‘Thy beauty hangs around thee like’

This incomplete lyric is drafted in Nbk 16 f. 104^r rev. Like the rest of the markings on this page it is in dark ink. Although the handwriting is rough, composition appears to have been fluent since there is only one alteration, in l. 3. At the top of the page, to the right, is a small sketch of foliage; most of its lower half is occupied by an elaborate sketch of a landscape with four trees in the foreground and a mountain to the rear. E. B. Murray’s conjecture – ‘There may be a figure leaning heavily on the left-center tree with what appears to be a whip or alpenstock in his 25hand’ (BSM iv, Pt II, 366) – is not immediately persuasive. At the foot of the page, over two lines, are the words ‘Hum, Humb um haumb haum, aum / um umb [ ? ]’ signalling, as suggested in Rogers 204, the rhythm of the lines above. Murray is more non-committal, noting that they ‘may represent a metrical beat or a tune just then running through Shelley’s mind—or nonsense’. They may be connected with the content of the verso of the leaf, f. 104^v rev., which C. D. Locock identified to be S.’s attempt ‘to make as many words as possible out of the letters in “starch”’ (Locock Ex 22) and Lawrence John Zillman saw as ‘some half a hundred English words listed as possibilities for rime combinations’ (Zillman Variorum 681 n. 22).