ABSTRACT
Mary S.’s transcript of this poem (Harvard MS 258.3, identified below as Harvard) is dated ‘Marlow May-1817’, and the poem presumably describes a real dream of Marianne Hunt’s while she and her husband Leigh Hunt were staying with S. at Albion House between 10 April and 25 June 1817. As it is uncertain how much S. invented, interpretation is not feasible, but certain dream-materials can be recognized. ‘He used to sit in a study adorned with casts, as large as life, of the Vatican Apollo and the celestial Venus’, Hunt wrote of S. at this time (Hunt Autobiography ch. xv), and at the end of her stay Marianne scraped and scrubbed these plaster statues (Mary Jnl i 175) so as to restore them to a ‘milky whiteness’ (Mary L i 38). The poem contains echoes of Spenser’s Faerie Queene Bk II which S. had been reading aloud during May, including the word sheen (line 10), S.’s only use of this adjective. Nonnus, Dionysiaca vi 206–388, describes how Zeus first burns, then drowns, the earth. S. ordered this poem only on 7 December 1817, and again (not having obtained it) on 23 December (L i 585), but Peacock may already have interested the Marlow circle in it.
