Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810) are metrical romances with quasi‐epic scope. Mingling fascination with fable and accumulation of cultural lore (evident in the long notes added to the poems, indicating provenance and sources), they bring into English poetry a resource that resonated with the period’s interest in other cultures. They orchestrate narrative and poetic motifs of power and richness in themselves, and are highly influential for later poets. One main example must suffice. Shelley, a great admirer of the poems, shows the impact of their situations and wording in many places. To consider the effect on the younger poet of just the earlier poem by Southey: when Thalaba goes on a boat‐trip ‘Without an air, without a sail’ (11.376),1 he anticipates the voyage undertaken by the protagonist of Alastor; and when he descends to the Domdaniel, the realm of the evil sorcerers at the close of Thalaba, he anticipates the descent of Asia, Panthea, and Ione into the cave of Demogorgon in the second act of Prometheus Unbound.
Moreover, the Green Bird (embodied soul of the slain Laila) that ‘Woke wonder while he gazed / And made her dearer for her mystery’ (11.285–6) contributes to the way in which Shelley celebrates Intellectual Beauty’s effects as kin to that which is ‘Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery’ (‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, 11). The bird’s voice has a feminine influence of a kind that anticipates effects not just of plot in Shelley but also of technique, since Southey delights in effects of varying, incremental repetition. In the lines, ‘It cheered his heart to hear / Her soft and soothing voice; / Her voice was soft and sweet’ (11.272–4), Southey, like Wordsworth and Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads, or Shelley in many passages, successfully surmounts the risks of mawkish simplicity or mere redundancy as he invites us to trace Thalaba’s kindling response to Leila’s presence. The Curse of Kehama leaves multiple traces on Shelley’s work: the germ of the ‘Ode on the West Wind’, with its figuration of the wind as a Vishnu / Seeva‐like ‘Destroyer and preserver’ (14), can be located in Book 19 when the Glendoveer prays to Seeva: ‘Thou who art every where, / Whom all who seek shall find, / Hear me, O Seeva! hear the suppliant’s prayer!’ (183–5). For his part, Keats’s evocation of the sorrowful beauty of Thea’s countenance close to the start of Hyperion is indebted to Southey. ‘How beautiful,’ writes Keats, ‘if sorrow had not made / Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self’ (35–6), reworking with elaborate stylishness Southey’s elegant lines in Thalaba, ‘She seemed sorrowful, but sure / More beautiful for sorrow’ (11.383–4).2
The plot of Thalaba is episodic, and yet effectively coherent as a whole, recalling in this aspect as in others the impact of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Whereas Spenser takes us into a hypnotically relevant dream‐world, however, Southey, for all his poetry’s fascination with the strangeness of event, rarely lingers over the symbolic wealth that the reader suspects lurks within his materials. This absence of poetic self‐concern is not always to the poem’s disadvantage. Thalaba supplies the driven plot‐line of Romantic quest; for symbolic and inward glosses on such questing we might wish to go to Coleridge’s earlier Kubla Khan or Shelley’s later Alastor. Thalaba seeks to avenge the death of his father Hodeirah; he has an ambiguous relation with enchantment himself, deploying yet finally casting aside the power of a magical ring he has taken from an enemy sorcerer. The tale has an Islamic colouring, but Thalaba’s virtues seem preeminently those of a pious, self‐denying English Protestantism, not incompatible with the sense of moral superiority that accompanied ongoing imperialist expansion at the time.
