“In verse only we throw off the yoke of the world,” Robert Southey wrote years after abandoning poetry as a vocation, “and are as it were privileged to utter our deepest and holiest feelings. … We express in it, and receive in it sentiments for which, were it not for this permitted medium, the usages of the world would neither allow utterance nor acceptance.”¹ He always believed that poetry was the sublimest form for expressing that “manifestation of spirit” and “inward revelation” he had experienced during the course of the French Revolution.² Poetry offered him the means to convey religious and historical beliefs to a public that might otherwise be shocked by his heterodoxy.

Southey's epics are not particularly sublime. Occasionally he strikes a responsive chord in the reader's mind, but for the most part his verse is fairly pedestrian stuff. In any event, it is not the quality of his verse that will be at issue here, but rather the contemporary attitudes about important moral, political and social issues which the epics express. The early nineteenth century was an age in acute crisis: not only political crisis regarding the relationship of change to order occasioned by the French Revolution, but also social crisis concerning man's relationship to his fellow man as a result of rapid economic growth, and moral crisis caused by growing doubts about Christian transcendental truths. Southey had things to say about how to resolve these crises, formulations he stressed openly and repeatedly in his later prose works, but which he expressed very early in his epic poetry. He was considered, after all, a poet of the first order in the early nineteenth century, and for better or worse, helped shape Victorian attitudes about the great issues of political revolution, social change, and morality. The debatable factor of “influence” aside, Southey reflected and expressed the prejudices and attitudes of many individuals toward the crises of the age; and most importantly perhaps, he enunciated in his epic poetry the advent of a new faith in man's apotheosis, a new form of nationalism, and a commitment to historical transcendence.

It would be misleading to maintain that Southey wrote poetry merely as an inoffensive way of stating unpalatable truths. In fact, Southey wrote poetry years before he discovered an “inward revelation.” Joan of Arc, his first epic, responsible for establishing his reputation, lacks the unity of purpose which marks his last four completed epics. It was written in the midst of disillusionment with political revolution and reaction, and was filled with discordant and contradictory religious and philosophical ideas. Like Wat Tyler (1794), and The Fall of Robespierre (written jointly with Coleridge, 1794), Joan of Arc expresses an attempt to come to grips with revolution, political order and morality.³ But the succeeding epics reveal a unity of purpose and coherence of ideas that testifies to a final resolution of the problem of reconciling change, order, and morality. These four epic poems, as well as many of the shorter poems written while he lived at Westbury from 1798 to 1803, contain sentiments he believed the world would accept in no other form, sentiments which amount to a statement of his religious faith and his post-Revolutionary world view.⁴

The four epics were conceived and written between 1794 and 1814.⁵Madoc, a Welsh-American epic, was begun in 1794, finished by 1799, laid aside, revised extensively, and finally published in 1805. He began Thalaba the Destroyer, a Moslem epic, in 1799 and published it in 1801. His Hindu epic, The Curse of Kehama, was begun in 1801 and published in 1810; and Roderick, The Last of the Goths, a medieval Spanish epic, was begun in 1809 and completed in 1814. The four epics were part of a larger design to build “a metrical romance upon every poetical faith that has ever been established,”⁶ a design he was never to complete. Southey ascribed his failure to waning poetical powers and lack of time to devote to non-lucrative poetic endeavors, but a more plausible explanation may be that his interests shifted from emotional representation of his ideas to more rational, phenomenological representations. It was no coincidence that he became interested in history at precisely the time he believed his poetical powers were flagging, for history, which he held to be the true record of man's apotheosis, became the central concern of his struggle to impose a transcendent meaning on man's existence.

Nonetheless, though he reconciled himself to the world and its usages after 1815, and felt that he could express his holiest feelings in a more “rational” art form, Southey always considered poetry the highest artistic endeavor. Southey believed that the poet possessed a greater power than other artists, for he could fashion the written word to elevate the mind through emotion, imagination, and the unconscious.⁷ As he remarked in Colloquies, poems “foster in [children] the seeds of humanity and tenderness and piety, awaken their fancy and exercise pleasurably and wholesomely their imaginative and meditative powers. … [Poems] provide a ready mirror for the young, in which they may see their own best feelings reflected.”⁸ In other words, poetry held a power to bring to consciousness innate virtues of which a person might be wholly ignorant. Although individuals must be unaware of their humane natures, poetry awakened their conscience and evoked a self-transcending charity for mankind. Southey's concept of poetry as a mirror of subconscious feeling was part of a growing change in critical opinion in the late eighteenth century. As M. H. Abrams observes,

Earlier critics had defined poems primarily as a delightful way of changing the reader's mind; the Wordsworthian critic, primarily as a way of expressing his own. The product effects human betterment, but only by expressing, hence evoking, those states of feeling and imagination which are the essential conditions of human happiness, moral decision, and conduct. By placing the reader in his own affective state of mind, the poet, without inculcating doctrines, directly forms character.⁹

Southey's early commitment to the French version of political and social revolution is well known; when he later changed his opinion of the Revolution, he was exposed to charges of apostasy. It is quite true that he desired radical changes in society, but he had never whole-heartedly embraced the French method of effecting it. What is more important, Southey never abandoned his early enthusiasm for social reform. Wat Tyler, The Fall of Robespierre, and Joan of Arc depict a growing disillusionment with the Revolution and its increasingly violent means of reordering society. Madoc, Kehama, Thalaba, and Roderick offer an alternative method of reform based on religious faith: The later poems express a vision of mankind's eventual unity, attained by personal moral reform rather than mass political revolution. They represent the true nature of Southey's “apostasy,”—that while his desire for reform had not abated, his proposed means by which reform could be effected had changed dramatically—and they reflect the nature of early English Romanticism, which was more concerned with moral than political revolution.

