NEOCLASSICAL VERSE
PEACOCK, Thomas Love.
Rhododaphne: or the Thessalian Spell. A Poem.
London, T. Hookham, Jun., and Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1818.
12mo, pp xi, [1], 181, [1]; with half-title and the separate fly-titles to Rhododaphne, each of the seven cantos, and the notes; a particularly fine copy, in contemporary speckled calf, spine gilt; with the bookplate and ownership inscription of Frances Anne Vane Tempest, Lady Londonderry.
First edition of Peacock’s last and most ambitious poem, inspired by his enthusiasm for Greek poetry in the company of Shelley. A mythological narrative set in ancient Thessaly, Rhododaphne tells the story of the shepherd boy Anthemion, in love with the mortal girl Calliroë, and of the nymph Rhododaphne, who carries him off to her enchanted palace. When Rhododaphne is destroyed by Heavenly or Uranian love – pure passion for the good and the beautiful – the mortal lovers are reunited.
As a poet Peacock had anti-Romantic neoclassical leanings, mostly clearly expressed in his 1820 essay ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’, with its attacks on the regressive primitivism of the first-wave Romantics Scott, Byron, and Wordsworth. Nevertheless, Rhododaphne was a notable influence on Keats, especially his Lamia. Mary Shelley transcribed the poem for Peacock in December 1817 (when they were all living at Marlow), and Keats is likely to have read it in manuscript at that time, but it was also in print well before the writing of Lamia. Shelley, too, shared this appreciation for Rhododaphne, and in an enthusiastic review written for The Examiner just before his final departure for Italy but never published, described it as ‘the transfused essence of Lucian, Petronius and Apuleius’.
Ashley Library, III, 202; Harrold, ‘Keats’s Lamia and Peacock’s Rhododaphne’, Modern Language Review, LXI (1966), 579-84.
