On the flyleaf of Britten's copy of Thomas Hardy's Collected Poems appear the titles (or some other reference – an abbreviation; a few words from an opening line) of twenty-one of its verses. The volume had been a gift from Christopher Isherwood in November 1949, marking the occasion of their time together in southern California toward the end of a Britten-Pears concert tour. It is not known precisely when Britten jotted these titles down, whether in the days immediately following his having received the volume, or sometime after he had journeyed home – the page bears no date – but when he did manage to get back to Hardy, a little more than three years later, in the spring of 1953, to select texts for Winter Words, he first chose seven from this list of twenty-one, then dove back into the full collection to find three more, set the resulting ten poems, and finally, omitted two of the ten songs (both of which set texts from his original twenty-one) to create the completed cycle.

Britten's list of twenty-one, reading from top to bottom, leaps around erratically in this enormous volume. The second title he scribbled appears more than 500 pages later than the first. He then moves back just over 200 pages, notes four poems in that general vicinity, then jumps back 150 pages to find two more poems, then ahead 300 for another. And so it goes. We can draw no conclusions whatever from this, of course; he may simply have been flipping through the work, noting verses that appealed to him, those that “caught his eye.” At the same time, as one reads these poems, and compares each to its neighbors that Britten passed over, it becomes increasingly apparent that the composer was looking for poems with specific qualities, that from this initial stage he had some idea – perhaps a very clear idea – of the cycle's overarching subject and organization. Each verse, the original twenty-one as well as the added three, engages in some way the themes of time or innocence. Britten's list appears as Figure 3-1, below.