ABSTRACT
Written probably September-October 1810 for St Irvyne (see headnote to No. 30), but possibly earlier in 1810, as it has clear connections both with WJ and with Coleridge’s ‘The Mad Monk’ (1800; reprinted in Wild Wreath, 1804): the murdered nun’s name is Rosa, like the novice’s in WJ and like the murdered maiden’s in Coleridge, and the remorseful Monk-murderer is released from a curse of immortality in line 46, while Coleridge’s tormented monk cries ‘Oh, let me die in peace, and be for ever dead!’ (45). But the writing is dilute and the gothic thrills trite and mechanical, suggesting that the ballad is an exercise deriving from these sources rather than a variation that shares the impulse of WJ’s origin. To some degree, however, it anticipates The Devil’s Walk and (more remotely) ‘November, 1815’ and ‘The Sensitive Plant’. In ch. ii of St Irvyne Steindolph repeats the lines to his fellow-bandits, in response to their demand for ‘metrical spectre tales’, saying: ‘I learnt it whilst in Germany; my old grandmother taught it me’. ‘As Steindolph concluded, an universal shout of applause echoed through the cavern’.
