ABSTRACT
Drafted in pencil in Nbk 11 p. 161, S. apparently wrote these lines while holding the nbk in an awkward position since they are markedly uneven. Nancy Goslee's explanation is that they may have been done in a carriage (.BSM xvii 199). Beneath, on the same page, is a prose jotting in ink (‘there is the common cant of those who hate’), a sketch, and a draft of lines for SP (no. 296). On the facing page of the nbk, p. 162, is another fragment: ‘a kind of an obscene and foul effect like a neglect of grace and guiltiness in Nature's [?Name &]’. Since the fragment on p. 162 is in the same irregular hand in pencil as these lines on p. 161, it would seem to have been done at the same time. Tatsuo Tokoo describes the fragment on p. 162 as a ‘continuation’ of these lines (‘The Composition of Epipsychidion: Some Manuscript Evidence’, K—SJ xlii (1993) 99), and Goslee, allowing that this is possible, identifies them as ‘in rhymed pentameter couplet’ (BSM xviii 304). However, that the p. 162 fragment is in fact prose, as it is classified in BSM xxiii 291, rather than verse, seems likely. Moreover, it appears to be unconnected with the lines on p. 161, albeit perhaps done at roughly the same time. Since draft of SP in ink is written around and, in places, over the fragment on p. 162, the lines on p. 161 must have been written by the end of March 1820. Hitherto, the accepted context for these lines has been Epipsychidion. Forman's view of the portions published together by Garnett in Relics, of which these lines form a part, is that they ‘are obviously approaches to that most glorious poem,—metre and method being alike identical in these and that’ (Forman 1876–7 ii 389n). Tokoo, in the above-mentioned article, reappraises the portions on the basis of the MS evidence, noting that a significant proportion were written in autumn 1819, or, as in the case of these lines, early 1820. However, notwithstanding the first two of these three lines being rhyming pentameters like Epipsychidion, a more likely context for their apocalyptic dimension is the rise of liberty addressed in several poems S. wrote in the second half of March and early April 1820 (see headnote to Liberty (no. 300)).
