The Orchard-pit

DGR began this ballad in 1869 when he wrote a few stanzas, and he sketched out the story in prose. But he never went on with the work. It has much in common with works like “Eden Bower” and The Doom of the Sirens”, both of which also date from the same period.

DGR's prose cartoon along with several verse fragments is part of Notebook IV in the Duke University Library. The same notebook has a draft of the opening stanzas (including a cancelled stanza), and the Huntington Library preserves another heavily corrected manuscript text of the first three stanzas. There exists as well a brief draft fragment in Notebook III in the Duke University Library.

WMR first published a fragment of the verse text as well as the extended prose summary in his 1886 edition and collected both thereafter. He was copying, presumably, from the texts of both that are preserved in Notebook IV at Duke.