ABSTRACT
This lyric is drafted in ink on Nbk 19 p. 52 reverso. The first two stanzas appear to have been written in one sitting with only the third line of the opening stanza having been re-worked; the last two lines of the second stanza are written around a patch of ink bleeding through from the other side of the leaf (p. 51) containing a draft of Charles the First (Longman v, no. 426) iii 76–82. The third stanza, at the foot of the page, shows much re-working and its several abandoned starts, along with cancel strokes through the first two words of its third line and the overwritten word at the start of the fourth, testify to its unfinished state. The darker ink of this third stanza and the fact that it is offset to the left with the writing beginning closer to the edge of the page than the stanzas suggest it was composed at a later point than they were. The horizontal lines after ll. 4 and 8 signal stanza breaks, and a second, long and thick line in dark ink beneath l. 4 was perhaps added at the time the third stanza was drafted.