The epics are unified and explicated by two questions: what constitutes reform and how can it be achieved? Southey answers these questions in each epic through the use of a universal moral concept and a theme of spiral historical progress.¹⁰ Universal morality was a self-transcending sense of right and wrong which Southey thought everyone possessed. His epics were designed to elicit from the reader a sense of moral kinship with peoples of different customs and faiths. Consequently, each epic deals with a different religion, or as Southey wrote, a different “poetic faith.” Universal morality, or self-transcendence, was the starting point for his theory of human reformation: if innate conscience was universal, bound by neither time nor space, then moral laws which acknowledged the worth of every individual might someday become universally practiced.

The spiral journey, on the other hand, was a poetic expression of man's historical apotheosis, the story of his first perfection, his fall, and his ultimate self-redemption. Through the spiral journey motif he accounted for evil in the world and the means by which it might be eradicated. The poems clearly indicate that evil is a product of man's freedom to choose between selfishness and selflessness: the implication is that because many choose selfishness, evil affects everyone, even those who exercise their freedom wisely. Southey also held the Rousseauian and Christian attitude that moral evil evolves through time into physical evils and death. Each epic traces a hero's journey from innocence through encounters with evil, chaos and alienation, to a consciously chosen repudiation of evil conduct and an atonement for past sins. In each epic, the hero's actions denote a code of conduct which reflects precepts inherent in universal morality; and each offers a solution for humanity's struggle to reform itself without recourse to political revolution.¹¹

In his construction of a personal utopian vision, Southey employed universal morality and the theme of the spiral journey to deal with other interrelated moral and political problems which troubled him. The two central motifs bind all the epics together, and provide a substantive and coherent unity to each epic as a separate work of art. Thalaba explores the nature and purpose of evil in a world created by a beneficent god; Madoc deals with the establishment of a utopia on earth as opposed to heaven; Kehama derives its unity from the theme of man's alienation from nature; and Roderick elucidates “nationalism” as an antidote to evil.

Southey decided to write a series of poems depicting the various mythologies of the world before he wrote Joan of Arc, though at the time he expressed no intention of developing a common religious theme in them.¹² But by 1798 he had resolved to use his original plan to demonstrate the possibility of a universal religion based upon common ethical precepts. One of the epics was to be constructed from the Old Testament account of the world before the flood: Southey wished to portray the universal corruption of the world under an atheistic monarchy similar to that of Louis XIV or Buonaparte. The flood would have represented a great cleansing chastisement ushering in a return of moral purity. Both the purity he spoke of and the themes in the proposed “World Before the Flood” are identical to those in his completed epics: as he explained to James Montgomery in 1811,

I had the same conception in writing both my mythological poems, tho not to the full extent to which you seem to have carried it. Our hopes, as well as our daydreams, have the same direction. I feel as ardently as you do respecting the Missions, and I look forward as you do to a state of things on earth, when the perfect establishment of the system of Christ Jesus shall extinguish moral evil, and therewith that physical evil which is its result.¹³

Southey found numerous precedents for portraying common moral attributes of religious mythologies. Certainly the mythological syncretists of the eighteenth century were important, but he discovered that Pico Mirandola had anticipated them by two centuries. He read Pico's works as early as 1805 and realized that the Renaissance scholar had wished to argue publicly for a universal religion. “Picus is accused of intermixing too much Platonism, and too many cabalistic reveries with his theology,” Southey wrote, “but we know from the oration with which he designed to open his public disputation, and which was published after his death, that it was one of his favorite opinions how the same great truths were taught in all mythologies, however involved in fable.”¹⁴ Southey's interpretation of Pico's intent expressed his own poetic attempt to bridge the theological barriers between the various world “mythological” religions. Moreover, the implication that Christianity was merely a less corrupted “mythology” logically followed, an heretical notion which if expressed in any medium other than poetry would alienate the readers whose minds he sought to enlarge.

Because the epics dealt with the similarities of ethical beliefs in all religions, he was accused of creating a false impression. Critics considered Thalaba, Roderick, Madoc and Ladurlad as so many Christians in foreign dress. William Wilberforce's critique of Thalaba as morally sublime but religiously misleading—for how could a pagan faith be morally sublime?—brought a rejoinder from Southey that the original Moslem faith possessed a morality as fine as that of Christianity, and it was this original purity he sought to convey in the epic.¹⁵ The parochialism of Wilberforce's critique was precisely the attitude Southey meant to combat. Wilberforce's misunderstanding demonstrated the weakness of affective poetry, for it might evoke virtuous thoughts which miss the poet's intent altogether: affective art provided neither direction nor plan by which those thoughts could be put to constructive use. Because of such failure to understand his intent, Southey turned to history, educational schemes, and political programs to direct the need for benevolent action.¹⁶

