'Nor in my conscience, nor my stomach, rise': food and eating in Southey's verse

In October 1821 the Poet Laureate served up an extremely odd dinner to his visiting friend and fellow 'Lake' poet:

Two or three weeks ago, calling at Calvert's,I learnt that Raisley C. had committed the great sin of shooting an owl. … Wordsworth and his wife were here, and as there was no sin in eating the owl, I ordered it to be dressed and brought in, in the place of game that day at dinner. It was served up without the head, and a squat-looking fellow it was, about the size of a large wild pigeon but broader in proportion to its length. The meat was more like bad mutton than anything else.

Wordsworth, Southey reported, 'was not valiant enough to taste it', but 'Mrs W did'.'If you ever have an owl dressed for dinner,' Southey advised his correspondent, 'you had better have it boiled, and smothered with onions, for it is not good roasted.'¹

The incident seems emblematic of thetwo poets' approach to food in their work: Wordsworth reticent, we might almost say inhibited, on such a topic, generally eschewing any but the most sparing references to food and eating, and then alluding to food in its simplest, uncooked, usually symbolic, forms; and Southey – Byron's 'mouthey' – deliberately searching out the odd and the grotesque, 'smothering' it with metaphorical sauce and serving it up, with a slightly warped sense of humour, to a somewhat unwilling partaker.² Southey's most recent biographer has described Southey's 'almost Proustian sense of smell', contrasting it with the fact that 'Wordsworth … could apparently smell and taste practically nothing'.³

Personal preferences and biological or biographical idiosyncracies are not enoughto account for contrasting approaches to the subject of food and eating in the work ofthese – or any other – writers. This aspect of Romantic-period writing has already been informed by many studies that relate it to wider literary, ideological, political and cultural discourses. In terms, for example, of the change in the 'figurative function' of food in Romantic-period writing identified by Jocelyne Kolb, Wordsworth might be seen to come before, and Southey after, a 'poetic revolution' in the literary treatment of food.⁴ Kolb's paradigm might be used to align Wordsworth's approach to food with an older – eighteenth-century – tradition that largely abjures the inclusion of the 'low' subject of food and eating in works of high style. Southey might be identified with a nineteenth-century challenge to the literary rules through his frequent recourse to culinary topics in verse and other writing, both low and high. Other cultural and historical discourses of the period might alsobe used to place Wordsworth and Southey on different 'sides'. Timothy Morton's discussion of Shelleyan vegetarianism predicates diet, the body and consumption – subjects on which Southey writes frequently and enthusiastically – as exactly the kind of 'highly charged political issues' that, according to the Romantic ideology of new historicism, Wordsworth seeks to exclude from his poetry.⁵ Morton also mentions 'Wordsworth's cavalier treatment of the non-human' in The Excursion in terms which would have dismayed Southey's (meat-eating but sympathetic) sensibility as the author of 'Lines on the Death of a Favourite Old Spaniel' (1797) and 'To a Dancing Bear' (1799).⁶

The attempt to minimize the role of personal preferences and idiosyncracies in aesthetic judgements was, moreover, a major philosophical project in and just before this period: as the neoclassical, Aristotelean hierarchy of the five senses was subjected to various efforts to redefine the relationship between the fine arts, aesthetics and the body. 'A smell which one man enjoys gives another a headache', Kant pointed out in the Critique of Judgement (1790), before going on to propose

the Idea of a communal sense, ie of a faculty of judgement, which in its reflection takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of all other men in thought; in order as it were to compare its judgement with the collective Reason of humanity, and thus to escape the illusion arising from private conditions that could be so easily taken for objective, which would injuriously affect the judgement. This is done by comparing our judgement with the possible rather than the actual judgement of others, and by putting ourselves in the place of any other man, by abstracting the limitations which contingently attach to our own judgement.⁷

While Kant invokes 'the collective Reasonof Humanity' in order to minimize the peculiarities of individual sense-responses in judging art, Hegel deploys science to eliminate altogether three of the senses from any representation in art. Whereas sight and sound ostensibly occur at a distance from their object, taste, smell and touch actually consume the object being sensed:

the sensuous aspect of art only refers to the two theoretical senses of sight and hearing, while smell, taste, and feeling remain excluded from being sources of artistic enjoyment. For smell, taste and feeling have to do with matter as such, and with its immediate sensuous qualities; smell with material volatilization in air, taste with the material dissolution of substance, and feeling with warmth, coldness, smoothness, etc. On this account these senses cannot have to do with the objects of art, which are destinedto maintain themselves in their actual independent existence, and admit of no purely sensuous relation.⁸

