CARRION COMFORT. Autograph in H, in three versions.
1st, deleted draft. 2nd, a complete version, both on same
page with 38 and 39. 3rd, with 41 on another sheet,
final (?) revision carried only to end of 1. 12 (two detached
lines on reverse). Text is this last with last two lines
from the 2nd version. Date must be 1885, and this is
probably the sonnet 'written in blood', of which he wrote
in May of that year.--I have added the title and the
hyphen in _heaven-handling_.

41. _No worst_. Autograph in H, on same page as third draft of
40. One undated draft with corrections embodied in the
text here.--l. 5, at end are some marks which look like
a hyphen and a comma: no title.

42. 'TOM'S GARLAND. Sonnet: common rhythm, but with
hurried feet: two codas. Dromore, Sept. '87.' With
full title, A.--Another autograph in B is identical. In
line 9 there is a strong accent on _I_.--l. 10, the capital
initial of _country_ is doubtful.--Rhythmical marks omitted.
The author's own explanation of this poem may be read
in a letter written to me from 'Dublin, Feb. 10, '88: ...
I laughed outright and often, but very sardonically, to
think you and the Canon could not construe my last son-
net; that he had to write to you for a crib. It is plain
I must go no further on this road: if you and he cannot
understand me who will? Yet, declaimed, the strange
constructions would be dramatic and effective. Must
I interpret it? It means then that, as St. Paul and Plato
and Hobbes and everybody says, the commonwealth or
well-ordered human society is like one man; a body with
many members and each its function; some higher, some
lower, but all honourable, from the honour which belongs
to the whole. The head is the sovereign, who has no
superior but God and from heaven receives his or her
authority: we must then imagine this head as bare (see
St. Paul much on this) and covered, so to say, only with
the sun and stars, of which the crown is a symbol, which
is an ornament but not a covering; it has an enormous
hat or skullcap, the vault of heaven. The foot is the day-
labourer, and this is armed with hobnail boots, because it
has to wear and be worn by the ground; which again is
symbolical; for it is navvies or day-labourers who, on the
great scale or in gangs and millions, mainly trench, tunnel,
blast, and in other ways disfigure, "mammock" the earth
and, on a small scale, singly, and superficially stamp it
with their footprints. And the "garlands