The story of humanity's moral improvement, which became the central theme of his later historical works, was already present in Southey's epic poems. He used the spiral journey motif to show the reader how innate goodness had been corrupted, to warn the present generation of the most dangerous evils encountered in the past, and to direct selfless emotional feelings toward a rationally conceived solution to the problem of man's inhumanity to man. And yet his plan, or “providence” (which was history itself), was not so much a program as an assurance that if one acted according to a prescribed standard of conduct the future was certain to become better, even though one might not live to witness it. He demonstrated that those who were virtuous would not be disappointed, and concomitantly, if the race obeyed the dictates of conscience, history would become meaningful and would advance to a beatific future. With a faith that surely equalled any Evangelical's, Southey looked to a day when moral and physical evils would cease: “Oh if this world of ours were but well cultivated and weeded well how like the Garden of Eden might it be made!—The evils might almost be reduced to physical sufferings and death;—the former continually diminishing,—and the latter always indeed an aweful thing, but yet to be converted into hope and joy.”¹⁷ Faith that man could effect his own salvation in this life, could transcend physical suffering and even death, provides the essential coherence and meaning to Southey's four epic poems.

I

Southey dealt primarily with the problem of evil in his first published mythological poem, Thalaba the Destroyer. Typically, he avoided any closely reasoned analysis of the problem. Thalaba is portrayed as the Moslem representative of moral man, a mythopoeic paladin chosen by the gods to destroy the forces of evil in their lair in the Domdaniel caverns. Thalaba is the Moslem version of Everyman, and his life symbolizes the history of the human race. Thus, in order to destroy evil he must lose his innocence just as the “mythological” Adam did; he must be allowed freedom to choose between good and evil. Thalaba is concerned with that point in world history and in everyone's life when innocence ends and evil is recognized. Evil is portrayed on two levels in the epic: an embodied entity, as in the sinister characters of the Domdaniel, and in more dangerous form, an aspect of the hero's personality. Thalaba is unable to recognize the evil of the Domdaniel characters until he discovers that evil also originates within himself. Only after his fall do we recognize that the Domdaniel is a representation of Thalaba's own mind and that the characters of the secret caverns are concrete manifestations of evil ideas originating within himself.

Thalaba encounters two agents of the Domdaniel, Lobaba and Mohareb, early in the poem, who tempt him with the possibilities of man's increasing powers over nature. Lobaba argues that the important thing is not to determine what is ethical, but to master nature by increasing knowledge; the future use of that power is irrelevant. He distinguishes power from morality, implying that the latter is relative to time and place.¹⁸ Thalaba cannot counter this argument because he has never experienced evil, but Lobaba's attempt on Thalaba's life later in the poem is proof enough that his argument is sophistry.

Lobaba is clearly intended to be a spokesman for material progress, a constellation of philosophies Southey despised. Rather than staging a metaphysical discussion in which Thalaba triumphed, Southey countered Lobaba's philosophy by demonstrating the result of such a system of beliefs in Lobaba's actions. Neither could Southey answer the logical arguments of the moral relativists, but he did argue that if morality was relative it would invariably be subservient to power. Men who exercised power without a universally grounded ethical code, men such as Robespierre and Danton, would misuse it and violate the freedom of anyone who seemed to threaten their political positions. Southey summed up his thoughts on the issue of power and morality much more succinctly in a review article on the moral state of the British nation some years later:

In the irreligious and demoralized state of this nation, scientific discoveries are immediately applied as surely to the purposes of mischief as of cupidity. Suicides (and what if murderers?) have availed themselves of the latest experiments upon poisons; and Davy's researches are put to the use of incendiaries; for, as Mr. Walker, in one of the tracts before us, says of wealth, so may it be said of physical science, that as it advances ‘the only alternative is a corresponding moral improvement, or eventual destruction.’ Unless the tree of Knowledge is grafted from the tree of Life, its fruit is bitter, malignant, deadly.¹⁹

Thalaba's story is a pilgrim's progress, a representation of every man's life, a catalogue of temptations, griefs and failings. He began life as an orphan in the family of Moath, in idealized domestic purity (IV, 94). But Thalaba is soon confronted with unwonted knowledge, first by the arguments of Lobaba which he cannot answer, then by temptations of a materialist paradise called Aloadon. He easily resists Aloadon's enticements of food and drink, but only a special charm saves him from sexual sin. The charm, which he finds in his own conscience, reminds him of the domestic happiness of Moath's family (IV, 232). As always in Southey's moral dictums, the family represents a talisman against sexual deviance and a remedy for alienation. In each of his utopian reveries, from his history of medieval Europe as a spiritual unity to his Pantisocratic plan, the family is the originator and preserver of moral purity and an escape from evil.

Thalaba's fall occurs, paradoxically, in an act of conquest, a recurring theme in the epics. After crushing Aloadon, he succumbs to the adulation of society; he falls victim to the same sense of pride in his own power which Lobaba had adumbrated. Thalaba's quest to destroy evil is clearly in jeopardy, since he cannot even recognize his own evil passions. The denouement is swift, for in the midst of his victory celebration and on the eve of his wedding, his betrothed, Oneiza, dies (IV, 262). He reacts frantically: he refuses to eat or rest, remains at the tomb day and night, and worships an apparition of Oneiza. He is so unable to deal with death that he not only loses all interest in his mission, but also loses his senses. Though Oneiza's death is retribution for his sin of pride, it quite clearly goes beyond that. For Thalaba's relationship with Oneiza is symbolically incestuous. Oneiza is Moath's daughter, and represents, at least spiritually, Thalaba's sister. Oneiza is stricken dead just before the marriage between foster-son and daughter can be consummated. Southey is telling his audience that such a marriage between two members of a spiritual family is incestuous, and makes the point even clearer by having Oneiza's father arrive to warn Thalaba that the image he worships every night is not Oneiza's spirit but an evil personification which must be slain before he can regain his freedom to fight evil. The inference is that the spirit of sexual sin originates within himself. When Thalaba refuses to listen, Oneiza's father kills it, and the scene closes with the hero once more pursuing his appointed task (IV, 275-82).