For Coleridge, too, the eye and ear 'alone are true organs of sense, their sensations in a healthy or uninjured state being too faint tobe noticed by the mind'. The 'lower senses' – touch or feeling, smell, and taste – are separated from these and have their own hierarchy:

The smell is less sensual and more sentient than mere feeling, the taste than the smell, and the eye than the ear; but between the ear and the taste exists a chasm or break, which divides the beautiful and the elements of beauty from the merely agreeable.⁹

This hierarchy of the senses was a well-known topos, which writers such as Southey could employ to guide the expectations of their readers. In Book 6 of Thalaba the Destroyer, the eponymous hero is lured into the secluded 'Earthly Paradise' of Aloadin and subjected toa trial in which the ekphrastic presentation of selected objects tests his ability to resist the allurements of the senses one after another. Once Thalaba has

            passively received The mingled joy which flow'd on every sense,

(Thalaba The Destroyer, VI, stanza 20, Southey's Poetical Works, p. 265)¹⁰

Southey's readers would have been alerted to expect a graded sequence of intensely sensuous evocations, relating to the five senses in 'descending' order. These increasingly confirm what readers have already been led to suspect: that this is a false paradise, modelled (as the epigraph indicates) on Spenser's Bower of Bliss, and designed to introduce the possibility (which readers also know will not actually come about) of diverting the hero from his solemn quest.

Thalaba is subjected to temptations of the eye which (like those in 'Kubla Khan') draw some of their inspiration from Purchas His Pilgrimage:

            Where'er his eye could reach,       Fair structures, rainbow-hued, arose;    And rich pavilions through the openingwoods Gleam'd from their waving curtains sunny gold,

(VI, 20. SPW, p. 265)

His ears are then assailed, and afterwards, his sense of smell:

      And oh! what odours the voluptuousvale             Scatters from jasmine bowers,                   From yon rose wilderness, From clustr'd henna and from orange groves.

(VI, 22. SPW, p. 266)

In stanza 24 Thalaba enters a banquet room, where he is offered (and as a good Muslim refuses) wine, but partakes of 'odorous fruits' which seem to be predecessors of some Keatsian feast:

            For all rich fruits were there;             Water-melons rough of rind,                Whose pulp the thirsty lip                   Dissolv'd into a draught;       Pistachios from the heavy-cluster'd trees             Of Malavert, or Haleb's fertile soil; And Casbin's luscious grapes of amber hue

(VI, 25. SPW, p. 267)

Touch is the last, most sensual, pleasure which Thalaba must resist. Southey again anticipates Keats (specifically, in the banquet scene of Eve of St Agnes) by using synaesthesia to both evoke and evade direct reference to the erotic appeal of touch. Instead the eye and the mouth do duty for the hand, tacitly anticipating tactile pleasures:

Anon a troop of females form'd the dance, …       Transparent garments to the greedy eye             Exposed their harlot limbs,       Which moved, in every wanton gestureskill'd.

(VI, 26. SPW, p. 268)

The seeing/eating/touching switch is further intensified as 'With earnest eyes the banqueters / Fed on the sight impure' (stanza 27). In the end it is only by abjuring assaults on all of his senses – by becoming 'Unhearing, or unheeding' – that Thalaba is able to escape from these voluptuous allurements. They and the Paradise of Irem at the beginning of the poem – for whose building 'The ruin of the royal voice / Found its way every-where' (I, 32, SPW, p. 221) – appear to make reference to the untimely extravagance of the Prince of Wales's Pavilion and his irregular domestic establishment at Brighton.¹¹

By contrast, Southey's readers would have been able instantly to gauge the honesty and integrity of the poem's protagonists by their unornamented taste in food:

            They brought the Traveller rice, With no false colours tinged to tempt theeye,                   But white as the new-fallen snow,                   When never yet the sullying Sun                         Hath seen its purity, Nor the warm zephyr touch'd and tainted it.

