ABSTRACT
Date of composition unknown; perhaps mid-July 1818. The lines are not safely datable by their miscellaneous surroundings, but they occur near the beginning of a nbk in a skeleton framework for stanzas numbered [l]-4, with appropriate spaces allotted. The spaces left for stanzas 2-3 contain no words except For though they under ‘2’; lines 5-12 are under ‘4’; and lines 1-4 at the beginning have no stanza number but are headed ‘Asia γυναικη προμηθζως’ (‘Asia wife of Prometheus’). It is not clear whether this is an intended title or an unconnected jotting, or whether the title is ‘Asia’ with a Gk notation added. Asia is identified as the wife of Prometheus only in Herodotus (Histories iv 45), and S. read Herodotus through (presumably the Histories) from 16 July to 2 August 1818 (Mary Jnl i 219-21). Herodotus cannot be said to have ‘sung’ of Asia or anyone else, however; and a possibility is that the reference is to Aeschylus’s partly-lost Prometheus trilogy, which S., for all his admiration, desired to revise, being ‘averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind’ (Preface to PU; see headnote and notes). A mountain in ‘Indian Scythia’ (line 6) must be on the northeastern edge of the Hindu Kush, the locale S. adopted two months later for PU, the epigraph to which ironically proclaims his own apostasy from the orthodoxy of Aeschylus’s submissive (lost) solution to the Zeus/Prometheus contest (see note to PU epigraph). Another possibility is that the reference is to Byron, whose short poem ‘Prometheus’ had been written in Switzerland and published with ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’ in 1816; this expresses only a despondent stoicism that S. doubtless found unsatisfactory. In any case S.’s scattered lines seem to belong to the period when he was ‘totally incapable of original composition’ (25 July 1818; L ii 26): the first two lines, in ink, end ‘&c’, and when (evidently at a later time) lines 3-4 were added in pencil, the last two words (including the obvious rhyme) were left unwritten. A similar interruption seems to have occurred between lines 5-9 (ink) and 10-12 (pencil).
