Southey, and Coleridge as well, espoused the cause of the French Revolution in their youth when they planned to emmigrate to America and there establish a "pantisocratic" utopia. Transparent Things and Ada often alude to the French Revolution and, indirectly, to various other tyrannies ( D.B.J called out attention, via R. Southey, of VN´s indirect and intense anger directed against a German bishop for his cruelty when burning the poor in a barn. It occurred to me that VN might be somehow alluding to Nazi Germany?).

The burning barn in Southey´s poem may not be unrelated to the "burning barn" episode in Ada, although I can find no obvious link for VN´s returning, in his later novel, to such a recondite reference from PF.
Perusing my old high school anthology ( Louis Untermeyer´s) I read under Robert Southey: " R.S´s collected verse, together with the superfluously explanatory notes, crowds ten volumes. His prose fills about forty. Never before or since has Pegasus been so hobbled..."
Southey´s poems were mocked by Byron ( in the opening of Don Juan) and Lewis Carroll´s "Father William".

VN, if I´m not mistaken, also wrote about Proust´s cruelty to rats - and, since I remember this subject having appeared in a former discussion at Nabokov-L, there might be other references to rats in VN´s books ( which could help to understand the reference to Southey and his preference for roasted rats) but which I cannot recall at the moment.

And yet, why would R.Southey be brought up together with Prof. Hurley? Why would R.Southey himself have decided to write a poem on a German bishop?

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