1819 Few deaths of monarchs have inspired a poem as fine, or a poem as mediocre, as that of George III.
On this day the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, as part of his official duty, commemorated the passing of the king (in truth long gone in age, madness and total incompetence) with an effusion in hexameters – the least British of prosodies – entitled ‘The Vision of Judgement’. It pictured the deceased king welcomed into heaven, by an appropriately deferential angelic host. The implication was that he would reign there, as he had on earth.
The poem took a year to publish and in the preface Southey made the mistake of attacking Byron (without actually naming him) as the leader of the ‘Satanic School’ of poetry. There would be no welcome in heaven for the author of Don Juan, it was implied. The other place awaited.
Byron penned a rapid response, subtly retitled ‘A Vision of Judgment’ (i.e. with an indefinite pronoun and differently spelled ‘Judgment’ – a cataloguer’s nightmare). The poem was written in flowing ottava rima, Byron’s favourite verse form.
In the preface, Byron contemptuously pointed to Southey’s earlier composition of the verse play Wat Tyler, with its celebration of regicide, adding:
If Mr Southey had not rushed in where he had no business, and where he never was before, and never will be again, the following poem would not have been written. It is not impossible that it may be as good as his own, seeing that it cannot, by any species of stupidity, natural or acquired, be worse. The gross flattery, the dull impudence, the renegado intolerance, and impious cant, of the poem by the author of Wat Tyler are something so stupendous as to form the sublime of himself – containing the quintessence of his own attributes.
The poem itself is a majestic denunciation of the most useless of England’s kings – a title for which George III’s successor, Byron’s ‘fat friend’ (i.e. the Prince Regent, later George IV), is a close contender:
… of all
The fools who flocked to swell or see the show,
Who cared about the corpse? The funeral
Made the attraction, and the black the woe,
There throbbed not there a thought which
pierced the pall;
And when the gorgeous coffin was laid low,
It seemed the mockery of hell to fold
The rottenness of eighty years in gold.