Additional copies my have these details or can provide clues to authorship and date through the context of the poem amongst other items Scholars assessing the frequency and dissemination of poetic works in manuscript and the culture of manuscript circulation. First Line Indexes often provide clues concerning families of manuscripts and, in turn, to the date and production of manuscripts. Adam Matthew Publications now overcomes these difficulties by presenting a series of First Line Indexes on microfiche and microfilm. This is an index to the First Lines of Poems written in English before about 1700 as they appear in manuscripts or in manuscript additions to printed books at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Occasionally, a later copy of the poem will be included.
Many poems appear in multiple copies, several of the popular ones in as many as a dozen copies.
The first line seen here may not necessarily be the first line of the complete poem, but only of the extract that has appealed to some compiler. At the beginning of the Index is a group of first lines that are not even complete. The card file has been compiled over several decades by a number of people, and this has lead to inconsistencies. The cards have been filed as if the spelling had been modernised. As is usual with First Line Indexes, the initial articles have not been silently suppressed.