ABSTRACT
Headed ‘1809’-decoratively underlined-in Esd, but probably written December 1810 or January 1811. (i) The poem shows S. as ‘wretched to the last degree’ and angry at the religious intolerance he considered responsible for his enforced break with Harriet Grove in autumn 1810, and closely parallels contemporary letters to Hogg (see specific notes below), (ii) S.’s ‘political’ poems begin only in November 1810 with PFMN; if this poem belonged to 1809 it would be unique, and the reference to similar ‘lays’ in line 3 inexplicable. (iii) It is metrically almost identical to ‘Dares the llama’, sent to Hogg 20 April 1811, and very similar in mood and wording, (iv) Cameron (Esd Nbk 251–4) notes the influence of Political Justice while conceding that S. may not have read this book before 1810. (v) Cameron also notes the ‘dedication’ theme in stanzas 1 and 4, but rightly distinguishes this experience from that later described in the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’. This ‘dedication’ is surely that expressed in letters to Hogg in the winter of 1810/11: ‘I swear on the altar of perjured love to avenge myself on the hated cause of the effect which even now I can scarcely help deploring.-Indeed I think it is to the benefit of society to destroy the opinions which can annihilate the dearest of its ties.-’ (20 December 1810, L i 27). The celebration of ‘Love’ or ‘philanthropy’ as superstition’s adversary is not Godwinian, and owes something to Volney’s Ruins. Volney (1757–1820), a Revolutionary deputy in 1790, was a steadfast libertarian who was imprisoned during the Terror and refused office under Napoleon. Volney’s Ruins later became a ‘textbook’ of Harriet Westbrook’s (Hogg ii 183).
