Though unauthorized, the supplied titles that I attribute to the Runes draw heavily on key phrases and memorable images that are Will’s own. In some cases, the titles point to focal subjects or themes in individual texts, but the eclectic, associative nature of the Runes doesn’t routinely allow easy reducibility. (Sonnets editor Stephen Booth notes the same “spin-off” tendencies in the Sonnets, where dominant figurative patterns often fail to subsume or unify diversely textured details.) Some of the titles are figurative epithets, some are composite phrases, many are puns. (The phallic wit in “Dreaming on Things to Come” is an instance of the last kind. Other instances of puns occur in “Who Will ‘Be-leave’ [i.e., paginate, publish] My Verse?” and “Three Themes in One, or Double ‘Pen-ance’ [i.e., use of the pen, and thus writing].”)

          Many titles here are Will’s own clandestine conceits for the runes collectively or singly; some are phrases that in various other ways show self-awareness of the very act of creating or uncovering duplicitous texts. I’ve picked the titles to capitalize on Q’s self-conscious tendency to discuss its own game, and I’ve phrased them with attention to meter, cadence, and of course brevity.

          While titling the Shakespearean Sonnets would surely seem a presumption, titling the somewhat more playful Runes—as one small part of an initial attempt to reconstruct and construe them—seems to me a less atrocious imposition. Not only “naming” the runes generically with figurative epithets but “titling” them individually may even be one of the game elements that Will imagined himself consciously triggering; in parallel fashion, he seems to toy with the idea of naming the sets. Plays such as the one in the line I choose in this link for an epigraph indicate to me that Will must have toyed with possible titles for the poems as he wrote them—likely for the Sonnets as well as the Runes.

          In any case, even Q’s overt texts (which we might conventionally call either “numbers” or “titles”) are untitled except numerically, following the convention of the sonnet cycle as it devolved from Petrarch. Such shaggy works as Q—or Emily Dickinson’s oeuvre—remind us how unhandy numeric titles are as handles that would ideally afford us firm grips on individual texts. In time, as the Runes become more familiar, the ascribed rubrics may in modest ways serve mnemonic purposes—just as some first lines already do for the Sonnets—and may help with identification of texts and references to them.

          First-line titles would of course be unsatisfactory because each line in the Runes has associations with some other text, a sonnet, and because some first-lines in the Runes are inextricably linked in our minds with individual texts that have long been visible in Q.

           Titles here that start with “A…” and “The…” are clustered—not alphabetized according to the first substantive word—because they seem likely to stick in the mind as whole phrases. The usage parallels the conventional pattern in first-line listings.

           A few of the titles below are themselves first lines or other full-line units. Occasionally a title repeats the heading that I’ve attributed to the set unit in which it occurs—just as the title poem in a volume of verses might. In the A and B variants of Set VIII, some titles get used twice; some A and B variants of the same number, however, seem to merit separate titles, since the difference of one (initial) line can set a given pair otherwise identical texts off on divergent topical tangents.

          I see it as a necessary gesture of modesty to link these fabricated titles not with the edited texts or with the raw assemblages of unedited lines but, rather, with the paraphrases, which are also blatantly interpretive. This procedure keeps the authorized line groups and the edited text that represent these groups a bit freer from intrusion and tampering than would be the case if I were to presume to ascribe my own, unauthorized titles to the poet’s self-crafted groupings. Editorial choices such as punctuations, of course, unavoidably impose interpretations on the poet’s intended meanings, but editorial titles would impose an even heavier load, one that might hinder a reader/player more than it would help.

          Anyone who is bothered by the presumption of these editorial titles can easily ignore them, with my blessing.