ABSTRACT
Headed ‘A Dialogue-1809’ in Esd, but more plausibly written January-April 1811. An untitled holograph version on a separate leaf, predating the Esd text, was sent by Hogg with a covering letter to Dawson Turner (MSO. 14.12, f. 126a, Trinity College, Cambridge) on 30 May 1834, as ‘a poem, or rather a rough draft of part of a poem’ which Hogg believed ‘was written in 1810, 163when the young poet was but 17, or 18, years old’. The origins of the other thirteen poems and fragments in Hogg’s possession can be accounted for: assuming, therefore, that he kept all the poetry S. gave him (which seems to be the case), these may be ‘some verses’ otherwise unaccounted for, sent him in a letter of 26 April 1811 (L i 68–70). This letter begins: ‘You indulge despair, why do you so?’ and ends: ‘You talk of the dead. Do we not exist after the tomb. It is a natural question my friend, when there is nothing in life’. Echoes of the poem occur in letters written to Hogg January-April 1811, and in other poems written at this time. Cameron, while accepting the 1809 date (Esd Nbk 236–7), notes of the revisions in lines 2–3 of Esd that S. ‘changes a personal, philosophical reference to a social, anti-war reference’, and points out that S.’s note to line 25 quotes Q Mab and must have been added on transcription in 1812.