There are many of Southey's experiences in Thalaba's gripping despair: the almost macabre fear of death, the refusal to accept it as final, and the illicit sexual desires.²⁰ But the scene of Thalaba's fall expresses Southey's faith in the ultimate conquest of death through moral progress and historical transcendence. For Thalaba, death is the most wrenching experience of evil in the spiral journey. Without faith in the possibility of transcending death, either through personal immortality or self-sacrifice in the service of future progress, one would be as destitute of hope and as prone to wickedness as the worst materialist. Thalaba's experiences with pride, sensuality and death teach him to recognize evil, and he realizes the futility of attempting to conquer it without selflessness and faith in the future. Clearly, despite his heroic stature and superhuman deeds, he represents man. His possibilities are boundless, and though he has suffered much because of his own shortcomings, he can conquer evil, he can overcome himself. Because Thalaba's every act after his fall originates from a morality based on love, the fall of the Domdaniel becomes inevitable.

The end of his journey is symbolized in three ways. First, he eschews revenge, an evil he suddenly recognizes disguised as one of his driving motives for so many years, and he refuses to kill his father's murderer, Okba. Second, Thalaba frees Othatha, a Promethean character, from the fiery chains that bind him to a rock in the Domdaniel, and thus frees man from the passions that have bound him in this imperfect stage of existence. Lastly, he destroys the Domdaniel, the personification of separation and disunion between men; but in the act of pulling down the Domdaniel he dies and thereby fulfills his faith in the promised reunion with those loved ones who had died before him (IV, 421-38). Thus Southey's first epic foreshadows the Victorian belief not only in an historical perfection, but also in a utopian “future stage of existence,” a place where evil shall have no dominion.

II

The conclusion of Thalaba flows naturally into the opening song of Madoc:

Through the great circle of progressive life,
He guides and guards, till evil shall be known,
And being known as evil, cease to be;
And the pure soul, emancipate by Death,
The Enlarger, shall attain its end predoom'd,
The eternal newness of eternal joy.(21)

The two epics share the common theme of historical transcendence: the providential ordering of man's temporal progress toward freedom from evil. Madoc, like Thalaba, is a prophecy that man will redeem himself from his present plight, not in an Evangelical afterlife only, but in future time. In this epic Southey portrays the other half of that curious Victorian dualistic vision of heaven: the perfection of the temporal “stage of existence.” Madoc is another form of the spiral journey and another link in the chain of mythologies bound together by a universal ethic.

Francis Jeffrey, who never cared much for any of Southey's poems, wrote that Madoc seemed to be a disconnected epic, two epics really: Madoc in Wales and Madoc in America.²² Far from conceiving this as a weakness, Southey designed the epic as a portrayal of two societies: the corrupt European world from which Madoc sought escape, and the new world where man might make a fresh start. The poem bears a striking resemblence to Thalaba in theme and characterization, but the evil in Madoc is neither allegorical nor symbolic. The story is set in Wales in the midst of an internecine war between the sons of the Welsh king, Owen. Madoc, the only son who has not become a participant, must choose between the causes of his elder brothers. The unmistakable historical parallel with the European war being waged as Southey composed the poem lends cogency to his conception of historical progression. The idea that history moved in a spiral supposed that the race continued to progress despite foolish repetition of the bloody mistakes of previous ages. Southey's comments on the Welsh war as “crimes,” and on the Welsh people as “fallen,” applied with equal cogency to the Revolutionary wars and the Europeans of the eighteenth century (V, 72). In a war in which neither side can claim ethical superiority, the only way out for an honest man is flight. This solution, as we shall see, is quite contrary to that of a war in which one side clearly acts in accord with universal morality and the providential historical design.

David, Madoc's eldest brother and the victor in the civil war, cannot recognize the ambition and pride which cripple him. He pursues his defeated brothers with an unyielding hatred that brooks no interference. Madoc, who took no part in the war, is more fortunate, for he learns from Cynetha, a blind prophet, that in order to maintain his integrity, in order to avoid being sucked into the tragedy of destroying the Welsh community, he must flee. Only Madoc's resettlement in the new world of Aztlan enables him to rediscover a sense of community on a more sublime level (V, 89). When David refuses to share his newly-won powers with his brothers, Madoc decides to leave Wales before he is forced to oppose the king's tyranny. His need to escape strongly resembled Southey's desire to leave England for a perfect Pantisocratic society during the years of the Revolutionary wars. In both instances America glitters as a potential utopia, a land untainted by European civilization (V, 69).

