… most writers—poets in especial—prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition; and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought, at the true purposes seized only at the last moment, at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view, at the fully matured fancies discarded as unmanageable, at the cautious selections and rejections, at the painful erasions and interpolations—in a word at the wheels and pinions, the tackle for scene shifting, the step ladders and demon traps, the cock’s feather, the red paint and the black patches, which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred constitute the properties of the literary histrio.
And so he proceeds to detail how he composed “The Raven.” First he decided on a length of about one hundred lines that could be read at one sitting; on beauty as its province; on sadness as its tone; on a variation of the application of the refrain—it remaining for the most part unvaried—to obtain what he termed “artistic piquancy;” proceeding only at that stage to the composition of the last verse as the first step. All this of course has little to do with “Derelict” and yet I cannot but see a sort of analogy of effect by processes wholly divergent, particularly as Allison once told me that the central idea of the last verse for consigning the bodies to the deep was ever in his mind and that this verse was first projected, although its development was the most difficult and its perfection did not come until later. So much for that! In the five verses he had arrived approximately at a consummation of the sea burial, the introduction very properly repeating the quatrain of Billy Bones before concluding:
We wrapped ’em all in a mains’l tight,
With twice ten turns of a hawser’s bight,
And we heaved ’em over and out of sight—
With a yo-heave-ho!
And a fare-you-well!
And a sullen plunge
In the sullen swell—
Ten fathom-lengths of the road to hell—