The shades of evening were growing thicker around us as my conductor finished his long narrative with this moral�"Ye see, birkie,1 it is nae chancy thing to tak a stranger traveller for a guide, when ye are in an uncouth2 land."


1824


1. Respectable. 107-8: Steenie's adventure in some respects 2. Chimney flue. repeats Tarn's. 3. Firecracker. 7. Contend. 4. Minister's house. 8. Husband. 5. Money given to bind the bargain when a servant 9. Their graves. is hired. 1. Clever young man. 6. Whiskey and weak beer that was sold for two 2. Strange. pence. Compare Burns's "Tam O'Shanter," lines


.


424


SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 1772-1834


In The Prelude Wordsworth, recording his gratitude to the mountains, lakes, and winds "that dwell among the hills where I was born," commiserates with Coleridge because "thou, my Friend! wert reared / In the great City, 'mid far other scenes." Samuel Taylor Coleridge had in fact been born in the small town of Ottery St. Mary, in rural Devonshire, but on the death of his father he had been sent to school at Christ's Hospital in London. He was a dreamy, enthusiastic, and extraordinarily precocious schoolboy. Charles Lamb, his schoolmate and lifelong friend, in his essay on Christ's Hospital has given us a vivid sketch of Coleridge's loneliness, his learning, and his eloquence. When in 1791 Coleridge entered Jesus College, Cambridge, he was an accomplished scholar; but he found little intellectual stimulation at the university, fell into idleness, dissoluteness, and debt, then in despair fled to London and enlisted in the Light Dragoons under the alias of Silas Tomkyn Comberbache�one of the most inept cavalrymen in the long history of the British army. Although rescued by his brothers and sent back to Cambridge, he left in 1794 without a degree.


In June 1794 Coleridge met Robert Southey, then a student at Oxford who, like himself, had poetic aspirations, was a radical in religion and politics, and sympathized with the republican experiment in France. Together the two young men planned to establish an ideal democratic community in America for which Coleridge coined the name "Pantisocracy," signifying an equal rule by all. A plausible American real-estate agent persuaded them that the ideal location would be on the banks of the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania. Twelve men undertook to go; and because perpetuation of the scheme required offspring, hence wives, Coleridge dutifully became engaged to Sara Fricker, conveniently at hand as the sister of Southey's fiancee. The Pantisocracy scheme collapsed, but at Southey's insistence Coleridge went through with the marriage, "resolved," as he said, "but wretched." Later Coleridge's radicalism waned, and he became a conservative in politics�a highly philosophical one�and a staunch Anglican in religion.


In 1795 Coleridge met Wordsworth and at once judged him to be "the best poet of the age." When in 1797 Wordsworth brought his sister, Dorothy, to settle at Alfoxden, only three miles from the Coleridges at Nether Stowey, the period of intimate communication and poetic collaboration began that was the golden time of Coleridge's life. An annual allowance of .l 50, granted to Coleridge by Thomas and Josiah Wedgwood, sons of the founder of the famous pottery firm, came just in time to deflect him from assuming a post as a Unitarian minister. After their joint publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Coleridge and the Wordsworths spent a winter in Germany, where Coleridge attended the University of Gottingen and began the lifelong study of German philosophers and critics�Kant, Schiller, Schelling, and Fichte�that helped alter profoundly his thinking about philosophy, religion, and aesthetics.


Back in England, Coleridge in 1800 followed the Wordsworths to the Lake District, settling at Greta Hall, Keswick. He had become gradually disaffected from his wife, and now he fell helplessly and hopelessly in love with Sara Hutchinson, whose sister, Mary, Wordsworth married in 1802. In accord with the medical prescription of that time, Coleridge had been taking laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol) to ease the painful physical ailments from which he had suffered from an early age. In 1800-01 heavy dosages during attacks of rheumatism made opium a necessity to him, and Coleridge soon recognized that the drug was a greater evil than the diseases it did not cure. "Dejection: An Ode," published in 1802, was Coleridge's despairing farewell to health, happiness, and poetic creativity. A two-year sojourn on the Mediterranean island of Malta, intended to restore his health, instead completed his decline. When he returned to England in the late summer of 1806, he was a broken man, a drug addict, estranged from his wife, suffering from agonies of remorse, and subject to


.


SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE / 42 5


terrifying nightmares of guilt and despair from which his own shrieks awakened him. By 1810, when he and Wordsworth quarreled bitterly, it must have seemed that he could not fall any lower.


Under these conditions Coleridge's literary efforts, however sporadic and fragmentary, were little short of heroic. In 1808 he debuted as a speaker at one of the new lecturing institutions that sprang up in British cities in the early nineteenth century. His lectures on poetry, like his later series on Shakespeare, became part of the social calendar for fashionable Londoners�women, excluded still from universities, particularly. He wrote for newspapers and single-handedly undertook to write, publish, and distribute a periodical, The Friend, which lasted for some ten months beginning in June 1809. A tragedy, Remorse, had in 1813 a successful run of twenty performances at the Drury Lane theater. In 1816 he took up residence at Highgate, a northern suburb of London, under the supervision of the excellent and endlessly forbearing physician James Gillman, who managed to control, although not to eliminate, Coleridge's consumption of opium. The next three years were Coleridge's most sustained period of literary activity. While continuing to lecture and to write for the newspapers on a variety of subjects, he published Biographia Literaria, Zapolya (a drama), a book consisting of the essays in The Friend (revised and greatly enlarged), two collections of poems, and several important treatises on philosophical and religious subjects. In these treatises and those that followed over the next fifteen years, he emerged as the heir to the conservatism of Edmund Burke, an opponent to secularism and a defender of the Anglican Church, and an unapologetic intellectual elitist with an ambitious account of the role elites might play in modern states, outlined in his discussions of national culture and of the "clerisy" who would take responsibility for preserving it.


The remaining years of his life, which he spent with Dr. and Mrs. Gillman, were quieter and happier than any he had known since the turn of the century. He came to a peaceful understanding with his wife and was reconciled with Wordsworth, with whom he toured the Bhineland in 1828. His rooms at Highgate became a center for friends, for the London literati, and for a steady stream of pilgrims from England and America. They came to hear one of the wonders of the age, the Sage of Highgate's conversation�or monologue�for even in his decline, Coleridge's talk never lost the almost hypnotic power that Hazlitt has immortalized in "My First Acquaintance with Poets." Mary Shelley appears to have been haunted by the memory of the evening when, a small child, she hid behind a sofa to listen to Coleridge, one of her father's visitors, recite The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and a stanza from that poem of dark mystery found its way into Frankenstein, just as her recollections of that visitor's voice contributed to her depictions of the irresistible hold her novel's storytellers have over their auditors. When he died, Coleridge left his friends with the sense that an incomparable intellect had vanished from the world.


Coleridge's friends, however, abetted by his own merciless self-judgments, set current the opinion, still common, that he was great in promise but not in performance. Even in his buoyant youth he described his own character as "indolence capable of energies"; and it is true that while his mind was incessantly active and fertile, he lacked application and staying power. He also manifested early in life a profound sense of guilt and a need for public expiation. After drug addiction sapped his strength and will, he often adapted (or simply adopted) passages from other writers, with little or no acknowledgment, and sometimes in a context that seems designed to reveal that he relies on sources that he does not credit. Whatever the tangled motives for his procedure, Coleridge has repeatedly been charged with gross plagiarism, from his day to ours. After The Ancient Mariner, most of the poems he completed were written, like the first version of "Dejection: An Ode," in a spasm of intense effort. Writings that required sustained planning and application were either left unfinished or, like Biographia Literaria, made up of brilliant sections padded out with filler, sometimes lifted from other writers, in a desperate effort to meet a deadline. Many of his speculations Coleridge merely confided to his notebooks and the ears of his friends, incor


.


42 6 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


porated in letters, and poured out in the margins of his own and other people's books.


Even so, it is only when measured against his own potentialities that Coleridge's achievements appear limited. In an 1838 essay the philosopher John Stuart Mill hailed the recently deceased Coleridge as one of "the two great seminal minds of England": according to Mill, Coleridge's conservatism had, along with the very different utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham (the other seminal mind identified in Mill's essay), revolutionized the political thought of the day. Coleridge was also one of the important and influential literary theorists of the nineteenth century. One of his major legacies is the notion that culture, the nation's artistic and spiritual heritage, represents a force with the power to combat the fragmentation of a modern, market-driven society and to restore a common, collective life. This was an idea that he worked out largely in opposition to Bentham's utilitarianism, the newly prestigious discipline of political economy, and the impoverished, soulless account of human nature that these systems of thought offered. And in Biogra-phia Literaria and elsewhere, Coleridge raised the stakes for literary criticism, making it into a kind of writing that could address the most difficult and abstract questions�questions about, for instance, the relations between literary language and ordinary language, or between poetry and philosophy, or between perception and imagination. Above all, Coleridge's writings in verse�whether we consider the poetry of Gothic demonism in Christabel or the meditative conversation poems like "Frost at Midnight" or "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison"�are the achievements of a remarkably innovative poet.


The Eolian Harp1


Composed at Clevedon, Somersetshire


My pensive Sara! thy soft cheek reclined


Thus on mine arm, most soothing sweet it is


To sit beside our cot, our cot o'ergrown


With white-flowered jasmin, and the broad-leaved myrtle,


5 (Meet emblems they of Innocence and Love!)


And watch the clouds, that late were rich with light,


Slow saddening round, and mark the star of eve


Serenely brilliant (such should wisdom be)


Shine opposite! How exquisite the scents


io Snatched from yon bean-field! and the world so hushed!


The stilly murmur of the distant sea


Tells us of silence.


And that simplest lute,


Placed length-ways in the clasping casement, hark!


i. Named for Aeolus, god of the winds, the harp whom he married on October 4, 1795, and took to has strings stretched over a rectangular sounding a cottage (the "cot" of lines 3 and 64) at Clevedon,


box. When placed in an opened window, the harp overlooking the Bristol Channel. He later several


(also called "Eolian lute," "Eolian lyre," "wind times expanded and altered the original version;


harp") responds to the altering wind by sequences the famous lines 26�29, for example, were not


of musical chords. This instrument, which seems added until 1817. Originally it was titled "Effusion


to voice nature's own music, was a favorite house-XXXV" and was one of thirty-six such effusions that


hold furnishing in the period and was repeatedly Coleridge included in a 1796 volume of verse;


alluded to in Romantic poetry. It served also as one revised and retitled, it became what he called a


of the recurrent Romantic images for the mind� "conversation poem"�the designation used since


either the mind in poetic inspiration, as in the last his day for a sustained blank-verse lyric of descrip


stanza of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" tion and meditation, in the mode of conversation


(p. 772), or else the mind in perception, respond-addressed to a silent auditor. This was the form ing to an intellectual breeze by trembling into con-that Coleridge perfected in "Frost at Midnight"


sciousness, as in this poem, lines 44�48. and that Wordsworth adopted in "Tintern Abbey."


