Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810; the Curse of Kehama

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THE PICKERING MASTERS

Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810

General Editor: Lynda Pratt Southey 4-prelim.fm Page ii Wednesday, March 31, 2004 10:29 AM

Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810

Volume 1: Joan of Arc, ed. Lynda Pratt Volume 2: Madoc, ed. Lynda Pratt Volume 3: Thalaba the Destroyer, ed. Tim Fulford Volume 4: The Curse of Kehama, ed. Daniel Sanjiv Roberts Volume 5: Selected Shorter Poems c. 1793–1810, ed. Lynda Pratt Southey 4-prelim.fm Page iii Wednesday, March 31, 2004 10:29 AM

Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810

General Editor: Lynda Pratt

Volume 4 The Curse of Kehama

Edited by Daniel Sanjiv Roberts Southey 4-prelim.fm Page iv Wednesday, March 31, 2004 10:29 AM

First published 2004 by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited

Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

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BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA Southey, Robert, 1774–1843 Robert Southey : poetical works 1793–1810. – (The Pickering masters) 1. Southey, Robert, 1774–1843 – Criticism and interpretation I. Title II. Pratt, Lynda III. Fulford, Tim IV. Roberts, Daniel 821.7

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Southey, Robert, 1774–1843. [Poems. Selections] Robert Southey : poetical works, 1793–1810. p. cm. – (The Pickering masters) Includes bibliographical references and index.

I. Title: Poetical works, 1793–1810. II. Pratt, Lynda, 1964– III. Fulford, Tim, 1962– IV. Roberts, Daniel Sanjiv. V. Title. VI. Series. PR5462 2004 821'. 7–dc22 2004000292

ISBN-13: 978-1-85196-731-5 (set)

Typeset by P&C Southey 4-prelim.fm Page v Wednesday, March 31, 2004 10:29 AM

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements vii Introduction ix Extant Manuscripts of The Curse of Kehama xxi

The Curse of Kehama 1 Book I – The Funeral 8 Book II – The Curse 17 Book III – The Recovery 24 Book IV – The Departure 31 Book V – The Separation 37 Book VI – Casyapa 46 Book VII – The Swerga 54 Book VIII – The Sacrifice 67 Book IX – The Home-Scene 73 Book X – Mount Meru 79 Book XI – The Enchantress 90 Book XII – The Sacrifice Compleated 99 Book XIII – The Retreat 103 Book XIV – Jaga-Naut 112 Book XV – The City of Baly 120 Book XVI – The Ancient Sepulchres 127 Book XVII – Baly 141 Book XVIII – Kehama’s Descent 146 Book XIX – Mount Calasay 151 Book XX – The Embarkation 157 Book XXI – The World’s End 161 Book XXII – The Gate of Padalon 166 Book XXIII – Padalon 173 Book XXIV – The Amreeta 182 Southey’s Notes 193

Manuscript Transcripts: The Curse of Keradou, 1801–2 273 Draft Fragment, c. 1801 323 Draft Fragments, 1802–3 325 Draft Fragment, 1806 351 Draft Fragments, 1808 and earlier 367 Draft Fragment, 1808 389

Editor’s Notes 395 v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to Lynda Pratt and Tim Fulford for correspondence on editorial and scholarly issues, and to Lynda in particular for her timely advice on manuscript locations. Carol Bolton provided welcome help with the manuscripts and the location of various reviews and articles. For assistance with Southey’s multi- lingual quotations, I must thank a cohort of obliging translators, namely Freder- ick Williams, Philip Beagon, Estelle Sheehan, Nigel Harkness, Ivan Herbison, John McBride, Uma¯ Satyavolu Ra¯u, and Anthony Soares. For academic support as well as for practical help and hospitality in connection with my work, I am grateful to Peter Kitson, Paul Jarman, Ellen Douglas-Cowie, Hugh Magennis, John Thompson, Mary Huth, Donna and Robert Iannapollo, and Suma Athreye. A special debt of gratitude is owed to Nigel Leask and Grevel Lindop for their feedback on the Introduction and to Michael Franklin for his generosity in once again tracing various references that had eluded my own efforts. For making available the manuscript resources essential to this work I should thank the Rush Rhees Library, Rochester University; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; the Bodleian Library, Oxford University; the British Library, London; the Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum, Lichfield; the Wis- bech and Fenland Museum, Wisbech; the National Art Library of Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. Quotation of manuscripts bMS Eng 265.1 and fMS Eng 265.4 are by permision of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. I thank the staff of the above- mentioned libraries for assistance cheerfully rendered, and also Florence Gray at Queen’s University Library for her efficient recovery of inter-library loan material. I would like to thank the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Board for research and leave funding respectively, and Queen’s Univer- sity for granting the leave necessary to bring the work to completion. I’m very grateful to Julie Wilson for her efforts in seeing the work and its corrections through the press. Not least, though last, I’d like to thank my wife, Satya, for her support despite her own loss and grief at a crucial moment in the progress of this work.

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INTRODUCTION

Genesis and Conception

In his late work of theological controversy, Vindiciæ Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ (1826), Southey wrote of his early and deeply momentous encounter, while still at West- minster School, with one of the most popular of eighteenth-century mythographic collections, Bernard Picart’s seven-volume work entitled The Cere- monies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of the Known World. ‘The book impressed my imagination strongly; and before I left school, I had formed the intention of exhibiting all the more prominent and poetical forms of mythology which have at any time obtained among mankind, by making each the ground- 1 work of an heroic poem’. And in a similar vein, he wrote to Anna Seward, the ‘Swan of Lichfield’, on 28 May 1808, placing his ongoing composition of The Curse of Kehama within a much larger scheme of development: ‘My old design was to build a metrical romance upon every poetic faith that has ever been established, and have gone on after the Mahommedan in Thalaba, and the Hindoo in this present poem, with the Persian, the Runic, the Keltic, the Greek, the Jewish, the Roman Catholick and the Japanese’ (NL, Vol. I, p. 476). Certainly, Southey cherished his grand designs with remarkable attention to detail. In a letter to Grosvenor Bedford, 2 January 1803, he writes of his returning to Picart’s volumes, which he is now busy filleting for his present purpose of writing Kehama: ‘I have also gutted Picart – that is the third volume – for the set to which I had access, as usual extended no farther. Now however I may have the complete work in French by sending for it’ (Harvard MS BMS 265.1). Southey’s consistency and the vastness of his mythographical project however should not blind us to the more immediate pressures and contexts that shape his work. Those pressures nearly caused him to abandon Kehama midway through its composition and resulted in a gestation period of a decade before its final publication. This makes Kehama in many ways, internally, one of Southey’s most conflicted and ideologically-riven texts. A brief map of its genesis and conception can help us achieve some understanding of its peculiarly palimpsestic nature. Kehama began to take definite shape in Southey’s imagination by mid-1800, immediately after his completion of Thalaba The Destroyer in manuscript. On 23 July 1800, he wrote to Charles Wynn, mentioning his attraction to India as a source of wealth and of antiquarian learning, and mentioning the distinct possi-

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bility of writing a romance based on Hindu mythology. He is aware of William Jones’s reputed pre-eminence in the field of British Orientalist scholarship, but considers Jones’s work inferior to that of the French Orientalist du Perron; his own patriotism seems to demand that British scholarship take the lead in the burgeoning field of oriental scholarship, but despite his interest in translating the Vedas, he seems opposed to the idea of learning a native language: Were I single, [India] is the country which would tempt me, as offering the shortest and most certain way to wealth, and many curious subjects of 2 literary pursuit. About the language, — is right, it is a baboon jargon not worth learning; but were I there, I would get the Vedams and get them translated. It is rather disgraceful that the most important acquisition of Oriental learning should have been given us by a Frenchman; but Anquetil du Perron was certainly a far more useful and meritorious orientalist than Sir Wm Jones, who disgraced himself by enviously abusing him. Latterly, Sir William’s works are the dreams of dotage. I have some distant view of manufacturing a Hindoo romance, wild as Thalaba …’ (L&C, Vol. II, pp. 96–7). Southey’s conjunction of commercial and literary interests together with a dis- missive attitude to ‘the language’ – he does not seem to distinguish between the several major Indian languages – as ‘a baboon jargon’ is revelatory of his disdain- ful and somewhat ambiguous attitude to India. Like the orientalists, particularly Sir William Jones, who had achieved social eminence and literary fame as admin- istrators and antiquarian scholars, Southey clearly sees the literary antiquities and classical mythology of India as valuable source material, ripe for European discovery. At the same time, his dismissiveness regarding the language of which he is ignorant reveals his own rigidity regarding western cultural supremacy, and anticipates his later public support for the Evangelical pro-missionary lobby in India. Moreover, India provides another locus and dimension to the intense struggle for supremacy between Britain and France during the Napoleonic era, and Southey’s mortification at the supposed superiority of French orientalist scholarship demonstrates petulantly the imbrication of politics in the orientalist and antiquarian researches of the period. Over the decade between 1800 when Kehama was conceived and 1810 when it was published, Southey established himself as an active reviewer of Indological material and an orientalist in his own right, publishing a series of reviews in the Annual Review and Quarterly Review on the Indian missions as well as various literary and travel writings on India. These items for review supplied Southey with a great deal of source material for Kehama, many of these scrupulously recorded in the notes that he appended to his text. The latter part of the decade saw a major polarization of opinion on the missionary activity in India, particularly in the aftermath of the Vellore massacre of 1806 in which native regiments of the East India Company revolted against European officers of the 69th Foot Regi- ment, killing the sick in hospital and firing into the European barracks; in retaliation, the British summarily executed about a hundred native sepoys, who

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3 were dragged out from hiding and shot to death against a wall. The ‘mutiny’ by the sepoys was apparently sparked off by the insistence of the Commander-in- Chief, Sir John Cradock, that native soldiers replaced their turbans with helmets and removed their beards and facial caste marks, and it was fanned to heat by rumours of forced conversions to Christianity on the part of the Baptists and other missionaries. Following the Vellore incident, a full-scale pamphlet war broke out between 1807–13, with leading Evangelicals in the Court of Directors such as Charles Grant seeking to dissociate missionary activity from the mutiny, and various others in the Court, led by Thomas Twining, Grant’s enemy, attempting conversely to limit missionary activity on the grounds that it was det- rimental to the interests of the British empire. In 1808 Colonel ‘Hindoo’ Stuart, a notable proponent of the orientalist view, produced a pamphlet entitled Vindi- cation of the Hindoos, by a Bengal Officer, which Southey reviewed in the Quarterly alongside the Periodical Accounts relative to the Baptist Missionary Society. On the subject of Hindu mythology, Stuart opined: Whenever I look around me, in the vast region of Hindoo Mythology, I discover piety in the garb of allegory: and I see Morality, at every turn, blended with every tale; and, as far as I can rely on my own judgement, it appears the most complete and ample system of Moral Allegory that the 4 world has ever produced. Such views were of course immediately attacked as blasphemous in relation to the claims of Christian revelation, and Southey, with the publication of Kehama in prospect, was anxious to distance himself from them. While Southey’s earlier reviews on the Indian missions published in the Annual Review were far more tolerant of a possible compatibility between Christianity and Hinduism, his later position in the Quarterly Review clearly hardened in its attitude while striving to maintain, at least ostensibly, a degree of consistency. While in the Annual Review Southey could write encouragingly of the prospect that, in India, ‘Christianity itself may be represented as a cast. … [and] that, in the language of the Hindoos, the Bible must be called a shaster, and the incarnation of the Son, or word, or spirit of God, an avatar’, in the Quarterly Review of 1809 he writes with a different spin on his words, that ‘if, from their gross notions of incarnations, and obscure fancies of a Trinity, their minds can be gradually and dextrously led into the higher and more satisfactory doctrines of the Gospel, no teacher should 5 decline it’ (AR, 1 (1803), p. 215; QR, 1 (1809), p. 215). In the cast of characters that prefaces Kehama, Southey is careful to maintain with regard to the ‘Trimourtee’ that ‘the allegory is obvious, but has been made for the Trimourtee, not the Trimourtee for the allegory’ (see p. 7). Far from finding moral allegory in the tales of Hindu mythology, as Stuart had done, Southey offered his own work as a means of repossessing that mythology and imposing a new (Christianized) allegorical meaning on it. The alleged narrow-mindedness and zealousness of the Evangelical missionaries in India was another thorny issue in the wider debate regarding the

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Christianization of India. In 1803 Southey, despite his appreciation for the ‘zeal’, ‘sincerity’ and ‘abilities’ of the missionaries, was ‘mortif[ied] to observe their abject prostration of intellect’ in relation to the Brahmins, particularly with regard to the far more tolerant Brahminical attitude, that ‘there are many ways among men, but all lead to God’ (AR, 1 (1803), pp. 215–16). In 1804 he com- mences a review of the Transactions of the Missionary Society noticing the Evangelicals in a less than complimentary vein: The history of this society is truly characteristic of the Evangelicals: it dis- plays their honourable zeal, and their base superstition; their collective importance, and their individual imbecility; the prodigious means which they possess, and the more prodigious absurdity with which they exert them (AR, 2 (1804), p. 189). In 1809 however, while he still distances himself from the dissenting traditions, he supports the efforts of the missionaries in India far more positively: ‘The religion which they preach is not the religion of our fathers, and what they have altered they have made worse: but they proceed with zeal and perseverance; and the purest forms, when they are forms only, are little able to resist such assailants’ (AR, 1 (1803), p. 215–16; QR, 1 (1809), p. 195). The pamphlet war unleashed by the Vellore incident brought into sharp focus the uneasy relationship between Christianity and Empire, an issue that became central to the 1810 Kehama. In 1803 Southey sought to dissociate Christianity from any commercial and imperialist motives: ‘Christianity will neither extend their conquests in Hindostan, nor increase their sales at the India House’ (AR, 1 (1803), p. 214). His position deploys utilitarian terminology in order to claim a moral high ground, insisting, despite the acknowledgement that salvation can be found outside of the church, that the propagation of Christianity was to be encouraged solely on account of the utility of the moral benefits that it would bring: But says the philanthropist, if salvation be possible out of the pale of the church, wherefore propagate Christianity? Because the moral institutes of Christianity are calculated to produce the greatest possible good, individual and general; because it would root out polygamy, with its whole train of evils; because it would abolish human sacrifices, infanticide, and practices of self-torture; because it is a system best adopted for our happiness here as well as hereafter (AR, 1 (1803), p. 207). In 1809, however, while continuing to insist on the moral imperative of Christi- anity, Southey is much more prepared to acknowledge the links between church and state in the service of empire: It is only by christianizing the natives that we can strengthen and secure ourselves. The path of duty and of policy is always the same; and never was it more palpably so than in this instance. The interests and existence of the native Christians would be identified with those of the British gov-

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ernment, and the church in India be truly the bulwark of the state (QR, 1 (1809) p. 211). Southey’s movement from a moderately transcultural position (though always presumptive of British/European and Christian superiority) to one of enforced imperial domination and ideological imposition is fairly clear through the course of his reviewing in the decade leading up to the publication of Kehama. In keeping with Southey’s newly found support for the nexus between church and state in the service of empire, the 1810 Kehama offers itself implicitly as an instrument of colonialist policy. A crucial difference between ‘Hinduism’ and the dogmatic religions of the Judeo-Christian tradition was of course the lack of centralizing authority or doctrinal orthodoxy in the various traditions of Hinduism. Practices such as sati were not sanctioned by the Hindu scriptures in any definitive sense and the basis for such practices was referred usually to ‘custom’ rather than doc- trine. The Evangelicals argued that such customs were independent of one’s essential faith and could be prohibited compulsorily by law with impunity. This was the position at which Southey arrived in his own thinking on the issue, cit- ing the Portuguese colonialist Alboquerque’s reputation as a benefactor and deliverer of women for his prohibition of sati in Goa in the sixteenth century (see p. 195). By 1809 Southey had reached a remarkably hard-line position when he argued that while ‘There is no other country in which it is possible to make converts by compulsion … by an absurdity unparalleled in any other system, the religion of a Hindoo does not depend upon himself; it is something independent of his thoughts, words, actions, understanding, and volition, and he may be deprived of it by violence, as easily as of his purse or his wallet’ (QR, 1 (1809), p. 208). By thus dispelling Hinduism of its putative content and inhabiting its vocabulary and mythology, one could achieve a linguistic and metaphorical violence that would render the religion essentially no different from Christianity and in the end fully replaceable by the latter. The 1810 Kehama clearly presented itself as a means to this end. By rendering the Hindu mythology in terms of Christian allegory and thus disarming it of its virulence, Southey hoped in one stroke to redeem the grossness of Hindu literature and reclaim its fabular traditions for European consumption. Despite the strongly imperialistic nature of his outlook on India by the time of Kehama’s publication, Southey was in some ways anti-imperialistic in certain attitudes, particularly with regard to the slave trade, which he consistently opposed. In this, he was similar to many of the Evangelicals who were strong abolitionists. And like many of the abolitionists in sensibility Southey was capable of investing the colonial subject with a degree of dignity and pathos that was potentially sub- versive of imperialist domination based on notions of racial and cultural superiority. No doubt, his sympathetic depiction of Kailyal and Ladurlad were of this stamp, relocating abolitionist feeling in the context of Indian caste politics, and, in contrast, Kehama as an orientalized Napoleonic figure carries an indubi- 6 tably imperialistic aspect. The earliest drafts of the poem bring out Kehama’s

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colonizing ambitions powerfully with the opening depiction of an aswamedha, the horse sacrifice by which a king could assert his power on the basis of an equine whim. Kehama’s ambitions are so grandiose that he wishes to seize the throne of Indra, the King of Heaven himself, by offering a hundred such aswamedhas, according to a mythical prescription. Later versions of the poem reveal a shifting ideological slant when the mythical aswamedha is displaced in favour of the sati scene, refocusing the opening of the poem from an anti-imperialist scene to one that is more markedly anti-nativist and distinctly contemporary in its implications. From the beginning, Southey seems torn between the exoti- cism of his source material and a desire to familiarize the ‘extravagance’ of Indian mythology to his English readership. His notes set out to legitimize his extravagance and yet to show how moderate he is in comparison with his sources. Successive drafts of the poem show the character of Kailyal undergoing a radical transformation from her dangerously exoticized (and eroticized) portrait, bath- ing with a ‘favourite crocodile’ (Rush Rhees MS AS.727; see p. 274), to the more dutifully pious filial figure we are familiar with, of the published text. Southey’s foregrounded depictions of sati, of temple prostitution and of the fren- zied self-destruction of devotees at the Jaggarnath temple were all in the 1800s various causes célèbres of Hindu practices which the Evangelical missionaries in India were seeking to proscribe against the previous Company policy of non- interference with local customs. Whereas the official supporters of Hindu customs could be accused of being commercially motivated, the missionaries were attacked for being over-enthusiastic in their beliefs and inimical to the spirit of empire. Sati itself, the most memorable of Southey’s targets of attack in Kehama, was to be banned by a later governor-general, William Bentinck, only in 1829, after several editions of Kehama had appeared; but before the final version in 1838.

