Plate 82
. . . .
I have naild his hands on Beth Rabbim & his hands on Heshbons
Wall
. . . . [43]
So saying: She drew aside her Veil from Mam-Tor to Dovedale
Discovering her own perfect beauty to the Daughters of Albion
And Hyle a winding Worm <be>neath <her Loom upon the
scales.
Hyle has become a winding Worm:> & not a weeping Infant.
[48]
. . . .
To feed the afflicted in the Furnaces: She minded not
The raging flames, tho she returnd <consumd day after day,
[67]
A redning skeleton in howling woe:> instead of beauty
Defo[r]mity: she gave her beauty to another: . . .
One of the words "hands" in line 43, probably the second, is a
mistake for "feet". Other signs of extreme carelessness on this plate are the
misspellings: "Defo[r]mity" (line 69), "siste[r]s" (72), "soften[in]g" (77),
and "Furna[c]es" (78, 79). Mended letters include the first w
in line 5 and the second b in 21.
The deletions in lines 47-48 and 67-68 are inked over with vines in
the Mellon, Harvard, and Morgan copies but are almost legible in the
Rinder copy and can be made out completely from the posthumous ones,
by enlargement.[29] The excision in
lines 47-48 removes a redundancy (but the cut into "be" of "beneath" seems
an accidental slip of the tool).[30] The
excision in lines 67-68 if it does not improve at least does not make any
worse the syntactical context of the dangling phrase, "instead of beauty
Deformity".[31]
Everything about this plate suggests that it was prepared in a
condition of unusual haste, or inattention, or illness, and that the text was
not freshly composed but transcribed from a fair copy of much earlier
vintage — consider particularly the "redning skeleton", inscribed and
etched but then rejected. From the style of lettering (and from the crowding
of the plate) I would conjecture a late date of etching.