(II, 33. SPW, p. 229)

Food is also used in this poem to present the model of a loving and benevolent domesticity, and Southey's 'Hymn to the Penates' (1796) reminds us that the gods of the store-cupboard are by extension the deities of the home. The central family is limited to a microcosm, consisting (both here and in Southey's other oriental romance, The Curse of Kehama, 1810) only of a widowed father, his daughter and a youth occupying the position of both (adopted) brother and lover to the daughter. The domestic setting is likewise reduced to its core: a few simple belongings, a tent and a hearth. This nomadic, self-sufficient small family has been read as reflecting Southey's yearning for home during his own wandering youth, but it also encapsulates the virtues of the pre-commercial and pre-luxurious stage of societal development postulated in many eighteenth-century anthropological texts. Similarly, their religious observance has distinctly primitivist, anti-ecclesiastical and naturalistic overtones:

                  Their Father is their Priest,       The Stars of Heaven their point of prayer,                   And the blue Firmament       The glorious Temple, where they feel                         The present Deity.

(III, 22. SPW, p. 236)

This is a Protestant Islam, spare and abstemious, in contrast to the gluttonous Roman Catholicism that Southey deplored:'I am never weary of repeating that faith is an appetite of the mind: our establishment starves it, the Catholics gorge it even to surfeiting and sickness'.¹² In these religious presentations Southey anticipates Byron, who similarly primes us (in Don Juan, III, 481–578) to expect disaster from Haidée's elaborate oriental feast for Juan, and for whom Roman Catholicism also held a half-horrifying gustatory fascination.¹³

Preparing food in Thalaba's family is women's work, although men may participate in related activities:

                  by the hearth       The Damsel shakes the coffee-grains,    That with warm fragrance fill the tent; And while, with dexterous fingers, Thalaba                Shapes the green basket.

(III, 18. SPW, p. 235)

Fathers stand in for male readers in the pleasure they gain from observing:

      He watch'd her nimble fingers spreadthe woof, Or, at the hand-mill, when she knelt andtoil'd,    Toss'd the thin cake on spreading palm,       Or fix'd it on the glowing oven's side    With bare wet arm, and safe dexterity.¹⁴

(III, 21. SPW, p. 236)

As in all Southey's long romance poems andhis drama Joan of Arc, the footnotes are voluminous and on occasion almost overwhelm the verse. Southey's description of the notes to Kehama as 'copious, & sufficiently dull: I give them as specimens of the ore, that the skill of the refiner may be understood' is disingenuous, however, as the notes also provide opportunities for non-generic material to be included in the work and for distinctly contrasting voices to be heard.¹⁵ An early note to Thalaba even risks undermining the whole orientalist project of the poem:

A waste of ornament and labour characterizes all the works of the Orientalists. I have seen illuminated Persian manuscripts that must each have been the toil of many years, every page painted, not with representations of life and manners, but usually like the curves and lines of a Turkey carpet, conveying no idea whatever, as absurd to the eye as nonsense-verses are to the ear. The little of their literature that has reached us is equally worthless.

(SPW, p. 215, note 3)

Southey's critique of what he construes to be empty oriental consumerism can be read as a classic case of European displacement of its own obsessions onto an alien society. Through his alter-ego Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, in Letters from England (p. 94), Southey reverses the point of view in order to observe English excess in the same light:

It is recorded of some old Eastern tyrant, that he offered a reward for the discovery of a new pleasure; – in like manner this nation [England] offers a perpetual reward to those who will discover new wants for them, inthe readiness wherewith they purchase any thing, if the seller will but assure them it is exceedingly convenient.

In Thalaba the poet manages, moreover, to 'have his cake and eat it' by, as we have seen, including passages describing the most sumptuous oriental ornament in the verse under the guise of their being temptations or examples of forbidden luxury, while the notes enable him to maintain a pose of northern reserve and rectitude.

The footnotes also provide ample opportunities to express a taste for the physically odd, Gothic and grotesque. Thus Thalaba includes several pages of notes about vampires (of the pre-Byronic, folkloric type), who are said to be 'so full of blood, that it runs out at all the passages of their bodies, and even at their very pores' (SPW, p. 277). The notes to Book II of Kehama feature 'the Jiggerkhar (or liver-eater)' which

steal[s] away the liver of another by looks and incantations [or] … by looking at a person, … deprives him of his senses, and then steals from him something resembling the seed of a pomegranate, which he hides in the calf of his leg. The Jiggerkhar throws on the fire the grain before described, which thereupon spreads to the size of a dish, and he distributes it amongst his fellows, to be eaten: which ceremony concludes the life of the fascinated person.