Coleridge wrote this poem to Sara Fricker,


.


THE EOLIAN HARP / 427


How by the desultory breeze caressed,


15 Like some coy maid half yielding to her lover,


It pours such sweet upbraiding,0 as must needs scolding


Tempt to repeat the wrong! And now, its strings


Boldlier swept, the long sequacious0 notes regularly following


Over delicious surges sink and rise,


20 Such a soft floating witchery of sound


As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve


Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land,


Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers,


Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,2


25 Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untamed wing!


O the one life within us and abroad,


Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,


A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,


Rhythm in all thought, and joyance3 every where�


30 Methinks, it should have been impossible


Not to love all things in a world so filled;


Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air


Is Music slumbering on her instrument.


And thus, my love! as on the midway slope


35 Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon,


Whilst through my half-closed eye-lids I behold


The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main,0 ocean


And tranquil muse upon tranquillity;


Full many a thought uncalled and undetained,


40 And many idle flitting phantasies,


Traverse my indolent and passive brain,


As wild and various as the random gales


That swell and flutter on this subject lute!


And what if all of animated nature


45 Be but organic harps diversely framed,


That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps


Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,


At once the Soul of each, and God of All?


But thy more serious eye a mild reproof


50 Darts, O beloved woman! nor such thoughts


Dim and unhallowed dost thou not reject,


And biddest me walk humbly with my God.


Meek daughter in the family of Christ!


Well hast thou said and holily dispraised


55 These shapings of the unregenerate4 mind;


Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break


On vain Philosophy's aye-babbling� spring. ever babbling


For never guiltless may I speak of him,


The Incomprehensible! save when with awe


2. Brilliantly colored birds found in New Guinea nectar. and adjacent islands. The native practice of remov-3. An archaic term for enjoyment, coined in the


ing the legs when preparing the skin led Europeans 16th century by Spenser and reintroduced by


to believe that the birds were footless and spent Coleridge.


their lives hovering in the air and feeding on 4. Spiritually unredeemed; not born again.


.


42 8 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


I praise him, and with Faith that inly feels;


Who with his saving mercies healed me,


A sinful and most miserable man,


Wildered and dark, and gave me to possess


Peace, and this cot, and thee, heart-honored Maid!


1795 1796


This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison


In the June of 1797, some long-expected Friends paid a visit to the author's cottage; and on the morning of their arrival, he met with an accident, which disabled him from walking during the whole time of their stay. One evening, when they had left him for a few hours, he composed the following lines in the garden-bower.1


Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,


This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost


Beauties and feelings, such as would have been


Most sweet to my remembrance even when age


5 Had dimmed mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,


Friends, whom I never more may meet again,


On springy2 heath, along the hill-top edge,


Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,


To that still roaring dell, of which I told;


10 The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep,


And only speckled by the mid-day sun;


Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock


Flings arching like a bridge;�that branchless ash,


Unsunned and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves


15 Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,


Fanned by the water-fall! and there my friends


Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds,


That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)


Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge


Of the blue clay-stone.3


20


Now, my friends emerge


Beneath the wide wide Heaven�and view again


The many-steepled tract magnificent


Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea, With some fair bark,� perhaps, whose sails light up boat


25 The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles


Of purple shadow! Yes! they wander on


1. The time was in fact July 1797; the visiting Southey, July 17, 1797, in which he transcribed friends were William and Dorothy Wordsworth the first version of this poem. In the earliest printed


and Charles Lamb; the accident was the fault of text, the title is followed by "Addressed to Charles


Mrs. Coleridge�"dear Sara," Coleridge wrote, Lamb, of the India-House, London."


"accidentally emptied a skillet of boiling milk on 2. Elastic, I mean [Coleridge's note].


my foot"; and the bower consisted of lime (i.e., lin-3. Cf. Dorothy Wordsworth's description of the


den) trees in the garden of Thomas Poole, next "low damp dell" in her Alfoxden Journal, February


door to Coleridge's cottage at Nether Stowey. 10, 1798 (p. 391).


Coleridge related these facts in a letter to Robert


.


THIS LIME-TREE BOWER MY PRISON / 429


In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,


My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined


And hungered after Nature, many a year,


30 In the great City pent,4 winning thy way


With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain


And strange calamity!5 Ah! slowly sink


Behind the western ridge, thou glorious sun!


Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,


35 Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!


Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!


And kindle, thou blue ocean! So my Friend


Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,


Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round


40 On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem


Less gross than bodily; and of such hues


As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes


Spirits perceive his presence. A delight


Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad


45 As I myself were there! Nor in this bower,


This little lime-tree bower, have I not marked


Much that has soothed me. Pale beneath the blaze


Hung the transparent foliage; and I watched


Some broad and sunny leaf, and loved to see


50 The shadow of the leaf and stem above


Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut-tree


Was richly tinged, and a deep radiance lay


Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps


Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass


55 Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue


Through the late twilight: and though now the bat


Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters,


Yet still the solitary humble bee


Sings in the bean-flower! Henceforth I shall know


60 That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;


No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,


No waste so vacant, but may well employ


Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart


Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes


65 'Tis well to be bereft of promised good, That we may lift the Soul, and contemplate


With lively joy the joys we cannot share.


My gentle-hearted Charles! when the last rook


Beat its straight path along the dusky air


70 Homewards, I blessed it! deeming its black wing


(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)


Had crossed the mighty orb's dilated glory,


While thou stood'st gazing; or when all was still,


4. Despite Coleridge's claim, Charles Lamb emi- 5. Some ten months earlier Charles Lamb's sister, nently preferred London over what he called "dead Mary, had stabbed their mother to death in a fit of


Nature." For Lamb's love of city life, see his letter insanity,


to Wordsworth at Norton Literature Online.


.


430 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 75Flew creeking o'er thy head, and had a charm For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom No sound is dissonant which tells of Life. 1797 1800


1. Coleridge describes the origin of this poem in the opening section of chap. 14 of Biographia Literaria. In a comment made to the Reverend Alexander Dyce in 1835 and in a note on "We Are Seven" dictated in 1843, Wordsworth added some details. The poem, based on a dream of Coleridge's friend Cruikshank, was originally planned as a collaboration between Coleridge and Wordsworth, to pay the expense of a walking tour they took with Dorothy Wordsworth in November 1797. Before he dropped out of the enterprise, Wordsworth suggested the shooting of the albatross and the navigation of the ship by the dead men; he also contributed lines 13�16 and 226�27. When printed in Lyrical Ballads (1798), this poem was titled "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere" and contained many archaic words and spellings, which, Wordsworth believed, hurt the sales of their volume. In later editions Coleridge revised the poem, in part by pruning those archaisms. He also added the Latin epigraph and the marginal


glosses written in the old-fashioned style of 17thcentury learning.


2. "I readily believe that there are more invisible than visible Natures in the universe. But who will explain for us the family of all these beings, and the ranks and relations and distinguishing features and functions of each? What do they do? What places do they inhabit? The human mind has always sought the knowledge of these things, but never attained it. Meanwhile I do not deny that it is helpful sometimes to contemplate in the mind, as on a tablet, the image of a greater and better world, lest the intellect, habituated to the petty things of daily life, narrow itself and sink wholly into trivial thoughts. But at the same time we must be watchful for the truth and keep a sense of proportion, so that we may distinguish the certain from the uncertain, day from night." Adapted by Coleridge from Thomas Burnet, Archaeologiae Philosophicae (1692). 3. At once.


.


THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER / 431


The wedding guest is spellbound by the eyeof the old sea-faringman, and constrained to hear his tale.


The iMariner tells


how the ship sailed


southward with a good wiiul and fair


weather, till it


reached the line.


The Wedding Guest heareth the bridal music; but the mariner continuetll his tale.


The ship driven by a storm toward the south pole.


He holds him with his glittering eye-�


The wedding-guest stood still,


And listens like a three years' child:


The Mariner hath his will.4 The wedding-guest sat on a stone:


He cannot choose but hear;


And thus spake on that ancient man,


The bright-eyed Mariner. "The ship was cheered, the harbor cleared,


Merrily did we drop


Below the kirk,5 below the hill,


Below the light house top. The sun came up upon the left,


Out of the sea came he!


And he shone bright, and on the right


Went down into the sea. Higher and higher every day,


Till over the mast at noon6�"


The wedding-guest here beat his breast,


For he heard the loud bassoon.


The bride hath paced into the hall,


Red as a rose is she;


Nodding their heads before her goes


The merry minstrelsy. The wedding-guest he beat his breast,


Yet he cannot choose but hear;


And thus spake on that ancient man,


The bright-eyed Mariner.


"And now the storm-blast came, and he


Was tyrannous and strong:


He struck with his o'ertaking wings,


And chased us south along.


With sloping masts and dipping prow,


As who pursued with yell and blow


Still treads the shadow of his foe,


And forward bends his head,


The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,


And southward aye7 we fled.


And now there came both mist and snow,


And it grew wondrous cold:


4. I.e., the Mariner has gained control of the will 5. Church. of the wedding guest by hypnosis�or, as it was 6. The ship had reached the equator.


called in Coleridge's time, by "mesmerism." 7. Always.


.


43 2 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


The land of ice, and of fearful sounds where no tiring thing was to be seen.


Till a great sea-bird, called the Albatross, came through the snow-fog, and was received with greatjoy and hospitality .


And Io! the Albatross prcn'eth a bird of good omen, andfolloweth the ship as it returned northward through fog and floating ice.


The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen.


8. Knew. 9. Swoon. And ice, mast-high, came floating by,


As green as emerald. And through the drifts the snowy clifts


Did send a dismal sheen:


Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken8�


The ice was all between. The ice was here, the ice was there,


The ice was all around:


It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,


Like noises in a swound!9 At length did cross an Albatross,


Thorough the fog it came;


As if it had been a Christian soul,


We hailed it in God's name. It ate the food it ne'er had eat,


And round and round it flew.


The ice did split with a thunder-fit;


The helmsman steered us through! And a good south wind sprung up behind;


The Albatross did follow,


And every day, for food or play,


Came to the mariners' hollo!


In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,1


It perched for vespers nine;


Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,


Glimmered the white moon-shine."


