This text is re-edited from the original manuscript with an introduction and notes by W.H. Bond, curator of manuscripts at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. "This extraordinary poem was written between 1756 and 1763, when its author was confined in a lunatic asylum...In its 1939 edition the poem was wrongly arranged so that many of its wild outpourings seemed a good deal more lunatic than they actually were. Mr Bond has proved...that some, if not all, of the poem was intended to be read antiphonally, in the manner of Hebrew poetry...It is as it were, a poem for two voices." This new arrangement brings out the power and imagery of the poem. This poem parses the holy scriptures into morphemes and alphabetizes the pieces, transforming holy writ into language according tp Thomas Vogler, a contemporary critic. Smart uses the Hebrew letter, lamed, to signify God in the poem. This copy was signed and owned by John Frederic Nims, a poet whose work is held by the Sackner Archive. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.