Christopher Ricks suggests that Tennyson's early sonnet, ‘Conrad! why call thy life monotonous?’, probably borrows the character to whom it gives its advice from Byron's The Corsair, where, ‘On Conrad's stricken soul Exhaustion prest, / And Stupor almost lulled it into rest’ (III, xxii). The sonnet was never published in Tennyson's lifetime, and the manuscript appears in Heath Notebook 7, along with poems published in 1830 and 1832. Writing about Tennyson and nineteenth-century subjectivism, William Brashear suggests that it counters another poem of the period, ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, in which Odysseus' exhausted mariners seem ‘to give way completely to absorption’. Indeed, ‘Conrad!’ also plays with many of the images of water, calm and sloth which will later tempt the speaker of In Memoriam A.H.H.