As Collingwood remarks, MS VI is a rough-copy book for  Iteriad  and for shorter poems, many of them copied into MS V. Unlike MS V, in which poems were fair-copied in an order regardless of their dates of composition, MS VI reveals a compositional sequence of poems--some lost with the removal of folios. The sequence starts with  Vesuvius,  which is the earliest item listed in Ruskin’s index. Since  Vesuvius  can be independently dated as February 1830, and some other titles in the index can also be dated from other sources, conjectural dates can be assigned to pieces based on their relative positions in the manuscript.
	Dates can be provisionally given even to titles of lost pieces, since their former positions are recorded in the index. Of course, we cannot be certain that Ruskin drafted the lost poems seriatim in the notebook, any more than we can assume that the extant poems form an undeviating sequence--and, as explained in  Description  above and in no. 91, Ruskin did at times skip backwards and fill unused spaces. In broad outline, however, the titles of lost poems indicate interests that absorbed Ruskin from early 1830 to late February or early March 1831, the period covered in the lost portion of MS VI.
	Throughout the notebook, shorter poems were interspersed with draft of  Iteriad,  no. 91. The index tells us that  Iteriad  itself started life as a shorter poem,  The Ascent of Skiddaw,  which would later become book 3 (see no. 91). The index cites p. 32 both for  Skiddaw  and for the first of a series of pages for  Iteriad.   Skiddaw  was drafted, judging by its indexed position, starting in late December 1830 or early January 1831, just following the lost piece  Revolution.  In MS VII Ruskin says he started  Iteriad  on November 28, 1830, either referring to MS VI and offsetting these calculations by just a month or referring to draft in another manuscript, now lost.