Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s script loops and tangles across the page as she works on the opening stanzas of a late poem, “A Musical Instrument." After six lines written in pen, the author appears to have left herself a space in which to draft more provisionally, in pencil, the next two lines: "He tears out a reed, the great god Pan / Out of the heart of the river.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), manuscript of Last Poems, undated. Purchased in 1945, MA 1211.