Robert Southey and The Prelude's 'Arab Dream'

Abstract

Book V of The Prelude contains the famous ‘Arab dream’, attributed to ‘a Friend’ from 1804 to 1839, thereafter to the poet. Critics have read it as Wordsworth's own (whether ‘real’ dream or ‘deliberate invention’). In Robert Southey, however, Wordsworth had ‘a Friend’ who may have told him of such a dream. Southey ‘dreamt much’ about the Deluge in 1801 when his imagination was exercised by a series of texts and writing projects intimately related to every aspect of the ‘Arab dream’. In particular, his interest in writing an epic poem deriving from Thomas Burnet's Theory of the Earth could have furnished materials for the apocalyptic desert setting and project of saving human knowledge, while Thalaba the Destroyer and related research could have supplied the Arabian elements. Wordsworth's hints at the character of his ‘Friend’ strengthen the case for Southey as the dreamer in The Prelude; the latter's mental breakdown in 1838–9 could, in addition, explain the late revision.