ABSTRACT
Written at Leigh Hunt’s house in Lisson Grove on 4 February 1818, in competition with Keats and Hunt within a time-limit of 15 minutes. Keats told his brothers on 14th: The Wednesday before last Shelley, Hunt and I wrote each a Sonnet on the River Nile, some day you shall read them air (Letters of John Keats, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols, Cambridge, Mass. 1958, i 227-8). S.’s sonnet was drafted on the MS of Keats’s