The journey to Aztlan, or Mexico, culminates in the expulsion of the Aztecs. Despite obvious parallels with the history of the Spanish conquistadores, Madoc's goal differs from theirs: he seeks neither fame nor riches, but a promised land of peace and harmony. The Aztecs are given every opportunity to become part of that harmony, but their evil religious practices, their human sacrifices, and their refusal to accept their own innate consciences lead to inevitable conflict with the Welshmen. Many of the Aztecs' subject tribes, however, accept the religious teachings of Cynetha, who tells them “Our God … is the same, / The Universal Father” (V, 65). He argues that all religious may be united through universal morality, even that of the Aztecs once stripped of its superstitions and evil encumbrances. Cynetha is a poetic representative of the heroes in history, of the Wesleys, the Luthers, and the Mohammeds. They are prophets, Southey claimed, who lived in every age and reminded nations that “when at times / They sinn'd and went astray, the Lord hath put / A voice into the mouths of holy men …” (V, 65). Like Carlyle's hero in history, Southey's could see what ordinary men could not, the means to reunify the race. In due course the Aztec are defeated, and Madoc in the center of their conquered city announces to his Indian allies that the new brotherhood of man has arrived, a reunion of the family of man, and an end of evil. “Sister and Queen,” Madoc tells Erillyab, the queen of his Indian allies,

          here let us hold united reign,
O'er our united people; by one faith,
Our interest bound, and closer to be link'd
By laws and language and domestic ties,
Till both become one race, for ever more
Indissolubly knit

(V, 361)

Madoc has at last recovered the community and peace he lost in Europe, and cements it by racial intermarriage. Once again Southey stresses the importance of domesticity as the central element of the new moral system, this time on a more universal level. But it is interesting to note that Madoc's new community of believers, united in love, is founded on the corpses of thousands of Aztecs. The connection between violence and morality, present in every epic, becomes the central theme of the last epic, Roderick.²³

III

Each of Southey's epics contains fairly well defined principles of good and evil. In Thalaba the forces of the Domdaniel bear no traces of moral qualities whatever, while Thalaba's bride, Oneiza, is the epitome of goodness. In Madoc the Aztecs certainly set the standard for evil conduct, and the Indian queen, Erillyab, is a paragon of virtue. The Curse of Kehama, however, sets out the clearest dichotomy between the two principles: Kehama is an evil power modelled after Napoleon, a figure striving to gain world domination and immortality in total defiance of morality. Kailyal, a woman, is the good principle, the figure of universal morality, in tune with nature, and trusting always in God. In contrast to so many Romantic portrayals of female figures as sensuous temptresses, Southey's heroines invariably represent man's better nature, the fount of virtue, and the standard which men ought to aspire to. In Kehama Ladurlad is Everyman, doomed to toil between the two principles. He is Hindu, to be sure, but he shares the pure morality at the heart of every religion, for as in all creeds, “the virtuous heart and resolute mind are free. / Thus in their wisdom did the Gods decree / When they created man.”²⁴

In Ladurlad's adventure, Southey explores alienation from and reunification with nature. Kailyal is humanity in union with nature; she is a pure, undefiled child of nature, not a noble savage, but a truly moral individual who communes with god through his creation and, indeed, is an integral part of that creation. Like other Romantics, Southey uses river images frequently as symbols of the interrelationships between man and nature. In this instance the Ganges communicates with Kailyal, bidding her join with it in spiritual purity. Her soul becomes symbolically united with the river through her eyes, which are as “dark as the depths of Ganges' spring profound / When night hangs over it” (VIII, 44). But man also strives with nature, desires to subdue and control it. This aspect of man's nature is represented by Kehama, who is the finished product of the philosophy Lobaba preached in Thalaba. The curse he pronounces results in alienation between man and nature.

Originally Ladurlad was as completely innocent and free of guilt and pain as a child. He lived peacefully with his daughter, Kailyal, as he remembered in the course of his later sufferings (VIII, 68). But the harmony between man and nature presided over by the innocent dominance of Kailyal abruptly ends with the intrusion of Kehama and his son, Arvalon. Almost without warning freedom and responsibility are thrust upon Ladurlad, and evil becomes a part of the world. Ladurlad kills Arvalon for attempting to rape Kailyal, a murder Southey might have committed himself under similar circumstances, but murder nonetheless. “Only in defence … / Only instinctively, … / Only to save my child, I smote the Prince,” Ladurlad cries (VIII, 14). Man's first crime, according to Southey, was a sexual act; his first failing was his inability to control sexual passion. Retaliation, usually murder, followed. Rape and murder, the two primeval crimes which plunged the race into chaos and evil, are stressed repeatedly in the epics. Southey's poetry amply demonstrates his preoccupation with sexuality and the need to hedge it about in marriage in order to tame it. Every epic portrays a rape scene and in every case the sexual crime leads to death.²⁵ For Southey, who believed religion to be a universal feeling of selflessness rather than the revealed truth of God, and perfection a product of man's apotheosis rather than God's will made manifest on earth, the appetites of man had to be curbed in a strict moral code if evil were to be defeated. One of his parameters was the limitation of sexuality to marriage; another was the elevation of woman from sensuous animal to caretaker of domestic virtue.