(SPW, p. 587).

The verse narrative of Kehama,too, is generally more ferocious in tone than Thalaba, in keeping with Southey's views of its subject matter: 'the religion of the Hindoos … of all false religions is the most monstrous in its fables, and the most fatal in its effects' (Original Preface, SPW, p. 548). Food here becomes a product – destined for wild beasts, not human beings – of the tyranny of the Rajah Kehama (a thinly-disguised portraitof Napoleon):

The steam of slaughter from that place ofblood          Spread o'er the tainted sky.       Vultures, for whom the Rajah's tyranny So oft had furnish'd food, from far and nigh       Sped to the lure: aloft with joyful cry,  Wheeling around, they hover'd over head; Or, on the temple perch'd, with greedy eye,          Impatient watch'd the dead.       Far off the tigers, in the inmost wood, Heard the death shriek, and snuff'd the scentof blood; They rose, and through the covert went their way,       Couch'd at the forest edge, and waited fortheir prey.

(IX, 1. SPW, p. 575)

Human consumption – in the form of drinking rather than eating – turns out to be symbolically crucial to the resolution of the plot of this poem, when Kehama, greedy for immortality, snatches up the 'Amreeta-cup':

         He did not know the holy mystery       Of that divinest cup, that as the lips   Which touch it, even such is its quality, Good or malignant: Madman! and he thinks   The blessed prize is won, and joyfully he drinks. …   The dreadful liquor works the will of Fate.             Immortal he would be, Immortal he is made; but through his veins          Torture at once and immortality, A stream of poison doth the Amreeta run.

(XXIV, 17–18. SPW, pp. 626–7)

Touch here is the catalyst of taste, and whereas Kehama's consumption of the Amreeta dooms him to eternal torture, the same cup bestows on the heroine Kailyel (who begins the poem as a peasant-girl) a metamorphosis into a higher being, and everlasting bliss with her winged lover.

The difference between colonial attitudesto the middle- and far East and to the Americas is reflected in the treatment of food in Madoc, published between Thalaba and Kehama in 1805. In the two orientalist romances colonialism is confined to the commentary (especially in the footnotes). In Madoc,however, the colonial project is enacted inthe narrative itself, through the voyages to America of a twelfth-century Welsh prince whose settlement there to some extent fantasizes Southey and Coleridge's 1790s Pantisocracy project.¹⁶ Madoc not only encounters strange food and eating practices (notably, Aztec cannibalism) among the American Indians, but he also introduces European habits of consumption to the natives alongside his conversion of them to Christianity.¹⁷ A classic colonial scene involvesa 'weak' and 'evil' native succumbing to the effects of the mead or metheglin provided by the European settlers (Madoc in Aztlan, IV, SPW, pp. 364–7). Despite Madoc's warnings when he first offers it to the Hoamen indians, the 'old beloved beverage' renders the native prince successively greedy, lustful, boastful, ineffectually threatening and finally comatose. The use of alcohol – in Southey's narrative supposedly unknown to the Indians before the arrival of the Europeans – here emphasizes the superior temperance, control and maturity of the European mental and physical constitution.

As Southey's Europeans are more able than his Indians to regulate what they take in, sotoo his Indians are less able to control what they let out. Southey displays considerable interest not only in the disastrous moral effects of cannibalism but also (through the notes) in its bizarre physical effects, when the Aztlan warriors before battle are given 'the ablutionof the Stone of Sacrifice' as a 'holy beverage' from which they will

Imbibe diviner valour, strength of arm Not to be wearied, hope of victory, And certain faith of endless joy in Heaven.

(Madoc in Aztlan, XV, 96–8. SPW, p. 392)

The footnote describes how the fierce American Indian Natchez warriors took 'an emetic, composed of a root boiled in water' before battle. 'The ceremony was to swallow it at one draught, and then discharge it again with loud eructations and efforts as might be heard at a great distance'. The Rabelaisian tone of the note (quoting from Heriot's History of Canada)undercuts the psalmic grandeur of the verse, setting up the Aztec warriors for the fall from dignity that duly follows.

