ABSTRACT
Date of composition unknown, but probably December 1810 or January 1811. The poem in Esd follows ‘The Retrospect’ (June 1812), which evidently was once intended to be the final poem of the collection (see headnote to No. 79), 148and precedes the two sonnets to Harriet and Ianthe S. (July and September 1813), but this may simply be because for some reason it was not available earlier. The Jew it presents differs both from the gothic sufferer of WJ and from the hypothetical phantasm of Q Mab, so it seems to be an independent poem, and could not easily have formed part of the revisions S. was planning on 2 December 1810 of his original WJ (L i 23–4). Like S.’s letters of the winter of 1810–11 it is strongly anti-religious. The decisive influence, however, is that of Southey’s The Curse of Kehama (1810), S.’s ‘most favourite poem’ by 11 June 1811 (L i 101), which he ordered from Stockdale on 18 December 1810 (L i 25). As it was published three days later (New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. K. Curry (1965) i 547) S. is likely to have read it before the end of the year. In Kehama, Ladurlad, having killed Arvalan to save his daughter from violation, is cursed in revenge by A.’s father Kehama, an evil mortal who has achieved near-omnipotence and seeks to supplant the Hindoo gods. The Curse entails exemption from death by any means, from sleep, and from relief from pain, And thou shalt seek Death To release thee, in vain; Thou shalt live in thy pain While Kehama shall reign (II xiv 17–20)
