ABSTRACT
Published 1851. C. B. Thackeray printed it from M. Brookfield’s papers, with the date 2 May 1846; this, ‘the original version’, began: ‘— to sit apart / And triumph in the Eagle’s heart; // Who clasps the crag with crooked hands’ (London Mercury xi, 1925, 620). The envelope of the Widener MS (Harvard) is dated 2 Oct. 1849; and the poem is in T.’s hand, inscribed and dated 30 Oct. 1849 (Letters i 307n). T. entered it in Dora Wordsworth’s album when in the Lake District in summer 1850 (CT, p. 205, mistakenly suggests that this was in 1845, following F. V. Morley, Dora Wordsworth: Her Book, 1924, p. 164). T. entered too on this page of the album The Two Voices 436–8, also in triplets. The placing in Eversley suggests composition before 1842, and its triplets are those of The Two Voices and Stanzas (both 1833). R. C. Sutherland argues that there is a background of evangelical Johannine symbolism which relates the poem to T.’s religious and mystical experiences (Studies in the Literary Imagination i, 1968, 23–35).
