4186. Robert Southey to Caroline Bowles, 10 May 1824

 

Address: To/ Miss Bowles/ Buckland/ Lymington/ Hampshire
Endorsements: No 53 To Miss Caroline Bowles; Keswick. 10 May 1824
MS: British Library, Add MS 47889. ALS; 4p. 
Unpublished.

Were you to see sometimes how doggedly I sit down to a stanza for the Paraguay tale,

(1)

Southey’s A Tale of Paraguay (1825).

– the pen drying half a dozen times before I get thro two lines of it, & the brain dry as the grey-goose quill, & not so easily moistened, – you would not perceive that want of ideas, & want of fancy & want of power, are no more proofs of incapacity, – than an empty purse is a proof of poverty, – our wealth is not always at command. One of these dry fits has come upon me in this first canto,

(2)

Southey and Bowles were beginning work on ‘Robin Hood’. The resulting incomplete poem was published in Robin Hood: a Fragment. By the Late Robert Southey, and Caroline Southey. With Other Fragments and Poems By R.S. and C.S. (London, 1847), pp. [1]–36.

– at a time too when I especially wished to get thro it, that I might begin the second upon your groundwork. Bear a part you most assuredly will; & this you will feel when better health brings with it better spirits. Try at some descriptive sketches in the metre, – such as painters make in a little pocket book to be introduced into their pictures. If after all you like better to write in rhyme, what is done may easily be translated, – in proof of the practicability – the first seventy pages of Kehama underwent this metamorphosis.

(3)

Southey’s The Curse of Kehama (1810).

– Something I did this morning – drily enough, – but I shall get on, – & you shall have every fragment.

Gratified I am indeed at what you say of those monumental verses.

(4)

Southey’s commemoration of Paul Henry Durell Burrard (1790–1809), an Ensign in the 1st Foot Guards, who was mortally wounded at the Battle of Corunna (1809). He was Caroline Bowles’s first cousin. Southey’s poem was entitled ‘Lines. To the Memory of a Young Officer, Who was Mortally Wounded in the Battle of Coruña. By Robert Southey, Esq. Poet Laureate’, The Literary Souvenir; Or, Cabinet of Poetry and Romance (London, 1826), pp. [341]–344.

This is one of the proper uses of poetry, – & the impulse which has thus been given is very likely to accelerate the progress of the series.

(5)

Southey’s inscriptions on the Peninsular War, most of which were unpublished until the eighteen finished poems were collected in Poetical Works, 10 vols (London, 1837–1838), III, pp. 122–156. Southey originally planned to write thirty inscriptions.

I have added another since,

(6)

The identity of the other poem that Southey had been working on is less clear; it might have been ‘Inscription for a Monument at Arroyo, in Molina. By Robert Southey, Esq., Poet Laureate’, Friendship’s Offering. A Literary Album (London, 1827), pp. [147]–148.

making the number nineteen, something more than half of what are intended.

I believe the delay of that first letter was occasioned by its arriving in town when Rickman had taken flight during the Easter recess.

(7)

Parliament was not sitting 16 April–2 May 1824, over the Easter period, and this suspended Rickman’s ability to frank mail.

Your adventure with the Satirist is an amusing one.

(8)

Caroline Bowles had been sent a satirical poem on Southey by a ‘Captain of Lancers, who has taken it into his head to turn author’. She declined to give any opinion on the poem and returned it to the author; see Caroline Bowles to Southey, 5 May 1824, Edward Dowden (ed.), The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles (Dublin and London, 1881), p. 60.

I remember writing in a printed satire of this kind, many years ago, these lines from a play of Sir Wm Davenant, – for myself & the friends

(9)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.

who were therein abused with me –

Libels of such weak texture & composure
That we do all esteem it greater wrong
To have our name extant in such paltry verse,
Than in the sland slanderous sense (10)

I thank God that as I have among my friends some of the best & wisest of their age, so I have for my enemies the veryest wretches that disparage nature. This Lancer is only a poor coxcomb – but I have them in all degrees of ass-ishness – & in all degrees of baseness & villainy, – from your Officer up to Lord Juan the Giaour.

God bless you – 
Yrs affectionately
RS.

10 May 1824

(11)

Deletion of the date is in another hand.

Notes

1. Southey’s A Tale of Paraguay (1825).[back]
2. Southey and Bowles were beginning work on ‘Robin Hood’. The resulting incomplete poem was published in Robin Hood: a Fragment. By the Late Robert Southey, and Caroline Southey. With Other Fragments and Poems By R.S. and C.S. (London, 1847), pp. [1]–36.[back]
3. Southey’s The Curse of Kehama (1810).[back]
4. Southey’s commemoration of Paul Henry Durell Burrard (1790–1809), an Ensign in the 1st Foot Guards, who was mortally wounded at the Battle of Corunna (1809). He was Caroline Bowles’s first cousin. Southey’s poem was entitled ‘Lines. To the Memory of a Young Officer, Who was Mortally Wounded in the Battle of Coruña. By Robert Southey, Esq. Poet Laureate’, The Literary Souvenir; Or, Cabinet of Poetry and Romance (London, 1826), pp. [341]–344.[back]
5. Southey’s inscriptions on the Peninsular War, most of which were unpublished until the eighteen finished poems were collected in Poetical Works, 10 vols (London, 1837–1838), III, pp. 122–156. Southey originally planned to write thirty inscriptions.[back]
6. The identity of the other poem that Southey had been working on is less clear; it might have been ‘Inscription for a Monument at Arroyo, in Molina. By Robert Southey, Esq., Poet Laureate’, Friendship’s Offering. A Literary Album (London, 1827), pp. [147]–148.[back]
7. Parliament was not sitting 16 April–2 May 1824, over the Easter period, and this suspended Rickman’s ability to frank mail.[back]
8. Caroline Bowles had been sent a satirical poem on Southey by a ‘Captain of Lancers, who has taken it into his head to turn author’. She declined to give any opinion on the poem and returned it to the author; see Caroline Bowles to Southey, 5 May 1824, Edward Dowden (ed.), The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles (Dublin and London, 1881), p. 60.[back]
10. Sir William Davenant (1606–1668; DNB), The Cruel Brother (1630), Act 1, scene 1, lines 193–196. Southey had written these lines in Richard Mant (1776–1848; DNB), The Simpliciad: a Satirico-Didactico Poem (1808), which attacked Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth as leaders of the ‘Anti-Classical School’; see Southey to Neville White [fragment], 11 March 1810, The Collected Letters of Robert Southey. Part Four, Letter 1757.[back]
11. Deletion of the date is in another hand.[back]
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