Reception

Pre-publication Readership The issue of Kehama’s reception was deeply troubling to Southey almost before it was begun. The publication in 1801 of Thalaba the Destroyer, Southey’s other great oriental venture, was clearly going to be an indicator of Kehama’s success. Madoc’s reception in 1805 was yet another factor that would undoubtedly weigh heavily. The unsigned Edinburgh Review notice in 1801 by Francis Jeffrey of Thalaba, perhaps the earliest sign that Southey received of a possible reaction from British reviewers, however, was less than kind. It famously identified Southey as one of the chief champions of a ‘sect’ of poets, the ‘Lake poets’, and proceeded to pour scorn on Thalaba, as ‘a jumble of all the measures that are known in English poetry’ and as ‘consist[ing] altogether of the most wild and extravagant fictions’ (ER, 1 (1802), pp. 72, 75). In a letter of 21 December

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1802, while providing early drafts of Kehama to his friend Grosvenor Bedford, Southey recorded his anger and dismay at this influential magazine’s reception: Have you seen the Scotch Review of Thalaba? Of which is good what is good is not about Thalaba, & what is about Thalaba is not good. The critic says there is no invention in Thalaba. Now Grosvenor I will tell you what I think of the Critic – to speak mildly of him – as one always should in these cases – he is a damned lying Scotch son of a bitch (Harvard MS BMS 265.1). Southey’s early letters to Bedford containing early drafts of Kehama clearly looked to Bedford for support and encouragement at a time when Southey himself was depressed at the reception of Thalaba. However, Bedford, despite agreeing heartily at once with Southey before reading the review himself, went on slightly later, when he did come across the review, to rather dampen Southey’s indignation: I have seen the Scotch review – hmm – it is very clever – nay don’t rave – … – You may see why he says Thalaba has little invention – your eager- ness to justify yourself for xxx your allusions in inserting so many notes has laid you open to the charge (Bodleian MS Eng Letters D 50). Bedford’s correspondence with Southey was highly instrumental in the early development – and, ultimately, non-development – of the poem. Southey provided Bedford with some of the earliest drafts, and clearly sought his frank opinion on a number of points. Bedford in turn responded in detail, pronounc- ing freely on matters of grammar, diction and even seeking to correct Southey’s orientalist pretensions. From the beginning however, Bedford’s responses were carping and unsympathetic, arguing with Southey’s logic and grammar, belittling his imagery, complaining of the poem’s ‘vicious innovation’, ridiculing the exotic names, challenging Southey’s orientalist expertise by reference to other authorities, and even offering his own verses to redeem Southey’s perceived failures. As late as 17 June 1806, Southey wrote to Bedford to say that his own ‘likings and dislikings’ to the poem were ‘equally divided’, plaintively adding that it needed ‘somebody’s encouragement to settle the balance’ (L&C, Vol. III, p. 44). However, Bedford’s concerns for the poem’s reception were shared by several of Southey’s other trusted friends such as Charles Wynn and William Taylor – although others, such as Richard Sharpe and Peter Elmsley, were more favourably inclined. In the end Southey explained his decision to publish Kehama as the result of his hurt pride when Walter Savage Landor offered to pay for the printing, although clearly Southey himself had found the work difficult to completely abandon.

Public Reception Kehama’s reception, like that accorded to much of Southey’s work, was one of a severely qualified admission of talent. While many critics praised Southey’s vivid or dazzling descriptive powers, the majority found fault with the poem’s ‘wild-

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ness’ or ‘extravagance’ or ‘folly’, each of these terms deriving clearly from the oriental subject matter which was associated explicitly with these qualities. Other points of regular difficulty included the poem’s misplaced religious tendencies and its unusual versification. The Monthly Mirror for instance is typical in prais- ing Southey’s industry and talent and quoting ‘favourable specimens of the poet’s genius’ but finally going on to lambaste Southey for his lack of judgement in choosing such an abstruse subject matter as the Hindu mythology which was so unknown to English readers: We are astounded by the workings of the bard’s vivid descriptions of sur- rounding objects, his fertile fancy and his potent imagery, but for those who put all this into action, his gods, they never appear but to excite our ridicule and contempt … we verily believe that Mr Southey will never acquire all the fame, which his poem is capable of conferring … until ‘The Curse of Kehama’ be translated into Hindoostanee (TMM, 2nd series, 9 (1811), pp. 134–5). Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review predictably chastises Southey for his ‘excessive love of the marvellous and gigantic’ which he sees as an instance of Southey’s ‘Childishness’. He uses the 1810 Preface to comment adversely on the foundation of the poem, upon the ‘revolting peculiarity of the Hindu faith’ that penances and prayers are able to achieve certain powers for worshippers inde- pendently of their intentions or motives. Although Jeffrey finds much to admire in Southey’s descriptive abilities he sees the effect of the ‘extravagant fictions [as] always debasing and unpleasant’. Southey’s metrical experiments are dismissed as ‘tottering and slovenly ’. On the whole, despite acknowledging that ‘Mr Southey is gifted with powers of fancy and of expression beyond almost any individual of his age’, Jeffrey concludes that Kehama is to be reprobated ‘with a severity pro- portioned to the mischief they occasion’ (ER, 17 (1811), pp. 429–65). The reviewer for The Critical Review finds the poem ‘dazzling’ but goes on to add that ‘it is the false blaze of enchantment, not the steady radiance of truth and nature’. The reviewer turns Southey’s criticism of ‘the Hindoo fables’ for ‘the constant mistake of bulk for sublimity’ against the poem itself. He finds fault with Southey’s ‘excessively heavy’ versification and offers his review as a proper indication of ‘how great a poet Mr Southey might be, were the single gift of judg- ment to be added to the qualities which he undoubtedly possesses’ (TCR, 22 (1811), pp. 244, 246, 250). The British Critic is similarly unflattering when it declares: Was ever extravagance equal to all this? and how must that understanding be constructed, which can delight to copy, invent, or work upon such strange and incongruous fictions? Yet it is certain that a wonderful power of imagination, and force of poetical description is displayed in all this machinery.

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The only persons by whom Kehama may be ‘received with general applause’ a footnote suggests tauntingly is by those ‘who wish to study the Hindoo mythology’ (BC, 39 (1812), pp. 279, 282). Ranged against these largely unsympathetic reviews are a smaller number of predominantly favourable reviews as well, such as those in the Quarterly Review, the Monthly Magazine, and the Literary Panorama. An apparently useful sup- porter was Sir Walter Scott whose review of Kehama (perhaps assisted by Bedford) was published in the Quarterly Review. Anticipating the charges of a lack of imagination, of immorality, and of injudicious poetical innovation, Scott asserted these very qualities in no uncertain terms. However, Scott’s insistence that the edification of the poem was based on the Hindu religion which he described in positive terms, echoing the preface to William Jones’s ‘Hymn to Lacshmi’, ‘as regulating the religious belief and moral practice of millions whom treaty or conquest has united to the British empire’ was clearly discomfiting to Southey. A letter of Southey’s to Bedford, 1 January 1811, describes Scott’s review as ‘an unlucky interference’ and suggests that Bedford ‘interpolate[s] it with one paragraph, written to point out the moral grandeur of the fable, and how it becomes of universal interest and application, founded as it is upon a particular superstition’ (NL, Vol. II, p. 1). Despite Scott’s misguiding emphasis, from Southey’s point of view, on the poem’s Hindu mythology as an appropriate basis for British reading interest, his was certainly among the most sympathetic and detailed early reviews of Kehama to appear in print. Southey’s fears regarding the reception of his poem were perhaps most strongly realized in the review by John Foster in the Eclectic Review. As a Baptist minister himself, Foster would have been aware of Southey’s unflattering remarks on the Baptist missionaries in earlier years, and was disturbed by the challenge that he saw the poem mounting to Christianity: the present fiction, so far and so long as the force of poetry (which the poet would have augmented indefinitely if he could) can render the illu- sion prevalent on the mind, is not only the making void of the true religion, and the substitution of another and a vile theology in its place; it is no less than the substitution of a positive and notorious system of paganism. It vacates the eternal throne, not only in order to raise thither an imaginary deity, but absolutely to elevate Seeva, the adored abomina- tion of the Hindoos. Like many of the Evangelicals, Foster is deeply critical about the nature of empire and satirizes the sense of pride in British dominion that results in a venture such as Kehama: It was a thing not to be endured, that, while we are as proud as Kehama of possessing India, we should not be able to bring to the augmentation of our national splendour that which India itself deems its highest glory, its mythology. And since the attempt was to be made, we should be very glad that it has been made by a poet, whose failure will be a permanent

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proof and monument of the utter desperateness of the undertaking (TER, 7 (1811), pp. 347, 349). Foster’s surety regarding the sufficiency of Christian revelation and his ambiva- lence to empire mocks the rather uneasy linkage between the interests of empire and the support for Christian missionary activity in India that Southey attempted to synthesize in his work.

Post-publication Reception to the Present In spite of Southey’s anxieties regarding the poem, Kehama was in fact moderately successful during Southey’s lifetime, achieving four further editions in 1811, 1812, 1818 and 1838. Southey published extracts from his work in various miscellanies and annual registers of the day. The lines from X.150–71 were published as ‘Love’ in English Minstrelsy: Being a Selection of Fugitive Poetry from the Best English Authors, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1810), Vol. II, pp. 236–7, and The Edinburgh Annual Register for 1808, 1 (1810), p. xxxi – although Southey himself dismissed the piece as ‘clap-trap’ to Bedford and declared to Scott, while offering it for publication in the English Minstrelsy, that he was ‘disposed to strike it out of the poem, because tho most people would be likely to think it the pret- tiest thing there, it does not seem to me sufficiently in keeping’ (NL, Vol. I, pp. 488, 501; see also L&C, Vol. III, p. 205 for Southey’s self-distancing from Bed- ford’s appreciation of the passage). And I.150–200 was published as ‘Burning of an Hindoo Woman’ in the Asiatic Annual Register for 1809 (1811), pp. 480–1. The American edition of Kehama published by David Longworth (New York, 1811) was well distributed though there is no evidence to suggest that Southey had a hand in its text. Kehama was reprinted several times thereafter in the nineteenth century (1853, 1872 and 1888) retaining a number of admirers at all times. Among the earliest enthusiasts was the young Shelley who responded strongly to the radical elements in Southey’s poem and visited Southey in the Lake District in 1811, but was apparently puzzled by the now conservative Southey’s insistence that the three statues in Books XXIII and XXIV of Kehama 7 were ‘to be contemplated with republican feelings – but not in this age’. Ye t another contemporary writer who was influenced by Kehama was William Beck- ford, whose copy of the 1810 edition with his marginal notes shows that 8 Beckford read Kehama closely and was attracted by its oriental imagery. Other literary admirers in the nineteenth century included Henry Crabb Robinson who preferred it to both Thalaba and Madoc; Charles Lamb who testified to the ‘wonder-workings of Kehama’ and ‘its power, which I confess with trembling’; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who declared that ‘the moral grandeur rises above the bril- liance of the colouring and the boldness and novelty of the machinery’; and 9 Cardinal Newman who as a boy had ‘got it well nigh by heart’. Coleridge’s favourable comments on Southey and on Kehama in his Biographia Literaria (1817), however, conceal an insidious strain of envy and subversiveness with regard to his attitude to Southey, an attitude that would prove most damaging to

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Southey’s reputation during the canonical years of High Romanticism. John Payne Collier, for instance, recorded Coleridge’s very characteristic comment on 10 Kehama as ‘a work of great talent, but not so much genius’. Yet Coleridge himself was deeply influenced by the imagery and versification of Kehama, most obviously so in his far more celebrated ‘Kubla Khan’, as Mark Storey has pointed 11 out. On the whole, Southey’s epic was deeply influential on writings on and attitudes to India during the nineteenth century. Bishop Heber’s 1828 Narrative of a Journey Through the Upper Provinces of India quotes Kehama at several points, implicitly authenticating Southey’s Indology and using Southey’s work – itself drawn from earlier travel narratives – as a perspectival device in viewing Hindu 12 customs. Towards the end of the century the influential critic George Saints- bury in a chapter on Southey declared Kehama to be ‘the greatest thing by far 13 that Southey did’. The twentieth century saw the Oxford edition of Southey’s poems edited by Maurice Fitzgerald published in 1909; this edition was widely distributed and served as the twentieth century’s most popular edition of Kehama. Fitzgerald, however, chose to omit all Southey’s notes, an editorial choice that effectively separated Southey’s poetry from his historical and antiquarian scholarship for much of Southey’s twentieth-century critical readership. Recent interest in orientalism sparked by Said’s seminal work of 1978 has redis- covered Southey’s orientalist epics and reengaged critical scholarship 14 productively. However, Southey’s manuscripts of the poem and the scholarship of his notes to the poem have hardly been touched upon in modern scholarship. This edition hopes to carry scholarship forward to a new understanding of the complexities of Kehama’s textual history and of Southey’s scholarship, reception and continuing significance to our age.

Southey’s Notes

The notes contain a profusion of eastern learning, and the massive blocks which Mr. Southey has selected as specimens of Bramanical poetry and mythology, give us at once an idea of the immense quarries, in which the author must have laboured, and of the taste, skill, aud [sic] labour necessary to fashion such unwieldy materials into the beautiful forms which they exhibit in the text (QR, 5 (1811), p. 61). Thus Walter Scott’s review of Kehama in the Quarterly Review, echoing the respectful though disengaged tone of many commentators on Southey’s poem. Typically Southey regards his orientalist source material very much in the light of an orange to be squeezed for his own use. Once Picart is ‘gutted’ and the details that he needs are transcribed, he proceeds to create his own work, which he considers will overcome the grossness of his source material. Southey’s letter of 27 September 1809 to Walter Savage Landor describes his own notes rather proudly as ‘copious, & sufficiently dull: I give them as specimens of the ore, that the skill

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of the refiner may be understood’ (Warter, Vol. II, p. 202). This is entirely consistent with his earlier remark in the notes to Thalaba (1801) that the Arabian Nights were ‘abound[ing] with genius’ purely on account of their having ‘lost their metaphorical rubbish in passing through the filter of a French translation’ (see Vol. 3, p. 194). The notes to Kehama are often derisive of the very sources that they offer in accompaniment to the poem. Yet it has to be remembered that Southey’s work is produced in a climate of commonly open hostility and racism regarding all things oriental or Indian. Southey’s curiously defensive tone needs to be placed within this context of readerly antipathy to the East. Quoting from William Carey’s translation of the great epic of the Ramayana, Southey offers his material as an anticipatory defence against the accusations of extravagance which he feels sure to invoke among readers and critics: ‘The reader will be less disposed to condemn the fictions of Kehama as extravagant, when he compares them with this genuine specimen of Hindoo fable’ (p. 225). Yet, other notes placed without authorial comment include extensive quotations from Charles Wilkins’s translation of the Bhagvat-Geeta (1785), which was a seminal orientalist text for early Romanticism and an acknowledged influence on the other Lake 15 poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Despite the open belligerence of some of the notes, many of them clearly convey a favourable though exoticised impression of Indian culture, both in its mythological and its contemporary aspects. Perhaps the most striking feature of Southey’s selection of source material for his notes to Kehama is the extraordinarily diverse nature of their ideological range. While some of his authorities – such as those on sati and aswamedha – are clearly unsympathetic to Hindu practices and beliefs, others are far more positive in their inclination, and Southey often quotes these implicitly in justification of his own favourable portraits of such characters as Kailyal and Ladurlad and of some of the gods of Hindu mythology such as ‘Pollear’ (Ganesha) or the goddess of pariahs, ‘Marriatally’. Not only do the notes describe in detail Indian exotica and strange customs, but they also testify doctrinally to coincidences between Christian and Hindu beliefs on certain points. Thus the phrase ‘undying as I am’ (II.24) from Arvalan’s lips, apparently affirming the Christian belief in the immortality of the soul, is justified by reference in the notes to a quotation from the Bhagvat-Geeta, the classic text for asserting an analogous relationship between Christianity and Hinduism. Other touches indicate a more positive view of certain aspects of Hindu culture. In this, he may have been influenced by the work by Francis Wilford, An Essay on the Sacred Isles in the West (1808) which argued that the mythological Sacred Isles of the Hindus were probably the Brit- ish Isles. Southey reviewed Wilford’s work favourably (AR, 4 (1808), pp. 643– 54) and quoted extensively from his writings in his notes to Kehama. Marri- atally’s exclusive domain as the goddess of pariahs separates her crucially from Brahminical Hinduism and her benevolent characteristics would seem to express, in a displaced form, Southey’s earlier radical and anti-institutional tendencies as a critic of church and state. Notwithstanding Southey’s explicitly demeaning comments on Hinduism in his Preface and elsewhere through the text of Kehama, his

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narrative and his deployment of Indian source materials have often been seen as 16 implicitly sympathetic to his subject matter. Despite the respect they have earned, Southey’s notes have remained (like Hopkins’s Wreck of the Deutchshland) the ‘dragon in the gate’ of his poetry, para- doxically a stumbling block to scholarly engagement with his work. Southey recorded his sources scrupulously, but unfortunately not very consistently or pre- cisely. The parading of sources was clearly designed to silence critics and not necessarily to dispatch his readers in the direction of orientalist scholarship. While in many cases one can expect to find his source material down to the page numbers, in other cases it is unclear which author or text he is referring to. The present edition hopes to make a major contribution to the future scholarship of Southey’s orientalist sources by tracking down and indicating in a consistent bibliographical format the exact location of much of Southey’s source material. Since, understandably, a few of Southey’s references remain untraced and it is difficult in most other cases to ascertain the precise edition he used, his own citations have been left intact as a clue to his use of sources for the benefit of future researchers. Further editorial comments on the authorship and nature of these sources are provided in the Explanatory Notes as a lead into this vast ‘profusion of eastern learning’.

