ABSTRACT
Written neatly in ink at the top of an otherwise blank page in Nbk 14, these lines were probably composed between October 1819 and August 1820. A further line begins with the first three letters, Thr, of an uncompleted word. The lines may be a re-working of earlier and more roughly drafted material on the subsequently torn-out page facing it. Carlene Adamson's point that ‘the metre and diction suggest, perhaps, that these may have been related to The Witch of Atlas’ (BSM v 394) is plausible and consistent with a date of August 1820. Like the draft material for WA (no. 341) in this nbk, the lines are written reverso and the metre and indentation of the second line suggests the beginning of an ottava rima stanza. Against this view is that they are in a different part of the nbk from the WA drafts. Moreover the biblical echo in the first line indicates a tone of righteous anger, on the face of it comparable with the first lines of the opening stanzas of To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh] (no. 252) even though the metre is distinct. Such a context would not be inconsistent with the date-range and content of this notebook which includes drafts of political poems from the autumn of 1819. A third possibility is that the lines relate to OT (no. 344) which, like WA, was drafted in August 1820 though no material relating to that play has hitherto been identified in this nbk.
