The Battle of Blenheim

Southey wrote many ballads, especially during the period in which he penned “The Battle of Blenheim.” His 1799 poetry collection contained eight ballads, including “The Sailor Who Served in the Slave Trade,” which, like “The Battle of Blenheim,” shows Southey’s social conscience. “The Sailor Who Served in the Slave Trade” is a denunciation of the trading of enslaved people; the sailor is haunted by his participation in it. On one voyage he was forced by the captain of the ship to flog an enslaved woman. She was so badly hurt that the next day she died; her body was tossed into the sea. The sailor is haunted by his memory of that sight, and now the Devil follows him everywhere he goes. Other Southey ballads such as “Jaspar” and “Sir William” were inspired by the popularity of an English translation in 1796 of a German ballad, Lenore, by Gottfried August Bürger, which featured horror and the supernatural.

Ballads were thus popular in the Romantic era in England. They ranged from Sir Walter Scott’s “Proud Maisie” to John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and the many ballads that appeared in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s collection Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798.