‘[Bind] eagle wings upon the lagging hours’

These lines are written neatly in ink in Nbk 12, ‘upright,’ notes Forman, ‘as if the book rested on the knee, out of doors’ (Huntington Nbks i 184). The probable allusion to Odyssey in the second line, together with S.’s account of his classical studies to Hogg on 25 July 1819—‘I have of late read little Greek. I have read Homer again and some plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and some lives of Plutarch this spring—that is all’ (L ii 105)—make late spring 1819 a possible date of composition. However the position of these three lines beneath, and on the same verso leaf as, the transcription and translation from Calderón's El príncipe constante suggests that they were probably written after them, between 30 September and 10 November (see headnote to The roses arose early to blossom (no. 235)). If ‘make the reading’, written above these lines in a similarly upright hand, though slightly larger, is, as both Forman (Huntington Nbks i 183–4) and Quinn ( MYRS vi 177) suppose, S.’s injunction to himself to versify his translation of the transcription from Calderón, then they are likely to have been written soon after the translation. These three lines allude to the death of Icarus. According to Diodorus Siculus, Library of History IV lxxvii 76, Pausanias, Description of Greece IX xi 2, and Ovid, Met. viii 229–30, the sea in which Icarus drowns is ‘without a name’ because his name is bestowed upon it only after he dies: ‘caerulea… /aqua, quae nomen traxit ab illo’ (‘in the dark blue sea, which took its name from him’). The phrase ‘noonday sun of Death’ recalls the implicit association of windless calm with midday and therefore death, noted by M. Davies, ‘The Sirens at Mid-day’, Prometheus: Rivista quadrimestrale di studi classici xxxi (2005) 225– 8, in Odyssey xii 168–9: αὐτίκ ἔπειτ̓ ἄνεμος μὲν ἐπαύσατο ἠδὲ γαγήνη/ἔπλετο νηνεμίη, κοίμησε δὲ κύματα δαίμων. (‘Then quickly the wind ceased and there was a windless calm, and a god lulled the waves to sleep.’)