Southey and the Three Bears

I saw a reference to poet Robert Southey who had been one of the English Poet Laureates. I had never heard of him but that doesn’t mean much to his fame. Though I read a lot more poetry than the average person, all I have to do is look at the table of contents of the Norton anthology of poetry on my shelf to realize how many poets I have not read and didn’t even know were poets.

Robert Southey was born in Bristol, England in 1774 and is considered one of the leading poets of his day, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. He belonged to the so-called Lake School of English Romantic poetry. Today his poetry is pretty much forgotten.

But we do do know one short children's story he published anonymously called "The Story of the Three Bears" (1837). 

He said his uncle had told him the story as a child. It was about an old woman who invades the house of three bears, tries out their porridge, their chairs, and their beds, and then jumps out the window when they come home. 

Southey's story has rather grim ending: "Out the little old woman jumped; and whether she broke her neck in the fall, or ran into the wood and was lost there, or found her way out of the wood and was taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant as she was, I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never saw anything more of her." 

The story has been rewritten many times by other authors and in the later more upbeat versions, the old woman becomes a little girl named "Goldilocks" who gets away unharmed from her break in to the home of the bears.

I feel bad for Robert that he is only remembered for that little story (though it has sold millions of copies over the years), so here is one of his sonnets.

            SONNET IV.

    I Praise thee not, ARISTE, that thine eye

      Knows each emotion of the soul to speak;

    That lillies with thy face might fear to vie,

      And roses can but emulate thy cheek.

    I praise thee not because thine auburn hair

      In native tresses wantons on the wind;

    Nor yet because that face, surpassing fair,

      Bespeaks the inward excellence of mind:

    'Tis that soft charm thy minstrel's heart has won,

      That mild meek goodness that perfects the rest;

      Soothing and soft it steals upon the breast,

    As the soft radiance of the setting sun,

    When varying through the purple hues of light,

    The fading orbit smiles serenely bright.

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