The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey
Robert Southey to Walter Savage Landor, 20 May 1808
“You have bound me to the completion of Kehama, and, if I have health
and eye-sight, completed it will be within twelve months. Want of practice has
not weakened me: I have ascertained this, and am proceeding.
“I will use such materials as have stood the test;
those materials are the same in all languages, and we know what they are. With
respect to metre it is otherwise: there we must look to English only, and in
English we have no other great poem than the Paradise Lost. Blank verse has long
appeared to me the noblest measure of which our language is capable, but it
would not suit Kehama. There
must be quicker, wilder movements; there must be a gorgeousness of ornament
also,—eastern gem-work, and sometimes rhyme must be rattled upon rhyme,
till the reader is half dizzy with the thundering echo. My motto must be,—
Ποιχίλον είδος έχων, οτι ποιχίλον άϕάσσω. |
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This is not from any ambition of novelty, but from the nature and
necessity of the subject. I am well aware that novelty in such things is an
obstacle to success; Thalaba has proved it to be so. The mass of mankind hate
innovation: they hate to unlearn what they have learnt wrong, and they hate to
confess their ignorance by submitting to learn anything right. I would tread in
the beaten road rather than get ![]()
| 146 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 34. |
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among thorns by turning
out of it; but the beaten road will not take me where I want to go. What seems
best to be done is this, to write mostly in rhyme, to slip into it rather than
out of it, and then generally into some metre so strongly marked, as to leave
the ear fully satisfied.
“One inference I think must be drawn from the obscurity
of Pindar’s metre,—that, be it
what it may, the pleasure which it gave did not result from rhythm. Indeed, the
whole system of classical metres seems to have been that of creating difficulty
for the sake of overcoming it. We mis-read Sapphics without making them worse;
we mis-read Pentameters and make them better; and the Hexameter remains the
most perceptible of all measures, though in our pronunciation we generally
distort four feet out of the six.
“A great deal more may be done with rhyme than has yet
been done with it; there is a crypto-rhyme which may often be introduced with
excellent effect; the eye has nothing to do with it, but the ear feels it
without, perhaps, perceiving anything more than the general harmony, and not
knowing how that harmony is produced. Sometimes the sparing intermixture of
rhymes in a paragraph may be so managed as to satisfy the ear, and give greater
effect to their after profusion. These are not things which one thinks of in
composition, but they are thought of in correcting; they are the touches in
finishing off, when a little alteration produces a great difference.
“Your dislike to the ballad metre is, perhaps, because
you are sick of a tune which has been sung ![]()
| Ætat. 34. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 147 |
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so often and
so badly. It is not incapable of dignity, but there is a sort of language that
usually goes with it, and has the effect of making it so. Kehama is pitched in too high a key for it;
I shall weed out all uncouth lines, and leave the public nothing to abuse
except the strangeness of the fable, which you may be sure will be plentifully
abused. The mythology explains itself as it is introduced; yet because the
names are not familiar, people will fancy there is a difficulty in
understanding it. Sir William Jones has
done nothing in introducing it so coldly and formally as he has done. They who
read his poems do not remember them, and none but those who have read them can
be expected to have even heard of my Divinities. But for popularity I care only
as regards profit, and for profit only as regards subsistence. The praise of
ten would have contented you; often have I said that you did not underrate the
number of men whose praise was truly desirable. Ten thousand persons will read
my book; if five hundred will promise to buy it, I shall be secure of all I
want. You shall have it in large portions as fast it is written.
Sir William Jones [Oriental Jones] (1746-1794)
English poet, jurist, and oriental philologist; he published
Poems,
consisting chiefly of Translations from the Asiatic Languages (1772).
Pindar (522 BC c.-443 BC)
Greek lyric poet who celebrated athletic victories in elaborate odes that became models
for intricate and often elliptical odes in English.