In all three of his romances set in non-European contexts Southey deploys food and eating as a way of highlighting the alien setting, and of exploring and discussing different aspects of foreignness. Perhaps because of its contentiousness and its cultural richness as a topic, the effect of contrasting voices – sometimes contradicting each other and adopting different moral, cultural and political stances and standards of taste – is particularly marked when food and eating are the subject. Surprisingly, this argumentative effect and apparently deliberate lack of authorial direction is also evident in manyof Southey's much shorter poems, where the smaller scale might have been expected to minimize the scope for such variability. Morton completes his reading of Southey's 'Poems Concerning the Slave-Trade' (mainly sonnets, written in the 1790s) by pointing out that it is not just over time (as Hazlitt, Byron and others alleged) that Southey's work changed in voice, focus and political persona – but even within these individual poems themselves.¹⁸ Thiseffect of uncertainty, slippage, or deliberate contrariness is equally characteristic of the many other short poems where – as in the slave-trade poems – food and eating take an important role.

Thus Southey's best-known 'food' poem – 'Gooseberry-pie, A Pindaric Ode' (1799) – compares gooseberries not only in classical terms to 'the gold-fruit-bearing tree / The glory of that old Hesperian grove' (SPW,pp. 125, 44-5), but also in disconcertingly carnivorous ones to 'the blood glutinous andfat of verdant hue' (line 5) of the turtle, usedto make turtle soup. Not unexpectedly, in the slave-trade context, the sugar for the pie evokes 'Gambia's arid side' where 'The Vulture's feet are scal'd with blood, / And Beelzebub beholds with pride, / His darling planter brood' (37–40). The suffering of the slaves seems to be undercut and diminished, however, by the equal or greater attention given to the imagined sufferings of an inanimate object – the brook – which with 'loud and agonizing groan / That makes its anguish known' is 'tortured by the Tyrant Lord of Meal' and 'broken on the Wheel' (26-9). And in this poem the real and metaphorical anguish, sugar, fruit and blood is all served up within a decorously Pindaric mock-heroic crust, which opens with an invocation to the Muse and closes with a polite exchange of compliments between the poet and the cook.¹⁹

'Ode to a Pig while his Nose was Boring' (1799) satirizes the arguments used to support the slave-trade, addressing the pig in the same terms that a slave might be apostrophized bya slave-trader anxious to justify the exchange from African forest to Caribbean plantation as that from a 'savage' to a 'civilized' existence:

   The social pig resigns his natural rights       When first with man he covenants to live; He barters them for safer stye delights,    For grains and wash, which man alone can give. … Go to the forest, Piggy, and deplore    The miserable lot of savage swine! See how young pigs fly from the great boar,    And see how coarse and scantily they dine! … And when, at last, the death-wound yawning wide,    Fainter and fainter grows the expiring cry, Is there no grateful joy, no loyal pride,    To think that for your master's good you die?²⁰

The plight of cruelly treated animals was often identified with that of slaves and other oppressed human groups in writing of this period.²¹ But whereas, for example, Cowper equates slaves with lambs, and Barbauld and Burns compare mice with the labouring poor, Southey upsets the delicate balance of sympathy by introducing a much less picturesque and sentimental animal, and by forcing us to read 'slave' for 'pig' and vice-versa.²² If slaves should not suffer to gratify a privileged appetite, this even-handed treatment seems to ask, should animals be exploited for this purpose either? Southey manages to combine a genuine sympathetic sensibility to animals with a sharp satiric humour. In 'To a Spider' (1798) and 'The Filbert' (1799) we are invited to extend our sympathies to creatures still 'lower' than the pig by a poet who closely identifies himself with the spider – spinning its bowels as the poet spins his brains to earn his living – or who hopes to be metamorphosed into a maggot, 'enkernell'd' in its nut away from wars, invasions, plots, Kings, 'Jacobines' and tax-commissioners, 'And in the middle of such exquisite food / To live luxurious' (SPW, pp. 127, 163, lines 33, 38–9).