"God save thee, ancient Mariner!


From the fiends, that plague thee thus!�


Why look'st thou so?"�With my cross-bow


I shot the Albatross.


Part 2


The Sun now rose upon the right:2


Out of the sea came he,


Still hid in mist, and on the left 85


Went down into the sea.


And the good south wind still blew behind,


But no sweet bird did follow,


Nor any day for food or play


Came to the mariners' hollo!


2. Having rounded Cape Horn, the ship heads north into the Pacific.


1. Rope supporting the mast.


.


His shipmates cry out against the ancient Mariner, for killingthe bird of good luck.


But when the fog cleared off , they justify the same, and thus make themselves accomplices in the


The fair breeze con


tinues; the ship


enters the Pacific


Ocean, and sails


northward, even till


it reaches the Line.3


The ship hath been


suddenly becalmed.


And the Albatross begins to be avenged.


THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER


And I had done a hellish thing,


And it would work 'em woe:


For all averred, I had killed the bird


That made the breeze to blow.


Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay,


That made the breeze to blow! Nor dim nor red, like God's own head,


The glorious Sun uprist:


Then all averred, I had killed the bird


That brought the fog and mist.


Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,


That bring the fog and mist. The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,


The furrow followed free;


We were the first that ever burst


Into that silent sea. Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,


Twas sad as sad could be;


And we did speak only to break


The silence of the sea! All in a hot and copper sky,


The bloody Sun, at noon,


Right up above the mast did stand,


No bigger than the Moon. Day after day, day after day,


We stuck, nor breath nor motion;


As idle as a painted ship


Upon a painted ocean. Water, water, every where,


And all the boards did shrink;


Water, water, every where,


Nor any drop to drink. The very deep did rot: O Christ!


That ever this should be!


Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs


Upon the slimy sea. About, about, in reel and rout


The death-fires4 danced at night;


The water, like a witch's oils,


Burnt green, and blue and white.


3. I.e., the equator. Unless it is simply an error (Coleridge misreading his own poem), this gloss


anticipates the ship's later arrival at the equator,


on its trip north from the region of the South Pole,


as described in lines 381�84.


4. Usually glossed as St. Elmo's fire�an atmospheric electricity on a ship's mast or rigging�


believed by superstitious sailors to portend disas


ter. Possibly the reference is instead to phospho


rescence resulting from the decomposition of


organic matter in the sea (see line 123).


/ 433


.


43 4 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


A spirit had followed them; one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls iwr angels; concerningwhom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the numerous, and there is


The shipmates, in


their sore distress,


would fain throw the


whole guilt on the


ancient Mariner: in


sign whereof they


hang the dead sea


bird round his neck.


The ancient Mariner


beholdeth a sign in


the element afar off .


At its nearer approach, it seemeth him to be a ship; and at a dear ransom he freeth his speech from the bonds of thirst.


A flash of joy;


5. Knew. 6. A supernatural being that supervises the natu-7. Great thanks; from the French grand-merci. ral elements (but Coleridge may in fact have been


And some in dreams assured were


Of the spirit that plagued us so;


Nine fathom deep he had followed us


From the land of mist and snow.


Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted. They are veryno climate or element without one or more.


And every tongue, through utter drought,


Was withered at the root;


We could not speak, no more than if


We had been choked with soot. Ah! well-a-day! what evil looks


Had I from old and young!


Instead of the cross, the Albatross


About my neck was hung.


Part 3


There passed a weary time. Each throat


Was parched, and glazed each eye.


A weary time! a weary time!


How glazed each weary eye,


When looking westward, I beheld


A something in the sky. At first it seemed a little speck,


And then it seemed a mist;


It moved and moved, and took at last


A certain shape, I wist.5 A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist!


And still it neared and neared:


As if it dodged a water-sprite,6


It plunged and tacked and veered. With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,


We could nor laugh nor wail;


Through utter drought all dumb we stood!


I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,


And cried, A sail! a sail! With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,


Agape they heard me call:


Gramercy!7 they for joy did grin,


And all at once their breath drew in,


As they were drinking all.


using the term to mean water -spout).


.


THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER / 435


And horror folio U'S.


For can it be a ship See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more! that conies onward Hither to work us weal;8


without wind or tide?


Without a breeze, without a tide,


She steadies with upright keel! The western wave was all a-flame.


The day was well nigh done!


Almost upon the western wave


Rested the broad bright Sun;


When that strange shape drove suddenly


Betwixt us and the Sun.


It seemcth him but


And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,


the skeleton of a


ship. (Heaven's Mother send us grace!)


As if through a dungeon-grate he peered


With broad and burning face. Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)


How fast she nears and nears!


Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,


Like restless gossameres?9


And its ribs are seen


Are those her ribs through which the Sun


as bars on the face of


the setting Sun. The Did peer, as through a grate?


specter-woman and il


Ands that Woman al her crew?


her death-mate, and


no other on board Is that a Death? and are there two?


the skeleton-ship.


Is Death that woman's mate? Like vessel, like Her lips were red, her looks were free,


cretv!


Her locks were yellow as gold:


Her skin was as white as leprosy,


The Night-mare Life-in-Death was she,


Who thicks man's blood with cold.


Death and Life-in-


The naked hulk1 alongside came,


death have diced for


the ship's crew, and And the twain were casting dice;


she (the latter) win


"The game is done! I've won! I've won!"


neth the ancient


Mariner. Quoth she, and whistles thrice. No twilight within The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:


the courts of the sun.


At one stride comes the dark;


With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea,


Off shot the spectre-bark.2


AtMoon, the rising of the We listened and looked sideways up! Fear at my heart, as at a cup,


My life-blood seemed to sip!


The stars were dim, and thick the night,


The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white;


8. Benefit. 1. Large ship. 9. Filmy cobwebs floating in the air. 2. Ghost ship.


.


43 6 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


One after another,


His shipmates drop down dead.


B�t Life-tn-Death


begins her work onthe ancient Mariner.


The wedding guest feareth that a spirit is talking to him.


But the ancient Mariner assureth him of his bodily life, and proceedeth to relate his horrible penance.


He despiseth the


creatures of the


calm,


And envieth that they should live, and so many lie dead.


From the sails the dew did drip�


Till clomh above the eastern bar


The horned Moon, with one bright star


Within the nether tip.3 One after one, by the star-dogged Moon,


Too quick for groan or sigh,


Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,


And cursed me with his eye. Four times fifty living men,


(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)


With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,


They dropped down one by one.


The souis jjj f rom their bodies fly,�


J


They fled to DUSS Or WOe!


And every soul, it passed me by,


Like the whizz of my cross-bow!


Part 4


"I fear thee, ancient Mariner!


I fear thy skinny hand!


And thou art long, and lank, and brown,


As is the ribbed sea-sand. I fear thee and thy glittering eye,


And thy skinny hand, so brown."�


Fear not, fear not, thou wedding-guest!


This body dropt not down. Alone, alone, all, all alone,


Alone on a wide wide sea!


And never a saint took pity on


My soul in agony. The many men, so beautiful!


And they all dead did lie:


And a thousand thousand slimy things


Lived on; and so did I. I looked upon the rotting sea,


And drew my eyes away;


I looked upon the rotting deck,


And there the dead men lay. I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;


But or ever a prayer had gusht,


A wicked whisper came, and made


My heart as dry as dust.


3. An omen of impending evil.


.


But the curse liveth


jor htm in the eye oj


the dead men.


In his loneliness and fixedness he yeaniethtowards the journey


ing Moon, and the


stars that still sojourn, yet still


move onward; and


THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER


I closed my lids, and kept them close,


And the balls like pulses beat;


For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky


Lay like a load on my weary eye,


And the dead were at my feet.


Th e coJd sw.a t meltecJ from, their limbs,


Nor rot nor reek did they:


The look with which they looked on me


Had never passed away. An orphan's curse would drag to hell


A spirit from on high;


But oh! more horrible than that


Is the curse in a dead man's eye!


Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,


And yet I could not die. The moving Moon went up the sky,


And no where did abide:


Softly she was going up,


And a star or two beside�


everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their mvn natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.


By the light of the Moon he beholdeth God's creatures ofthe great calm.


Their beauty and their happiness.


He blesseth them i his heart.


Tlte spell begins to break.


Her beams bemocked the sultry main,


Like April hoar-frost spread;


But where the ship's huge shadow lay,


The charmed water burnt alway


A still and awful red. Beyond the shadow of the ship,


I watched the water-snakes:


They moved in tracks of shining white,


And when they reared, the elfish light


Fell off in hoary flakes. Within the shadow of the ship


I watched their rich attire:


Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,


They coiled and swam; and every track


Was a flash of golden fire. O happy living things! no tongue


Their beauty might declare:


A spring of love gushed from my heart,


And I blessed them unaware:


Sure my kind saint took pity on me,


And I blessed them unaware. The selfsame moment I could pray;


And from my neck so free


/ 437


260


270


280


.


43 8 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


The Albatross fell off, and sank


Like lead into the sea.


Part 5


Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing,


Beloved from pole to pole!


To Mary Queen the praise be given!


She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,


That slid into my soul. By grace of the holy The silly4 buckets on the deck,


Mother, the ancient


Mariner is refreshed That had so long remained,


with rain.


I dreamt that they were filled with dew;


And when I awoke, it rained. My lips were wet, my throat was cold,


My garments all were dank;


Sure I had drunken in my dreams,


And still my body drank. I moved, and could not feel my limbs:


I was so light�almost


I thought that I had died in sleep,


And was a blessed ghost.


He heareth sounds


and seeth strange And soon I heard a roaring wind: sights and commo-It did not come anear;


tions in the sky and


But with its sound it shook the sails,


the element.


That were so thin and sere. The upper air burst into life!


And a hundred fire-flags sheen,5


To and fro they were hurried about!


And to and fro, and in and out,


The wan stars danced between. And the coming wind did roar more loud,


And the sails did sigh like sedge;6


And the rain poured down from one black cloud;


The Moon was at its edge. The thick black cloud was cleft, and still


The Moon was at its side:


Like waters shot from some high crag,


The lightning fell with never a jag,


A river steep and wide.


4. Simple, homely. describing the Aurora Australis, or Southern 5. Shone. These fire-flags are probably St. Elmo's Lights, and possibly also lightning. fire (see n. 4, p. 433), but Coleridge may be 6. A rushlike plant growing in wet soil.


.


The bodies of the ship's crew are inspired, and the ship moves on;


But not by the souls of the men, nor bydaemons' of earth or middle air, but by a blessed troop of angelic spirits, sent down by the imvocation of the guardiansaint.


THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINERThe loud wind never reached the ship,


Yet now the ship moved on!


Beneath the lightning and the moon


The dead men gave a groan. They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,


Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;


It had been strange, even in a dream,


To have seen those dead men rise. The helmsman steered, the ship moved on;


Yet never a breeze up blew;


The mariners all 'gan work the ropes,


Where they were wont to do;


They raised their limbs like lifeless tools�


We were a ghastly crew. The body of my brother's son


Stood by me, knee to knee:


The body and I pulled at one rope,


But he said nought to me.


"I fear thee, ancient Mariner!"


Be calm, thou Wedding-Guest!


Twas not those souls that fled in pain,


Which to their corses8 came again,


But a troop of spirits blest:


For when it dawned�they dropped their arms,


And clustered round the mast;


Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths,


And from their bodies passed.


Around, around, flew each sweet sound,


Then darted to the Sun;


Slowly the sounds came back again,


Now mixed, now one by one.


Sometimes a-dropping from the sky


I heard the sky-lark sing;


Sometimes all little birds that are,


How they seemed to fill the sea and air


With their sweet jargoning!9


And now 'twas like all instruments,


Now like a lonely flute;


And now it is an angel's song,


That makes the heavens be mute.


7. Supernatural beings halfway between mortals 8. Corpses. and gods (the type of spirit that Coleridge describes 9. Warbling (Middle English).


in the gloss beside lines 13 1-34).


/ 439


.


44 0 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


The lonesome spiritfrom the soiith-polecarries on the ship as far as the line, in


obedience to the angelic troop, but


still requireth


vengeance.


The Polar Spirit's fellow daemons, the invisible inhabitants of the element, take part in his wrong; and two of them relate, one to the other, that penancelong and heavy for the ancient Mariner hath been accorded to the Polar Spirit, who retunteth southward.


It ceased; yet still the sails made on


A pleasant noise till noon,


A noise like of a hidden brook


In the leafy month of June,


That to the sleeping woods all night


Singeth a quiet tune. Till noon we quietly sailed on,


Yet never a breeze did breathe:


Slowly and smoothly went the ship,


Moved onward from beneath. Under the keel nine fathom deep,


From the land of mist and snow,


The spirit slid: and it was he


That made the ship to go.


The sails at noon left off their tune,


And the ship stood still also. The Sun, right up above the mast,


Had fixed her to the ocean:


But in a minute she 'gan stir,


With a short uneasy motion-�


Backwards and forwards half her length


With a short uneasy motion. Then like a pawing horse let go,


She made a sudden bound:


It flung the blood into my head,


And I fell down in a swound. How long in that same fit I lay,


I have not1 to declare;


But ere my living life returned,


I heard and in my soul discerned


Two voices in the air. "Is it he?" quoth one, "Is this the man?


By him who died on cross,


With his cruel bow he laid full low


The harmless Albatross. The spirit who bideth by himself


In the land of mist and snow,


He loved the bird that loved the man


Who shot him with his bow." The other was a softer voice,


As soft as honey-dew:


Quoth he, "The man hath penance done,


And penance more will do."


1. I.e., have not the knowledge.


The Mariner hath been cast into a trance; for the angelic power causeth the vessel to drive northward fas


ter than human life could endure.


The supernaturalmotion is retarded; the Mariner awakes, and his penancebegins anew.


The curse is finally expiated.


.


TH E RIM E OF THE ANCIEN T MARINE R / 44 1 Part 6 FIRST VOICE "But tell me, tell me! speak again, Thy soft response renewing� What makes that ship drive on so fast? What is the ocean doing?" 410 SECOND VOICE "Still as a slave before his lord, The ocean hath no blast; His great bright eye most silently Up to the Moon is cast� If he may know which way to go; For she guides him smooth or grim. See, brother, see! how graciouslyShe looketh down on him." 415 420 FIRST VOICE "But why drives on that ship so fast, Without or wave or wind?" SECOND VOICE "The air is cut away before, And closes from behind. Fly, brother, fly! more high, more high! Or we shall be belated: For slow and slow that ship will go, When the Mariner's trance is abated." I woke, and we were sailing on As in a gentle weather: 'Twas night, calm night, the moon was high; The dead men stood together. All stood together on the deck, For a charnel-dungeon fitter: All fixed on me their stony eyes, That in the Moon did glitter. The pang, the curse, with which they died, Had never passed away: I could not draw my eyes from theirs, Nor turn them up to pray. And now this spell was snapt: once more I viewed the ocean green, And looked far forth, yet little saw Of what had else been seen�


.


442 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.


But soon there breathed a wind on me, Nor sound nor motion made: Its path was not upon the sea, In ripple or in shade.


It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek Like a meadow-gale of spring� It mingled strangely with my fears, Yet it felt like a welcoming.


Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship, Yet she sailed softly too: Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze� On me alone it blew.


And the ancient Q h ! dream of joy! is this indeed


manner beholaeth i his native country. The light-house top I See? Is this the hill? is this the kirk? Is this mine own countree?


We drifted o'er the harbour-bar, And I with sobs did pray� O let me be awake, my God! Or let me sleep alway.


The harbour-bay was clear as glass, So smoothly it was strewn! And on the bay the moonlight lay, And the shadow of the moon.


The rock shone bright, the kirk no less, That stands above the rock: The moonlight steeped in silentness The steady weathercock.


And the bay was white with silent light, Till rising from the same, The angelic spirits Full many shapes, that shadows were,


leave the dead


bodies, In crimson colours came.


And appear ill their


own forms o/ light. A little distance from the prow Those crimson shadows were: I turned my eyes upon the deck� Oh, Christ! what saw I there!


Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat, And, by the holy rood!


.


THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER / 443


A man all light, a seraph-man,2 490 On every corse there stood.


This seraph-band, each waved his hand:


It was a heavenly sight!


They stood as signals to the land,


Each one a lovely light; 495 This seraph-band, each waved his hand,


No voice did they impart�


No voice; but oh! the silence sank


Like music on my heart. But soon I heard the dash of oars, 500


I heard the Pilot's cheer;


My head was turned perforce away,


And I saw a boat appear. The Pilot and the Pilot's boy,


I heard them coming fast: 505


Dear Lord in Heaven! it was a joy


The dead men could not blast. I saw a third�I heard his voice:


It is the Hermit good!


He singeth loud his godly hymns 510


That he makes in the wood. He'll shrieve3 my soul, he'll wash away


The Albatross's blood.


Part 7


The Hermit of the JJ^ Hermi t �ood ]ives jn that WOOd wood, ~


Which slopes down to the sea. 515


How loudly his sweet voice he rears!


He loves to talk with marineres


That come from a far countree. He kneels at morn, and noon, and eve�


He hath a cushion plump: 520


It is the moss that wholly hides


The rotted old oak-stump. The skiff-boat neared: I heard them talk,


"Why, this is strange, I trow!


Where are those lights so many and fair, 525


That signal made but now?"


Approacheth the ship


"Strange, by my faith!" the Hermit said�


with wonder. � > J J


"And they answered not our cheer!


The planks looked warped! and see those sails,


2. A shining celestial being, highest in the ranks 3. Absolve, of the angels. "Rood": cross.


.


44 4 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


How thin they are and sere! I never saw aught like to them, Unless perchance it were


Brown skeletons of leaves that lag My forest-brook along; When the ivy-tod4 is heavy with snow, And the owlet whoops to the wolf below, That eats the she-wolf's young."


"Dear Lord! it hath a fiendish look"� (The Pilot made reply) "I am a-feared"�"Push on, push on!" Said the Hermit cheerily.


The boat came closer to the ship, But I nor spake nor stirred; The boat came close beneath the ship, And straight a sound was heard.


The ship suddenly


Under the water it rumbled on,


sinketh.


Still louder and more dread: It reached the ship, it split the bay; The ship went down like lead.


The ancient Mariner


Stunned by that loud and dreadful sound,


is saved in the Pilot's


boat. Which sky and ocean smote, Like one that hath been seven days drowned My body lay afloat; But swift as dreams, myself I found Within the Pilot's boat.


Upon the whirl, where sank the ship, The boat spun round and round; And all was still, save that the hill Was telling of the sound.


I moved my lips�the Pilot shrieked And fell down in a fit; The holy Hermit raised his eyes, And prayed where he did sit.


I took the oars: the Pilot's boy, Who now doth crazy go, Laughed loud and long, and all the while His eyes went to and fro. "Ha! ha!" quoth he, "full plain I see, The Devil knows how to row."


And now, all in my own countree, I stood on the firm land!


4. Clump of ivy.


.


THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER


The Hermit stepped forth from the boat, And scarcely he could stand.


The ancient Mariner �QH, shrieve me, holy man!" earnestly entreatetn 7 > ' J the Hermit to shrieve The Hermit crossed his brow.5


SRIEVE me


him; and tire pen- ��i ck," quoth he, "I bid thee say�


qu


ance of Itfe jails on J r 1 �>�


him. What manner of man art thou?


Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched With a woful agony, Which forced me to begin my tale; And then it left me free.


And ever ami anon Since then, at an uncertain hour,


throughout his future


life an agony con-That agony returns: straineth him to And till my ghastly tale is told,


travel from land to


latul. This heart within me burns.


I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me: To him my tale I teach.


What loud uproar bursts from that door! The wedding-guests are there: But in the garden-bower the bride And bride-maids singing are: And hark the little vesper bell, Which biddeth me to prayer!


O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been Alone on a wide wide sea: So lonely 'twas, that God himself Scarce seemed there to be.


O sweeter than the marriage-feast, 'Tis sweeter far to me, To walk together to the kirk With a goodly company!�


To walk together to the kirk, And all together pray, While each to his great Father bends, Old men, and babes, and loving friends, And youths and maidens gay!


And to teach, by his


Farewell, farewell! but this I tell


own example, love


and reverence to all To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!


things that God


He prayeth well, who loveth well


made and loveth.


Both man and bird and beast.


/ 445


5. Made the sign of the cross on his forehead. "Shrieve me": hear my confession and grant me absolution.


.