Southey presents Kehama's revenge on Ladurlad in the form of a rather ingenious allegory on the plight of modern man. Instead of killing Ladurlad, Kehama curses him with eternal separation from nature. Ladurlad finds himself alienated from nature without even hope for reunification through death. He can find peace neither in pain, nor in suffering, nor in hope for eternal life—a situation Southey considered the modern world to be in. The truly maddening thing about the curse is that Ladurlad still lives within nature, still knows the possibilities of interaction and harmony with nature, but can do nothing to realize them. Yet an antidote existed, paradoxically, in the curse itself, but Ladurlad was not to discover this until he had suffered the bitterest torments. He fled from Kailyal and from love; he lost faith in innate goodness and in progress (VIII, 69). Despite Kailyal's pleas to return, “selfish in misery, / He heard the call and faster did he fly” (VIII, 34). Kailyal was left to the fate of a poisonous tree and the murderous hunger of a tiger, images of man in conflict with nature.

Ladurlad's crisis is similar to Thalaba's. Both temporarily lose faith in their own power, that is, in man's power to effect his own salvation. In the face of death and despair, the heroic individual must seek solace beyond himself: Thalaba in the strength of his foster-father, Ladurlad in a mystic experience. Ladurlad cannot turn to nature for comfort and renewal as Wordsworth would recommend, because nature is malevolent and incomprehensibly cruel, at least in man's fallen state. At best nature can soothe the troubled mind only temporarily, but since it inexplicably breeds death within itself, it offers no real answer to man's dilemma. In Ladurlad's crisis, Southey stresses the disjunction of man and nature in the modern materialist world, a disharmony which cannot be repaired by retreat from civilization into the isolation of rural scenes. On the contrary, man must use his mastery of nature rather than repudiate it in order to effect a self-willed recreation of natural harmony. This resignation is the result of Ladurlad's transcendental experience in which he visits the heavens and briefly overcomes the torments of alienation. Though the poetry lacks power, the allegory is trenchant enough: moral man must find the power within himself—must look to an inward revelation—if he is to conquer evil (VIII, 46).

Ladurlad awoke from his mystical reverie to begin his life anew, but this time with a “heart subdued, / A resolute, unconquer'd fortitude, / An agony represt, a will resign'd” (VIII, 46). And though the curse still holds and harmony with nature is yet impossible, he can vicariously realize through Kailyal the happiness which moral perfection will bring. Ladurlad is finally mature enough, finally conscious enough of his freedom within subjugation, to find optimism in the future and to develop a plan of action that will turn man's curse into a weapon to combat evil. It occurs to him that if his curse separates him from nature, it also makes him impervious to its malevolence. He can defy nature's laws to defeat the evil characters who must abide by them. His curse makes Ladurlad a superman who can walk beneath the sea or defeat Kehama's armies without fear of death. Of all Southey's mythical allegories on man's history, Kehama is the most complete and imaginative statement of his solution for the reform of humanity. Just as Ladurlad is able to turn his curse into an effective weapon against evil, so modern man may turn material progress into a moral weapon for the benefit of humanity. Although the curse separates man from nature, isolates him, and ends his innocence, it allows him freedom of choice which he did not posses in a state of nature. Ladurlad is now free to recognize evil, to face death without fear, and to make a free choice between Kailyal or Kehama, between God or Mammon.

The Amreeta Cup is the final symbol of the poem; it is the cup of immortality. Only two mortals may drink from the cup: Kailyal and Kehama. As always, Southey's final statement is a reassurance for himself as well as his readers that death will have no dominion. At Kehama's very moment of triumph, just as he conquers the last stronghold of the gods, he hopes to crown his victory with immortality and so drinks from the cup. But at that moment he becomes captive to death and all his achievements dissolve into the ephemeral illusions they had always been, despite their appearance of substantiality. Kailyal also drinks from the cup, but her death is merely the beginning of eternal happiness; at the same moment Ladurlad's curse falls away (VIII, 197-209).

IV

On the narrative level, Roderick, Southey's last completed epic, is an account of the events surrounding the Moorish conquest of Spain in the Middle Ages. A second level of interpretation comprises an analogy between the Medieval events of the narrative and the Napoleonic conquest of Spain. Finally, a third level of interpretation involves an allegory on the human race which continues the ideas and themes of the first three epics; the poem presents the concept of universal morality and theme of man's spiral historical progress against a background of Spain's struggle for survival. Through all three levels of meaning, the central problem at issue is the relationship of violence to morality and to man's moral progress. While the effective experience which saves the heroes in the other epics is the realization of faith in a universal moral creed that will enable man to create a perfect sense of community, the hero in Roderick saves himself by embracing a faith in the cleansing power of war. Thus, Southey affirms that violence is a component of universal moral behavior and a legitimate method of purging evil. His endorsement of violence as a virtue appears fully developed in his writings at the time of the Peninsular War, though at no time in his life had he espoused pacifism. Roderick is the poetic sanction of the just war, or “holy war,” and his History of the Peninsular War is its prose counterpart.²⁶

The institution of the family is the most important motif in Roderick, for the justification of violence is developed in reaction to the dangers which threaten it. The narrative traces the destruction of individual family unity: the families of Pelayo and Count Julian split into factions, some joining the Moorish-Spanish armies, others joining the Spanish nationalists. Family is equally important on both allegorical levels: Spain is represented as a family torn apart by Napoleon's incursion into Iberia, but the nation is also an allegory for the family of man which has disintegrated as a result of the primal crime. In each of his epics Southey portrays the family as the vehicle for moral progress, because man's apotheosis demanded a firm commitment to human relationships and the most selfless acts originated within the family. Southey further believed that the nation was a macrocosmic family, and quite naturally came to equate nationalism with morality. The Moorish invasion of Spain, Napoleon's war in the Peninsula, and the deed which led to the disintegration of the family of man, represented the same destructive act. Each level of interpretation depicts a threat to the family unit, and therefore a threat to moral progress. In Roderick Southey asserts the family's right to use violence to defend itself for the good of humanity.