Extant Manuscripts of The Curse of Kehama

The extraordinarily lengthy gestation period of The Curse of Kehama for a poet as efficient as Southey at producing text, and the extent to which he continued to work on the poem for nearly a decade, has resulted in a particularly complex manuscript history for the poem. Southey seems to have laid the poem to rest for long periods, but he also constantly returned to the text and revised it each time. His active reviewing of Indological material and orientalia throughout are further evidences of his continuous engagement and interest in the subject of the poem. There are four full text, or nearly complete, manuscripts of the poem. These longer manuscripts (from the Bodleian Library, the National Art Library, the British Library and the Beinecke Library respectively) are described below; all substantive variants in these are recorded in the textual notes at the foot of the page.

Bodleian Library, Eng Poet E.86 Location: Bodleian Library, Oxford University Description: This is a bound notebook of 295 folios. The first few folios contain handwritten notes and scraps pasted in, evidently by J. W. Warter, the editor of Southey’s Commonplace Book (who purchased the manuscript), which are transcribed in the Appendix. The manuscript is dated periodically by Southey, commencing on 28 May 1806 and ending on 25 November 1809 at Keswick.

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Most leaves are written on recto sides only; in some cases Southey makes corrections or additions to the facing page in the verso of the previous folio. The notebook bears Southey’s bookplate on the inside cover. In this manuscript version of the poem Southey consistently spells ‘Kailyal’ as ‘Kalyal’, ‘Nealliny’ as ‘Nealline’, and ‘Marriataly’ as ‘Mariatale’. These variant forms are not listed below unless concurrently with other noteworthy variants. Although Bodleian MS Eng. Poet E.86 provides a text that is closer to the 1810 version of Kehama than the British Library MS Add. 36485, approximating most closely to Bei- necke MS Gen MSS 298, it offers a number of cancelled passages that pre-date the former. Several of these cancelled passages are written on the facing verso for lack of space; in such cases the practice has been to include them as insertions using the format: { }. Southey apparently goes back to an earlier draft of the poem which is contained in the notebook in order to revise it for publication, though he had already completed the intermediate British Library manuscript version of the poem. Hence this peculiarly complex manuscript offers both earlier and later versions of the text than the British Library manuscript. An important feature of this manuscript is the recording of dates by Southey usually at the beginning and/or end of each book (dates 1 and 2 respectively), and a table in Southey’s hand in the inside of the back cover, indicating the linear total of each book in the two versions that the manuscript records. Southey kept an accurate running total of both versions (though the final figure of 5,246 is rounded up to 5,250). These details which provide a useful chart of the poem’s composition are brought together in the table below.

Book Date 1 Date 2 1st 2nd Total 1 Total 2 No. count count I 28 May 1806 – 174 191 – – II – – 177 181 – – III – – 113 138 – – IV – – 122 139 – – V – – 173 227 – – VI – – 151 181 910 1057 VII 17 May 1808 – 288 326 – – VIII 27 May 1808 – 165 175 – – IX 14 June 1808 11 July 1808 161 186 – – X – 10 Aug. 1808 358 356 1882 2100 XI 11 Aug. 1808 6 Oct. 1808 272 280 – – XII 18/19 Oct.1808 24 Oct. 1808 131 131 – – XIII 25 Oct. 1808 8 Nov. 1808 142 271 XIV 9 Nov. 1808 – 234 235 2661 3017 XV 24 Nov. 1808 11 Dec. 1808 226 225 – – XVI 13 Dec. 1808 4 Mar. 1809 359 359 – – XVII 5 Mar. 1809 13 Mar. 1809 171 171 – –

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XVIII 14 Mar. 1809 25 Mar. 1809 145 – 3562 3917 XIX 8 May 1809 17 May 1809 221 219 – – XX 17 May 1809 – 114 – – – XXI 13 Sept. 1809 29 Sept. 1809 157 – – – XXII 11 Oct. 1809 2 Nov. 1809 222 249 4276 XXIII 3 Nov. 1809 20 Nov. 1809 288 289 – – XXIV 20 Nov. 1809 25 Nov. 1809 280 301 4844 5250

In the table above, Southey’s normal use of a day-date format (occasionally punctuated by years) has been used to verify and reconstruct the full date including year. 18 October (1808) is recorded as a Wednesday by Southey; he must have meant either Tuesday 18 or Wednesday 19 of that year from the evidence of the other dates. No other adjustments are made to Southey’s recording of data. Measurements: 189 mm x 110 mm This manuscript is named as the ‘Bodleian MS’ in the list of variants below the text.

National Art Library (Great Britain), Forster Manuscript 480.G.31 Location: National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Description: This was the (partially autograph) manuscript version sent in portions by Southey to Walter Savage Landor in Bath. The manuscript comprises 29 folios, closely written on both sides, bound together in a single volume with a manuscript of ‘Pelayo’ (later Roderick, the Last of the Goths). The volume carries a bookplate of John Forster (1812–76; DNB), the friend of Landor, Carlyle and Dickens, whose collection of manuscripts and books now forms one of the major special collections of the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Books VII–XXIV of the manuscript are written in Southey’s hand. The work was evidently sent to Landor in four portions. The first of these is postmarked from Warwick; the second and third from Keswick; and final portion does not include a postmark. The first ends with Book XV, dated 14 December 1808 and is postmarked 17 December 1808. Book XIX, end-dated 13 July 1809, ends with a note from Southey to Landor: ‘ more sections will conclude the poem & I expected to have finished them six weeks ago: but since my mind has been in a right state my body has not […]. About half the next section however is written, & a weeks work, as soon as I get a weeks comfort will carry me triumphantly to the end’. Book XXI is end-dated 30 September [1809]. The final portion is undated. The manuscript represents a version of the poem prior to the British Library manuscript but later than the pre-cancellation version of the Bod- leian manuscript. Southey’s scribe for books I–VI places the date of 28 May 1806 at the head of the manuscript, evidently transcribing the date at the start of the Bodleian manuscript. It would appear then that Southey used the Bodleian manuscript as a basis for producing this draft of the poem though without the benefit of the later cancellations and revisions that the Bodleian manuscript contains. The opening folio bears the title, The Curse of Kehama, but there are no xxiii Southey 4-intro.fm Page xxiv Wednesday, March 31, 2004 5:09 PM

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mottos or epigraphs included. Kailyal and Marriataly are spelt Kalyal and Mari- atale consistently throughout the manuscript, although these changes in spellings are not specifically noted as variants unless in the context of other changes. Measurements: 23 x 35.3 cm Watermarks: various; f. 2 dated 1804; f.18 dated 1806 Dates: [November?]/ December 1808–[December?] 1809 No. of folios: 29 This manuscript is named ‘NAL MS’ in the list of variants below the text.

British Library, Add. MS 36485 Location: British Library, London. Description: This autograph manuscript comprises 338 folios bound in the form of a notebook (brown boards, gilt lettering) with Southey’s bookplates. A note on f. 337 by the poet’s brother, Capt. Thomas Southey, declares that the manuscript was ‘sent sheet by sheet in letters’ to him while he was ‘on board His Majesty’s Dreadnought off the coast of France in 1809’. Folio 2 carries the epigraph ‘Curses are like young chicken, … they always come home to roost’ attributed here to ‘Uncle William’ (see note 1 on p. 395 for details regarding Southey’s ‘translation’ of the quotation into Greek and his later concealment of the source). Folio 3 carries the second epigraph facing the opening page of text: ‘I will for no mans pleasure/ Change a syllable or measure./ Pedants shall not tie my strains/ To our antique Poets veins,/ Being born as free as these/ I will sing as I shall please’ attributed to ‘Wither’ (see note 12 on p. 396 for details of the source). The consistent spellings in this manuscript of Nealliny as Nealline, Kailyal as Kalyal and Marri- ataly as Mariatale are not noted unless alongside other changes. Measurements: 8.5 x 10.7 cm This manuscript is named as ‘BL Add. MS’ in the list of variants below the text.

Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 298 Location: Beinecke Library, Yale University. Description: This autograph manuscript of c. 1809–10 represents the closest approximation to the printed version available and was evidently the basis for the printer’s copy. Some passages are however notably different from the printed version of 1810 and probably indicate late corrections at proof stage. In particular lines 145–67 and 178–83 of Book XIV are later additions to the text and the second of these alterations seems designed to retain the pagination of the page proofs since the expansion of text that it achieves compensates for the number of lines lost with the first. The manuscript lacks Books XXII and XXIV, evidently for lack of space in the notebook. Ten blank sheets follow Book XXI (insufficient for the long Book XXII) and only two blank sheets remain after Book XXIII. The name of Nealliny is spelt consistently as Nealline in the manuscript and is not recorded as a variant in each case. The manuscript represents the last known autograph version of the poem and contains several cancelled and variant pas-

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sages of interest throughout. Regarding the cancelled passage at XVI.211, Southey wrote to Landor on 26 March 1810, while the volume was ‘half printed’, ‘I want to get rid of the Snake in the Water Chambers, which is neither well conceived nor well written’ (NL, Vol. I, p. 533). The text is written on 180 leaves and bound in the form of a notebook. The catalogue describes the binding as ‘full blue-green contemporary straight-grain morocco, [with] elaborately gilt and blind tooled borders on the sides and inner edges, untrimmed; somewhat rubbed.’ The manuscript was acquired by the Bei- necke Library in 1954; it has bookplates of James Cowan, Roderick Terry and Chauncey Brewster Tinker. This manuscript is named as ‘Beinecke MS’ in the list of variants below the text. Size: Octavo Apart from these four major manuscripts, there are in addition a number of fragments and drafts relating to the poem. These are described and fully transcribed in the section devoted to transcripts in the following order: ‘The Curse of Keradou’ (Rush Rhees Library, Southey Papers AS727). This provides the first substantial drafts and notes of the poem, written between [early May] 1801 and 14 December [1802]. Wisbech and Fenland Museum, Townshend Collection VII.84–5. This is an early fragment of Kehama, corresponding most closely to the 1801 version, though possibly reworked by Southey at a later date. Houghton Library, bMS Eng 265.1, files 3, 5, 8–11. These are a series of autograph letters between 8 October 1802 and 27 May 1803 to Bedford providing draft text and notes for Kehama. Houghton Library, fMS Eng 265.4. This is a fragment of Kehama sent to William Taylor dated 27 June 18[06] to 8 July [1806]. National Library of Wales, NLW 4819E, ff. 12–21. These are drafts of books VII and VIII sent to Charles W. W. Wynn in October 1808, as well as one of Book I which evidently represents a much earlier version of the text also sent to Wynn. Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum Library, 2001.71.59. This contains fragments of Books I and IV, dated 29 December 1808, and sent to Anna Seward. The conventions for manuscript transcription are provided in Vol. 1 of this edition. A few peculiarities of Southey’s manuscripts may need explanation. Occasionally Southey rearranges the words on the page of his manuscript, using superscripted numerals or alphabets to indicate the new order intended without cancelling his words. These are represented in the same form as Southey provided, using superscripted numerals/alphabets to indicate the new order 2 1 intended. Thus, ‘ The funeral song, the dance of sacrifice’ in the BL Add. MS becomes subsequently: ‘The dance of sacrifice! the funeral song!’ (X.92). In his manuscripts, Southey does not seem to distinguish between two forms of amper-

sand: ‘ ’& and ‘&’ and uses both indifferently; for convenience both these forms have been standardized as ‘&’ by the editor. Southey’s use of two periods instead of the conventional three to indicate an ellipsis has been standardized throughout

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to three. Southey had the habit of indicating alternative phrases (with one reading often written in above the other) without apparently making a choice until later in the editorial process. Such alternative readings are indicated by the editor by the use of insertion marks. Where manuscript insertions by Southey corre- spond to the copy text without variation, this is indicated by the use of three periods within square brackets thus […].

Textual History and Copy Text

Returning from Grasmere to Keswick on 21 December 1810, Southey found the parcel containing the first edition of Kehama waiting for him. ‘I look upon cut- ting open the leaves of the first copy of his own book to be the consummation of an author’s happiness’, he wrote the next day to Bedford. Always the professional man of letters, Southey at once set about dissociating himself from any errors and advising Bedford on how he might notice the work in a review: ‘I am sorry to see that a number of errors have crept into the printing since I corrected the press, and which I am certain did not exist at that time. In several instances two paragraphs are printed as one, where there was a natural and necessary division. Pray notice the fashion of the typography, and complain that the first two or three sheets are not correct in this respect. It is a great improvement and any public mention of it in this way will go far towards establishing it’ (NL, Vol. I, pp. 547–8). Southey’s typographical innovation was to centre each line of verse individually – as opposed to the conventional practice of staggered left margins (often used in Pindaric odes and other verse forms with lines of unequal length) which had been his practice in the first edition of Thalaba. The new method, as he explained to Scott, ‘has the merit of applying a principle of typographical regularity to irregular verse’ (NL, Vol. I, p. 550). Southey’s use of rhymes together with irregular verse was explicitly intended to match the wildness of his subject matter (see especially L&C, Vol. III, p. 145), but the introduction of a principle of regularity would possibly save him from the kind of criticism that Jeffrey had inflicted on Thalaba. The printer however did not at once understand Southey’s instructions and the first few pages were somewhat raggedly arranged. Centring the lines was of course a more difficult task with hand-set presses than with today’s computerized processes of setting, and despite his printer’s improvement over the course of the work, the centring was clearly more uneven throughout than a modern printing or even a linotype would be able to achieve. While Southey’s manuscripts are somewhat uneven in the centring that they achieve (the idea of course was a late development), this edition follows the practice of centring the poetry text throughout. Similarly, for the sake of consistency, this edition designates as ‘books’ what Southey inconsistently referred to as ‘sections’ or ‘books’ (he even considered ‘canto’, ‘scene’, ‘chapter’, ‘song’, ‘fit’, ‘rhapsody’, ‘part’ and ‘canticle’ as alternatives; see Houghton Library bMS 265.1, File 6).

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Despite the reservations expressed by Southey, the first edition of 1810 was perhaps the most carefully overseen and corrected of the various editions of the poem until the final version which Southey prepared for his collected poetical works in 1838. While the first edition was handsomely printed in a single volume in quarto, the later editions, 1811, 1812 and 1818 appear in two volumes, duodecimo, and the 1838 edition appears as volume 8 of The Poetical Works of Robert Southey in duodecimo. The 1811 edition was something of a disaster in its preliminary pages, omitting the epigraph from Wither and ‘the brief explanation of mythological names’ promised in the Preface, while including by mistake a dedication to Edith from 1797 and the Preface to Joan of Arc. Other than these clearly unintended alterations in the 1811 edition, the text remained relatively stable until 1838. The 1838 edition however introduces a number of fairly sig- nificant textual changes including the addition of four new notes and the omission of three notes previously included in all the earlier editions. The new notes indicate Southey’s continuing interest in Orientalist literature and provide some responses to criticisms of Kehama encountered by him. The omitted notes include some of the most affirmatory of Southey’s quotations of Orientalist writings, linking Biblical and Hindu mythologies and quoting the Bhagvat-Geeta in an evidently favourable light, though it is difficult to determine whether the omission in 1838 was a deliberate one or not on Southey’s part. These alterations are recorded among the variants indicated below the text in the present edition. The 1838 edition also introduces two engravings by the brothers Edward and William Finden on the title page and facing verso respectively, adding an antiquarian gloss to the work. ‘The Three Pagodas’ (verso) are the shore temples of Mamallapuram near Chennai, and the ‘Black Pagoda’ (title page) is the Temple Chariot of the Sun God at Konark in Orissa. The day/night contrast- ing images are associated with the legends of ‘Baly’ and ‘Jaga-Naut’ respectively, suggesting the benign and ominous aspects of Hindu mythology in Kehama. Regrettably these illustrative additions though substantive have not been included with the present edition on account of practical difficulties of reproduction. The present edition uses 1810 as its copy text and records all verbal variants between 1810 and 1838. ‘Accidentals’ – differences in punctuation and spelling – are however not recorded since Southey did not punctuate his manuscripts carefully and clearly expected the printer to supply appropriate punctuation. With regard to Southey’s prose notes to the poem, it is evident that Southey did not correct these as painstakingly as his poetic text. A number of small though evident errors – for instance, his note to ‘Azyoruca’ (XXIII.268) mistakenly transcribing ‘tapasya’ (penance) from his source as ‘taparya’ – remains uncorrected from 1810 until the 1838 edition. Hence the present edition records only signif- icant variants (i.e., the inclusion or exclusion of various notes in 1838) and does not seek to record lesser variants introduced unwittingly by the publisher in each edition. Southey prefaced each note with a phrase or quotation from his text. This format has been followed here, although lengthy quotations have been

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abbreviated to first and last word, separated by an ellipsis (…). The stanza breaks that Southey complains were missing from 1810 are somewhat difficult to establish. The later editions introduce various new stanza breaks, not always consistently. A further complication in determining stanza breaks resides in the problem presented by page endings in 1810, which may or may not have been intended as stanza breaks. As a general rule for the sake of consistency, this edition follows the 1810 edition despite Southey’s complaints in this respect, and only uses the 1838 edition to determine end-of-page stanza breaks from 1810 that are otherwise indeterminate. These are indicated on the page by the introduction of a parenthetical indication thus: [], with a textual note reading ‘1810 page break; 1838 stanza break’. The textual notes also record other stanza breaks from 1838 and from manuscript sources should the scholar wish to note these. The only other intervention from the editor is to supply line numbers against the poetic text. From 1812 Southey began to number the stanzas of his poem, but these numbers did not remain consistent as the text went through the remaining editions. As a more accurate form of reference, we have introduced line numbering throughout. These line numbers are also used instead of the more approximate page numbers (or, in later editions, stanza numbers) that Southey provided while referring to various passages from the poem in his notes.

