Southey 4-prelim.fm Page i Wednesday, March 31, 2004 10:29 AM 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 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Taylor & Francis 2004 All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. 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 Southey 4-prelim.fm Page vii Wednesday, March 31, 2004 10:29 AM 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 manu- script 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 mate- rial. 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. vii Southey 4-prelim.fm Page viii Wednesday, March 31, 2004 10:29 AM To Grevel Lindop, with deepest appreciation for his unfailing scholarly, editorial and human support. Southey 4-intro.fm Page ix Wednesday, March 31, 2004 5:09 PM 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 estab- lished, 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 vol- umes, 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 consist- ency and the vastness of his mythographical project however should not blind us to the more immediate pressures and contexts that shape his work. Those pres- sures 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- ix Southey 4-intro.fm Page x Wednesday, March 31, 2004 5:09 PM Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810 – Volume 4 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 orien- talist than Sir Wm Jones, who disgraced himself by enviously abusing him.