ABSTRACT
The Daemon (Part I) is the last poem in 1816. On 6 January 1816 S. sent John Murray ‘a copy of all the sheets but the last of a Vol. of poems which it is my intention to publish… I have written to Mr. Hamilton the printer to send you the sheet which is deficient, title-page &c’ (L i 438–9), and Mary S., in her note on Q Mab, states that S. ‘never intended to publish Queen Mab as it stands; but 490a few years after, when printing Alastor, he extracted a small portion which he entitled “The Daemon of the World”’ (1839 i 103). Part I of this poem, therefore, a revision of Cantos i and ii of Q Mab, was probably completed in mid-December 1815 while Alastor was actually being printed (see SC iv 496–7). Preliminary revisions only were made in a copy of Q Mab (SC 296) which is now in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, under a heading ‘The Queen of the Universe. The Metre Pastor Fido’; the main work must then have been done on loose sheets, which are lost, and the corrections were transcribed for the printer into another copy of Q Mab (MS. Ashley 4040) which is now in the British Library. These two copies of Q Mab are distinguished below as Pf.MS and Ashley MS. Besides first-draft revisions of Cantos i and ii, Pf.MS also contains speculative changes for Q Mab iv 227–36 and v 1–15; the slight modification of vi 72–104 which allowed those lines to be published in 1816 as a separate poem entitled ‘Superstition’; and a complete draft revision of Cantos viii and ix, headed ‘Second Part’. Cameron, in his study of Pf.MS (SC iv 487–514), argues that The Queen of the Universe’ represents a quite distinct poem from ‘The Daemon of the World’, but this seems unnecessary. Although under the heading ‘The Queen of the Universe’ (possibly to recall Paradise Lost ix 684, where Eve is addressed by Satan as ‘Queen of this Universe’), and although ‘Queen’ is adhered to throughout the early tentative revisions, the revisions of Cantos viii and ix refer to the visiting Power as ‘Daemon’, of neuter gender (e.g. ii 305: ‘The Daemon called its wingèd ministers’); and it is natural to assume that the sub-heading ‘Second Part’ which announces these later revisions signals a continuation of the section printed as ‘The Daemon of the World’. Moreover it has not been noticed that the long final passage of Part I was evidently written so as to link directly with the opening of Part II: neither the submissive homage of Evil’s slaves (i 276–9) nor their rage against the Daemon of the World (i 282–7) will persist in the visioned future (ii 15–20; ii 20–23). That the two parts were not, in fact, written-out or published together may have been because the apocalyptic optimism of the ‘Second Part’ was out of keeping with the other contents of 1816, or simply because S. could not prepare Part II for the printer in time. Unlike Part I it involved both MS additions and a complex rearrangement of printed passages. S. therefore probably made preliminary changes to Q Mab i and ii in Pf.MS and a complete sketch of alterations to viii and ix, changing his ‘Queen’ to ‘Daemon’ while doing so. He then finished revising i and ii on loose sheets and made a fair copy of Part I into Ashley MS, but had no time or eventual wish to make his alterations to viii and ix clearly intelligible for printing; so Ashley MS was sent in haste to the printer (unopened from Canto iv onwards) and the drafts in Pf.MS were abandoned. ‘The Daemon of the World’ is no evidence of changed opinions in S. Q Mab, though never formally published, had cost him Harriet’s two children, and he was unlikely to risk Mary’s first child (born 24 January 1816) by the least chance of prosecution; so he revised only the descriptive opening and the ideal end, toning down words and phrases which seemed provocative. The main innovation is the concept of influences from a universal Power, expressed in the wind-harp imagery that appears in other poems of this 491period, e.g. ‘Mutability’ 5–8; ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ 1–12, 32–4; Alastor 37–49.
