Southey's "Christabel"; Coleridge's Thalaba

Southey’s “Christabel” abstract

In September 1800, while living in Portugal, Robert Southey wrote a verse romance responding to the story of “Christabel.” He composed several hundred lines of poetry about Leoline, a “hell-hag,” a damsel, and her mother the Lady of the Land – intending them for the last book of his Oriental romance Thalaba the Destroyer. They remain little known, although they are preserved in two MS drafts, because Southey dropped them from the poem before publication. The purpose of this article is to make them more easily available to scholars, and to consider what they reveal about Coleridge and Southey as instigators and revisers of each other’s poetry (including their adoption of experimental meters), about the trajectory of Coleridge’s unfinished poem, and about the development of Oriental and gothic romance from its origins in Spenser and Percy. Southey’s Leoline verses were not only one of the first but also one of the best-informed responses to “Christabel”: they were inflected by inside knowledge of Coleridge’s intentions for the poem, and throw light on its second part and on his plans for its completion.