ABSTRACT
I have put up among my papers the memoranda which were made many years ago for a poem upon Robin Hood. They are easily shaped into a regular plan, and, in my judgment, a promising one. Will you form an intellectual union with me that it may be ex ecuted? We will keep our own secret as well as Sir Walter Scott has done. Murray shall publish it, and not know the whole mystery that he may make the more of it, and the result will be means in abundance for a summer’s abode at Keswick, and an additional motive for it that we may form other schemes of the same nature. Am I dreaming when I think that we may derive from this much high enjoyment, and that you may see in the prospect something which is worth living for? [an allusion to her very poor health] The secret itself would be delightful while we thought proper to keep it; still more so the spiritual union which death would not part. (4 November 1823: Dowden, p. 42)
Her reply, while playfully accepting the spirit of his proposal, betrays an understandable wariness:
How you have set me thinking! Thinking, wondering, wishing, debating, doubting, almost - yes, almost - despairing ... I can find no language to express more warmly how, with heart and soul, I would say ‘Yes’ - promptly and eagerly, ‘Yes’ - to your tempting, tantalizing proposition, if only - that odious monosyllable! You know well enough all it implies. You must know, if you consider by the cold, clear light of reason alone, unmingled with the warm, illusive emanations from that kind heart of yours, which (in its zeal to make me in love with life) has conjured up all this beautiful fabric. But let it stand awhile; I have not the heart to demolish it with one resolute word ... Nobody can detect the dovetailing of Beaumont and Fletcher’s works: true; but their intellectual powers were matched as well as paired. Here the case is far otherwise. In feeling, I think, I believe (not surely in self-conceit) that I may go along with you; but when I would express those feelings, even in familiar conversation, I feel myself hemmed in like a salamander in his glowing circle - baffled, obstructed, repelled in every quarter. (Ibid., p. 44)
She also questions his assumption that she could write the ‘forest scen ery’ parts, pointing out that her house is far from the edge of the forest, and that ‘our forest differs greatly, in almost every feature, from that of “Merry Sherwood’” . But in the event, the biggest obstacle turned out to be the metre Southey was set upon using for the poem. This was to be the same quirky, unrhythmical, experimental metre that he had used in
