ABSTRACT

First publ. DP, 28 May 1864; repr. DP2, 1868, 1872, 1888. Our text is 1864. The MS, part of the printer’s copy for DP, is at Morgan. There are no substantive variants, and almost none of any kind after publication, with the exception, in DP2 , of the naming of the ‘First Speaker’ and ‘Second Speaker’ as ‘David’ and ‘Renan’. The poem is the final item in 1872, and comes at the end of a group of long poems about religion drawn from both M & W and DP: An Epistle (III 552), Caliban (p. 3), Saul ( III 491), and Rabbi Ben Ezra (p. 52). It functions as the conclusion to this group, but may also have been designed as a conclusion to the whole volume of selections; in the preface, B. claimed that by ‘stringing together certain pieces on the thread of an imaginary personality’ he was presenting them ‘as the natural development of a particular experience’.