Note 293:1 — THE BALLAD OF THE DARK LADIÉ[293:1]

First published in 1834. 'In a manuscript list (undated) of the poems drawn up by Coleridge appear these items together: Love 96 lines . . . The Black Ladié 190 lines.' Note to P. W., 1893, p. 614. A MS. of the three last stanzas is extant. In Chapter XIV of the Biographia Literaria, 1817, ii. 3 Coleridge synchronizes the Dark Ladié (a poem which he was 'preparing' with the Christabel). It would seem probable that it belongs to the spring or early summer of 1798, and that it was anterior to Love, which was first published in the Morning Post, December 21, 1799, under the heading 'Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladié'. If the MS. List of Poems is the record of poems actually written, two-thirds of the Dark Ladié must have perished long before 1817, when Sibylline Leaves was passing through the press, and it was found necessary to swell the Contents with 'two School-boy Poems' and 'with a song modernized with some additions from one of our elder poets'.