44 6 / SAMUE L TAYLOR COLERIDG E He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.6 615 The Mariner, whose eye is bright, Whose beard with age is hoar, Is gone: and now the Wedding-GuestTurned from the bridegroom's door. 620 He went like one that hath been stunned, And is of sense forlorn:7 A sadder and a wiser man, He rose the morrow morn. 625 1797 1798


Kubla Khan


Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment


In1 the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effect of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: "Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall."2 The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses,3 during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of


6. Coleridge said in 1830, answering the objection rity" was Lord Byron. of the poet Anna Barbauld that the poem "lacked 2. "In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Pal-


a moral": "I told her that in my own judgment the ace, encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground


poem had too much; and that the only, or chief with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleas-


fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the ant Springs, delightfull Streames, and all sorts of


moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a prin-beasts of chase and game, and in the middest


ciple or cause of action in a work of pure imagi-thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may


nation. It ought to have had no more moral than be removed from place to place." From Samuel


the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting Purchas's book of travelers' tales, Purchas his Pil


down to eat dates by the side of a well and throwing grimage (1613). The historical Kublai Khan


the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up and says founded the Mongol dynasty in China in the 13th


he must kill the aforesaid merchant because one of century.


the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the 3. In a note on a manuscript copy of "Kubla


genie's son." Khan," Coleridge gave a more precise account of


7. Bereft. the nature of this "sleep": "This fragment with a 1. In the texts of 1816�29, this note began with good deal more, not recoverable, composed, in a an additional short paragraph: "The following frag-sort of reverie brought on by two grains of opium,


ment is here published at the request of a poet of taken to check a dysentery, at a farmhouse


great and deserved celebrity, and, as far as the between Porlock and Linton, a quarter of a mile


Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a from Culbone Church, in the fall of the year,


psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any 1797."


supposed poetic merits." The "poet of. . . celeb


.


KUBLA KHAN / 447


the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter:


Then all the charm Is broken�all that phantom-world so fair Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread, And each mis-shape [s] the other. Stay awhile, Poor youth! who scarcely dar'st lift up thine eyes� The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon The visions will return! And lo! he stays, And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms Come trembling back, unite, and now once more The pool becomes a mirror.


[From Coleridge's The Picture; or, the Lover's Resolution, lines 91-100]


Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him. Aupiov abiov aooo:4 but the to-morrow is yet to come.


As a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease.5�


1816.


In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph,6 the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man


5 Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;


io And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.


But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted


is As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover!


4. 1 shall sing a sweeter song tomorrow (Greek; of demonic inspiration is much more than a mere recalled from Theocritus's Idyls 1.145). "psychological curiosity."


A number of Coleridge's assertions in this pref-5. Coleridge refers to "The Pains of Sleep."


ace have been debated by critics: whether the 6. Derived probably from the Greek river Alpheus,


poem was written in 1797 or later, whether it was which flows into the Ionian Sea. Its waters were


actually composed in a "dream" or opium reverie, fabled to rise again in Sicily as the fountain of Are-


even whether it is a fragment or in fact is complete. thusa.


All critics agree, however, that this visionary poem


.


44 8 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced:


20 Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail: And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river.


25 Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far


30 Ancestral voices prophesying war!


The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves.


35 It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!


A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid,


40 And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora.7 Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me,


45 That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware!


50 His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice,8 And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.9


ca. 1797-98 1816


7. Apparently a reminiscence of Milton's Paradise 9. Lines 50ff. echo in part the description, in Lost 4.280�82: "where Abassin Kings their issue Plato's Ion 533-34, of inspired poets, who are "like


guard / Mount Amara (though this by some sup-Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from


posed /True Paradise) under the Ethiop line." the rivers when they are under the influence of


8. A magic ritual, to protect the inspired poet from Dionysus but not when they are in their right intrusion. mind."


.


CHRISTABEL / 44 9


Christabel1


Preface


The first part of the following poem was written in the year 1797, at Stowey, in the county of Somerset. The second part, after my return from Germany, in the year 1800, at Keswick, Cumberland. It is probable, that if the poem had been finished at either of the former periods, or if even the first and second part had been published in the year 1800, the impression of its originality would have been much greater than I dare at present expect. But for this, I have only my own indolence to blame. The dates are mentioned for the exclusive purpose of precluding charges of plagiarism or servile imitation from myself. For there is amongst us a set of critics, who seem to hold, that every possible thought and image is traditional; who have no notion that there are such things as fountains in the world, small as well as great; and who would therefore charitably derive every rill they behold flowing, from a perforation made in some other man's tank. I am confident, however, that as far as the present poem is concerned, the celebrated poets2 whose writings I might be suspected of having imitated, either in particular passages, or in the tone and the spirit of the whole, would be among the first to vindicate me from the charge, and who, on any striking coincidence, would permit me to address them in this doggerel version of two monkish Latin hexameters.


Tis mine and it is likewise yours; But an if this will not do; Let it be mine, good friend! for I Am the poorer of the two.


I have only to add, that the metre of the Christabel is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle: namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables.3 Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four. Nevertheless this occasional variation in number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of convenience, but in correspondence with some transition, in the nature of the imagery or passion.


Part 1


'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock, And the owls have awakened the crowing cock;


1. Coleridge had planned to publish Christabel in uscript. Coleridge has in mind Scott's Lay of the the 2nd edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) but had La$t Minstrel (1805) and Byron's Siege of Corinth not been able to complete the poem. When Chris-(1816), which showed the influence of Christabel, tabel was finally published in 1816 in its present especially in their meter. fragmentary state, he still hoped to finish it, for the 3. Much of the older English versification, follow-


Preface contained this sentence (deleted in the ing the example of Anglo-Saxon poetry, had been


edition of 1834): "But as, in my very first concep-based on stress, or "accent," and some of it shows


tion of the tale, I had the whole present to my as much freedom in varying the number of sylla


mind, with the wholeness, no less than with the bles as does Christabel. The poem, however, is a


liveliness of a vision; I trust that I shall be able to radical departure from the theory and practice of


embody in verse the three parts yet to come, in the versification in the 18th century, which had been


course of the present year." based on a recurrent number of syllables in each


2. Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, who had read line. and admired Christabel while it circulated in man


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45 0 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDG E Tu�whit! Tu�whoo! And hark, again! the crowing cock, How drowsily it crew. Sir Leoline, the Baron rich, Hath a toothless mastiff bitch; From her kennel beneath the rock She maketh answer to the clock, Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour; Ever and aye,� by shine and shower, Sixteen short howls, not over loud; Some say, she sees my lady's shroud. always Is the night chilly and dark? The night is chilly, but not dark. The thin gray cloud is spread on high, It covers but not hides the sky. The moon is behind, and at the full; And yet she looks both small and dull. The night is chill, the cloud is gray: 'Tis a month before the month of May, And the Spring comes slowly up this way. The lovely lady, Christabel, Whom her father loves so well, What makes her in the wood so late, A furlong from the castle gate? She had dreams all yesternight Of her own betrothed knight; And she in the midnight wood will pray For the weaF of her lover that's far away. well-being She stole along, she nothing spoke, The sighs she heaved were soft and low, And naught was green upon the oak, But moss and rarest mistletoe:4 She kneels beneath the huge oak tree, And in silence prayeth she. The lady sprang up suddenly, The lovely lady, Christabel! It moaned as near, as near can be, But what it is, she cannot tell.� On the other side it seems to be, Of the huge, broad-breasted, old oak tree. The night is chill; the forest bare; Is it the wind that moaneth bleak? There is not wind enough in the air To move away the ringlet curl


4. In Celtic Britain the mistletoe (a parasitic plant) had been held in veneration when it was found growing�as it rarely does�on an oak tree. (Its usual host is the apple tree.)


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CHRISTABEL / 45 1


From the lovely lady's cheek


There is not wind enough to twirl


The one red leaf, the last of its clan,


50 That dances as often as dance it can,


Hanging so light, and hanging so high,


On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky. Hush, beating heart of Christabel!


Jesu, Maria, shield her well!


55 She folded her arms beneath her cloak,


And stole to the other side of the oak.


What sees she there? There she sees a damsel bright,


Drest in a silken robe of white,


60 That shadowy in the moonlight shone:


The neck that made that white robe wan,


Her stately neck, and arms were bare;


Her blue-veined feet unsandal'd were,


And wildly glittered here and there


65 The gems entangled in her hair.


I guess, 'twas frightful there to see


A lady so richly clad as she�


Beautiful exceedingly! "Mary mother, save me now!"


70 (Said Christabel,) "And who art thou?"


The lady strange made answer meet,0 appropriateAnd her voice was faint and sweet:�


"Have pity on my sore distress,


I scarce can speak for weariness:


75 Stretch forth thy hand, and have no fear!"


Said Christabel, "How earnest thou here?"


And the lady, whose voice was faint and sweet,


Did thus pursue her answer meet:� "My sire is of a noble line,


so And my name is Geraldine:


Five warriors seized me yestermorn,


Me, even me, a maid forlorn:


They choked my cries with force and fright,


And tied me on a palfrey white.


85 The palfrey was as fleet as wind,


And they rode furiously behind. They spurred amain,0 their steeds were white: at top speed And once we crossed the shade of night.


As sure as Heaven shall rescue me,


90 I have no thought what men they be;


Nor do I know how long it is


(For I have lain entranced I wis5)


5. I believe (Coleridge's misinterpretation of the Middle English adverb yivis, meaning "certainly").


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45 2 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


Since one, the tallest of the five, Took me from the palfrey's back, A weary woman, scarce alive. Some muttered words his comrades spoke: He placed me underneath this oak; He swore they would return with haste; Whither they went I cannot tell� I thought I heard, some minutes past, Sounds as of a castle bell. Stretch forth thy hand" (thus ended she), "And help a wretched maid to flee."


Then Christabel stretched forth her hand And comforted fair Geraldine: "O well, bright dame! may you command The service of Sir Leoline; And gladly our stout chivalry Will he send forth and friends withal To guide and guard you safe and free Home to your noble father's hall."


She rose: and forth with steps they passed That strove to be, and were not, fast. Her gracious stars the lady blest, And thus spake on sweet Christabel: "All our household are at rest, The hall as silent as the cell;� a monastery Sir Leoline is weak in health, And may not well awakened be, But we will move as if in stealth, And I beseech your courtesy, This night, to share your couch with me."


They crossed the moat, and Christabel Took the key that fitted well; A little door she opened straight, All in the middle of the gate; The gate that was ironed within and without, Where an army in battle array had marched out. The lady sank, belike through pain, And Christabel with might and main Lifted her up, a weary weight, Over the threshold of the gate:6 Then the lady rose again, And moved, as she were not in pain.


So free from danger, free from fear, They crossed the court: right glad they were. And Christabel devoutly cried To the Lady by her side;


6. According to legend, a witch cannot cross the threshold by her own power because it has been blessed against evil spirits.


