Poems — Inside the Classic

(0 User reviews) 2033

In Category - Science Fiction Utopias

Authors: Southey, Robert, 1774-1843 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2005 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Poetry Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 25,105

Reading time 110 min

Text sections 3

The catalog record for Poems — Inside the Classic provides practical reading context through 25,105 words, 1 hr 50 min estimated reading time, and 3 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 22.2 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Poetry,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #8212

Robert Southey's 1797 collection reveals a poet self-consciously navigating between youthful lyricism and mature moral verse, with poems addressing social injustice, classical myth, and personal grief, marked by formal experimentation and a persistent tension between public duty and private melancholy.

Editorial Edition Score 4.5/5

★★★★★ ★★★★★

Calculated from edition completeness, EPUB availability, text structure and catalogue metadata. Not a user rating.

How this score is calculated

Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg8212

Read the Text

Husht was the lute, the Hebrew ceas'd the song; Long peals of plaudits echoed from the throng; Each tongue the liberal words of praise repaid, On every cheek a smile applauding play'd; The rival Bard advanced, he struck the string, And pour'd the loftier song to Persia's King.

Why should the wearying cares of state Oppress the Monarch with their weight? Alike to him if Peace shall bless The multitude with happiness; Alike to him if frenzied War Careers triumphant on the embattled plain, And rolling on o'er myriads slain, With gore and wounds shall clog his scythed car. What tho' the tempest rage! no sound Of the deep thunder shakes his distant throne, And the red flash that spreads destruction round, Reflects a glorious splendour on the Crown.

Where is the Man who with ennobling pride Beholds not his own nature? where is he Who but with deep amazement awe allied Must muse the mysteries of the human mind, The miniature of Deity. For Man the vernal clouds descending Shower down their fertilizing rain, For Man the ripen'd harvest bending Waves with soft murmur o'er the plenteous plain. He spreads the sail on high, The rude gale wafts him o'er the main; For him the winds of Heaven subservient blow, Earth teems for him, for him the waters flow, He thinks, and wills, and acts, a Deity below!

Where is the King who with elating pride Sees not this Man--this godlike Man his Slave? Mean are the mighty by the Monarch's side, Alike the wife, alike the brave With timid step and pale, advance, And tremble at the royal glance; Suspended millions watch his breath Whose smile is happiness, whose frown is death.

Why goes the Peasant from that little cot, Where PEACE and LOVE have blest his humble life? In vain his agonizing wife With tears bedews her husband's face, And clasps him in a long and last embrace; In vain his children round his bosom creep, And weep to see their mother weep, Fettering their father with their little arms; What are to him the wars alarms? What are to him the distant foes? He at the earliest dawn of day To daily labor went his way; And when he saw the sun decline, He sat in peace beneath his vine:-- The king commands, the peasant goes, From all he lov'd on earth he flies, And for his monarch toils, and fights, and bleeds, and dies.

What tho' yon City's castled wall Casts o'er the darken'd plain its crested shade? What tho' their Priests in earnest terror call On all their host of Gods to aid? Vain is the bulwark, vain the tower; In vain her gallant youths expose Their breasts, a bulwark, to the foes. In vain at that tremendous hour, Clasp'd in the savage soldier's reeking arms, Shrieks to tame Heaven the violated Maid. By the rude hand of Ruin scatter'd round Their moss-grown towers shall spread the desart ground. Low shall the mouldering palace lie, Amid the princely halls the grass wave high, And thro' the shatter'd roof descend the inclement sky.

Gay o'er the embattled plain Moves yonder warrior train, Their banners wanton on the morning gale! Full on their bucklers beams the rising ray, Their glittering helmets flash a brighter day, The shout of war rings echoing o'er the vale: Far reaches as the aching eye can strain The splendid horror of their wide array. Ah! not in vain expectant, o'er Their glorious pomp the Vultures soar! Amid the Conqueror's palace high Shall sound the song of victory: Long after journeying o'er the plain The Traveller shall with startled eye See their white bones then blanched by many a winter sky.

