ABSTRACT
These seven couplets are fluently drafted with few cancellations on f. 62v rev. of Nbk 10. They appear to form a single sentence, flowing with few pauses from one line to the next in imitation of the narrative movement that carries Pleasure from birth to perfected beauty. The phrase At the creation is cancelled on the following f. 63r rev., an indication that in the present lines S. is developing an idea that came to him in another context, as Forman suggested in Huntington Nbks ii 184–5: see There was a gorgeous marriage feast (no. 238). The position of the draft in Nbk 10 and its relation to fragments such as There was a gorgeous marriage feast and Sucking hydras hashed in sulphur (no. 266) in the same nbk make it likely that it was written in late 1819, as they appear to have been, though any date between late 1819 and spring 1820 is possible. Although it was first 262published in Relics as a fragment, a designation followed by later eds, At the creation may well have been intended to be a complete poem. The birth of the goddess Pleasure has evident similarities of both conception and language to the passage in PU (no. 195) II v which includes Panthea's account of Asia's birth (16–71 and notes), and which borrows details from the mythical birth of the goddess Aphrodite from the sea. In other poems S. personifies Pleasure as an elemental principle comparable to Love, Sympathy, Sorrow: see L&C (no. 143) 2205, Misery.—A Fragment (no. 202) 53, Adonais 114. He develops an important distinction between two kinds of Pleasure, ‘one durable, universal, and permanent; the other transitory and particular’ in DP (Reiman 2002 para. 32).