As in the other epics, Roderick portrays the most significant events in the spiral journey allegorically through the hero's adventures. Roderick's rape of Florinda is, therefore, the primal crime which plunges the world into chaos. Seeking revenge, Count Julian, Florinda's father, deserts the Catholic faith in order to gain the aid of the Moors, and together they conquer Spain and defeat Roderick. After losing his crown, Roderick takes to the mountains, transformed from a mighty king to an abject hermit, conscious that he is personally responsible for Spain's destruction. The burden of guilt so overwhelms him that he cannot bear to face another human being and ultimately contemplates suicide. Finally, in a dream he learns that to atone for his sin he must lead a holy war against the Moors and expel them from Spain.²⁷

Roderick's expiation is analogous to Ladurlad's determination to face evil and conquer it. For the eradication of evil in the world is Roderick's responsibility just as its existence is his fault. Every epic, and this one more than the others, stresses the need actively to combat the evils of the world. In the midst of his wanderings Roderick discovers that two remedies for grief exist: “Religion, surest, firmest, first and best, / Strength to the weak and to the wounded balm; / And strenuous action next” (II, 1). Southey's affirmation of religion's power to heal is more than obeisance to the orthodox Anglican readership he was appealing to, but it is a religion consecrated to man and dedicated to man's active power of will.

The expiation of the primal crime must be in blood: the evils unleashed upon the world by Roderick's sexual sin can be rooted out only by war. Revenge becomes duty and devotion, and violence becomes Spain's salvation (I, 45). It will unite not only Spain but also the whole of Europe in a new brotherhood. Southey transformed the allegorical account of the fall of man and the subsequent disintegration of the human race into warring factions to the contemporary anarchy of Europe. In seeking a remedy for man's plight, he equated the war against Napoleon with a war against all the evils of the world. Therefore, physical violence came to seem a logical and virtuous weapon in the broader quest for moral reformation. Such was the belligerent twist his Christian morality took under the exigency of total war with France.²⁸

Roderick and Pelayo unite the disintegrated forces of Spain in a spirit of nationalistic and religious passion. They are then able to crush the Moors and their Spanish allies in a series of bloody battles. Released at last from his moral anguish Roderick disappears from the battlefield to die in solitude. But the final symbolic reunification of the family occurs earlier, when Count Julian forgives Roderick for his crime and rejoins the Spanish forces. In Section 12A a dialogue between Julian and Roderick (disguised as a priest) foreshadows Julian's repentance and stresses the importance of universal morality. Are not all religions beholden to the same creator, Julian asks, “Thou seest my meaning; … that from every faith / As every clime, there is a way to Heaven, / And thou and I may meet in Paradise” (II, 98). Roderick does not deny the truth of Julian's question, but impugns his motive for asking it. Julian, Roderick asserts, is suffering from a guilty conscience. He has contravened the universal laws of morality in seeking personal revenge, destroyed family unity, and changed faiths for ignoble purposes; only by repenting and returning to his former faith can he find the peace of mind he seeks. At the end of the poem Julian does desert the Moors and dies in battle (II, Book 24: “Roderick and County Julian”). Thus, the two central characters of the poem, Roderick and Julian, are responsible for the crimes which destroyed Spanish unity and sacrifice themselves for reunification.

Roderick and Julian's search for expiation is a variation of Ladurlad, Madoc and Thalaba's quest for meaning in an evil and chaotic world. Southey's resolution of this quest as well as his explanation of evil is very much in the Christian tradition. But despite his pronouncements about heaven and hope in an afterlife, he was convinced that morality no less than evil is the product of man's will. God plays very little part in any of these poems, except as an impersonal standard of excellence: in each poem man plays the active role in self-creation. The myth of Edenic perfection is to be actualized by the self-willed choices of Everyman. Southey repeatedly stresses the idea that evil, however deplorable, allows man the opportunity to elevate himself to the level of co-creator with God of a new Eden, more beautiful and desirable than the first because it is consciously sought (II, 108-109). And the lesson Southey learned from his disillusion with the Revolution is repeated in each poem: the way to reform, the imposition of meaning upon life, must come through individual moral reformation rather than mass political revolution.

Yet Southey's faith in historical transcendence,—that is, his notion that immortality might be achieved in time,—was ambiguous. His poetry expresses no clear acceptance of the finality of existential time. The legacy of one's good name through influential moral decisions, moral upbringing of one's children, or familial perpetuity does not seem to warrant Southey's full faith. On the one hand the epics express a belief that moral actions will have repercussions upon future generations, will grow and flourish until they choke out evil action entirely at some future time, but on the other hand the poems convey a timelessness as though a historical legacy was not enough, as though Southey needed to live on in flesh and in bone. Southey's epics illustrate a period of transcendental ambiguity, for they paradoxically demonstrate a world in which time is still denied, and a world in which man is wholly immersed in time. Southey's epic heroes strive for self-willed perfection here, and receive perfection hereafter as well. The fate of Madoc, Ladurlad, Roderick and Thalaba is Southey's fate, for the evil that breaks in upon their innocence is Southey's knowledge that man stands alone devoid of God, and must now fashion his own future, letting immortality come if it will. What is clear in the epics is that the best future man can fashion will come through a heroic affirmation of total self-transcendence.