In another pig poem the authorial viewpoint appears initially to be clearer, since the argument is divided between the rustic Jacob, whose nose is 'Turn'd up in scornful curve at yonder pig' (SPW, p. 162, line 2), and the more cultured narrator, who pleads the animal's cause, pointing out that it is

                     a democratic beast, [Who] knows that his unmerciful drivers seek Their profit, and not his. He hath not learnt That pigs were made for man, – born to be brawn'd And baconized; that he must please to give Just what his gracious masters please to take.

('The Pig, a Colloquial Poem',SPW, p. 162, lines 15–20)

Just when the narrator seems to be winning the argument, however, the breeze rises and blows his sentimental anthropomorphism away:

               Oer yon blossom'd field Of beans it came, and thoughts of bacon rise.

(66–7)

The relationship between pigs and bacon seems, indeed, to be one which makes the poet positively relish his own moral helplessness, especially after he has completed his dinner, in yet another pig poem which appears to borrow not only from eighteenth-century sentimental animal elegies but also from satires of them such as Cowper's 'To the Immortal Memory of the Halybutt on which I dined this day' (1784):

And I have din'd! again have made mymeal –       Yes, and I found the Eggs and Bacon sweet; Alas! that men who eat should finely feel –       Alas, that men who finely feel shouldeat! … But wherefore should I muse on thoughts like these?       Why wake the wounds of feeling thus unwise? – Nay, nay, ye Eggs and Bacon, be at peace,       Nor in my conscience, nor my stomach, rise.

('Elegy upon Eggs and Bacon', 1799,CRSMP, pp. 169–71. 1–4, 17–20)

Southey's only half-hearted desire here to reconcile the demands of his conscience and his stomach recalls Coleridge's endorsement of Wordsworth's complaint about a poet who 'writes too much at his ease'.²³ The difference and distance between Southey's literary projects and purposes and those of his fellow 'Lakers' is, indeed, one of the features that emerges most clearly from a study of Southey's approaches to food and eating – as is an appreciation of the extent to which his work influenced that of the younger Romantic generation in this respect.²⁴ Kolb places Byron in opposition to Southey in her study of eating in Don Juan, but actually it is the things that they share and that Byron learnt from Southey that are striking. The focus on cannibalism as a site of civilized as well as savage anxiety, the symbolic contrasting of luxurious and disciplined food habits and, above all, the useof footnotes and digressions to create opportunities for an evasion of coherence anda mobilité in the voices discussing these topics: all these are in Southey's work before they appear in Byron's. Southey precedes Shelley in introducing anxieties about meat-eating and 'vegetarian' discourse to his verse, alongside radical politics and a critique of slavery and consumerism based on what Morton calls macellogia – a discourse about the shambles(a literal as well as metaphorical concern for Southey: see footnote 6). Southey's sensuous evocations of food in oriental and mediaeval settings, and his deployment of food and eating as a means of advancing a narrative, setting a mood and handling erotic topics are clearly precursors of the spicy delights of Keats's Eve of St Agnes and even of 'To Autumn', while Espriella/Southey's knowing descriptions of fashionable London shopping in Letters from England indicate his grasp of exactly the consumptive and Cockney milieu in which Keats was operating.²⁵

Southey's 1824 description of his Shandean novelistic work-in-progress The Doctor shows him metaphorically poised between the Lakers and the later generation:

Such a variety of ingredients I think never before entered into any book which had a thread of continuity running through it. I promise you there is as much sense as nonsense there. It is very much like a trifle, where you have good whipt cream at thetop, sweetmeats below, and a good solid foundation of cake well steeped in ratafia. You will find a liberal expenditure of long hoarded stores, such as the reading of few men could supply; satire and speculation; truths, some of which might beseem the bench or the pulpit, and others that require the sanction of the cap and bells for their introduction. And withal a narrative interspersed with interludes of every kind; yet still continuous upon a plan of its own, varying from grave to gay; and taking as wild and yet as natural a course as one ofour mountain streams.

(LCRS, 5. 190)

While the mountain stream, with its 'wild' but 'natural' course, is clearly a 'Lake' trope, the man- (or woman-) made 'trifle', put together out of already-composed and processed foods (whipt' and 'steeped') is from another, bourgeois and self-ironizing environment altogether. This, along with a roasted owl served in place of game, is the world that Southey – though not Wordsworth – was 'valiant enough' to put to the proof of taste.