Notes

1. Robert Southey, Vindiciæ Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ: Letters to Charles Butler Comprising Essays on the Romish Religion and Vindicating the Book of the Church (London, 1826), p. 7. 2. Possibly RS refers to Hindustani; it seems unlikely that he is referring to the classical language of Sanskrit. The ‘Vedams’ (or Vedas) that he wished to translate/ have translated were in Sanskrit. 3. For a good account of the ‘Vellore Mutiny’ and the pamphlet war that it unleashed, see David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance (Berke- ley, 1969) pp. 136–44. 4. Charles Stuart, Vindication of the Hindoos, by a Bengal Officer (London, 1808) p. 97. Stuart refutes Buchanan’s view of the degeneracy of modern Hindus and quotes extensively from William Jones’s (and other) translations of Hindu texts to assert the wisdom of Hindu beliefs and customs. 5. More specifically, Southey’s later wariness reflects the debate between G. S. Fra- ser and Thomas Maurice on the appropriateness of comparing the Christian and Hindu Trinities. See Nigel Leask’s essay, ‘Mythology’ in Iain McCalman (ed.), An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776–1832 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 342–3. 6. The ‘Almighty Rajah’ Kehama was explicitly imagined as an oriental version of Napoleon himself. RS wrote to GCB, 20 May 1803, providing a manuscript draft of the first part of Book III which he describes as ‘a good sketch of the gen-

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eral state of the Universe in consequence of the Eastern Bonapartes proceedings’ (Harvard MS bMS Eng 265.1). 7. Frederick L. Jones (ed.), Collected Letters of P.B. Shelley, 2 vols (Oxford, 1964), I, pp. 154–5. Nigel Leask has dealt interestingly with RS’s influence on Shelley through TCK; see his British Romantic Writers and the East (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 96–7, 148–51. 8. Beckford’s copy of TCK is located at the Beinecke Library, Yale (call number: Beckford 362). 9. Quoted in Madden, pp. 159, 187, 259 and 422. 10. See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ta b l e Ta l k , 2 vols, ed. Carl Woodring (Princeton, 1990), Vol. II, p. 326. 11. See Mark Storey, Robert Southey: A Life (Oxford, 1997), p. 205. 12. Reginald Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India, 2 vols (London, 1828), Vol. I, pp. 57–8, 76. Describing a religious procession, Heber quotes (apparently from memory) from Book XIV, ll. 89–92; at another point he describes a banian tree in similar terms to those of Book XIII, adding, ‘I should exult, in such a scene, to collect a Christian congregation’ (Vol. II, p. 117). On Heber’s imaginative use of Southey in ‘shaping his apostolic mission in India into a moral unity’, see Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing (Oxford, 2002), pp. 189–91. 13. George Saintsbury, Essays in English Literature, 1780–1860: Second Series (Lon- don, 1895) p. 26. 14. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). For some examples of recent ‘postcolonial’ criticism on TCK, see Javed Majeed’s interesting chapter on ‘Southey and the Oriental Renaissance’ in his Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford, 1992), pp. 47-86; Leask, pp. 95–8 and passim; David Neff, ‘Hostages to Empire: The Anglo-Indian Problem in Frankenstein, The Curse of Kehama, and The Missionary’, ERR, 8 (1997), pp. 386–408; and Balachandra Rajan, ‘Monstrous Mythologies: Southey and The Curse of Kehama’, ERR, 9 (1998), pp. 201–16. 15. For a recent critical study of the Bhagvat-Geeta’s influence on romanticism – – including RS in TCK, see K.G. Srivastava, Bhagavad-Gl ta and the English Romantic Movement: A Study in Influence (New Delhi, 2002). 16. This has been the case from contemporary reception to recent times, though viewed very differently by commentators. Thus the Evangelical reviewer John Foster took RS to task for ‘verify[ing] the paganism of the whole theology of the poem’ (TER, 7 [1811] 347–8) while a recent study by an Indian commentator opines that RS ‘realized … [the] inherent beauty and sublimity’ of Hindu mythology in TCK (Srivastava, p. 258). Another critic, B. Rajan, comments insightfully that ‘By 1837 Kehama was an embarrassment to its prefaces. Perspec- tives change and a more modern reading might well find the prefaces an embarrassment to what we now make of the poem’ (ERR, 9 [1998], p. 213).

xxix

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KATAPAI, ΩΣ KAI TA AΛEKTPΥONONEOTTA, OIKON AEI, OΨE KEN EΠANHΞAN EΓKAΘIΣOMENAI. AΠOΦΘ. ANEK. TOY ΓΥAIEA. TOY MΗT.1

CURSES ARE LIKE YOUNG CHICKEN, THEY ALWAYS COME HOME TO ROOST.

THE AUTHOR OF GEBIR,

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR,2

THIS POEM IS INSCRIBED,

ROBERT SOUTHEY.

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PREFACE.

IN the religion of the Hindoos, which of all false religions is the most monstrous in its fables, and the most fatal in its effects, there is one remarkable peculiarity. Prayers, penances, and sacrifices, are supposed to possess an inherent and actual value, in no degree depending upon the disposition or motive of the person who performs them. They are drafts upon Heaven, for which the Gods cannot refuse payment. The worst men, bent upon the worst designs, have in this manner obtained power which has made them formidable to the Supreme Deities themselves, and rendered an Avatar, or Incarnation of Veeshnoo the Preserver, necessary. This belief is the foundation of the following Poem. The story is original; but, in all its parts, consistent with the superstition upon which it is built; and however startling the fictions may appear, they might almost be called credi- ble when compared with the genuine tales of Hindoo mythology.

No figures can be imagined more anti-picturesque, and less poetical, than the mythological personages of the Bramins. This deformity was easily kept out of sight:– their hundred hands are but a clumsy personification of power; their numerous heads only a gross image of divinity, ‘whose countenance,’ as the Bhagvat-Geeta expresses it, ‘is turned on every side’.3 To the other obvious objec- tion, that the religion of Hindostan is not generally known enough to supply fit machinery for an English poem, I can only answer, that, if every allusion to it throughout the work is not sufficiently self-explained to render the passage intel- ligible, there is a want of skill in the poet. Even those readers who should be wholly unacquainted with the writings of our learned Orientalists, will find all the preliminary knowledge that can be needful, in the brief explanation of mythological names prefixed to the Poem.a

a Preface] 1838 reprints the 1810 preface as ‘Original Preface’ and adds a new ‘Preface’ as follows: Several years ago, in the Introduction of my ‘Letters to Mr. Charles Butler, vindicating the Book of the Church’,4 I had occasion to state that, while a school-boy at Westminster, I had formed an intention of exhibiting the most remarkable forms of Mythology which have at any time obtained among mankind, by making each the ground work of a narrative poem. The performance, as might be expected, fell far short of the design, and yet it proved something more than a dream of juvenile ambition. I began with the Mahommedan religion, as being that, with which I was then best acquainted myself, and of which every one who had read the Arabian Nights’ 3 Southey 4-01.fm Page 4 Wednesday, March 31, 2004 11:33 AM

Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810: Volume 4

Entertainments possessed all the knowledge necessary for readily understanding and enter- ing into the intent and spirit of the poem. Mr. Wilberforce5 thought that I had conveyed in it a very false impression of that religion, and that the moral sublimity which he admired in it was owing to this flattering misrepresentation. But Thalaba the Destroyer was pro- fessedly an Arabian Tale. The design required that I should bring into view the best features of that system of belief and worship which had been developed under the Cove- nant with Ishmael, placing in the most favourable light the morality of the Koran, and what the least corrupted of the Mahommedans retain of the patriarchal faith. It would have been altogether incongruous to have touched upon the abominations engrafted upon it; first by the false Prophet himself, who appears to have been far more remarkable for audacious profligacy than for any intellectual endowments, and afterwards by the spirit of Oriental despotism which accompanied Mahommedanism wherever it was established. Heathen Mythologies have generally been represented by Christian poets as the work of the Devil and his Angels; and the machinery derived from them was thus rendered cred- ible, according to what was during many ages a received opinion. The plan upon which I proceeded in Madoc was to produce the effect of machinery as far as was consistent with the character of the poem, by representing the most remarkable religion of the New World such as it was, a system of atrocious priestcraft. It was not here as in Thalaba the foundation of the poem, but, as usual in what are called epic poems, only incidentally connected with it. When I took up, for my next subject, that mythology which Sir William Jones6 had been the first to introduce into English poetry, I soon perceived that the best mode of treating it would be to construct a story altogether mythological. In what form to com- pose it was then to be determined. No such question had arisen concerning any of my former poems. I should never for a moment have thought of any other measure than blank verse for Joan of Arc, and for Madoc, and afterwards for Roderick. The reason why the irregular rhymeless lyrics of Dr. Sayers7 were preferred for Thalaba was, that the freedom and variety of such verse were suited to the story. Indeed, of all the laudatory criticisms with which I have been favoured during a long literary life, none ever gratified me more than that of Henry Kirke White8 upon this occasion, when he observed, that if any other known measure had been adopted, the poem would have been deprived of half its beauty, and all its propriety. And when he added, that the author never seemed to inquire how other men would treat a subject, or what might be the fashion of the times, but took that course which his own sense of fitness pointed out, I could not have desired more appropriate commendation. The same sense of fitness which made me chuse for an Arabian tale the simplest and easiest form of verse, induced me to take a different course in an Indian poem. It appeared to me, that here neither the tone of morals, nor the strain of poetry, could be pitched too high; that nothing but moral sublimity could compensate for the extravagance of the fictions, and that all the skill I might possess in the art of poetry was required to counterbalance the disadvantage of a mythology with which few readers were likely to be well acquainted, and which would appear monstrous if its deformities were not kept out of sight. I endeavoured, therefore, to combine the utmost richness of versification with the greatest freedom. The spirit of the poem was Indian, but there was nothing Oriental in the style. I had learnt the language of poetry from our own great masters and the great poets of antiquity. No poem could have been more deliberately planned, nor more carefully composed. It was commenced at Lisbon on the first of May, 1801, and recommenced in the summer of the same year at Kingsdown, in the same house (endeared to me once by many delightful but now mournful recollections) in which Madoc had been finished, and Thalaba begun. A little was added during the winter of that year in London. It was resumed at Kingsdown in the summer of 1802, and then laid aside till 1806, during which interval Madoc was 4 Southey 4-01.fm Page 5 Wednesday, March 31, 2004 11:33 AM

The Curse of Kehama: Preface

reconstructed and published. Resuming it then once more, all that had been written was recast at Keswick: there I proceeded with it leisurely, and finished it on the 25th of November, 1809. It is the only one of my long poems of which detached parts were written to be afterwards inserted in their proper places. Were I to name the persons to whom it was communicated during its progress, it would be admitted now that I might well be encouraged by their approbation; and, indeed, when it was published, I must have been very unreasonable if I had not been satisfied with its reception. It was not till the present edition of these Poems was in the press, that, eight and twenty years after Kehama had been published, I first saw the article upon it in the Monthly Review,9 parts of which cannot be more appropriately preserved any where than here; it shows the determination with which the Reviewer entered upon his task, and the importance which he attached to it. ‘Throughout our literary career we cannot recollect a more favourable opportunity than the present for a full discharge of our critical duty. We are indeed bound now to make a firm stand for the purity of our poetic taste against this last and most desperate assault, conducted as it is by a writer of considerable reputation, and unquestionably of considerable abilities. If this poem were to be tolerated, all things after it may demand impunity, and it will be in vain to contend hereafter for any one established rule of poetry as to design and subject, as to character and incident, as to language and versification. We may return at once to the rude hymn in honour of Bacchus, and indite strains adapted to the recitation of rustics in the season of the vintage: – Quæ canerent agerentque peruncti fæcibus ora.10 It shall be our plan to establish these points, we hope, beyond reasonable controversy, by a complete analysis of the twenty four sections (as they may truly be called) of the portentous work, and by ample quotations interspersed with remarks, in which we shall endeavour to withhold no praise that can fairly be claimed, and no censure that is obviously deserved’. The reviewer fulfilled his promises, however much he failed in his object. He was not more liberal of censure than of praise, and he was not sparing of quotations. The analysis was sufficiently complete for the purposes of criticism, except that the critic did not always give himself the trouble to understand what he was determined to ridicule. ‘It is necessary for us’, he said, ‘according to our purpose of deterring future writers from the choice of such a story, or for such a management of that story, to detail the gross follies of the work in question; and tedious as the operation may be, we trust that in the judgement of all those lovers of literature who duly value the preservation of sound principles of composition among us, the end will excuse the means’. The means were ridicule and reprobation, and the end at which he aimed was thus stated in the Reviewer’s peroration. ‘We know not that Mr. Southey’s most devoted admirers can complain of our having omitted a single incident essential to the display of his character or the developement of his plot. To other readers we should apologise for our prolixity, were we not desirous, as we hinted before, of giving a death-blow to the gross extravagancies of the author’s school of poetry, if we cannot hope to reform so great an offender as himself. In general, all that nature and all that art has lavished on him is rendered useless by his obstinate adherence to his own system of fancied originality, in which every thing that is good is old, and every thing that is new is good for nothing. Convinced as we are that many of the author’s faults proceed from mere idleness, deserving even less indulgence than the erroneous principles of his poetical system, we shall conclude by a general exhortation to all critics to condemn, and to all writers to avoid the example of combined carelessness and perversity which is here afforded by Mr. Southey; and we shall mark this last and worst eccentricity of his Muse with the following character:– Here is the composition of a poet not more distinguished by his genius and knowledge, than by his contempt for public opinion, and 5 Southey 4-01.fm Page 6 Wednesday, March 31, 2004 11:33 AM

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ETHΣATE MOΙ ΠΡΩTHA ΠOΛΥTΡOΠON, OΦPA ΦANEIH ΠΟIKIAON EI∆OΣ EΧΩN, OTI ΠOIKIAON ΥMNON AΡAΣΣΩ.

ΝOΝ. ∆ΙON11

FOR I WILL FOR NO MAN’S PLEASURE CHANGE A SYLLABLE OR MEASURE; PEDANTS SHALL NOT TIE MY STRAINS TO OUR ANTIQUE POETS’ VEINS; BEING BORN AS FREE AS THESE, I WILL SING AS I SHALL PLEASE. 12

GEORGE WITHER.

the utter depravity of his taste, – a depravity which is incorrigible, and, we are sorry to add, most unblushingly rejoicing in its own hopelessness of amendment’. The Monthly Review has, I believe, been for some years defunct. I never knew to whom I was beholden for the good service rendered me in that Journal, when such assistance was of most value; nor by whom I was subsequently, during several years, favoured in the same Journal with such flagrant civilities as those of which the reader has here seen a sample. Keswick, 19th May, 1838. 6 Southey 4-01.fm Page 7 Wednesday, March 31, 2004 11:33 AM

The Curse of Kehama

BRAMA,...... the Creator. VEESHNOO,...... the Preserver. SEEVA,...... the Destroyer. These form the Trimourtee, or Trinity, as it has been called, of the Bramins. The allegory is obvious, but has been made for the Trimourtee, not the Trimourtee for the allegory; and these Deities are regarded by the people as three distinct and personal Gods. The two latter have at this day their hostile sects of worshippers; that of Seeva is the most numerous; and in this Poem, Seeva is represented as Supreme among the Gods. This is the same God whose name is variously written Seeb, Sieven and Siva, Chiven by the French, Xiven by the Portugueze, and whom European writers sometimes denominate Eswara, Iswaren, Mahadeo, Mal- madeva, Rutren, – according to which of his thousand and eight names prevailed in the country where they obtained their information. INDRA,...... God of the Elements. The SWERGA, ...... his Paradise, – one of the Hindoo heavens. YAMEN, ...... Lord of Hell, and Judge of the Dead. PADALON, ...... Hell, – under the Earth, and, like the Earth, of an octagon shape; its eight gates are guarded by as many Gods. MARRIATALY,...... the Goddess who is chiefly worshipped by the lower casts. POLLEAR,...... or Ganesa, – the Protector of Travellers. His statues are placed in the highways, and sometimes in a small lonely sanctuary, in the streets and in the fields. CASYAPA, ...... the Father of the Immortals. DEVETAS, ...... the Inferior Deities. SURAS, ...... Good Spirits. ASURAS,...... Evil Spirits, or Devils. GLENDOVEERS,..the most beautiful of the Good Spirits, the Grindouvers of Sonnerat.

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I. THE FUNERAL.

