ABSTRACT
These two lines and what appears to be the beginning of a third are written in ink on p. 18 of Nbk 14 facing the start of the pencil and ink drafts for God save the Queen! [A New National Anthem] (no. 313). This position suggests that S. might have intended the couplet for the beginning of another stanza of his rewriting of the national anthem, perhaps to follow stanza three. BSM v 369 notes the resemblance to lines from a cancelled draft of stanza XIII of OL (no. 322) in the same nbk: ‘see the battled spider caught/In the tangled woof he wrought’ (p. 122 rev.). In that draft the spider is a figure for an oppressor who denies Liberty but who can be overcome, a theme that would make an appropriate addition to God save the Queen!. OL was composed between about 9 May and mid-June 1820 and God save the Queen! probably in late April or early May. Like a black spider caught would then seem to date from late April to mid-June. But this dating is proposed subject to caution. Written in a different ink from either of those drafts and fitted into a narrow blank space at the bottom of a page, the couplet is unlikely to have been entered earlier in 1820 but might have been as late as summer/autumn of that year, the latest period in which the nbk appears to have been used.
