Robert Southey: The Three Bears and Sir Thomas More

“In the name of God,” I exclaimed, “who are you, and wherefore are you come?” 

“Be not alarmed,” he replied.  “Your reason, which has shown you the possibility of such an appearance as you now witness, must have convinced you also that it would never be permitted for an evil end.  Examine my features well, and see if you do not recognise them.  Hans Holbein was excellent at a likeness.” 

I had now for the first time in my life a distinct sense of that sort of porcupinish motion over the whole scalp which is so frequently described by the Latin poets.  It was considerably allayed by the benignity of his countenance and the manner of his speech, and after looking him steadily in the face I ventured to say, for the likeness had previously struck me, “Is it Sir Thomas More?” 

“The same,” he made answer, and lifting up his chin, displayed a circle round the neck brighter in colour than the ruby.  “The marks of martyrdom,” he continued, “are our insignia of honour.  Fisher and I have the purple collar, as Friar Forrest and Cranmer have the robe of fire.” 

A mingled feeling of fear and veneration kept me silent, till I perceived by his look that he expected and encouraged me to speak; and collecting my spirits as well as I could, I asked him wherefore he had thought proper to appear, and why to me rather than to any other person?--from Sir Thomas More, or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society

Today is the anniversary in 1774 of the birth of Robert Southey, the Romantic Poet who at first embraced the spirit of the French Revolution and then like William Wordsworth and other Lake Poets became more conservative: from Radical to Tory! As the Poetry Foundation notes:

Of his fellow Romantics he was perhaps the most versatile, as well as one of the most prolific. As poet—and eventually poet laureate—he produced epics, romances, and metrical tales, ballads, plays, monodramas, odes, eclogues, sonnets, and miscellaneous lyrics. His prose works include histories, biographies, essays, reviews, translations, travelogues, semi-fictional journalism, polemical dialogues, and a farraginous work of fiction, autobiography, anecdote, and omnium-gatherum that defies classification. His bent was inherently encyclopedic; and, while his writings lack both moral profundity (as distinct from moral fervor) and “natural magic,” they compensate by their vigor and abundance for their dearth of genius. Coleridge rightly called him the complete man of letters.

Among those encyclopedic works are two wonderful inventions: the story of The Three Bears and his imaginary dialogue with Sir Thomas More, cited above.

Southey wrote a narrative version of a well-known fairy story and published it in his 1837 volume, The Doctor. Instead of  girl named Goldilocks entering the three bears's house, "an impudent, bad old woman . . . set[s] about helping herself" and says wicked words when the chairs, porridge, and beds don't suit her.

Of Sir Thomas More, or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, the Poetry Foundation opines:

More’s historical Catholicism, in fact, gets in the way—Southey turns him into an embryonic Protestant—and the fiction of a visitation by and dialogue with a ghost becomes bizarre after the first encounter and irritating after the second or third. The work has often been praised for its limpid prose style. But that style is generally at its best in the numerous descriptive and anecdotal digressions—about local scenery, local legends, or Southey’s library holdings—interspersed with the more portentous dialogues, rather than in the dialogues themselves.

Southey died on March 21, 1843, having been appointed Poet Laureate of England in 1813; William Wordsworth succeeded him the next month.

"Love You More" Photo copyright Stephanie A. Mann, February 14, 2015.