GENEVIEVE[19:1]
Maid of my Love, sweet Genevieve!
In Beauty's light you glide along:
Your eye is like the Star of Eve,
And sweet your voice, as Seraph's song
Yet not your heavenly beauty gives [5]
This heart with Passion soft to glow:
Within your soul a voice there lives!
It bids you hear the tale of Woe.
When sinking low the sufferer wan
Beholds no hand outstretch'd to save, [10]
Fair, as the bosom of the Swan
That rises graceful o'er the wave,
I've seen your breast with pity heave,
And therefore love I you, sweet Genevieve!
1789-90.
FOOTNOTES:
[19:1] First published in the Cambridge Intelligencer for Nov. 1, 1794: included in the editions of 1796, 1803, 1828, 1829, and 1834. Three MSS. are extant; (1) an autograph in a copy-book made for the family [MS. O]; (2) an autograph in a copy-book presented to Mrs. Estlin [MS. E]; and (3) a transcript included in a copy-book presented to Sara Coleridge in 1823 [MS. O (c)]. In an unpublished letter dated Dec. 18, 1807, Coleridge invokes the aid of Richard ['Conservation'] Sharp on behalf of a 'Mrs. Brewman, who was elected a nurse to one of the wards of Christ's Hospital at the time that I was a boy there'. He says elsewhere that he spent full half the time from seventeen to eighteen in the sick ward of Christ's Hospital. It is doubtless to this period, 1789-90, that Pain and Genevieve, which, according to a Christ's Hospital tradition, were inspired by his 'Nurse's Daughter', must be assigned.
'This little poem was written when the Author was a boy'—Note 1796, 1803.
LINENOTES:
[Title]] Sonnet iii. MS. O: Ode MS. E: A Sonnet MS. O (c): Effusion xvii. 1796. The heading, Genevieve, first appears in 1803.