ABSTRACT
These couplets are tucked into the top right-hand corner of a page in Nbk 5 with stanza 2 of To Constantia’ (Thy voice, slow rising’) drafted round them and covering the last word, ‘Sick’. They immediately follow ‘My spirit like a charmèd bark’, and then the ‘Essay on Christianity’, which was probably abandoned at the end of 1817. They are therefore likely to date from November or December 1817 and may well, as many readers have assumed, belong to the material associated with Claire Clairmont which surrounds them. Mary Shelley thought that, like ‘Athanase’, the lines expressed ‘the restless passion-fraught emotions of one whose sensibility, kindled to too intense a life, perpetually preyed upon itself’ (1839 iii 69). However, the apparent situation (which Forman labelled ‘Unsatisfied Desires’ and linked with J&M – 1876-7 iii 405 – and which Locock more decorously called ‘Igniculus Desiderii’ – Locock Ex 63) and certain phrases also call to mind Shelley’s projected Tasso drama, begun six months later in Italy. The unlikely verb wail (line 1), which has worried all transcribers but seems correct, suggests a fictional persona. Shelley later used both situation and phrasing from these lines for Orsino’s soliloquy at the close of Cenci II (ii 133-44).
