ABSTRACT
Mary published in 1840 (251–2) six untitled stanzas of this polemical rewriting of the national anthem God Save the King. She does not place it among the other political poems of 1819, inserting it instead into her Note on the Poems of 1819 where she introduces it thus: ‘He sketched also a new version of our national anthem, as addressed to Liberty.’ Her ‘sketched’ acknowledges the rough and unfinished nature of the draft materials from which she had to construct the text. The mixed pencil and ink draft, in places rough indeed, runs from pp. 19 to 22 of Nbk 14. S. appears to have drafted the first, third, fourth and fifth stanzas of the present text (which follows the order of the stanzas in 1840) in pencil on pp. 19–20, then corrected these pages in ink and made some additions, including the second stanza. Further additions in ink on pp. 21 and 22 include a draft of the final stanza as well as incomplete drafts of two more stanzas, which are given in the next paragraph. The additional lines on p. 21 are written across a draft of ll. 59–66 and 71–2 of The Cloud (no. 319) those on p. 22 below drafts for the first stanza of Song of Apollo (no. 317). As both these poems can be dated to late April or early May 1820, the drafting of God save the Queen! was probably completed in that period. It seems all but certain that this was one of the poems intended by S. for the ‘little volume of popular songs’ that he proposed to Leigh Hunt in a letter of 1 May (L ii 191); it may even be that it was the composition of this ‘new version’ of the national anthem that prompted him to test the idea for such a collection on Hunt. See headnote to Song: To the Men of England (no. 291).