Lord of the Earth! we will not raise The Temple to thy bounded praise. For thee no victim need expire, For thee no altar blaze with hallowed fire! The burning city flames for thee-- Thine altar is the field of victory! Thy sacred Majesty to bless Man a self-offer'd victim freely flies; To thee he sacrifices Happiness, And Peace, and Love's endearing ties, To thee a Slave he lives, to thee a Slave he dies.

Continue Reading →

Southey opens his 1797 Poems with a sonnet that presents the poet as a "Pilgrim woe-begone" who gathers "wild and simple flowers of Poesy" along life's road. This self-portrait as a wandering, wayward collector sets the tone for a volume acutely aware of its own making. In the preface, Southey distinguishes between his earlier lyric pieces—which he now considers the "most worthless species of composition"—and the later poems "addressed to the heart and the understanding." The collection thus enacts a deliberate shift from youthful ornament to moral substance, yet the poems themselves often blur this boundary, embedding social critique within conventional forms and personal lament within public address.

Formal Self-Consciousness and the Poet's Voice

Southey's prefatory remarks reveal a poet unusually explicit about his craft. He dismisses the ode as "the most worthless species of composition" and regrets the "shackle of rhyme and the confinement to fourteen lines" in his sonnets. Yet the volume includes both odes and sonnets in abundance, suggesting a tension between stated aesthetic judgments and actual practice. The sonnets themselves often comment on the act of writing: Sonnet IX addresses the beloved Edith directly, contrasting the "hard durance of the empty throng" with the relief of pouring out feelings in verse. This self-referential strain runs throughout—the poet is forever aware of his audience, his predecessors, and his own evolving standards.

Social Conscience in Lyric Form

Several poems take up explicitly political subjects. The section "Poems on the Slave-Trade" and the address "To the Genius of Africa" signal Southey's engagement with abolitionist causes. In the "Botany-bay Eclogues," he turns to the lives of transported convicts, using the pastoral eclogue form to frame scenes of dispossession and exile. The sonnet sequence includes a meditation on a storm that contrasts the speaker's sheltered position with a "way-worn traveller" who "Wraps his torn raiment round his shivering form." Southey's social concern is often mediated through a personal lens—the poet sighs "for the crimes and miseries of mankind" from a position of relative safety, a stance that the volume neither fully endorses nor entirely critiques.

Classical Myth and Emotional Extremity

The monodrama "Sappho" exemplifies Southey's use of classical material to explore psychological crisis. Sappho stands on the Leucadian promontory, debating whether to leap—a leap that promises either oblivion or cure. The poem's argument notes that the leap was "believed by the Greeks to be a remedy for hopeless love, if the self-devoted victim escaped with life." Southey heightens the dramatic tension through Sappho's address to Venus as an "ungrateful Goddess" and her invocation of Nemesis. The piece is structured as a dramatic monologue, allowing the speaker's emotional volatility to drive the verse. This interest in extreme states—love, despair, suicidal impulse—recurs in other poems such as "To Horror" and "The Widow," suggesting a fascination with the boundaries of human endurance.

Readers approaching Southey's Poems will find a collection that resists easy categorization. The poet's own retrospective judgments—dismissing his odes, qualifying his sonnets—invite a reading attentive to the gaps between intention and execution. Pay particular attention to the way Southey juxtaposes public and private modes: a poem on the slave trade may sit beside a sonnet on domestic affection. The volume's structure, with its errata list and careful ordering, suggests a poet who saw his work as an evolving project rather than a finished monument.

That rainy afternoon, Southey’s poems felt like a conversation between duty and quiet longing, especially his pastorals. I remember setting the book down, thinking of the hedgerows he described, and somehow reaching for Wild Flowers; or, Pastoral and Local Poetry — Key Ideas to Explore instead. The rain kept falling, and the local fields in that other book seemed to answer his melancholy with a simpler kind of light.