After Blenheim - Criticism

Criticism

While Southey's verse, After Blenheim, is considered an anti-war poem, arguably Southey was not himself anti-war: Byron himself considered Southey a puzzle: one the one hand, he denigrated the English victory at Blenheim, but praised the Battle of Waterloo in The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo, a popular poem that generated £215 in two months of publication.

It is one of Southey's most famous poems. The internal repetition of but 'twas a famous victory juxtaposed with the initial five lines of each stanza, establish that the narrator does not know why the battle was fought, why thousands died, why his father's cottage was burned. The often-quoted closing lines are:

After Blenheim, also called Battle of Blenheim, was written during Southey's Jacobin years (roughly 1790 – 1800). In a letter to Charles Collins, Esquire, he wrote of traveling through Woodstock in the summer of 1793, and of refusing to even turn his head to look at the walls of the palace, built by Marlborough, and named for the battle. He wrote the poem, sometimes considered by critics as the most celebrated of British anti-war poems, while living at Westbury with his mother and his cousin (Peggy) in a renovated ale-house, which he shared also with a "great carroty cat". It appeared in publication with several others, in the category of Ballads and metrical tales, with the revenge tale of Lord William, and the narrative Queen Oracca.

By 1820, however, Southey had changed his mind about the Battle, describing it instead as the most brilliant moment in British arms. The fate of Germany, had it not been won, he calculated, might have over set the Protestant Succession in Britain.