"The Ruined Cottage" and Southey's "English Eclogues"

Abstract

Southey's English borrowed several themes and settings directly from Wordsworth's poetry (Jacobus 21-22), but treatment of human suffering most fully reveals originality of first version of Cottage. The Eclogues were product of Southey's visit to William Taylor in June, 1798, and were completed by end of that year. Although he had objected to Taylor's translation of Lenora in Monthly Magazine (March, 1796), Southey warmed to Taylor in person, finding him young man of fortune, much diffidence, much genius & very uncommon acquirements (Collected Letters, part 2, letter 318; hereafter, RSCL). (1) Their conversations about German poetry helped Southey define what he wanted his eclogues to achieve: purpose writing some which may be called English, as sketching features peculiar to England: not like one which you read to me of Goethe which would suit any country with Roman (RSCL 2. 338). To thank Taylor for his hospitality, Southey sent him his new poem, Old Mansion-House, a revised version of which was published following year as Eclogue I in Poems (1799). The poem Taylor read to Southey was his translation of Goethe's Der Wandrer, published in August, 1798, in Monthly Magazine. Jonathan Wordsworth has suggested that this poem, which tells story of an encounter between a Wanderer and a woman whose family lives among ruins of an ancient temple, also influenced Wordsworth's work on Cottage (263) in period after Coleridge's June, 1797, visit to Racedown. The woman in Goethe's piece, for instance, initially mistakes Wanderer for a asking him if he has brought toys,/ [o]r other ware, from town to sell i'th' country? (6-7). Both poems similarly attend to what Wordsworth termed the calm oblivious tendencies/ [o]f nature (Ruined Cottage and Pedlar, Ms. D, 504--5; hereafter, RC): in Der Wandrer, thistles cover ground, briars shade ruins, and tall grass wav[es] o'er their prostrate forms (42); in Cottage, rose and sweet-briar gone, replaced by [a] cold bare wall whose earthy top is tricked/[w]ith weeds and rank spear-grass (Ms. D, 106, 107-8). Although evidence that Wordsworth saw even a manuscript copy of Der Wandrer before June, 1798, is not strong (see Wu 68), concern in all three poems with place of human structures in natural landscape and value of those buildings to past memories and present experiences points to a broader convergence between Wordsworth' and Southey's poetry in 1797-8. Southey's Cottage, which takes reader to a poor cottage, with roof/ [p]art mouldered in, rest o'ergrown with weeds,/ [h]orse-leek and long thin grass and greener moss (Poetical Works, 5. 326, 11. 12, 13-15; hereafter, RSPW) is an obvious point of intersection, but it is only one of several pieces in which Southey responded to originality of first version of Wordsworth's Ruined Cottage and attempted to reclaim and relocate strangeness of Wordsworth's poem within a less troubling narrative frame. The version of Cottage that Wordsworth drafted in Spring, 1797, offered a way of writing about human suffering that relied on neither class nor politics; Southey briefly identified with this approach in Hannah, but poems he produced after his conversations with Taylor return to earlier, more sentimental models to justify their tales of loss and suffering. The version of Old Mansion-House that Southey sent to Taylor differed from version published in Poems (1799) as Eclogue I. At Taylor's suggestion, Southey replaced expository opening with a dialogue and changed Traveller of original version to a Stranger who is revealed, in a new final stanza, to be owner of house. Anticipating Hazlitt's criticism that the dialogues in The Excursion are soliloquies of same character, taking different views of subject (4. …