Southey concluded Roderick with a poetic declaration of the optimistic faith in human possibility which was the theme of all four poems. It was not only a fitting statement of the faith that had inspired his poetic efforts, but also a simple summation of his philosophy of history.

                                                                                          Here we see
The water at its well-head; clear it is,
Not more transpicuous the invisible air;
Pure as an infant's thoughts; and here to life
And good directed all its uses serve.
Unsullied thus it holds its bounteous course;
But when it reaches the resorts of men,
The service of the city there defiles
The tainted stream; corrupt and foul it flows
Through loathsome banks and o'er a bed impure,
Till in the sea, the appointed end to which
Through all its way it hastens, 'tis received,
And, losing all pollution, mingles there
In the wide world of waters

(II, 107-108).

Notes

1. Robert Southey, Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1829), 2:399.

2. Southey is referring to his religious beliefs, which were far from orthodox. Southey to James Montgomery, 6 May 1811, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of James Montgomery, ed. John Holland and James Everett, 7 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1854-56), 2:298-99.

3. For an analysis of Southey's early poetry see my unpublished dissertation, “Robert Southey and the Development of a Romantic Teleology,” Emory University, 1976.

4. This essay will confirm Northrop Frye's suspicion that “surely Southey intended his complete scheme to be a unity, an epic-romance of a scope even broader than Spenser's,” Fearful Symmetry (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1947), p. 176.

5. I am defining “epic” as a long narrative poem about the deeds of an heroic individual. Neither Thalaba nor Kehama fits some of the criteria of formal epic verse, but for the purposes of this paper a very loose definition is not amiss. For a thoroughgoing definition of epic and a discussion of Southey's epics, see Brian Wilkie, Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1965), pp. 30-38.

6. Southey to Anna Seward, 28 May 1808, in Kenneth Curry, ed. New Letters of Robert Southey, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965), 1:476.

7. Southey, review of “Duppa's Heads, from M. Angelo and Raffaello,” Annual Review, 3 (1804), 918-19.

8. Colloquies, 2:398.

9. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 329.

10. The spiral or circuitous journey was both a “naturalized” form of the Christian story of the fall, and an historical theory. Southey was the first English Romantic to transform the spiral journey concept from a basically poetic motif to an historical philosophy. For a brilliant study of the theme and its relation to Romanticism, see M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971).

11. Southey to Grosvenor Bedford, 29 December 1814, Bodleian MS. English Letters, c. 25, fol. 144.

12. Southey to James Montgomery, 26 April 1812, Memoirs of James Montgomery, 2:334.

13. Southey to James Montgomery, 29 November 1811, Keswick Museum MS. “Collection of Autograph Letters,” fol. 2.

14. Southey, review of “Memoirs of Angelinus Politanus, Joannes Picus of Mirandula, &tc.,” Annual Review, 4 (1805), 513-14.

15. Southey, Thalaba the Destroyer, The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, 10 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844), 4:xv.

16. Southey, review of “The History of Canada by George Heriot,” Annual Review, 3 (1804), 194; and Southey to Sir Walter Scott, 17 March 1816, Natl. Libr. of Scotland MS. 3887, fol. 31.

17. Southey to Dr. Robert Gooch, 30 November 1814, Bodleian, Doncaster MS., d. 86, fol. 7.

18. Thalaba the Destroyer, in The Poetical Works, 4:144-45. Cited textually hereafter.

19. Southey, “Moral and Political State of the British Empire,” The Quarterly Review, 44 (January 1831), 304.

20. Especially vivid accounts of Southey's fear of death (a constant preoccupation throughout his life) and sexual neuroses are recorded in his journal of dreams. See the Appendix of Edward Dowden, ed., The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, & Co., 1881).

21. Madoc, in The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, 15:15. Cited textually hereafter.

22. The Edinburgh Review, 7 (October 1805), 5, 9.

23. In his monumental historical work on Brazil Southey expressed the belief that the reunification of religion must come from the new world. History of Brazil, 3 vols. (London; Longman, Hurst, Rees, & Orme, 1810-19), 3:878.

24. The Curse of Kehama, in The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, 8:155-56. Cited textually hereafter.

25. There is a parallel situation in Wat Tyler, when Wat kills the Tax Collector for attempting to rape his daughter, thus setting off a general war. Wat Tyler: A Dramatic Poem (London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1817), p. 25.

26. The History of the Peninsular War (1823-32) was an expanded form of the historical sections of the Edinburgh Annual Register which Southey wrote from 1808 to 1811, or about the same time he was composing Roderick. For his definition of a “holy war” see the Register for 1808 (Edinburgh: John Ballantyne & Co., 1810), pt. I, 320-21.

27. “Roderick in Solitude,” Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814; 3rd rpt. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816), 1:15-26. Cited textually hereafter.

28. See the Edinburgh Annual Register for 1808, pt. I, 396; for 1809, pt. I, 56-57; and for 1810, pt. I, 473-74. In the Life of Nelson (1813; rpt. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1906, Everyman's Library), he concludes by saying that “the most triumphant death is that of the martyr; the most awful that of the martyred patriot; the most splendid that of the hero in the hour of victory,” p. 268.