‘a metropolis/Hemmed in with mountainous walls and [craglike] towers’

Drafted in ink immediately below the three lines of ?[Oh] Music, thou art not ‘the food of Love’ (no. 223) on f. 4^r of Nbk 12, this evocation of a city in a mountain valley bears resemblances to ll. 5–6 of the fragment I hear, ye hear/The sudden-whirlwind (no. 221) which is drafted on f. 5^r and seems to be related to PU III. Each is in blank verse, and they share the motifs of mountainous towers and palaces. Whether the metropolis of l. 1 is an imaginary one suggested by the observed configuration of a mountain landscape, as in Mont Blanc (no. 124) 102–6, or whether it is based on the view of an actual city, Florence for example, as in The vale is like a vast Metropolis (no. 250), is impossible to determine on the basis of so brief a fragment. A plausible conjecture would be that a metropolis/Hemmed in was inspired by a view of the city of Florence which S. visited on 23 September 1819 before returning to take up lodgings there from 2 October 1819 to 26 January 1820. Details in common with a panorama of the city as seen from the Boboli gardens in December 1819, included among S.’s Notes on Sculptures in Rome and Florence (headnote to no. 250), add weight to the hypothesis of a date of composition between late September 1819 and late January 1820.