Midnight, and yet noa eye Through all the Imperial City clos’d in sleep!b Beholdc her streets a-blaze With light that seemsd to kindle the red sky, Her myriads swarming thro’ the crowded ways! 5 Master and slave, old age and infancy, All, all abroad to gaze; House-top and balcony Clustered with women, who throw back their veils,e With unimpeded and insatiate sight 10 To view the funeral pomp which passes by, As if the mournful rite Were but to them a scene of joyance and delight.f Vainly, ye blessed twinklers of the night, Your feeble beams ye shed, 15 Quench’d in the unnatural light which might out-stare Even the broad eye of day; And thou from thy celestial way Pourest, O Moon, an ineffectual ray! For lo!g ten thousand torches flame and flare 20

a yet no] not one {yet no} Bodleian MS; not an NAL MS, BL Add. MS b sleep!] slumber {sleep}/ {[line heavily scored out]}/ Abated! … & hear that universal cry/ Whose uproar dread, in their deep bed,/ Almost might break the silence of the dead!/ Ye blessed stars, in vain/ Your feeble beams ye shed,/ Quenched in the unnatural light, more broad than day;/ And thou O Moon, thine ineffectual ray! Beinecke MS c Behold] Her multitudes abroad, NAL MS, BL Add. MS d With … seems] her countless numbers {slumbers}/ Abroad, & hear that universal cry/ Whose uproar dread in their deep bed/ Almost might break the silence of the dead./ With lights which seem Bodleian MS e veils,] veils/ {[line heavily scored out]} Beinecke MS f With light … delight.] NAL MS, BL Add. MS omit g Vainly … lo!] In vain ye blessed stars of Heaven/ Ye shed your feeble beams/ Quench’d in the unnatural light, more broad than day/ And thou O Queen of Night/ Thine ineffectual ray. NAL MS; In vain ye blessed stars/ Ye shed your feeble beams/ Quench’d in the unnatural light, more broad than day/ And thou O Queen of Night/ Thine ineffectual ray. BL Add. MS

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The Curse of Kehama: Book I – The Funeral

Upon the midnight air,a Blotting the lights of heaven With oneb portentous glare. Beholdc thed fragrant smoke in many ae fold, Ascending floats along the fieryf sky,g 25 And hangeth visible on high,h A dark and waving canopy. Hark! ’tis the funeral trumpet’s breath!i ’Tisj the dirge of death! At once ten thousand drums begin,k 30 With one long thunder-peal the ear assailing;l Ten thousand voices then join in, And with one deep and general din Pour their wild wailing.m The song of praise is drown’d 35 Amid thatn deafening sound;o You hear no more the trumpet’s tone, You hear no more the mourner’s moan, Tho’ the trumpet’s breath, and the dirgep of death, Mingle and swellq the funeral yell. 40 But rising over all in one acclaim Is heard the echoed and re-echoedr name,

a air,] gloom air Bodleian MS; gloom NAL MS b one] their one Bodleian MS; their BL Add. MS c With … Behold] NAL MS omits d Behold the] the BL Add. MS e a] a surging NAL MS, BL Add. MS f Behold … fiery] Below the fragrant smoke in many a surging swelling fold/ {[line heavily scored out]}/ Ascending floats along the yellow {fiery} Beinecke MS g Ascending … sky,] 2Ascending thro {eth floats along} the yellow sky,/ 1 Upward & still upward roll’d,/ Bodleian MS h Ascending … high,] Upward & still upward rolld,/ Ascendeth thro the yellow sky, NAL MS, BL Add. MS i breath!] tone breath Bodleian MS; tone! NAL MS, BL Add. MS j ’Tis] Hark! tis Bodleian MS; Hark! tis NAL MS, BL Add. MS k begin,] begin/ Set up their thunder-peal; Bodleian MS l assailing;] assailing/ At once ten thousand voices in one cry/ Pour forth their wild wailing. In the deafening sound Bodleian MS m begin, … wailing.] Set up their thunder peal;/ At once ten thousand voices in one cry/ Pour their wild wailing … in the deafening sound NAL MS; Set up their thunder-peal;/ At once ten thousand voices in one cry/ Pour their wild wailing: in the deafening sound BL Add. MS n that] the 1838 o Amid … sound;] Amid that deafening sound/ whose uproar dread in their deep bed/ Almost might break the silence of the dead Bodleian MS; NAL MS, BL Add. MS omit p dirge] song {dirge} Bodleian MS; song NAL MS q Mingle and swell] Swell with commingled force 1838

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From all that countless rout:a Arvalan! Arvalan!b Arvalan!c Arvalan!d 45 Ten times ten thousand voices in one shout Call Arvalan!e The overpowering sound, From house to house repeated ringsf about, From tower to tower rollsg round.h The death-procession moves along; 50 Their baldi heads shining to the torches ray, The Bramins lead the way, Chaunting the funeral song. Andj now at once they shout Arvalan! Arvalan! 55 With quick rebound of sound, All ink accordant cry, Arvalan! Arvalan! The universal multitude reply. In vain ye thunder on his ear thel name!m 60 Would ye awake the dead? Borne upright in his palankeen, Theren Arvalan is seen! A glow is on his face, … a livelyo red; It is the crimson canopy 65 Which o’er his cheek the reddening shade hath shed. He moves, … he nods his head, …p But the motion comes from the bearers’ tread, As the body, borne aloft in state,

r and re-echoed] NAL MS, BL Add. MS omit a From … rout:] NAL MS, BL Add. MS omit b From … Arvalan!] Bodleian MS omits c Arvalan!] Arvalan!/ It rings distinctly thro the dizzy din,../ Arvalan! Arvalan!/ It peals from house to house, from tower to tower. Bodleian MS d Arvalan! Arvalan!] BL Add. MS omits e Call Arvalan!] Thunder the name: {Call Arvalan} Bodleian MS f rings] peals {rings} Bodleian MS g rolls] reechoing rolls Bodleian MS h rolls round.] reechoing rolls around. BL Add. MS i bald] bare NAL MS j And] Then Beinecke MS k All in] {Then} In one Bodleian MS; In one NAL MS, BL Add. MS l ear the] ear/ The ineffectual NAL MS, BL Add. MS m name!] name./ The ineffectual name/ Bodleian MS n There] Lo! Bodleian MS, BL Add. MS; Lo NAL MS o lively] life-like {lively} Bodleian MS; life-like NAL MS p head, …] head …/ It is {but} the bearer’s tread,/ The body borne in state/ Swaying obedient to its own dead weight./ Bodleian MS

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The Curse of Kehama: Book I – The Funeral

Sways with the impulse ofa its own dead weight. 70 Close following his dead son, Kehama came, Nor joining in the ritualb song, Nor calling the dear name;c

With head deprest and funeral vest, And arms enfolded on his breast, 75 Silent and lost in thought he moves along.d King of the world, his slaves unenvying now Behold their wretched Lord; rejoiced they see The mighty Rajah’s misery; For Nature in his pride hath dealt the blow, 80 And taught the master of mankind to know Even hee himselff is man, and not exempt from woe.g O sight of grief!h the wives of Arvalan, Young Azla, young Nealliny, are seen!i Their widow-robes of white, 85 With gold and jewels bright, Each like an Eastern queen. Woe! woe! around their palankeen, As on a bridal day,j With symphony, and dance, and song, 90 Their kindred and their friends come on. The dance of sacrifice! the funeral song!k And next the victim slaves in long array,

a But the … of] It is the bearers tread/ The body borne in state/ swaying obedient to NAL MS b ritual] funeral {ritual} Bodleian MS; funeral NAL MS c name;] name,/ Silent he only of that countless throng. King of the World, his Slaves/ Unenvying now behold their wretched Lord;/ With self-consoling joy they see/ That Nature in his pride hath smitten him; That now the Master of Mankind/ Is make to feel that he himself is man. Bodleian MS d With head … along.] Silent he only of that countless throng./ NAL MS e he] he himself Bodleian MS f himself] BL Add. MS omits g rejoiced … woe.] With self-consoling joy they see/ That Nature in his pride hath smitten him;/ That now the Master of Mankind/ Is make to feel that he himself is man. NAL MS h O … grief!] Woe … woe {O […] grief}! Bodleian MS; Woe … woe! NAL MS; Woe! woe! BL Add. MS i are seen!] NAL MS, BL Add. MS omit j Woe! … day,] Each like an Eastern queen./ 2As on a bridal day./ 1Woe … woe! around their palanquin Bodleian MS; As on a bridal day./ Woe, … woe! around their palanquin/ NAL MS; As on a bridal day!/ Woe! woe! around their palanquin,/ BL Add. MS k The … song!] 2The funeral song, 1the dance of sacrifice. Bodleian MS; The funeral song, the dance of sacrifise [sic]. NAL MS; The funeral song, the dance of sacrifice. BL Add. MS

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Richly bedight to grace the fatal day, Move onward to their death; 95 The clarions’a stirring breath Lifts their thin robes in every flowing fold, And swells the woven gold, That on the agitated air Trembles, b and glitters to the torches glare.c 100 A man and maid of aspect wan and wild, Then, side by side, by bowmend guarded, came. O wretched father! O unhappy child! Them were all eyes of all the throng exploring…. Is this the daring man 105 Who raised his fatale hand at Arvalan? Is this the wretchf condemn’d to feel Kehama’s dreadful wrath? Themg were all hearts of all the throng deploring, For not in that innumerable throng 110 Was one who lov’d the dead; for who could know What aggravated wrong Provok’d the desperate blow! Far, far behind, beyond all reach of sight, In ordered files the torches flow along, 115 One ever-lengthening line of glidingh light:i Far … far behind, Rolls on the undistinguishable clamour, Of horn, and trump, and tambour;j Incessant as the roark 120

a clarions’] trumpets {clarions} Bodleian MS; trumpets NAL MS, BL Add. MS b Trembles,] Flutters 1838 c That … glare.] Tremulous & glittering to the torches flame {That on the agitated air/ Trembles & glitters to the torches glare.} Bodleian MS; Tremulous & glittering to the torches flame. NAL MS, BL Add. MS d bowmen] bowyers{men} Bodleian MS; bowyers NAL MS e fatal] vengeful {desperate} {fatal} Bodleian MS; vengeaful NAL MS; desperate BL Add. MS f wretch] wretched man NAL MS, BL Add. MS g Them] Then 1818, 1838 h gliding] moving NAL MS, BL Add. MS i gliding light:] moving {gliding} light./ Far … far behind tambour & trump & horn/ Roll on their undistinguishable sounds./ Incessant as the din/ Of mountain cataracts;/ And louder than the wrathful elements/ When the winds rage over the Waves/ And Ocean roars to the Storm.// And now upon the rivers brink they pause; The funeral place is here,/ Here hath the trench been delved,/ And here with myrrh & ambergris/ The sandal-pile bestrewn. Bodleian MS j Rolls … tambour;] tambour & tramp & horn/ Roll on their indistinguishable sounds, NAL MS; tambour & trump & horn/ Roll on their undistinguishable sounds. BL Add. MS

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The Curse of Kehama: Book I – The Funeral

Of streams whicha down the wintry mountain pour,b And louder than the dread commotionc Of stormy billowsd on a rocky shore,e When the winds rage over the waves, And Ocean to the Tempest raves.f 125 And now toward the bank they go, Where, winding on their way below, Deep and strong the waters flow. Here doth the funeral pile appear With myrrh and ambergris bestrew’d, 130 And built of precious sandal wood. They cease their music and their outcry here;g Gently they rest the bier: They wet the face of Arvalan, No sign of life the sprinkled drops excite; 135 They feel his breast, … no motion there; They feel his lips, … no breath;h For not with feeble, nor with erring hand, The sterni avenger dealtj the blow of death. Then with a doublingk peal and deeper blast, 140 The tambours and the trumpets sound on high, And with a last and loudest cry They call on Arvalan. Woe! woe! for Azla takes her seat Upon the funeral pile! 145

k roar] din NAL MS, BL Add. MS a which] that Bodleian MS b streams … pour,] mountain cataracts. NAL MS, BL Add. MS c dread commotion] wrathful elements BL Add. MS d stormy billows] breakers 1838 e Of … shore,] BL Add. MS omits f to … raves.] roars to the Storm. BL Add. MS g dread commotion … here;] wrathful elements/ When the Winds rage over the Waves/ And Ocean roars to the storm.// And now upon the rivers brink they pause; The funeral place is here,/ Here hath the trench been delved,/ And here with myrrh & ambergris/ The sandal-pile bestrewn. NAL MS; dread commotion […] And now upon the rivers brink they pause./ The funeral place is here;/ Here hath the trench been delved./ And here with myrrh & ambergris/ The sandal pile bestrewn. BL Add. MS h They … breath;] 1They 2feel 3his 4lips; aThey bfeel chis dbreast,/ eNo fmotion gthere, 5no 6breath, …/ Bodleian MS i The stern] Had that The stern Bodleian MS; The brave 1838 j The … dealt] The stern avenger driven {dealt} Bodleian MS; Had that avenger driven NAL MS, BL Add. MS k doubling] doubled NAL MS, BL Add. MS

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Calmly she tooka her seat,b Calmly the whole terrific pomp survey’d; As on her lap the while The lifeless head of Arvalan wasc laid. Woe! woe! Nealliny, 150 The young Nealliny! They strip her ornaments away, Bracelet and anklet, ring, and chain, and zone; Around her neck they leave The marriage knot alone, … 155 That marriage band, whichd when Yon waning moon was young, Around her virgin neck With bridal joy was hung. Then with white flowers, the coronal of death, 160 Her jetty locks they crown. []e O sight of misery! You cannot hear her cries, … all otherf soundg In that wild dissonance is drown’d; …h But in her face you see 165 The supplication and the agony, …i Seej in her swelling throat the desperate strength That with vain effort struggles yet for life; Her arms contracted now in fruitless strife, Now wildly at full length 170 Towards k the crowd in vain for pity spread, …l They force her on, they bind her to the dead.m

a took] takes {took} Bodleian MS; takes NAL MS, BL Add. MS b seat,] seat/ And calmly on her lap/ She lets the Bodleian MS c Calmly … was] Calmly the whole terrific pomp survey’d;/ As on her lap the while/ The lifeless head of Arvalan be {was} Bodleian MS; And calmly on her lap/ She lets the head of Arvalan be NAL MS, BL Add. MS d which] that Bodleian MS, NAL MS e 1810 page break; 1838 stanza break; see Introduction, p. xxii. f all other] their 1838 g … all other sound] NAL MS omits h is drowned; …] NAL MS omits i agony, …] agony, …/ The ineffectual prayer, the frantic shriek, …/ You see her straining arms./ And Bodleian MS j See] The ineffectual prayer, the frantic shriek,/ You see her straining arms/ And NAL MS k Towards] Toward BL Add. MS l Her … spread, …] NAL MS omits m BL Add. MS no stanza break follows

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The Curse of Kehama: Book I – The Funeral

Then alla around retire; Circling the pile, the ministringb Bramins stand, Each lifting in his hand ac torch on fire.d 175 Alone the Father of the dead advanced And lit the funeral pyre.e At once on every side The circling torches drop.f At once on every side 180 The fragrant oil is pour’d, At once on every side The rapidg flames rush up. Then hand in hand the victim bandh Roll in the dance around the funeral pyre;i 185 Their garments flying folds Float inward to the fire.j In drunken whirl they wheel around; One drops, … another plunges in;k And still with overwhelming din 190 The tambours and the trumpets sound;l And clap of hand, and shouts, and cries, From all the multitude arise: While round and round, in giddy wheel, Intoxicate they roll and reel, 195 Till one by one whirl’d in they fall, And the devouring flames have swallowed all.

a all] all draw back Bodleian MS b around … ministring] around […] circling {ministring} Bodleian MS; drew back, around/ The circling NAL MS c a] the ready {a} Bodleian MS d a … fire.] the ready torch NAL MS e pyre.] pile. f drop.] fall; {drop} Bodleian MS; fall NAL MS; fall; BL Add. MS g rapid] torrent {rapid} Bodleian MS; torrent NAL MS; torrent- BL Add. MS h band] slaves band Bodleian MS; slaves NAL MS, BL Add. MS i pyre;] fire pyre Bodleian MS; fire: NAL MS j fire.] flame fire. Bodleian MS; flame. NAL MS k in;] now in, Bodleian MS; now, NAL MS l sound;] sound, …/ And still with shout & clap of hand/ The admiring multitude applaud, And round & round intoxicate./ The victims reel till all are fallen.// That moment all was still./ The drums & clarions ceased,/ The multitude were hushd, …/ Only the roaring of the flame was heard. Bodleian MS

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Thena all was still; the drums and clarions ceas’d; The multitude were hush’d in silent awe;b Only the roaring of the flamesc was heard. 200

a clap … Then] Still with shout & clap of hand/ The admiring multitude applaud/ And round & round intoxicate/ The victims reel till all are fallen.// That moment NAL MS b multitude … awe;] multitude 3in silent awe 1were 2hushd; Bodleian MS; multitude were hush’d NAL MS; multitude in silent awe were hush’d. BL Add. MS c flames] flame NAL MS

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EDITOR’S NOTES

The abbreviation DNB in parenthesis against the names of persons below indicates that further biographical information may be found in the Dictionary of National Biography.

