Rare Books Librarian Susan Stead was doing routine cataloging when she found the 12-line poem—which is dated April 12, 1812, and begins “Absent or present still to thee”—inscribed in an 1810 copy of Samuel Rogers’s The Pleasures of Memory. “I just opened the book and there it was,” Stead said in a January 3 BBC news report.
The poem was published in 1816 but there had been no known autograph manuscript of it until Stead’s discovery. The manuscript, which was later authenticated by Byron experts, will remain in the library’s collection, where it will be available to researchers, the Guardian reported January 4.
Posted January 6, 2006.