There are frequent complications of incident, yet recurrent events help bind the poem together, as does the emphasis on the hero’s pure, unyielding intensity of purpose as Thalaba embarks on his avenging quest. The poem involves a continual battle between masculine firmness and an alternately yielding and tempting that is gendered female. Such yielding is first apparent in the attitude and subsequent death of Thalaba’s mother Zeinab, with her piously acquiescent mantra ‘Praise to the Lord our God, / He gave, he takes away!’ (1.172–3), and then in the deaths of the mother substitutes and lover figures, Oneiza and Laila; the tempting is evident in the hero’s need to resist various seductive females, notably Maimuna, the witch‐like spell‐caster who finally converts to good. Yet even here Southey is not merely stereotypical: Thalaba’s final submission to the voice of the ‘Prophet of God!’ (12.486) he addresses at the close, when he says to it, ‘Do with me as thou wilt! thy will is best’ (12.489), shows him to be very much his mother’s son. And to the degree that he seems to be more obedient automaton than morally taxed hero, Thalaba is a protagonist who raises questions in the reader’s mind about the meanings that Southey attaches to what he calls ‘the chariot‐wheels of Destiny’ (11.2). Is this a poem exhorting or interrogating, for example, a British sense of imperial sway as it undertook its forays into the east? Such a political reading can be extracted from the poem, but the poem remains cunningly guileless, as though its one purpose were simply to narrate its tale.
For all the unambiguous moral clarity of his poem’s design, Southey excels at suggesting the inexplicable power of evil. The description (turning into evocation) of Maimuna’s beguiling spell is one example, where the writing’s use of monosyllabic nouns and verbs masks as it implies her sinister intent, ‘And then again she spake to him / And still her speech was song’ (8.332–3), where ‘to him’, omitted in printings from 1809, points up the fact that she has Thalaba in her thrall, even as he ‘knew not the words’ (8.303). Another is the dialectical argument shaped by the ‘sophist speech’ (9.145) of the arch‐enemy Morareb, arguing enticingly for a relativist view of ‘Evil and Good … / What are they Thalaba but words?’ (9.169–70; ellipses are Southey’s); there, the hero’s name is used with an almost chummy familiarity, as though Thalaba’s high moral air were merely an act. Southey manages well, too, his hero’s haughty, unhasty response: ‘know ye not / That leagued against you are the Just and Wise / And all Good Actions of all ages past, / Yea your own Crimes, and Truth, and God in Heaven!’ (9.219–22). As in an X‐ray, one sees at this textual moment a flaring into eloquent being of the Romantic defiance to be heard in Byron and Shelley: a defiance at once proudly individualist yet calling on the past for support, even as it is, arguably, more religiously orthodox in inflection than the later poets ever manage or want to be.
A key to the poetic effect of Thalaba is Southey’s choice of a metre that avoids rhyme and varies in line length; based, he tells us in the Preface, on the ‘dramatic sketches of Dr. Sayer[s]’ (p. 3), it is among the most significant prosodic experiments undertaken by the first‐generation Romantic poets. Sayers was the author of Poems, Containing Sketches of Northern Mythology (1792), and, as Tim Fulford notes, Southey admired in Sayers his ‘abandonment of the neo‐classical couplet’.3 The metre Southey uses seeks to avoid either the mechanically regular rhythm of the iambic pentameter or the merely improvised. What Southey wants is a measure that supplies both ‘the sense of harmony’ and ‘the accent of feeling’, a metre that does not chop lines ‘which could be read as one’, but allows each line its own life, even as the overall effect is intended to be harmonious. For Southey, metre is the soul of poetry. The metre of Thalaba ‘suits’, he claims, ‘the varied subject’ and is ‘the Arabesque ornament of an Arabian tale’ (Preface, p. 3).
An ‘Arabesque ornament’ twists, undulates, and interweaves through a design, and Southey’s metre adapts itself particularly well to the expression of interwoven events, descriptions, and transitions, and to the questioning which Southey introduces in order to nuance the predominantly declarative, active force of his poem’s syntax. Typically a character is introduced in a place; we learn his or her history later and, indeed, history as fallen narrative is a powerful force in the poem. We meet characters who exist in their own imaginative space like figures from Spenser, and the poem, for all its awareness of the hurts of memory and its near‐apocalyptic anticipation of a final contest, enjoys a continual emphasis on a narrative immediacy: spaces in which acts of will and moral choice have to be confronted and imaginatively undertaken all over again. To take just one instance, more or less at random, the following lines typify the startling thereness of Southey’s narrative technique, as though each instant contained a quality of the potentially marvellous: ‘The song of many a bird at morn / Aroused him from his rest. / Lo! By his side a courser stood!’ (6.19–21). The effect is both to delight in the particular ‘courser’ standing by him and to suggest the hero’s larger function, continually to be arisen from ‘rest’. The consequence, overall, is a highly significant and unfairly neglected example of poetic narrative in the period.