The Curse of Kehama 1 KATAPAI, … MET.] Southey conceived the motto at an early stage of the poem’s drafting. The Rush Rhees manuscript which contains the earliest fragmentary drafts of the poem contains it and so does the British Library manuscript. On 2 January 1803 Southey wrote to Bedford, ‘The motto to Kehama is a text & the story of the poem the Sermon. Curses are like young chicken. they always go home to roost. Twas one of the thousand & one odd sayings of an odd relation of mine […] if you like to put his name in Greek it may look more ancient & venerable’ (Houghton Library, bMS Eng 265.1, File 7). The British Library manuscript attributes the saying to ‘Uncle William’ though later published versions of the poem do not mention him. Southey gives details of his Uncle William in his letter to Bedford of 2 January 1803 as well as in his autobiograph- ical letter to John May (see L&C, Vol. I, pp. 11–14). The Greek version and its mystifying reference to ‘the unedited sayings of William of Met.’ have been attributed by his son, Charles Cuthbert Southey, to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (L&C, Vol. I, p. 12), though Southey also appealed to Bedford to ‘put his name in Greek’. Southey’s reference to ‘Gul – Avan’ in the same letter to Bedford is evidently a pun on the French origin of the name William, or ‘Guillaume’. The translation of the quotation into Greek and the obscuring of Uncle William’s name in the published versions of the poem evidently serve the purpose of making the saying more ‘ancient and venerable’. The 1838 edition corrects the Greek motto slightly to read: KATAPAI, ΩΣ KAI TA A∆EKTPΥONONEOTTA, OIKON AEI, OΨE KEN EΠANHΞAN EΓKAΘIΣOMENAI. AΠOΦΘ. ANEK. TOY ΓΥAIEA. TOY MET. 2 LANDOR,] Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864; DNB), author of Gebir (1798), and an influential later acquaintance of Southey. Southey met Landor c. April 1808 and wrote excitedly to Bedford as follows: ‘At Bristol I met with the man of all others whom I was most desirous of meeting, – the only man living of whose praise I was ambitious, or whose censure would have humbled me. Savage Lan- dor, the author of Gebir, a poem which, unless you have heard me speak of it, you have probably never heard of at all. I never saw any one more unlike myself in every prominent part of human character, nor any one who so cordially and

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Notes to pages 3–6

instinctively agreed with me on so many of the most important subjects … I told him of the series of mythological poems which I had planned … and also told him for what reason they were laid aside; – in plain English, that I could not afford to write them. Landor’s reply was, “Go on with them, and I will pay for printing them, as many as you will write and as many as you please”’(L&C, Vol. III, 138–9; see also NL, Vol. I, pp. 470–1 for a similar testimony to Anna Seward). Shortly after this meeting Southey sent Landor the extant drafts of Kehama and wrote to him, 2 May 1808, ‘You have awakened in me hopes which I had dismissed contentedly, and, as I thought, for ever. If you think Kehama deserves to be finished I will try whether subscribers can be procured for five hundred copies, by which means I should receive the whole profit to myself ’ (L&C, Vol. III, p. 143). Southey later sent Landor drafts of TCK as it was completed. 3 ‘whose … side’.] Southey quotes from Sir Charles Wilkins’s enormously influential translation of the Bhagvat-Geeta (London, 1785), p. 90. For a modern reprint of the text see Michael Franklin (ed.), The European Discovery of India: Key Indologi- cal Sources of Romanticism (London, 2001), Vol. 1. Charles Wilkins (?1794– 1836; DNB) was one of the most eminent of British orientalist scholars. 4 ‘Letters … Church’,] See Vindiciæ Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ: Letters to Charles Butler Com- prising Essays on the Romish Religion and Vindicating the Book of the Church (London, 1826). 5 Mr. Wilberforce] William Wilberforce (1759–1833; DNB), the influential evangelical philanthropist and abolitionist. 6 Sir William Jones] William Jones (1746–94; DNB), important orientalist who founded the Bengal Asiatic Society in 1784, and was a judge in the High Court at Calcutta. His essays and translations of Sanskrit texts such as Kalidasa’s Sacon- tala and The Institutes of Menu were said to have inaugurated an ‘oriental renaissance’ in the romantic period. Southey quotes his works frequently in his notes to TCK, though he was also critical of Jones’s work. 7 Dr. Sayers] Frank Sayers (1763–1817; DNB) trained in surgery under John Hunter, but later abandoned medicine for poetry. He was the author of Dramatic Sketches of Northern Mythology (1790). 8 Henry Kirke White] (1785–1806; DNB), poet. His 1803 volume of poems, Clifton Grove, attracted Southey’s attention favourably and upon his early death in 1806, Southey edited his Remains (1807). 9 the article … Review,] See MR, 2nd series, 65 (1811), pp. 55–6, 113–28. 10 Quae … ora.] Thespis, who is said to have invented Tragedy, is described by Horace in the Ars Poetica as having ‘carried his pieces in wagons to be sung and acted by players with faces smeared with wine-lees’ (dicitur et plaustris vexisse poemata Thespis/ Quæ canerent agerentque peruncti fæcibus ora). See the Loeb edition of Horace, Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica (London, 1929), pp. 472–3. 11 ΣTHΣATE … ΠO∆ΥTROΠON] ‘Bring me Proteus of many turns, that he may appear in all his diversity of shapes, since I twang my harp to the diversity of song.’ Southey quotes from the Greek of Nonnos Dionysiaca, I, 14–15. See W. H. D. Rouse (ed.), Nonnos Dionysiaca, 3 vols (London, 1962), Vol. I, pp. 2–3. 12 FOR I WILL … PLEASE.] Southey quotes George Wither (1588–1667; DNB), poet and pamphleteer. See his Fair-Virtue, the Mistresse of Phil’Arete (1622), ll. 503–4, 509–10, 513–14.

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Notes to pages 193–5

13 SHE, says … saw it.] Southey quotes Francois Bernier’s Voyage dans les États du Grand Mogol. See Francis Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, trans. Irving Brock, 2 vols (London, 1826), Vol. II, p. 16. Francois Bernier (1620–88), French travel writer, published his Travels in the Mogul Empire in 1670 in Paris. An English translation was published in London in 1671. 14 She went … STAVORINUS.] Quoted from John Splinter Stavorinus, Voyages to the East Indies, 1768–1778, trans. Samuel H. Wilcocke, 3 vols (London, G.G. and J. Robinson, 1798), Vol. I, pp. 445–6. Stavorinus was a Dutch Rear Admi- ral and a widely-known travel writer on India. 15 When the time … A. ROGER.] Southey quotes from the monumental work by Ber- nard Picart, The Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the various Nations of the known World, 7 vols (London, 1733–9). See A Dissertation on the Religion and Manners of the Bramins … Extracted from the Memoirs of the Rev. Abraham Roger in B. Picart, Ceremonies, II (1734) p. 329. Bernard Picart (1673–1733) was a French print maker and illustrator who migrated to Amsterdam and, with the publisher and book dealer Jean-Frédéric Bernard, published his famous Histoire des Cérémonies et Coutumes Religieuses de tous les Peuples du Monde in seven volumes between 1723–38. Picart’s illustrations of the Hindu ceremonies were compiled from various sources since he had no direct knowledge of India, but nevertheless proved immensely influential in the transmission of eighteenth-century orientalism. 16 ‘Tis true … BERNIER.] From Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, pp. 17–19. See n. 13 above. 17 Pietro Della Valle … place.] From The Travels of Pietro della Valle in India, trans. G. Havers, (London, 1664). See Edward Grey (ed.), The Travels of Pietro della Valle in India, 2 vols (London: Hakluyt Society, 1892), Vol. II, pp. 274–7. Pietro della Valle (1586–1652) was an Italian traveller whose descriptive letters from Turkey, Persia and India were published largely posthumously. His letters from India were first published in 1663 and an English translation by G. Havers was brought out in London in 1664. 18 Dellon … Tom. i. p. 138.] French, widows are burnt there ‘one way or another. One sees many people who, having desired and demanded death with real cour- age, and having obtained and bought permission to burn themselves, trembled at the sight of the pyre, belatedly repented their foolishness, and tried in vain to retract. But when that happens, the Bramins tie up these unfortunates and burn them by force, without the slightest regard for their screams or pleas’. Quoted from Charles Dellon (b. 1649), French traveller who published his Relation d’un Voyage des Indes Orientales, 2 vols, in 1685. For an English translation see A Voy- age to the East-Indies, trans. Jodocus Crull (London, 1698), pp. 47–51. 19 It would … natives.] Southey refers to the Commentarios de Afonso Dalboquerque (1557). For an English translation see The Commentaries of the great Afonso Dal- boquerque, trans. Walter de Gray Birch (London, 1875). Alfonso d’Alboquerque (1453–1515) was a commander of Portuguese forces and an early colonialist of Goa. 20 ‘It may … p. 499.] From Mark Wilks, Historical Sketches of the South of India, 3 vols (London, 1810–14). Wilks (?1760–1831; DNB) was a lieutenant-colonel in the Madras army. The sale catalogue of Southey’s library includes a later 1820

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Notes to pages 196–8

edition of Wilks’s work; see Roy Park (ed.), Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Emi- nent Persons: Poets and Men of Letters (London, 1974), pp. 75–288. 21 When Bernier … BERNIER.] See Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, Vo l . I I , pp. 12–13. See n. 13 above. 22 This excellent … BERNIER.] See Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, Vol. II, pp. 14–15. See n. 13 above. 23 The Hindoos … CRAWFURD.] Southey possibly quotes from Quentin Craufurd, Sketches of the History, Religion, Learning, and Manners, of the Hindoos (London, 1788). Quentin Craufurd (1743–1819; DNB) joined the East India Company at an early age and returned to Europe in 1780, settling in Paris. 24 Some of … DELLA VALLE.] See the descriptions of giogis (or yogis) in Edward Grey (ed.), The Travels of Pietro della Valle in India, especially Vol. I, pp. 100–1. See also n. 17 above. 25 The civilized … BUCHANAN.] Claudius Buchanan (1766–1815; DNB), East India Company Chaplain, was a notable advocate of missionary activity in India. Southey quotes from his Memoir on the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establish- ment for British India (London, 1805), pp. 48–9. In his Memoir Buchanan dwells on the (supposed) savagery and cruelty of Hindu customs and argues that the Hindu religion offers no ‘moral instruction’ (p. 33). Buchanan argued however that Christianity had already taken root in India and that it could easily be accepted by Hindus. 26 This practice … 167–8–9.] Southey quotes from William Jones’s translation of The Institutes of Hindu Law, or the Ordinances of Menu (1794). For a modern edition reprinting this seminal text of Romantic orientalism see Michael Franklin (ed.), Representing India: Indian Culture and Imperial Control in Eighteenth-Cen- tury British Orientalist Discourse (London, 2000), Vol. IX, p. 143. See also n. 6 above. 27 According to … 14.] Southey’s probable source is Johann Lucas Niekamp, Histoire de la Mission Danoise dans les Indes Orientales, 3 vols (1745). A Latin version was published as Historia Missionis Evangelicae in India Orientali (Halle, 1747). Niekamp was a Danish missionary based in Tamil Nadu, South India. The sale catalogue of Southey’s library includes the Latin edition; see n. 20 above. 28 The inhabitants … Researches.] These details are taken from Thomas Shaw’s article, ‘On the Inhabitants of the Hills near Rajamahall’, Asiatic Researches, IV (1807) pp. 31–96. 29 Pope Benedict XII … Mahommedans.] Benedict XII (John Fournier) was Pope from 1334–42. Southey’s view of Pope Benedict XII’s dealings with Armenia might be seen as questionable. According to John Peterson in The Catholic Ency- clopaedia (1907), ‘Pope Benedict XII manifested his solicitude for the Church in Armenia which, in the early fourteenth century, suffered from Mohammedan invasions, succouring the unfortunates in temporal matters and healing doctrinal differences which had long rent Armenia with schism’. 30 This paper … Bernino,] Untraced. 31 I must … understand] From William Davenant Love and Honour (London, 1649) Act III, sc. i. (p. 18). Davenant (1606–68; DNB), poet and dramatist, was made Poet-Laureate in 1638.

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Notes to pages 198–202

32 By … Menu] Southey quotes, with minor adaptations, from Sir William Jones’s translation of The Institutes of Hindu Law, or the Ordinances of Menu (1794). See Franklin (ed.), Representing India, Vol. IX, p. 347. See n. 6 above. 33 Henry More … ear.] From Henry More, Antipsychopannychia, or the third book of ‘The Song of the Soul’ in his Philosophical Poems (1647), p. 280, ll. 1359–76. Henry More (1614–87; DNB) was a poet and theologian. 34 The Soul … GEETA.] Southey quotes from Charles Wilkins’s translation of the Bhagvat-Geeta (London, 1785), p. 37. See n. 3 above. 35 Mariatale … to her.] Southey quotes from Pierre Sonnerat, A Voyage to the East Indies and China, trans. Francis Magnus, 3 vols (Calcutta, 1788), Vol. I, pp. 148–50. Pierre Sonnerat (1748–1814) was French travel writer and naturalist; his Voyage aux Indes Orientales et a la Chine was published in Paris in 1782. 36 Among … HALHED.] From Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, A Code of Gentoo Laws (London, 1776). For a reprint of this text, see Franklin (ed.), Representing India, Vol. IV; especially pp. l–li. Nathaniel Halhed (1751–1830; DNB) was a notable orientalist who published A Grammar of the Bengal Language (1778) apart from his influential study of Hindu law. 37 The tufted … number.] From Charles Sonnini (1751–1812), French traveller and author of Voyage dans la Haute et Basse Égypte (1799). See the English translation, Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt (London, 1800), pp. 620–1. 38 The watchmen … TENNANT.] From William Tennant, Indian Recreations, Consisting Chiefly of Strictures on the Domestic and Rural Economy of the Mahommedans and Hindoos, 3 vols (1802). Southey’s review of Tennant’s Indian Recreations was published in Annual Review, 3 (1805), pp. 658–70. Tennant was a Chaplain in India and author of another influential work possibly known to Southey, Thoughts on the Effects of the British Government on the State of India (1807). 39 Every thing … SYMES.] See Michael Symes, An Account of an Embassy to the King- dom of Ava (1800). Symes (?1753–1809; DNB) was a soldier and diplomat who was sent on missions to Burma. 40 At this … HODGES.] From William Hodges, Travels in India (London, 1793), p. 35 reprinted in Franklin (ed.), The European Discovery of India, Vol. III, p. 35. William Hodges (1744–97; DNB) is remembered as a landscape painter who painted views of India under the patronage of Warren Hastings, 1778–84. 41 It is … 22.] Southey quotes from Thomas Williamson, Oriental Field Sports (Lon- don, 1807). Southey’s quotations have been checked against the second edition of Williamson’s work, which from the exact correspondence of page numbers appears to be a reprint of the first. See Thomas Williamson, Oriental Field Sports, 2nd edn (London, 1819), Vol. II, pp. 22–3. Williamson was a British officer of the East India Company who served in Bengal for twenty years. 42 This … her.] Southey refers evidently to the essay published in Blackwood’s Edin- burgh Magazine, XXXVII (1835), pp. 815–42, on ‘The Female Characters in our Modern Poetry, No. 1: Kailyal – in The Curse of Kehama’ in which the reviewer comments, in an otherwise favourable review, on Ladurlad’s decision to leave Kailyal: ‘So assuring himself that she is asleep, he rises up, and “stealing away with silent tread,” leaves her in the wild never more to be afflicted by the misery of her father’s face. We know not whether this be natural or no – Southey felt it to be so as he was in the fit of strong imagination – and therefore we would fain believe it right – nor is it often that a poet errs in conceiving a crisis – yet we have

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never yet been affected by the passage as we would wish – and even now suspect that the “Separation” was suggested, not by the passion of the present scene, but with an eye to the future’ (pp. 820–1). 43 ‘Mighty … deserted wife’.] From H.H. Milman, Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems (London, 1835) Book X, pp. 27–9. Henry Hart Milman (1791–1868; DNB) was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, 1821–31; he became the Dean of St Paul’s in 1849. 44 ‘It … Magazine’.] Untraced. 45 The first … SONNERAT.] See Sonnerat, A Voyage to the East Indies and China, see n. 27 above. The naturalist Pierre Sonnerat (1745–1814) accompanied the 1769 French expedition to New Guinea, the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines. 46 story of Peter Wilkins.] Robert Paltock, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750). 47 Stothard] Thomas Stothard (1775–1834; DNB) painter and book illustrator. 48 the Novelist’s Magazine] A London periodical which ran from 1780–8. Stoth- ard’s illustrations may be found in The Novelist’s Magazine, XII (1783). 49 ‘She first … myself ’] Quoted from Robert Paltock, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750), ch. XX. Southey quotes from the text of The Novelist Magazine, XII (1783), pp. 71–2. See alternatively Christopher Bentley (ed.), The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (London, 1973), pp. 138–40 which provides a text based on the first edition with some variation from Southey’s quotation. 50 Dushmanta. … SACONTALA.] Quoted (selectively) from Sir William Jones’s influential translation of Kalidasa’s Sacontala, or the Fatal Ring. See The Works of Sir William Jones, 13 vols (London, 1807), Vol. IX, pp. 514–16. For a modern reprint (and a useful introduction to Jones’s translation) of Sacontala, see Frank- lin (ed.), The European Discovery of India, Vol. 3. See also n. 6 above. 51 I will … Geeta.] See Franklin (ed.), The European Discovery of India, Vol. I, p. 76. See n. 3 above. 52 The Indian … JONES.] See William Jones, ‘A Hymn to Indra’, in The Works of Sir William Jones, 6 vols (London, 1799), Vol. VI, pp. 337–44, especially pp. 337– 8. See also n. 6 above. 53 A distinct … antelope’s eyes.] Selectively quoted from William Jones, ‘A Hymn to Indra’, in The Works of Sir William Jones, Vol. VI, pp. 337–44, especially p. 337. See also n. 6 above. 54 ‘In the wood, … Hindostan.] Quoted from Thomas Maurice, The History of Hin- dostan, 2 vols (London 1795–8), Vol. II, p. 19. Thomas Maurice (1754–1824; DNB) was an oriental scholar and historian, credited as the first to popularize Eastern religions and history in England. 55 You see … SACONTALA.] From Sir William Jones’s translation of Kalidasa’s Sacon- tala, or the Fatal Ring. See The Works of Sir William Jones, 13 vols (London, 1807), Vol. IX, p. 515. For a modern reprint of Jones’s translation of Sacontala, see Franklin (ed.), The European Discovery of India, Vol. III. See also n. 6 above. 56 Ravana, … 333.] From Edward Moor, Hindu Pantheon (London, 1810). Edward Moor (1771–1848; DNB) was a writer on Hindu mythology and a member of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta. 57 Seeva was … note.] From Wilks, Historical Sketches of the South of India. See n. 20 above.