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CHRISTABEL / 45 3


"Praise we the Virgin all divine


140 Who hath rescued thee from thy distress!"


"Alas, alas!" said Geraldine,


"I cannot speak for weariness."


So free from danger, free from fear,


They crossed the court: right glad they were. 145 Outside her kennel the mastiff old


Lay fast asleep, in moonshine cold.


The mastiff old did not awake,


Yet she an angry moan did make!


And what can ail the mastiff bitch?


150 Never till now she uttered yell


Beneath the eye of Christabel.


Perhaps it is the owlet's scritch:


For what can ail the mastiff bitch?


They passed the hall, that echoes still,


155 Pass as lightly as you will!


The brands were flat, the brands were dying,


Amid their own white ashes lying;


But when the lady passed, there came


A tongue of light, a fit of flame;


160 And Christabel saw the lady's eye,


And nothing else saw she thereby,


Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall,


Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall.


"O softly tread," said Christabel,


165 "My father seldom sleepeth well." Sweet Christabel her feet doth bare,


And, jealous of the listening air,


They steal their way from stair to stair,


Now in glimmer, and now in gloom,


170 And now they pass the Baron's room,


As still as death with stifled breath!


And now have reached her chamber door;


And now doth Geraldine press down


The rushes7 of the chamber floor. 175 The moon shines dim in the open air,


And not a moonbeam enters here.


But they without its light can see


The chamber carved so curiously,


Carved with figures strange and sweet,


180 All made out of the carver's brain,


For a lady's chamber meet:


The lamp with twofold silver chain


Is fastened to an angel's feet.


The silver lamp burns dead and dim;


185 But Christabel the lamp will trim.


7. Often used as a floor covering in the Middle Ages.


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454 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


She trimmed the lamp, and made it bright,


And left it swinging to and fro,


While Geraldine, in wretched plight,


Sank down upon the floor below. "O weary lady, Geraldine,


I pray you, drink this cordial wine!


It is a wine of virtuous powers;


My mother made it of wild flowers." "And will your mother pity me,


Who am a maiden most forlorn?"


Christabel answered�"Woe is me!


She died the hour that I was born.


I have heard the grey-haired friar tell,


How on her death-bed she did say, That she should hear the castle-bell Strike twelve upon my wedding day. 0 mother dear! that thou wert here!"


"I would," said Geraldine, "she were!"


But soon with altered voice, said she�


"Off, wandering mother!8 Peak and pine!


1 have power to bid thee flee."


Alas! what ails poor Geraldine?


Why stares she with unsettled eye?


Can she the bodiless dead espy?


And why with hollow voice cries she,


"Off, woman, off! this hour is mine�


Though thou her guardian spirit be,


Off, woman, off! 'tis given to me."


Then Christabel knelt by the lady's side,


And raised to heaven her eyes so blue�


"Alas!" said she, "this ghastly ride�


Dear lady! it hath wildered you!"


The lady wiped her moist cold brow,


And faintly said, " 'tis over now!"


Again the wild-flower wine she drank:


Her fair large eyes 'gan glitter bright,


And from the floor whereon she sank,


The lofty lady stood upright;


She was most beautiful to see,


Like a lady of a far countree.


And thus the lofty lady spake�


"All they who live in the upper sky,


Do love you, holy Christabel!


And you love them, and for their sake


And for the good which me befell,


8. A term that could designate a fit of hysteria. "Peak and pine": Shakespeare's Macbeth 1.3.22.


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CHRISTABE L / 45 5 Even I in my degree will try, Fair maiden, to requite you well. But now unrobe yourself; for I Must pray, ere yet in bed I lie." Quoth Christabel, "So let it be!" And as the lady bade, did she. Her gentle limbs did she undress, And lay down in her loveliness. But through her brain of weal and woe So many thoughts moved to and fro, That vain it were her lids to close; So half-way from the bed she rose, And on her elbow did recline To look at the lady Geraldine. Beneath the lamp the lady bowed, And slowly rolled her eyes around; Then drawing in her breath aloud, Like one that shuddered, she unbound The cincture0 from beneath her breast: belt Her silken robe, and inner vest, Dropt to her feet, and full in view, Behold! her bosom and half her side A sight to dream of, not to tell! O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!9 Yet Geraldine nor speaks nor stirs; Ah! what a stricken look was hers! Deep from within she seems half-way To lift some weight with sick assay,0And eyes the maid and seeks delay; attempt


Then suddenly as one defied Collects herself in scorn and pride,


And lay down by the maiden's side!�


And in her arms the maid she took, Ah well-a-day!


And with low voice and doleful look


These words did say: "In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell,


Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel!


Thou knowest to-night, and wilt know to-morrow


This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow;


But vainly thou warrest, For this is alone in


Thy power to declare, That in the dim forest


Thou heard'st a low moaning,


And found'st a bright lady, surpassingly fair:


9. In several manuscripts and the first printing, this line reads "And she is to sleep by [or with] Christabel."


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45 6 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


And didst bring her home with thee in love and in charity,


To shield her and shelter her from the damp air."


The Conclusion to Part 1


It was a lovely sight to see


280 The lady Christabel, when she


Was praying at the old oak tree.


Amid the jagged shadows


Of mossy leafless boughs,


Kneeling in the moonlight,


285 To make her gentle vows; Her slender palms together prest,


Heaving sometimes on her breast;


Her face resigned to bliss or bale0� evil, sorrow


Her face, oh call it fair not pale,


290 And both blue eyes more bright than clear,


Each about to have a tear. With open eyes (ah woe is me!)


Asleep, and dreaming fearfully,


Fearfully dreaming, yet I wis,


295 Dreaming that alone, which is� O sorrow and shame! Can this be she,


The lady, who knelt at the old oak tree?


And lo! the worker of these harms,


That holds the maiden in her arms,


300 Seems to slumber still and mild,


As a mother with her child. A star hath set, a star hath risen,


O Geraldine! since arms of thine


Have been the lovely lady's prison.


305 O Geraldine! one hour was thine�


Thou'st had thy will! By tairn1 and rill,


The night-birds all that hour were still.


But now they are jubilant anew,


From cliff and tower, tu�whoo! tu�whoo!


310 Tu�whoo! tu�whoo! from wood and fell!2 And see! the lady Christabel


Gathers herself from out her trance;


Her limbs relax, her countenance


Grows sad and soft; the smooth thin lids


315 Close o'er her eyes; and tears she sheds�


Large tears that leave the lashes bright!


And oft the while she seems to smile


As infants at a sudden light!


Yea, she doth smile, and she doth weep,


320 Like a youthful hermitess,


Beauteous in a wilderness,


1. Tarn, a mountain pool. 2. Elevated moor, or hill.


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CHRISTABEL / 45 7


Who, praying always, prays in sleep.


And, if she move unquietly,


Perchance, 'tis but the blood so free,


325 Comes back and tingles in her feet.


No doubt, she hath a vision sweet.


What if her guardian spirit 'twere?


What if she knew her mother near?


But this she knows, in joys and woes,


330 That saints will aid if men will call:


For the blue sky bends over all!


Part 2


"Each matin bell," the Baron saith,


"Knells us back to a world of death."


These words Sir Leoline first said,


335 When he rose and found his lady dead:


These words Sir Leoline will say,


Many a morn to his dying day!


And hence the custom and law began, That still at dawn the sacristan,3


340 Who duly pulls the heavy bell, Five and forty beads must tell4 Between each stroke�a warning knell,


Which not a soul can choose but hear From Bratha Head to Wyndermere.5


345 Saith Bracy the bard, "So let it knell!


And let the drowsy sacristan


Still count as slowly as he can! There is no lack of such, I ween," believe


As well fill up the space between.


350 In Langdale Pike� and Witch's Lair, Peak And Dungeon-ghyll6 so foully rent, With ropes of rock and bells of air


Three sinful sextons' ghosts are pent,


Who all give back, one after t'other,


355 The death-note to their living brother;


And oft too, by the knell offended,


Just as their one! two! three! is ended,


The devil mocks the doleful tale


With a merry peal from Borodale."


360 The air is still! through mist and cloud


That merry peal comes ringing loud;


And Geraldine shakes off her dread,


And rises lightly from the bed;


Puts on her silken vestments white,


3. Church officer who digs the graves and rings 5. These and the following names are of localities the bells. in the English Lake District.


4. Pray while "telling" (keeping count on) the 6. Ravine forming the bed of a stream. beads of a rosary.


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45 8 / SAMUE L TAYLO R COLERIDG E 365 And tricks her hair in lovely plight,0And nothing doubting of her spell Awakens the lady Christabel. "Sleep you, sweet lady Christabel? I trust that you have rested well." plait 370375380385 And Christabel awoke and spied The same who lay down by her side� O rather say, the same whom she Raised up beneath the old oak tree! Nay, fairer yet! and yet more fair! For she belike hath drunken deep Of all the blessedness of sleep! And while she spake, her looks, her air Such gentle thankfulness declare, That (so it seemed) her girded vests Grew tight beneath her heaving breasts. "Sure I have sinned!" said Christabel, "Now heaven be praised if all be well!" And in low faltering tones, yet sweet, Did she the lofty lady greet With such perplexity of mind As dreams too lively leave behind. 390So quickly she rose, and quickly arrayed Her maiden limbs, and having prayed That He, who on the cross did groan, Might wash away her sins unknown, She forthwith led fair Geraldine To meet her sire, Sir Leoline. 395The lovely maid and the lady tall Are pacing both into the hall, And pacing on through page and groom, Enter the Baron's presence room. 400The Baron rose, and while he prest His gentle daughter to his breast, With cheerful wonder in his eyes The lady Geraldine espies, And gave such welcome to the same, As might beseem so bright a dame! 405But when he heard the lady's tale, And when she told her father's name, Why waxed Sir Leoline so pale, Murmuring o'er the name again, Lord Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine? 410Alas! they had been friends in youth; But whispering tongues can poison truth; And constancy lives in realms above; And life is thorny; and youth is vain;


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CHRISTABEL / 45 9


And to be wroth with one we love,


Doth work like madness in the brain.


And thus it chanced, as I divine,


415 With Roland and Sir Leoline.


Each spake words of high disdain


And insult to his heart's best brother:


They parted�ne'er to meet again!


But never either found another


420 To free the hollow heart from paining�


They stood aloof, the scars remaining,


Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;


A dreary sea now flows between;�


But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,


425 Shall wholly do away, I ween,


The marks of that which once hath been.


Sir Leoline, a moment's space,


Stood gazing on the damsel's face:


And the youthful Lord of Tryermaine


4BO Came back upon his heart again.


