DP poem where Caliban attempts to understand, on the basis of his experience on the island, the nature and motivations of a higher power. L 4.3–4 concludes that it may have been started in 1859–60 and finished in 1862. The primary source is *Shakespeare’s The Tempest. RB’s Caliban is intensely aware of the physical world, instinctively violent and enslaved by Prosper. He draws on the original Caliban’s awareness of the creatures and sounds of the island (The Tempest 2.2.167–72, 3.2.133–6); his references to the god Setebos (1.2.375, 5.1.261); his sense of persecution by an unreasonable higher power—Prospero and his spirits (1.2.374–6, 2.2.3–14, 81–3); and his violence and vindictiveness (I.2.323–6, 341–2, 349–50, 366, 2.2.1–3, 3.2.59–60, 86–90). In both poem (287–95) and play (5.294–5) Caliban’s rebellious words are followed by complete submission. The difference is that RB’s Caliban gropes towards a rationale for his experience, an explicable if arbitrary Setebos, a ‘Quiet’ somehow above him. Cronin (2012) observes that ‘by imagining such a being’ as the Quiet, ‘Caliban reveals his ability to emerge from that intense bodily life in which the poem begins’. In his imaginings, dramatisations and song he is a type of the artist (p. 156). In taking the character seriously the poem follows a tendency in productions of the play since *Macready’s in 1838 (see L 4. 4–5). There is also a possible debt to Renaissance travellers’ accounts (L 4. 5) and to Richard Henry Stoddard’s monologue for Caliban, ‘The Witch’s Whelp’ (1851) (Phelan [2008]; L 4.5–6).