ABSTRACT

This fragment of narrative verse was scrawled with a blunt pencil at the top of p. 167 of Nbk 11, apparently without firm support underneath the nbk so that the resulting script is irregular and indistinct. As drafts for SP (no. 296), composed in March 1820, immediately precede this one on p. 166 and follow it lower down p. 167, it might seem that An infant in a boat was produced on an impulse during the drafting of SP. But the SP draft was fitted into various parts of this nbk as blank space permitted; and, given their appearance of sudden spontaneity, these five lines could have been set down earlier than March 1820 on the first empty page that S. found on opening the nbk abruptly, perhaps out of doors. Moreover, the miscellaneous nature of the poems and fragments in Nbk 11, and the casual order in which they were entered, over a period of years, makes determining a sequence of composition for them problematic and offers no secure basis for assigning a date to this one.