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Notes to pages 211–17

58 ‘A most … Researches.] Quoted from the article by Francis Wilford, ‘On Egypt and other countries adjacent to the C¯al¯i River, or Nile of Ethiopia, from the Ancient Books of the Hindus’, Asiatic Researches, III (1794), pp. 295–468; see especially pp. 448–29. 59 ‘In what … SACONTALA.] See Franklin (ed.), The European Discovery of India, pp. 512–14. See also n. 6 above. 60 The island … MANDELSLO.] Quoted from The Voyages and Travels of J. A. de Man- delslo into the East-Indies, 2nd edn (London, 1669), p. 224. A biographical note on Johann Albrecht von Mandelslo (1616–44) may be found in the Deutsche Biographische Encyklopädie (München, 1995). 61 ‘Assi … aves’.] ‘So I have no doubt (he adds) that this phoenix of plants is just as fictional as the avian kind.’ See Benito Jeronimo Feijoo (1676–1764), Theatro Critico Universal, Vol. 2, Discurso Segundo, section 65. The sale catalogue of Southey’s library includes the 1769 Madrid edition of Feijoo’s various works in thirty-seven volumes; see n. 20 above. 62 ‘There are… Islands.] See George Glas, The History of the Discovery and Conquest of the Canary Islands, 2 vols (Dublin, 1767), Vol. II, p. 119. George Glas (1725– 65; DNB) founded the settlement of Port Hillsborough in 1764; his work on the Canary Islands was offered as a translation from a Spanish manuscript. The sale catalogue of Southey’s library includes the 1764 edition of Glas’s book; see n. 20 above. 63 Cordeyro … portions.] See Antonio Cordeyro (1641–1722), Historia Insulana das Ilhas a Portugal Sugeytas no Oceano Occidental (1717). 64 Cockburne’s Travels;] Untraced. 65 ‘Que … cabezas’.] ‘In the middle of the siesta, no matter how strong the sun was, it seemed that the shade of the tree refreshed the heart, like a very fine dew which gave comfort to our heads’. From Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España (Madrid, 1632). For an English translation of this work see Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, 5 vols (London, 1908). Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1492–1584) was one of the chief chroniclers of the conquest of Mexico by Spain; though his work was unpublished until 1632. 66 The islanders … water] From Jean Barbot, A Description of the Coasts of North and South-Guinea. Southey evidently refers to the edition printed in Awnsham and J. Churchill, A Collection of Voyages and Travels, 6 vols (London, 1732), Vol. V, p. 405, though his parenthetical reference following the quotation seems to have been distorted. 67 Monthly Magazine] The Monthly Magazine and British Register, a periodical published from London which ran from 1796–1825. Southey’s extract is untraced. 68 Ecce autem … aurem.] Latin, ‘But lo, the viewer of the wonder, while the pathless torch is carried, happens to come upon the miraculous water. In the midst of a pool stood a tree, flourishing, shady, huge, untouched from a previous age. A welcoming repose for Nymphs, a welcome rest for birds cherishing shade. Their sound is charming. Not by any skill has a musical tone taught the wood to echo./ / At first he only hears the rare measure. But when he moves his step close, he remains fixed as viewer too. For he saw the moist tree send down silver in drops, from bark and from topmost leaves – rain, though the sky knew it not. The clear liquid fell into a shell of marble lying beneath, until, with all the streams brought

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together into the spring, it grew, and now not ungrateful, from its very rising, returned the moisture to its mother, which provides the shade.// While he gazed and pondered how the water could creep through both fibres and green leaves and be borne aloft, though its guiding spirit leads down, behold, a nymph stood by him. Nyad or Dryad, he hesitated to judge, likewise, whether guardian of tree or spring. More truly, I believe, had it been the patron spirit of that place, in guise of nymph.// As soon as our most excellent hero saw her he said, “Be merciful, most beautiful one, if I, a wretched shipwreck victim, recently cast up on your shores, seem perhaps bold in my questions. Come, tell: the water I see slip from the trunk. Does it fall in the mountains and is then conveyed in hidden channels, eventually to leap into the leafy arms aloft of the soaking tree, and its branchlike tubes, or does the birth-producing womb of the shady mother rear (the water), as often we see balsam gum drip from trunks and amber beads from clusters of grapes. Let it not be a serious matter to reveal to one desiring to know the cause, the experience which has made this commonplace miracle for you.// Having said this, he was silent. Then the maid responded thus: “Guest, whoever you are (and to be sure, your presence indicates someone distinguished), you are mistaken, if by chance you think the water you see is sprung from earth. The wondrous tree, far away, remote from every dwelling, owes its gifts to Heaven alone. Since you seek to know the method by which it takes the water, I shall reveal it. But lest weariness should creep up in telling the story, this place and this very tree, about which the story will be told, gives timely shade with pleasant breezes. Let us sit here together”. And both sat in the shade of the spring and then, as the chirruping of the birds stopped for a moment, she told this story in a gentle voice.// “There was a maiden called Canaria, from whom the island takes its name, endowed with both beauty and a gift of rare modesty. She hid a remarkable prayer in her heart; a desire to be both mother and virgin. But because, as chance would have it, her mother had been reared in the city, her father in the country, she derived from these different ways of life both the stern love of the wood and the voluptuous love of the city.// Often when in her desire to visit, she had come to cities and had seen mothers giving and receiving endear- ments from their children before the doors, she desired to be loved as a mother. Equally, when she was in the country, amidst the nymphs of Diana, and had seen the goddess who lacked a partner in the bridal chamber, she desired to be like her and not to be loved as a mother.// But what should she do? She decided that what she desired could not come about. However, not to desire burns the lover all the more cruelly. It was in the middle of the night. In this spot where we now are, she happened to be, looking at the moon shining in the sky. “O goddess to whom power over a three-fold realm has been given, be merciful, I pray,” she said, “if I bring forth now what I have not dared before. What you may not hear in your role as Diana, you can heed when you are the moon. The darkness has lessened my modesty. Virginity is dearer to me than anything, I confess it. How- ever, putting this to one side, if I could share the name of fertile Mother, I would be greatly ambitious for a two-fold title. To be sure, no small desire has seized me, if any child were to play before me, if he spoke to me in gesture or with his dear little eyes, were he to call me by name wherever and whenever he could, in whose face I would see much of his mother. However, if human nature does not permit this, may it happen in whatever way it can. It matters not to change my

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form if, in the end, my prayer is answered.”// The favourable goddess nodded kindly upon the suppliant; because she had prayed worthily of a virgin, the virgin-goddess approved. She chose therefore from the flock of plants of wood one which was single. The plane tree fitted. [In classical Latin the adjective caelebs attached to platanus signified that vines were not trained against it]. She decided thus: if she turned Canaria’s body into such a tree she saw that it would be as dear to her for all time as the laurel is to Apollo.// There is no delay. Lest some signs of the gift be lacking she moves the horns of the curved forehead on the one demanding the gift. At once the maiden’s legs grow stiff. Her soft body is clothed with rough bark. She herself marvels how her ivory neck stretches as far into the heavens as roots reach down to Hades.// Now, from the beautiful maiden, stood a tree no less beautiful. That which once in her whole body had been similar to ivory, there a whiteness remained in the bark. But a partner for such a wife was lacking – her equal in lack of passion and celibacy and love of virginity – by which she might be fruitful. In truth such a husband had to be sought not from earth but from heaven. And so the incorrupt Hersophorus is called for from all the children of the starry night – thus the Greeks call him – the Italians name him Dew.// And on whatever day (who could believe it), as if by some agreement when the sun stands highest, the starry groom, veiled in garb of cloud slips hither and embraces his wife with snow-white wings. And this defies belief; in a little while she conceives a child and shortly after gives birth. Do you wish to know the soft child-bed? Ask the spring, which is present on our account, in which the mixture of the two may be recognized: both mother and father shine forth.// The happy mother cherishes, her prayer answered. In whose face she had desired to know herself, she knows. To see him playing around with her; she sees him play. To hear him calling mother with unformed voice; she hears that while she murmurs that she is called mother.// Not only is the virginity of the tree fertile, also fertile are the fronds which the tree sends forth. For as soon as the water on the top is heated and has fallen – the flame of Phoeban heat has approached from above – the fronds conceive and give birth. And a most sweet bird is born, the canarius, which is virtually hatched into the air. Still tender and inexperienced of the sky and immature for toil, it makes efforts to cleave the outstanding branches and fronds from which it came. It sites its nest beneath these, as protec- tion from the Sun, to which it can spread and dry its wings. Here it lies hidden and sings with no taught skill and fills its mother’s ears with singing.// Moreover, it repeats the same dispositions of its mother. Just as she enclosed in her maidenly heart the stern love of the wood and the soft passion of the city, thus does it love woods nor tires of cities. This woodland child dwells in rooftops, tolerates man, does not fear the huge pride of the courtyard of the rich man. Warned off in the lowest place, scarcely a courtier at all at first, then it becomes a flatterer, ready to bring forth a tune, with which to pluck the master’s ear.’ From Ubertinus Car- rara, Columbus, Carmen Epicum (Rome, 1715). A biographical note on Ubertinus Carrara (d. 1345) may be found in the Dizionario Biografico Degli Ital- iani (Rome, 1973). 69 ‘Nared sat … JONES.] Quoted from William Jones’s article ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India, written in 1784, and since revised’, Asiatic Researches, I (1788), pp. 221–5; see also p. 265. See also n. 6 above.

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Notes to pages 218–24

70 ‘Being on … Perouse.] See Houtou de La Billardiere, An Account of a Voyage in Search of La Pérouse, 2 vols (London, 1800), Vol. I, pp. 349–50. Houtou de La Billardiere (1755–1834) was a French naturalist who visited Australia in 1791. 71 Nareda … p. 204.] From Moor, Hindu Pantheon. See n. 56 above. 72 The Raisoo … Creeshna.] Untraced 73 No person … STRUYS.] Quoted from Jan Struys, The Voyages and Travels of John Struys, trans. John Morrison (London, 1683), pp. 31, 50–1. Jan Struys (d. 1694) was a Dutch travel-writer who travelled across the Mediterranean and the East to Italy, Greece, Persia, India and Japan among other places. 74 The Aswamedha … Res.] From Wilford, ‘On Egypt and other countries adjacent to the C¯al¯i River’. See n. 58 above. 75 Mr Halhed … Shekuh.] Quoted in Halhed, A Code of Gentoo Laws. For a modern reprint of this text, see Franklin (ed.), Representing India, Vol. IV, pp. xix–xxi. See n. 36 above. 76 Compare … p. 206.] See Williamson, Oriental Field Sports, Vol. II, p. 206; see n. 41 above. 77 The day … STAVORINUS.] From Stavorinus, Voyages to the East Indies, Vol. I, p. 464. See n. 14 above. 78 They make … CARERI.] Untraced. 79 After … KURREEM.] Quoted from Francis Gladwin’s translation from Persian of The Memoirs of Khojeh Abdulkurreem (London, 1793), pp. 76–7. 80 The plane-tree … FORSTER.] See George Forster, A Journey from Bengal to England, 2 vols (Calcutta, 1790), Vol. II, p. 464. George Forster (d. 1792; DNB) worked for the East India Company and was the author of another work on India, Sketches of the Mythology and Customs of the Hindoos (1785). 81 The Pandal … Picart.] See A Dissertation on the Religion and Manners of the Bramins in Picart, The Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of the Known World, Vol. III, p. 350. See n. 15 above. 82 About noon … BUCHANAN.] From Francis Buchanan, A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar, 3 vols (London, 1807), Vol. I, p. 117. Francis Hamilton Buchanan (1762–1829; DNB) was a Fellow of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta and a surgeon; his Journey was undertaken at the behest of the Governor General of India, Wellesley. 83 In … p. 259.] See Williamson, Oriental Field Sports, Vol. I, pp. 258–9; see n. 41 above. 84 The buffalo … p. 49.] See Williamson, Oriental Field Sports, Vol. II, pp. 49–50; see n. 41 above. 85 Captain Beaver] Quoted from Philip Beaver, African Memoranda (London, 1805) p. 355. Philip Beaver (1766–1813; DNB) was a navy captain who accompanied an unsuccessful expedition for colonizing the island of Bulama, near Sierra Leone in 1792–4. 86 Many … p. 89.] See Williamson, Oriental Field Sports, Vol. I, p. 89. See n. 41 above. 87 According to … Researches.] From Wilford, ‘On Egypt and other countries adjacent to the C¯al¯i River’, especially p. 299. See n. 58 above. 88 In the Vayu … edition.] Quoted from Francis Wilford, ‘An Essay on the Sacred Isles in the West, with other Essays’, Asiatic Researches, VIII (1809), pp. 245– 375; see especially p. 326, wrongly identified as p. 322 by Southey in his note.

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Notes to pages 224–37

Southey takes his references to Pliny and Curtius from Wilford. See also n. 58 above. Latin, ‘With a great crash of the stream itself, the Ganges burst forth, and the heights of great mountains confine it in a straight bed, and when it is first touched by the soft plain, it is received in a certain lake.’ 89 The Swarganga, … edition.] From Wilford, ‘An Essay on the Sacred Isles in the West, with other Essays’, especially p. 317. See also n. 88 above. 90 The mountains … p. 41.] Untraced. 91 At Gangottara … BUCHANAN.] From Francis Buchanan, A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar, Vol. II, p. 307. See n. 82 above. 92 The mountain … Researches.] Quoted from Jonathan Duncan, ‘An Account of Two Fakeers, With their Portraits’, Asiatic Researches, V (1799), pp. 37–52; see especially p. 46. 93 Respecting … Stavorinus.] From Stavorinus, Voyages to the East Indies, Vol. I, p. 397n. See n. 18 above. 94 ‘Above … west’.] Quoted from Sir William Jones, ‘A Hymn to Ganga’ (ll. 14–26), in The Works of Sir William Jones, 6 vols (London, 1799), Vol. VI, pp. 383–92. 95 the Ramayuna … Europe,] Southey quotes from William Carey’s translation of The Ramayuna of Valmeeki (Serampore, 1806–10); this was the earliest English translation of the great Indian epic. 96 All the Devatas, … Pooraun.] Quoted from Maurice, History of Hindostan, Vol. II, pp. 104–5. See n. 54 above. 97 Quando o Sol … Sermoens, tom. ix, p. 505.] Portuguese, ‘The Philosophers considered that when the Sun stopped at Joseph’s voices, the celestial movement having ceased, all those consequences occurred in the world. The plants did not grow during all that time; the qualities of the elements and their mixtures did not alter; the growth and the corruption that conserves the world ceased; the arts and exercises of both Hemispheres were suspended; the Antipodeans did not work, as they lacked light, while those above left work tired from such a long day; the latter were astonished at seeing the Sun not moving; the former were also astonished at waiting for the Sun that did not arrive; they thought that light had left them; they imagined that the world was ending: all was tears, all doom, all horrors, all confusion’. Southey’s source is probably António Vieira, Sermoens, 15 vols (Lisbon, 1678–1718). 98 Surya, … JONES.] See Sir William Jones, ‘A Hymn to Surya’ in The Works of Sir William Jones, 6 vols (London, 1799), Vol. VI, pp. 345–54. See also n. 6 above. 99 That sun, … Ve d a .] Quoted from William Jones’s article ‘A Supplement to the Essay on Indian Chronology’ in The Works of Sir William Jones, 6 vols (1799), Vol. I, pp. 315–29; see especially p. 326. Southey misspells ‘Garga’ (an important astronomer, whom Jones describes as ‘a priest of eminent sanctity’) as ‘Ganga’, an error that persists into the final edition of 1838. See also n. 6 above. 100 Ra’hu … Researches.] From Wilford, ‘On Egypt and other countries adjacent to the C¯al¯i River’, especially pp. 419–20. See n. 58 above. 101 The word … Researches.] From the article by J. D. Paterson, ‘On the Origin of the Hindu Religion’, Asiatic Researches, VIII (1809), pp. 44–87; see especially p. 50.

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Notes to pages 237–46

102 Eternal … Jones.] From William Jones, ‘A Hymn to Camadeo’ (ll. 23–4) in The Works of Sir William Jones, 6 vols (London, 1799), Vol. VI, pp. 313–16. See also n. 6 above. 103 He was … JONES.] Quoted selectively from William Jones, ‘A Hymn to Camadeo’ (‘The Argument’) in The Works of Sir William Jones, 6 vols (London, 1799), Vol. VI, p. 313. See also n. 6 above. 104 Mahadeva … Researches.] Quoted from the article by Wilford, ‘On Egypt and other countries adjacent to the C¯al¯i River’, especially pp. 402–3. See n. 58 above. 105 One of … AKBERY.] Taken from Francis Gladwin, Ayeen Akbery, or the Institutes of the Emperor Akbar (London, 1800), Vol. II, pp. 127–8. For a modern reprint of the Ayeen Akbery, see Franklin (ed.), Representing India, Vols V and VI. 106 An Arabian … VALLE.] Southey probably quotes from The Travels of Pietro della Va l l e i n I n d i a , though it is unclear which edition he translates/paraphrases from. See also n. 17 above. 107 The Calis … SoNNERAT.] Southey quotes from Sonnerat, A Voyage to the East Indies and China, Vol. I, pp. 64–5. See n. 35 above. 108 Sani being … p. 311.] From Moor, Hindu Pantheon. See n. 56 above. 109 A stately … did here.] From Joseph Beaumont, Psyche: or, Loves Mysterie (London, 1648), Canto V, stanzas 197–203. 110 The Aunnays … walk.] See Nathaniel Kindersley, The History of the Nella-Rajah in Specimens of Hindoo Literature (London, 1794), pp. 83–328. 111 The Burghut … p. 113.] Southey appears to quote selectively from his source. See Williamson, Oriental Field Sports, Vol. II, pp. 113–15; see n. 41 above. 112 It is … p. 10.] See Williamson, Oriental Field Sports, Vol. I, p. 10; see n. 41 above. Southey omits the volume number in his bibliographic reference; an omission that persists in all editions of TCK. 113 Some … p. 116.] See Williamson, Oriental Field Sports, Vol. II, p. 116; see n. 41 above. 114 There are … BUCHANAN.] From Francis Buchanan, A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar, Vol. I, pp. 11–12. See n. 73 above. 115 Where there are … p. 9.] Quoted from Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon in the East Indies (1681). Robert Knox (?1640–1720; DNB) went to Fort George in 1657 and was made a prisoner in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) on his homeward voyage. His Historical Relation is considered the first major account of Ceylon in English. 116 The materials … Ava.] Quoted from Symes, An Account of an Embassy to the King- dom of Ava, pp. 244–5. See n. 39 above. 117 In this district … TENNANT.] From Tennant, Indian Recreations, Vol. II, pp. 124–5. See n. 38 above. 118 The Hindoos … Geeta.] Southey quotes from Charles Wilkins’s translation of the Bhagvat-Geeta (London, 1785). For a modern reprint of the text see Franklin (ed.), The European Discovery of India, Vol. 1, especially pp. 139–40. See n. 3 above. 119 This wife … KINDERSLEY.] From Nathaniel Kindersley, Specimens of Hindoo Litera- ture (London, 1794), pp. 19–20. 120 The Surput … p. 32.] See Williamson, Oriental Field Sports, Vol. I, pp. 32–3; see n. 41 above.

