Tamerlane and Other Poems

Edgar Allan Poe · 1827

The witness is Shepherd's 1884 typeset republication of the 1827 Boston pamphlet, from the British Library copy (title page: FIRST PUBLISHED AT BOSTON IN 1827; ONE HUNDRED COPIES ONLY PRINTED; London, George Redway, MDCCCLXXXIV). The 1827 pamphlet has no table of contents. It holds ten poems: Tamerlane and nine Fugitive Pieces. Five were assigned from the witness. The other five were placed by hand, because the witness shows them and the scorer could not. Tamerlane (heading TAMERLANE, opening "I HAVE sent for thee, holy friar") is the 406-line 1827 text; the corpus holds the later 243-line recension, so sampled lines from this gathering are mostly absent. The Happiest Day stands under that first line as heading, OCR-garbled ("U£ happiest day— 4he happiest hour"). Song is headed TO, not Song; the opening "I saw thee on the bridal day" is present with the I eaten ("SAW thee on tke bridal dajf"). Spirits of the Dead is headed VISIT OF THE DEAD; the opening "Thy soul shall find itself alone" is present with the T eaten. A Dream is untitled in 1827; the pamphlet opens "A wilder'd being from my birth", which this gathering dropped, so the corpus's first line is the 1827 second stanza. The threshold was not lowered. Only membership is by hand. tools/books.py order placed the five poems whose corpus titles match a heading on this witness (Tamerlane, Dreams, Evening Star, Imitation, The Lake), from the body after Shepherd's preface and before his notes. The other five keep sequence null: Song is headed TO, Spirits of the Dead is headed VISIT OF THE DEAD, and Stanzas, A Dream, and The Happiest Day are untitled or headed by their first line. That was not filled in from Shepherd's contents, which are his, not the 1827 page. The 1884 reprint assigns later titles in its own contents (Communion with Nature for the untitled stanzas beginning "In youth have I known one"). Those are Shepherd's headings, not the 1827 page.