"Why should I drag along this life I hate, / Without one thought to mitigate the weight? / Whence this mysterious bearing to exist, / When every joy is lost, and every hope dismissed? / In chains and darkness wherefore should I stay, / And mourn in prison, while I keep the key?"
Addressed to ----
Written in 1736. See Isobel Grundy, <u>Lady Mary Wortley Montagu</u> (OUP, 2001), p. 364.<br>
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Text from Roger Lonsdale's <u>Eighteenth Century Women Poets</u> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).<br>
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I find two eighteenth-century printings: "Verse on Self-Murder, address'd to ---- by a Lady," in <u>The Gentleman's and London Magazine</u> (June 1749), p. 306. Also published as "Suicide" in <u>The County Magazine</u> (May 1786), No. V, vol. i, p. 71. Lonsdale confirms the first in his notes on the poem.