ABSTRACT
Date of composition unknown, but probably late 1810 or early 1811. When S. included stanza 4 in a letter of c. 20 June 1811 (L i 106) Edward Fergus Graham was evidently expected to recognize it, and line 39 of ‘To Death’ (No. 43), here assigned to November-December 1810, quotes a phrase from the same stanza. Cameron (Esd Nbk 272) compares ‘pomp-fed Kings’ (line 30) with ‘pomp-fed despots’ (‘Henry and Louisa’, No. 7, line 312) and dates the poem a year earlier. Words and music of ‘La Marseillaise’ were composed by Rouget de Lisle in 1792 and adopted as the French National Anthem on 14 July 1795. In this rather free version (his only translation from French) S. tried to widen its nationalism with a more universal revolutionary appeal. Thus ‘contre nous’ (3) is rendered ‘Against thy rights’; ‘nos fiers guerriers’ (26) becomes ‘the arm upraised for Liberty’; and ‘La France’ (38) becomes ‘Our Mother Earth’. The extra line in each stanza corresponds to the repetition of each fourth line of the original; and S.’s form is stricter in that lines 2, 4 and 9 of each stanza rhyme throughout the poem. In places, however, S. misunderstands the original (e.g. 6, 41–2), and he evidently did not know the tune, as his words will not fit it.
