ABSTRACT
These lines, the following poem The Two Spirits’, and PU I 752-800, have strong affinities yet their precise relationship is puzzling. All three are drafted within the first 26 pages of Nbk 11; all three are concerned with an apparently ineluctable linkage of good and evil: enlightenment appearing as mental darkness; aspiration that risks calamity; love whose shadow is pain; and all share similar metaphors, especially that of flight above the earth, and (in the first two cases) a striking phrase. As Chernaik 239 suggests, contemporary composition is probable: most likely the last week in September or the first in October 1818. Forman 1876-7 iii 401 note, followed by Hutchinson 548, assign the present lines to Otho, for no reason beyond their accidental contiguity with genuine lines from Otho printed in Relics over the date 1817. Lines 1-2 suggest rather that ‘Behold, sweet Sister mine’ was drafted for PU (which may be why Mary S. did not transcribe the lines, though she transcribed and printed The Two Spirits’), but that this prelude led in turn to a dialogue unsuited to the drama. It seems possible that lines 752-88 of PU Act I were inserted into the Act after its initial completion. All or most of the Act had been written on separate sheets (L ii 39-40; see headnote to PU), and the draft lines in Nbk 11 are the only surviving MS lines of this Act. All three compositions discussed here may therefore have originated in the death of Clara S. on 24 September, which was a disaster resulting from S.’s impulsive good intentions in trying to help Claire C. and Allegra. S. applied the metaphor of flight to his own actions in this matter (‘Am I not like a wild swan to be gone so suddenly?’: L ii 40); and one of the interpolations on f. 13 (see headnote to ‘The Two Spirits’) is ‘the good die first –’: unless this quotation, repeating the epigraph to Alastor, refers to Clara’s death its entry here is obscure. On f. 18 occur three pencilled lines beginning ‘How pale and cold thou art in thy despair’ (no. 199), which must be addressed to Mary S. after the death either of Clara or of William S. nine months later. The commas after Behold and mankind, and the full stop, are editorial.
