Page 43

A compact political-literary lament linking England, Ireland, Eliot, and Donne in a drowning vision of mutual ruin.

Because the page is so compressed, the allusions do the heavy lifting. The result feels like a clipped historical curse: nations, writers, and the sea all collapse into one shared image of drowning and reciprocal violence.

A second placement of 'England Dying' (cf. page 33), reading 'The Irish even / Would kill you too' where the earlier version had 'ever', still drowning 'Each done / on the Donne island of our own'.

The reprise turns a one-off into a motif: printed once the Donne/done pun might pass as a wisecrack, but its return insists the book means it, the inverted 'no man is an island' marooning Eliot, Donne, and the speaker on separate finished islands. The single variant - 'Irish even' for page 33's 'Irish ever' - quietly shifts the accusation from a claim about all time ('ever') to a note of surprised inclusion ('even'), as if the menace had reached one more unexpected party. Holding both drafts in the sequence lets the reader hear the first appearance retroactively as an index entry for this one. This reading tracks a 'mixed' OCR band, but the page is manually reviewed and short; the source spacing and the Donne/done wordplay are kept as written.