0 then the Baron forgot his age,


His noble heart swelled high with rage;


He swore by the wounds in Jesu's side,


He would proclaim it far and wide


435 With trump and solemn heraldry,


That they who thus had wronged the dame,


Were base as spotted infamy!


"And if they dare deny the same,


My herald shall appoint a week,


440 And let the recreant traitors seek


My tourney court7�that there and then


1 may dislodge their reptile souls


From the bodies and forms of men!"


He spake: his eye in lightning rolls!


445 For the lady was ruthlessly seized; and he kenned


In the beautiful lady the child of his friend!


And now the tears were on his face,


And fondly in his arms he took


Fair Geraldine, who met the embrace,


450 Prolonging it with joyous look.


Which when she viewed, a vision fell


Upon the soul of Christabel,


The vision of fear, the touch and pain!


She shrunk and shuddered, and saw again�


455 (Ah, woe is me! Was it for thee,


Thou gentle maid! such sights to see?)


Again she saw that bosom old,


Again she felt that bosom cold,


And drew in her breath with a hissing sound:


7. Arena for tournaments.


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46 0 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


460 Whereat the Knight turned wildly round,


And nothing saw, but his own sweet maid


With eyes upraised, as one that prayed.


The touch, the sight, had passed away,


And in its stead that vision blest,


465 Which comforted her after-rest,


While in the lady's arms she lay,


Had put a rapture in her breast,


And on her lips and o'er her eyes


Spread smiles like light! With new surprise,


470 "What ails then my beloved child?"


The Baron said�His daughter mild


Made answer, "All will yet be well!"


I ween, she had no power to tell


Aught else: so mighty was the spell. 475 Yet he, who saw this Geraldine,


Had deemed her sure a thing divine.


Such sorrow with such grace she blended,


As if she feared, she had offended


Sweet Christabel, that gentle maid!


480 And with such lowly tones she prayed,


She might be sent without delay


Home to her father's mansion. "Nay!


Nay, by my soul!" said Leoline.


"Ho! Bracy, the bard, the charge be thine!


485 Go thou, with music sweet and loud,


And take two steeds with trappings proud,


And take the youth whom thou lov'st best


To bear thy harp, and learn thy song,


And clothe you both in solemn vest,


490 And over the mountains haste along,


Lest wandering folk, that are abroad,


Detain you on the valley road.


And when he has crossed the Irthing flood,


My merry bard! he hastes, he hastes


495 Up Knorren Moor, through Halegarth Wood,


And reaches soon that castle good


Which stands and threatens Scotland's wastes. "Bard Bracy! bard Bracy! your horses are fleet,


Ye must ride up the hall, your music so sweet,


500 More loud than your horses' echoing feet!


And loud and loud to Lord Roland call,


Thy daughter is safe in Langdale hall!


Thy beautiful daughter is safe and free�


Sir Leoline greets thee thus through me.


505 He bids thee come without delay


With all thy numerous array;


And take thy lovely daughter home:


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CHRISTABEL / 461


510


515


520


525


530


535


540


545


550


555


And he will meet thee on the way


With all his numerous array


White with their panting palfreys' foam:


And by mine honour! I will say,


That I repent me of the day


When I spake words of fierce disdain


To Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine!�


�For since that evil hour hath flown,


Many a summer's sun hath shone;


Yet ne'er found I a friend again


Like Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine."


The lady fell, and clasped his knees,


Her face upraised, her eyes o'erflowing;


And Bracy replied, with faltering voice,


His gracious hail on all bestowing!� "Thy words, thou sire of Christabel, Are sweeter than my harp can tell;


Yet might I gain a boon of thee, This day my journey should not be,


So strange a dream hath come to me;


That I had vowed with music loud


To clear yon wood from thing unblest,


Warned by a vision in my rest!


For in my sleep I saw that dove,


That gentle bird, whom thou dost love,


And call'st by thy own daughter's name�


Sir Leoline! I saw the same


Fluttering, and uttering fearful moan, Among the green herbs in the forest alone. Which when I saw and when I heard,


I wonder'd what might ail the bird;


For nothing near it could I see,


Save the grass and green herbs underneath the old tree.


"And in my dream methought I went


To search out what might there be found;


And what the sweet bird's trouble meant,


That thus lay fluttering on the ground.


I went and peered, and could descry


No cause for her distressful cry;


But yet for her dear lady's sake


I stooped, methought, the dove to take,


When lo! I saw a bright green snake


Coiled around its wings and neck,


Green as the herbs on which it couched,


Close by the dove's its head it crouched;


And with the dove it heaves and stirs,


Swelling its neck as she swelled hers!


I woke; it was the midnight hour,


The clock was echoing in the tower;


But though my slumber was gone by,


This dream it would not pass away�


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462 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


It seems to live upon my eye!


560 And thence I vowed this self-same day,


With music strong and saintly song


To wander through the forest bare,


Lest aught unholy loiter there."


Thus Bracy said: the Baron, the while,


565 Half-listening heard him with a smile;


Then turned to Lady Geraldine,


His eyes made up of wonder and love;


And said in courtly accents fine,


"Sweet maid, Lord Roland's beauteous dove,


570 With arms more strong than harp or song,


Thy sire and I will crush the snake!"


He kissed her forehead as he spake, And Geraldine, in maiden wise,0 manner Casting down her large bright eyes,


575 With blushing cheek and courtesy fine


She turned her from Sir Leoline;


Softly gathering up her train,


That o'er her right arm fell again;


And folded her arms across her chest,


580 And couched her head upon her breast, And looked askance at Christabel


Jesu Maria, shield her well!


A snake's small eye blinks dull and shy,


And the lady's eyes they shrunk in her head,


585 Each shrunk up to a serpent's eye, And with somewhat of malice, and more of dread,


At Christabel she looked askance!�


One moment�and the sight was fled!


But Christabel in dizzy trance


590 Stumbling on the unsteady ground Shuddered aloud, with a hissing sound;


And Geraldine again turned round,


And like a thing, that sought relief,


Full of wonder and full of grief,


595 She rolled her large bright eyes divine


Wildly on Sir Leoline.


The maid, alas! her thoughts are gone,


She nothing sees�no sight but one!


The maid, devoid of guile and sin,


600 I know not how, in fearful wise


So deeply had she drunken in


That look, those shrunken serpent eyes,


That all her features were resigned


To this sole image in her mind;


605 And passively did imitate That look of dull and treacherous hate!


And thus she stood, in dizzy trance,


Still picturing that look askance


With forced unconscious sympathy


6io


615


620


625


630


635


640


645


650


655


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CHRISTABEL / 463


Full before her father's view


As far as such a look could be,


In eyes so innocent and blue!


And when the trance was o'er, the maid


Paused awhile, and inly prayed:


Then falling at the Baron's feet,


"By my mother's soul do I entreat


That thou this woman send away!"


She said: and more she could not say:


For what she knew she could not tell,


O'er-mastered by the mighty spell.


Why is thy cheek so wan and wild,


Sir Leoline? Thy only child


Lies at thy feet, thy joy, thy pride,


So fair, so innocent, so mild;


The same, for whom thy lady died! 0 by the pangs of her dear mother


Think thou no evil of thy child!


For her, and thee, and for no other,


She prayed the moment ere she died:


Prayed that the babe for whom she died,


Might prove her dear lord's joy and pride!


That prayer her deadly pangs beguiled,


Sir Leoline!


And wouldst thou wrong thy only child,


Her child and thine?


Within the Baron's heart and brain


If thoughts, like these, had any share,


They only swelled his rage and pain,


And did but work confusion there.


His heart was cleft with pain and rage, His cheeks they quivered, his eyes were wild,


Dishonoured thus in his old age;


Dishonoured by his only child,


And all his hospitality


To the wrong'd daughter of his friend


By more than woman's jealousy


Brought thus to a disgraceful end�


He rolled his eye with stern regard


Upon the gentle minstrel bard,


And said in tones abrupt, austere� "Why, Bracy! dost thou loiter here? 1 bade thee hence!" The bard obeyed;


And turning from his own sweet maid,


The aged knight, Sir Leoline,


Led forth the lady Geraldine!


The Conclusion to Part 2


A little child, a limber elf,


Singing, dancing to itself,


A fairy thing with red round cheeks,


.


464 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


That always finds, and never seeks,


660 Makes such a vision to the sight


As fills a father's eyes with light;


And pleasures flow in so thick and fast


Upon his heart, that he at last


Must needs express his love's excess


665 With words of unmeant bitterness.


Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together


Thoughts so all unlike each other;


To mutter and mock a broken charm,


To dally with wrong that does no harm.


670 Perhaps 'tis tender too and pretty


At each wild word to feel within


A sweet recoil of love and pity.


And what, if in a world of sin


(O sorrow and shame should this be true!)


675 Such giddiness of heart and brain Comes seldom save from rage and pain,


So talks as it's most used to do. 1798-1800 1816


Frost at Midnight1


The frost performs its secret ministry,


Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry


Came loud�and hark, again! loud as before.


The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,


5 Have left me to that solitude, which suits


Abstruser musings: save that at my side


My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.


'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs


And vexes meditation with its strange


io And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,


This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,


With all the numberless goings on of life,


Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame


Lies on my low burnt fire, and quivers not;


15 Only that film,2 which fluttered on the grate,


Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.


Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature


Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,


Making it a companionable form,


20 Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit


By its own moods interprets, every where


1. The scene is Coleridge's cottage at Nether fire, he watches "The sooty films that play upon Stowey; the infant in line 7 is his son Hartley, then the bars, / Pendulous and foreboding, in the view


aged seventeen months. / Of superstition prophesying still, / Though still


2. In all parts of the kingdom these films are called deceived, some stranger's near approach." Several strangers and supposed to portend the arrival of editions of Cowper's poems were advertised on the


some absent friend [Coleridge's note]. The "film" verso of the last page of Coleridge's text in the 1798


is a piece of soot fluttering on the bar of the grate. volume in which "Frost at Midnight" was first pub-


Cf. Cowper's The Task 4.292-95, in which the lished.


poet describes how, dreaming before the parlor


.


FROST AT MIDNIGHT / 465


Echo or mirror seeking of itself,


And makes a toy of Thought. But O! how oft,


How oft, at school, with most believing mind,


25 Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,


To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft


With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt


Of my sweet birth-place,3 and the old church-tower,


Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang


30 From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,


So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me


With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear


Most like articulate sounds of things to come!


So gazed I, till the soothing things I dreamt


35 Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!


