ABSTRACT
Date of composition uncertain, but perhaps February-March 1812 in Dublin. The Tarnished nation’ and ‘unhappy land’ of lines 2 and 12 suggest Ireland. It is undated in Esd, which may indicate that it was a recent poem when transcribed there, and S. still thought highly enough of it a year later to include a revised version (the present text) in his notes to Q Mab as ‘so strongly expressive of my abhorrence of despotism and falsehood, that I fear lest it never again be depictured so vividly. This opportunity is perhaps the only one that ever will occur of rescuing it from oblivion’ (see p. 362). The archetype of this and contemporary dialogues like it was the second witches’ scene in Macbeth (I iii 1–37). out Locock recognized Coleridge’s War Eclogue, ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ (1798) as the immediate inspiration (Locock 1911 ii 553), in which the three Sisters are incited to their evil deeds in Ireland and elsewhere by the then 212Prime Minister, Pitt. Coleridge’s poem, in the same octosyllabic metre as S.’s, was reprinted in the Annual Anthology (1800). Where Coleridge’s poem bears specifically on the policies of Pitt, S.’s much more sweeping assault is on the moral causes leading to the ‘desolated globe’ of 1811–12, when Napoleon’s victories held nearly all the European monarchies in nominal subservience. S.’s school friend Andrew Amos remembered him singing the Witches’ songs in Macbeth at Eton (White ii 495).
