burden try.

60

TO AUTUMN.*

SEAS

I.

EASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

2.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

(61-2) Line 61 originally began with Though their Pleasures; and the final line stands in the draft thus

You and I a stave will try.

The reading of the text is in the finished manuscript, as well as in the first edition.

This poem seems to have been just composed when Keats wrote to Reynolds from Winchester his letter of the 22nd of September 1819. He says "How beautiful the season is now. How fine the air a temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather - Dian skies. I never liked stubble-fields so much as now - aye, better than the chilly green of the Spring. Somehow, a stubble plain looks warm, in the same way that some pictures look warm. This struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it."

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

3.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

ODE ON MELANCHOLY.*

I.

Noane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine ;

O, go to Lethe, neither twist

Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,

Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl

A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,

And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

(3) The term Hedge-crickets for grasshoppers in line 9 resumes very happily the whole sentiment of Keats's competition sonnet On the Grasshopper and Cricket. See page 49.

*Lord Houghton gives the following stanza as the intended opening of the Ode. from the original manuscript:

Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones,

And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast,

Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans

To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast;

2.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall

Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty

3.

Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

Although your rudder be a dragon's tail
Long sever'd, yet still hard with agony,

Your cordage large uprootings from the skull

Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail

To find the Melancholy-whether she
Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull.

His Lordship adds - "But no sooner was this written, than the poet became conscious that the coarseness of the contrast would destroy the general effect of luxurious tenderness which it was the object of the poem to produce, and he confined the gross notion of Melancholy to less violent images,..."