ABSTRACT
This fragment is drafted in pencil in Nbk 14 p. 9. ‘God & the Devil’, centred at the head of the page, was probably intended as a title. There follow two cancelled lines: ‘Take the holy instrument/To the race of mortal men’, perhaps words addressed by God to the Devil in view of the title and of what appears to be a scene of cosmic origins in ll. 1–4. S. imagines a similar scene in At the creation of the Earth [The Birth of Pleasure] (no. 285) which was probably written in late 1819. (One might conjecture that ‘the holy instrument’ of the cancelled line quoted above is the Pleasure of At the creation but such a link between the two texts is no more than conjectural.). On the same page is written reverso a draft of ll. 161–9 (stanza xv) of WA (no. 341). There being insufficient space on the page for the following stanza, this in turn is drafted reverso on the following page 8. The present lines must therefore have been in place when S. drafted WA between 14 and 16 August 1820. A date of composition for this fragment in late 1819 or early 1820 seems probable therefore; its proximity to drafts for Song: To the Men of England (no. 291) and To —— (Corpses are cold in the tomb) (no. 292), which can both be dated between early 1820 and 1 May of that year, make early 1820 more likely.