The Curse of Kehama thrives on the episodic, dividing its twenty‐four books into a number of sections and employing rhyme with as much virtuosity as Thalaba dodges it. In Kehama Southey often rhymes and occasionally avoids rhyme with extraordinary skill. An example occurs in Book 2 in which Kehama curses Ladurlad, preventing him from sleeping or from the release of death, or from the effects of time, by taking him out of nature – and thus inadvertently conferring the capacity for heroic status on him (Ladurlad will be able to save his daughter from burning to death – apparently her only way of escaping rape – because of his invulnerability to fire). The curse is a powerful incantation, mingling intensifying triplet rhyme (161–3) and a line, ‘With a fire in thy heart’ (164), that stands expressively alone, without a rhyme partner. In the passage that ensues (170–84), describing the impact on Ladurlad of the terrifying curse, Southey eschews rhyme, an eschewal that, in context, reinforces inability to believe what has just happened, as his hero stands ‘with loose‐hanging arms, / And eyes of idiot wandering’ (172–3). The control of mood and pace effected by Southey’s handling of rhyme effects is highly impressive throughout the poem.
The poem’s story is once again Manichean in import and inflection, as it adapts Indian mythology to a tale of good versus evil, coming to a focus in Kehama’s drinking of ‘The Amreeta‐cup of immortality’ (24.131), another Southeyan detail which Shelley seems to have remembered in The Triumph of Life:
He did not know the holy mystery
Of that divinest cup, that as the lips
Which touch it, even such its quality,
Good or malignant: Madman! and he thinks
The blessed prize is won, and joyfully he drinks. (24.214–18)
The lines illustrate the declarative terseness and lucid compression of Southey’s writing, with its sharp rhymes and enjambments. The poem strikes a fine balance between sketching the possibly Napoleon‐like power of Kehama,4 exemplified by his acts of sudden brutality (and Southey doesn’t shrink from a considerable degree of physical horror), and the believable courage of Ladurlad and Kailyal, ‘Sufferers from tyranny’ (23.283), whose champion is the Glendoveer, half angelic Sir Galahad, half Popean sylph. The division of the poem into a series of encounters and dramatic highpoints allows Southey to maintain tension and offer a virtual tour round the domain of his mythological learning. Gods are depicted with solemnity and respect, yet with a strong sense of the limitations placed upon their exercise of absolute power. The resemblance is more with classical than Christian narrative since the idea of plural deities holds sway in the poem, even as the notion of ‘omniscience’ and ‘omnipotence’ (24.208, 209) warrants the narrator’s fulminating interest. In his 1838 Preface, Southey depicts himself as an adventurous mythographer, explaining the poem as produced by the desire ‘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’ (Preface, p. 3). The poem has a conflicted nature; it has ‘radical elements’ in its hatred of despotism and sympathy for ordinary, lower‐caste people that appealed to Shelley, as the editor of the Pickering edition notes (p. xviii), and it attempts to do justice to the benign and more fearsome aspects of Hindu mythology in (for example) the material about Baly and the Juga‐Naut (see vol. 4, p. xxvii). The argument that it promotes a Christianizing, proto‐imperialist view of its subject‐matter is fashionable, yet it ignores Southey’s responsiveness to his materials. What he achieves in The Curse of Kehama is a poem that finds in Hindu mythology more than an exotic other and not merely a serviceable mirror of Western concerns; there is a passion of narrative invention and immersion in episodic intensity that gives the poem a continuing life.