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Notes to pages 246–52

121 Nature … p. 100.] See Williamson, Oriental Field Sports, Vol. I, p. 100; see n. 41 above. 122 The Hindoo … Researches.] Quoted from Wilford, ‘On Egypt and other countries adjacent to the C¯al¯i River’, especially pp. 443–4. See n. 58 above. 123 They are … wind.] Philip Beaver, African Memoranda, p. 336. See n. 85 above. 124 I have … Researches.] From William Jones, ‘On the Musical Modes of the Hin- dus’, Asiatic Researches, III (1794), pp. 55–87; see especially pp. 57–8. See also n. 6 above. 125 Nor were … ground.] From ‘The Enchanted Fruit; or the Hindu Wife: An Ante- diluvian Tale’ (ll. 401–40), see The Works of Sir William Jones, 13 vols (London, 1807), Vol. II, p. 183. See also n. 6 above. In the footnote regarding ‘Seita’ taken from Jones, Southey misspells Ram as ‘Rani’, an error that persists through to 1838. 126 The Hindoo … Jayadeva.] Quoted from ‘Gitagovinda, or the Song of Jayadeva’, Asiatic Researches, III (1794), pp. 185–207; see especially p. 197. 127 The custom … p. 271.] Southey appears to quote selectively from his source. See Williamson, Oriental Field Sports, Vol. I, p. 271; see n. 41 above. 128 Glass rings … BUCHANAN.] From Francis Buchanan, A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar, Vol. I, p. 150. See n. 82 above. 129 There is … amatur.] Latin, ‘This land finds favour, and seems safest to the timid mother. Even so a bird already taking anxious thought, as her delivery draws nigh, on what branch to hang her empty home, here foresees winds, there bethinks her fearfully of snakes, and there of men; at last in her doubt a shady spot finds favour; scarce has she alighted on the boughs, and straightway loves the tree’. See Statius, trans. J. H. Mozley, 2 vols (London, 1928), Vol. II, p. 525. Southey’s quotation is taken from ll. 212–16 of the first book of Achilleid, and not the second as consistently maintained in all editions of TCK from 1810 to 1838. 130 This temple … TENNANT.] From Tennant, Indian Recreations, especially Vol. I, p. 106. See n. 38 above. 131 A small … STAVORINUS.] Quoted from Stavorinus, Voyages to the East Indies, Vol. II, pp. 483–4. See n. 14 above. 132 The idol … Collection.] Probably from William Bruton, Newes from the East, or Voyage to Bengalla (London, 1638). 133 Currus … sufficiant.] Latin, ‘Chariots are of such horrendous magnitude that even a thousand men would scarcely be enough to drag one’. Southey’s probable source is the Latin version of Niekamp’s Historia Missionis Evangelicae in India Orientali. See n. 27 above. 134 They have built … Collection.] Probably from William Bruton, Newes from the East, or Voyage to Bengalla (London, 1638). 135 They sometimes … BUCHANAN.] Southey quotes from Claudius Buchanan, Memoir on the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for British India, p. 93. See n. 25 above. 136 There are … Relations.] Probably from Sulaim¯an, Anciennes Relations des Indes et de la Chine de Deux Voyageurs Mahometans (Paris, 1718). 137 Incited, … Antiquities.] From Thomas Maurice, Indian Antiquities, 7 vols (Lon- don, 1794–1801), Vol. II, 306–8.

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Notes to pages 252–7

138 These imposters … BERNIER.] Southey quotes Francois Bernier’s Voyage dans les Etats du Grand Mogol. See Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, Vol. II, p. 7. See n. 13 above. 139 The fifth … p. 24.] Southey quotes from Sonnerat, A Voyage to the East Indies and China, see especially Vol. I, pp. 22–4. See n. 35 above. 140 The Brahmans … CRAUFURD.] Southey possibly quotes from Craufurd, Sketches of the History, Religion, Learning, and Manners, of the Hindoos. See n. 23 above. 141 A rock, … Researches.] Quoted selectively from William Chambers, ‘Some Account of the Sculptures and Ruins at Mavalipuram’. Asiatic Researches, I (1788) pp. 145–70; see especially pp. 146–53. This is the piece Southey refers to in his letter of [October] 1808 to Bedford: ‘Tomorrow I begin my descent into the Ancient Sepulchres which are below the sea, the real scene is Seven Pagodas on the Coramandel Coast, for which you may see the first Vol. of the Asiatic Researches if it be at hand’ (NL, Vol. I, p. 488). Sir William Chambers was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William; he wrote for the Asiatic Miscellany and also published A Persian translation of the regulations for the administration of justice in the courts of Suddur and Mofussil Dewannee Adauluts printed by Charles Wilkins in 1782. 142 Daniel … misery.] From Samuel Daniel, The Civil Wars between the Two Houses of Lancaster and York (1609), Book II, ll. 417–30. Samuel Daniel (1562–1619; DNB) is chiefly remembered for his poetry, which included sonnets, narrative poetry and tragedy among other forms. 143 This monster … trunk.] See Nathaniel Kindersley, Specimens of Hindoo Literature (London, 1794), p. 334, fig. 2. 144 Malecheren, … Res.] Quoted from Chambers, ‘Some Account of the Sculptures and Ruins at Mavalipuram’, see especially pp. 156–7. See n. 141 above. 145 In the Bahia … MSS. i. 8.] Untraced. 146 The inhabitants … LANDT.] Southey paraphrases/translates from G. Landt, A Description of the Feroe Islands, anonymously translated (London, 1810); see especially p. 351. 147 Brahma … p. 10. §7.] See both Nathaniel Kindersley, Specimens of Hindoo Litera- ture (London, 1794), p. 21, and, probably, Niekamp’s Historia Missionis Evangelicae in India Orientali. See n. 27 above. 148 See also … Mahommedans.] See Vol. 3 of this edition, p. 247. Southey’s parenthetical reference is to the second edition of 1809. 149 Quand … p. 248.] French, ‘When they are reproached for some vice, or pulled up for a bad deed, they reply coldly that it is written on their head, and they couldn’t have acted in any other way. If you seem surprised by this new way of speaking, if you ask to see where it is written, they will show you various joints of their skull, claiming that the sutures themselves are the letters of this mysterious writing. If you press them to decipher these characters and to tell you what they mean, they admit that they do not know. But since you are not able to read this writing, I would say to these stubborn people, who reads it for you then? Who explains its meaning to you and tells you what it contains? Besides, since these alleged characters are the same on everyone’s head, how is it that they act so differently, and that here are such contrasts between their intentions and plans? The Bramins listened to me impassively, without worrying about these con- tradictions or the ridiculous consequences they were forced to admit. Finally,

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Notes to pages 257–60

when they felt particularly pressured, they simply withdrew without saying a word.’ Southey’s evident source is from the voluminous accounts of the Jesuit missionaries, Lettres Édifiantes et Curieuses Écrites des Missions Étrangères, 26 vols (Paris, 1780–3). 150 The seas … KINDERSLEY.] Quoted from Kindersley, Specimens of Hindoo Literature, pp. 42–3. 151 ‘Agastya … MAURICE.] Untraced; Thomas Maurice’s major works were The His- tory of Hindustan, 2 vols (London, 1795–8) and Indian Antiquities, 7 vols (London, 1794–1801). 152 The Pauranics … Researches.] Quoted from William Jones’s article ‘On the Antiquity of the Indian Zodiac’, Asiatic Researches, I (1798), pp. 289–306; see especially pp. 290–1. See also n. 6 above. 153 ‘Eight original … Res.] Quoted from William Jones, ‘A Dissertation on the Orthography of Asiatick Words’, Asiatic Researches, I (1798), pp. 1–56, see especially p. 40. 154 The residence … BALDÆUS.] Quoted from Philippus Baldaeus (1632–72), A True and Exact Description of the Most Celebrated East-India Coasts of Malabar and Coromandel, translated from the High Dutch, in Awnsham and Churchill, Collec- tion of Voyages and Travels, 6 vols (London, 1732), Vol. III, p. 757. Philippus Baldaeus (1632–72) was a Dutch reformed missionary whose important work on the coastal areas of south India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) was first published in Dutch in 1672. 155 ‘Even … Bhagavat.] Quoted from William Jones’s article ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India, written in 1784, and since revised’, Asiatic Researches, I (1788), pp. 221–75; see especially p. 245. See also n. 6 above. 156 I am … Bhagavat-Geeta.] Southey quotes from Charles Wilkins’s translation of the Bhagvat-Geeta (London, 1785). For a modern reprint of the text see Franklin (ed.), The European Discovery of India, Vol. 1; see especially p. 70. See also n. 3 above. 157 Being now … ENGELBRECHT.] Quoted from Hans Engelbrecht, The Divine Visions of John Engelbrecht, trans. F. Okely, 2 vols (Northampton, 1780), pp. 59–60. Hans Engelbrecht was originally a sheetmaker from Brunswick whose revelations were reported in 1707 and were compared to those of Swedenborg. 158 Something … Darkness.] See Joanna Southcott, A Dispute between the Woman and the Powers of Darkness (London, 1802), p. 48. Joanna Southcott (1750–1814; DNB) achieved brief fame in the early Romantic period with her visions and prophecies, winning converts in the early 1800s; but she was soon dismissed as fanatical or deranged and died of a brain disorder. 159 ‘There … enlightened.] Quoted from William Jones, ‘On the Literature of the Hindus’, in The Works of Sir William Jones, 6 vols (London, 1799), Vol. I, pp. 349–63; see especially p. 357. 160 Hæc ait, … CARRARA.] Latin, ‘He says this, and he encloses himself as inaccessible in the darkness of his own rays’. From Ubertinus Carrara, Columbus, Carmen Epicum (Rome, 1715). See also n. 68 above. 161 I heard … Missionaries.] Southey collates two versions of this incident by the missionaries Cary and Thomas who reported it in the Periodical Accounts of the Baptist Missionaries, I (1800), pp. 182, 208. Southey was a regular reader of the

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Notes to pages 260–6

Periodical Accounts of the Baptist Missionaries and his reviews of selected volumes appeared in the Annual Review, I (1803) and Quarterly Review, I (1809). 162 The Chatookee … 309.] See Periodical Accounts of the Baptist Missionaries, II (1801), p. 309. 163 Eίµì … α.σ.λ.] Greek, ‘I am that foremost fish, placed in this lake through the hands of Emperor Frederick II on the fifth day of October [a.s.l.]’. The final three letters are uncertain and may represent a date. 164 Besides … άλλ’] In his work on the Parts of Animals, Aristotle writes: ‘In some birds the legs are very long, the cause of this being that they inhabit marshes – and nature makes the organs for the function, and not the function for the organs’. See Jonathan Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 vols (Princ- eton, 1984), Vol. I, 1082.13–15. 165 Which … swims.] In his History of Animals, Aristotle writes: ‘no creature is able only to move by flying, as the fish is able only to swim; for the animals with leathern wings can walk, the bat has feet, and the seal has imperfect feet’. See Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol. I, 776.21–3. 166 There is a bird … Ch. 11.] From Henry More, An Antidote against Atheism in A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings (London, 1662), pp. 74–8. 167 ‘Mankind … edition.] From Jeremy Taylor, A Vindication of the Glory of the Divine Attributes in Reginald Heber (ed.), The Whole Works of Jeremy Taylor, 15 vols (London, 1822). Jeremy Taylor (1613–67; DNB), Bishop of Down and Connor, was the author of a number of theological, devotional and literary works. 168 Ya m a … J ONES.] From William Jones’s essay ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’ in Asiatic Researches, I (1799), pp. 221–75; see especially, pp. 239–40. See also n. 6 above. 169 There is … PICART.] Southey condenses and paraphrases from the monumental work by Picart, The Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the various Nations of the known World, see especially Vol. III, pp. 428–30. See n. 15 above. 170 They who … Geeta.] Southey quotes from Charles Wilkins’s translation of the Bhagvat-Geeta (London, 1785). For a modern reprint of the text see Franklin (ed.), The European Discovery of India, Vol. 1; see especially pp. 75–6. See n. 3 above. 171 The guess … c. 10. §2.] Southey’s probable source is Niekamp’s Historia Missionis Evangelicae in India Orientali. See n. 27 above. 172 The true cause … p. 4.] From Moor, Hindu Pantheon. See n. 56 above. 173 The Dharma-Raja, … Researches.] From the article by Francis Wilford, ‘Remarks on the Names of the Cabirian Deities’, Asiatic Researches, V (1808), pp. 297– 301; see especially, pp 297–8. See also n. 58 above. 174 Punishment … sect. 8.] Quoted from Halhed, A Code of Gentoo Laws. For a reprint of this text, see Franklin (ed.), Representing India, Vol. IV; for the location of Southey’s quotation see especially p. 297. See n. 36 above. 175 In Patala … Res.] Quoted from the article by Francis Wilford, ‘Remarks on the Names, Asiatic Researches, V (1808), pp. 297–301; see especially p. 297. See n. 58 above. Southey misspells ‘Tapasya’ as ‘Taparya’, an error that persists through to 1838. 176 ‘In the place … resounding’.] Quoted from Maurice, The History of Hindostan, Vol. II, pp. 113–14. See n. 54 above.

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Notes to pages 271–84

177 ‘There is … use’.] Southey quotes from Wilkins’s translation of the Bhagvat-Geeta. For a modern reprint of the text see Franklin (ed.), The European Discovery of India, Vol. 1; see especially p. 151. See n. 3 above. 178 Amrita … streams.] From William Jones, ‘The Third Anniversary Discourse’, Asi- atic Researches, 1 (1789), pp. 415–31; see especially p. 419. See also n. 6 above.

‘The Curse of Keradou’: Draft Fragment and Notes, 1801–2 1 Maundervile] Southey alludes to the story of the magical sparrow-hawk (not a falcon) from Mandeville’s Travels. Anyone who is able to keep the bird awake for seven days and seven nights is granted a wish. See M.C. Seymour (ed.), Mandev- ille’s Travels (Oxford, 1967), p. 107. 2 To b i t ] From the book of Tobit in the Old Testament. Tobias, the son of Tobit, was advised by an angel on how to conduct himself during his wedding night in order to deal with an evil spirit infesting his bride: ‘Tobias remembered Rap- hael’s advice; he went to his bag, took the fish’s heart and liver out of it and put some on the burning incense. The reek of the fish distressed the demon, who fled through the air to Egypt. Raphael pursued him there, shackled him and strangled him forthwith’ (Tobit 8:2–4). t 3 S Cecilias angel-lover,] A tradition from the fifth century: St Cecilia was married to Valerianus who was told by the saint on their wedding night that she was betrothed to an angel and that he could not therefore violate her virginity. 4 To … Thalaba.] From Thalaba the Destroyer, IX.567–605, see Vol. 3, pp. 144–5. 5 The darkness … Hodges.] From William Hodges, Travels in India (London, 1793). Southey quotes the passage referred to here in his note to V.34–6. 6 Arbol triste do dia] Possibly reference to the ‘raining tree’; see VII.137n. 7 Pietro Della Valle] From The Travels of Pietro della Valle in India, trans. G. Havers, (London, 1664). Southey quotes this work in his notes to the poem. 8 Strabo] Greek geographer and historian (27 BC–AD 14). 9 Kindersley] A reference to Nathaniel Kindersley, Specimens of Hindoo Literature (London, 1794) p. 11. Southey quotes Kindersley in his notes to TCK. 10 Veeshnoos … earth.] From Nathaniel Kindersley, Specimens of Hindoo Literature (London, 1794) pp. 19–20. Southey uses the quotation in his notes to the poem, see XIII.131n. 11 Kindersley] See n. 9 above. 12 P. della Valle] From The Travels of Pietro della Valle in India, trans. G. Havers, (London, 1664). Southey quotes this work in his notes to the poem. 13 du Pirron.] Possibly a reference to Anquetil du Perron (1731–1805), a French Orientalist who travelled to India in 1754 and translated the Parsi (Zoroastrian) scriptures, the Avesta (1771), for the first time. His work was dismissed as a for- gery perpetrated by contemporary Parsi priests by William Jones and other scholars; but was largely vindicated in due course. Southey thought highly of Du Perron, but does not quote him in his notes. 14 The Chatookee … clouds.] From Periodical Accounts of the Baptist Missionaries, Vol. ii. p. 309. Southey quotes this description in his notes to the poem, see XXI.84n. 15 inter homines … voraverunt.] Latin, ‘They behaved very savagely amongst men and to increase their own cruelty they devoured the flesh of animals and of men’.

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Notes to pages 284–360

Southey’s probable source is Johann Lucas Niekamp’s Historia Missionis Evangel- icae in India Orientali (Halle, 1747); see also the note to his poem II.6n above. 16 Vairarin … est.] Latin, ‘Of buried treasures the most grievous is the devil’. Southey is evidently noting an image for further use or development in his poem. 17 Vaicarany … crost.] Southey’s source is ‘A Letter From Father Bouchet, a Jesuit Missionary to Maduras, and Superior of the New Mission of Carnate to Monsr. Huet, Bp. of Avranches’ published in the third volume of Picart’s Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of the Known World, 7 vols (1733–9), Vol. III, pp. 442–54. Jean-Venant Bouchet (1655–1732) was a French Jesuit priest who set up the Carnatic Mission in India in 1702.

Draft Fragment, 1806 1 Saturday … 18{[stain]}] This would have been 1806; however it was a Friday, and not a Saturday as Southey records.

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