And so I brooded all the following morn,


Awed by the stern preceptor's4 face, mine eye


Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:


Save if the door half opened, and I snatched


40 A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,


For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,


Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,


My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!5 Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,


45 Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,


Fill up the interspersed vacancies


And momentary pauses of the thought!


My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart


With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,


50 And think that thou shalt learn far other lore


And in far other scenes! For I was reared


In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,


And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.


But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze


55 By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags


Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,


Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores


And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear


The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible


60 Of that eternal language, which thy God


Utters, who from eternity doth teach


Himself in all, and all things in himself.


Great universal Teacher! he shall mould


Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask. 65 Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,


Whether the summer clothe the general earth


With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing


3. Coleridge was born at Ottery St. Mary, Devon-school, Christ's Hospital. shire, but went to school in London, beginning at 5. I.e., when both Coleridge and his sister Ann still


the age of nine. wore infant clothes, before he was deemed old


4. The Reverend James Boyer at Coleridge's enough to be breeched.


.


466 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch


Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch


70 Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall


Heard only in the trances of the blast,


Or if the secret ministry of frost


Shall hang them up in silent icicles,


Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.


Feb." 1798 1798


Dejection: An Ode1


Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon, With the old Moon in her arms; And I fear, I fear, my Master dear! We shall have a deadly storm.


Ballad of Sir Patrick S-pence


1


Well! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made


The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,


This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence


Unroused by winds, that ply a busier trade


5 Than those which mould yon cloud in lazy flakes,


Or the dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes Upon the strings of this Eolian lute,2 Which better far were mute.


For lo! the New-moon winter-bright!


10 And overspread with phantom light, (With swimming phantom light o'erspread


But rimmed and circled by a silver thread)


I see the old Moon in her lap, foretelling


The coming on of rain and squally blast,


is And oh! that even now the gust were swelling, And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast!


Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed, And sent my soul abroad, Might now perhaps their wonted0 impulse give, customary20 Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live!


2


A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,


A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,


1. This poem originated in a verse letter of 340 the hopelessness of his love for Sara Hutchinson. lines, called "A Letter to ," that Coleridge In the next six months Coleridge deleted more than wrote on the night of April 4, 1802, after hearing half the original lines, revised and reordered the the opening stanzas of "Ode: Intimations of remaining passages, and so transformed a long Immortality," which Wordsworth had just com-verse confession into the compact and dignified posed. The "Letter" was addressed to Sara Hutch-"Dejection: An Ode." He published the "Ode," in inson (whom Coleridge sometimes called "Asra"), substantially its present form, on October 4, 1802, the sister of Wordsworth's fiancee, Mary. It picked Wordsworth's wedding day�and also the seventh up the theme of a loss in the quality of perceptual anniversary of Coleridge's own disastrous marriage experience that Wordsworth had presented at the to Sara Fricker.


beginning of his "Ode." In his original poem Cole-2. A stringed instrument played upon by the wind


ridge lamented at length his unhappy marriage and (see "The Eolian Harp," n. 1, p. 426).


.


DEJECTION: AN ODE / 46 7


Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, In word, or sigh, or tear� 25 O Lady!3 in this wan and heartless mood, To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd, All this long eve, so balmy and serene, Have I been gazing on the western sky, And its peculiar tint of yellow green:


30 And still I gaze�and with how blank an eye! And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, That give away their motion to the stars; Those stars, that glide behind them or between, Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:


35 Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grew In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!


3


My genial" spirits fail; creative 40 And what can these avail


To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? It were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for ever


On that green light that lingers in the west: 45 I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.


4


O Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live: Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!4


50 And would we aught� behold, of higher worth, anythingThan that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,


Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth, A light, a glory,5 a fair luminous cloud 55 � Enveloping the Earth� And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element!


5


O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me


60 What this strong music in the soul may be! What, and wherein it doth exist, This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, This beautiful and beauty-making power.


Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given,


3. In the original version "Sara"�i.e., Sara 5. A "glory" is a halo. Coleridge often uses the Hutchinson. After intervening versions, in which term to identify in particular the phenomenon that the poem was addressed first to "William" (Words-occurs in the mountains when a walker sees his or worth) and then to "Edmund," Coleridge intro-her own figure projected by the sun in the mist, duced the noncommittal "Lady" in 1817. enlarged and with light encircling its head. Cf. 4. I.e., nature's wedding garment and shroud are Wordsworth's Prelude 8.268-70 (p. 368). ours to give to her.


.


468 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


65 Save to the pure, and in their purest hour,


Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower,


Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power,


Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower, A new Earth and new Heaven,6


70 Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud�


Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud�


We in ourselves rejoice!


And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,


All melodies the echoes of that voice,


75 All colours a suffusion from that light.


6


There was a time when, though my path was rough,


This joy within me dallied with distress,


And all misfortunes were but as the stuff


Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:


SO For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,


And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.


But now afflictions bow me down to earth:


Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth,


But oh! each visitation" i.e., of affliction


85 Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,


My shaping spirit of Imagination.


For not to think of what I needs must feel,


But to be still and patient, all I can;


And haply by abstruse research to steal


90 From my own nature all the natural man�


This was my sole resource, my only plan:


Till that which suits a part infects the whole,


And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.


7


Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind,


95 Reality's dark dream!


I turn from you, and listen to the wind,


Which long has raved unnoticed. What a scream


Of agony by torture lengthened out


That lute sent forth! Thou Wind, that ravest without, 100 Bare crag, or mountain-tairn,7 or blasted tree,


Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb,� climbed


Or lonely house, long held the witches' home,


Methinks were fitter instruments for thee,


Mad Lutanist! who in this month of showers,


105 Of dark brown gardens, and of peeping flowers,


Mak'st Devils' yule,8 with worse than wintry song,


The blossoms, buds, and timorous leaves among.


Thou Actor, perfect in all tragic sounds!


Thou mighty Poet, e'en to frenzy bold!


6. The sense becomes clearer if line 68 is punc-dowry, "a new Earth and a new Heaven," a phrase tuated in the way that Coleridge punctuated it echoing Revelation 21.1.


when quoting the passage in one of his essays: 7. Tarn, or mountain pool.


"Which, wedding Nature to us, gives in dower." 8. Christmas as, in a perverted form, it is cele


I.e., Joy marries us to Nature and gives us, for our brated by devils.


.


THE PAINS OF SLEEP / 469


110 What tell'st thou now about? 'Tis of the rushing of a host in rout,


With groans of trampled men, with smarting wounds�� At once they groan with pain, and shudder with the cold! But hush! there is a pause of deepest silence!


lis And all that noise, as of a rushing crowd, With groans, and tremulous shudderings�all is over�


It tells another tale, with sounds less deep and loud! A tale of less affright, And tempered with delight,


120 As Otway's9 self had framed the tender lay, 'Tis of a little child Upon a lonesome wild,


Not far from home, but she hath lost her way: And now moans low in bitter grief and fear, 125 And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother hear.


8


'Tis midnight, but small thoughts have I of sleep: Full seldom may my friend such vigils keep! Visit her, gentle Sleep! with wings of healing,


And may this storm be but a mountain-birth,1 130 May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling,


Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth! With light heart may she rise, Gay fancy, cheerful eyes,


Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice; 135 To her may all things live, from pole to pole, Their life the eddying of her living soul!


O simple spirit, guided from above, Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice. Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice.


Apr. 4, 1802 1802


The Pains of Sleep1


Ere on my bed my limbs I lay, It hath not been my use to pray With moving lips or bended knees; But silently, by slow degrees,


9. Thomas Otway (1652�1685), a dramatist noted entirely to the Horrors of every night�I truly dread for the pathos of his tragic passages. The poet orig-to sleep. It is no shadow with me, but substantial


inally named was "William," and the allusion was Misery foot-thick, that makes me sit by my bedside


probably to Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray." of a morning, 8c cry�. I have abandoned all opiates


1. Probably, "May this be a typical mountain except Ether be one; & that only in fits. . . . " The storm, short though violent," although Coleridge last sentence indicates what Coleridge did not might have intended an allusion to Horace's phrase know�that his guilty nightmares were probably "the mountain labored and brought forth a withdrawal symptoms from opium. The dreams he mouse." describes are very similar to those that De Quincey 1. Coleridge included a draft of this poem in a let-represents as "The Pains of Opium" in his Confester to Robert Southey, September 11, 1803, in sions of an English Opium-Eater. which he wrote that "my spirits are dreadful, owing


.


47 0 / SAMUE L TAYLOR COLERIDG E My spirit I to Love compose, In humble trust mine eye-lids close, With reverential resignation, No wish conceived, no thought exprest, Only a sense of supplication; A sense o'er all my soul imprest That I am weak, yet not unblest, Since in me, round me, every where Eternal strength and wisdom are. But yester-night I prayed aloud In anguish and in agony, Up-starting from the fiendish crowd Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me: A lurid light, a trampling throng, Sense of intolerable wrong, And whom I scorned, those only strong! Thirst of revenge, the powerless will Still baffled, and yet burning still! Desire with loathing strangely mixed On wild or hateful objects fixed. Fantastic passions! maddening brawl! And shame and terror over all! Deeds to be hid which were not hid, Which all confused I could not know, Whether I suffered, or I did: For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe, My own or others still the same Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame. So two nights passed: the night's dismay Saddened and stunned the coming day. Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me Distemper's worst calamity. The third night, when my own loud scream Had waked me from the fiendish dream, O'ercome with sufferings strange and wild, I wept as I had been a child; And having thus by tears subdued My anguish to a milder mood, Such punishments, I said, were due To natures deepliest stained with sin,� For aye entempesting anew The unfathomable hell within, The horror of their deeds to view, To know and loathe, yet wish and do! Such griefs with such men well agree, But wherefore, wherefore fall on me? To be beloved is all I need, And whom I love, I love indeed. 1803 1816


.


To WILLIAM WORDSWORTH / 47 1


To William Wordsworth


Composed on the Night after His Recitation of a Poem on the Growth of an Individual Mind'


Friend of the wise! and teacher of the good!


Into my heart have I received that lay� song


More than historic, that prophetic lay


Wherein (high theme by thee first sung aright)


5 Of the foundations and the building up


Of a Human Spirit thou hast dared to tell


What may be told, to the understanding mind


Revealable; and what within the mind


By vital breathings secret as the soul


10 Of vernal0 growth, oft quickens in the heart springtimeThoughts all too deep for words!2�


Theme hard as high!


Of smiles spontaneous, and mysterious fears


(The first-born they of Reason and twin birth),


Of tides obedient to external force,


is And currents self-determined, as might seem, Or by some inner power; of moments awful,0 awe-inspiring


Now in thy inner life, and now abroad,


When power streamed from thee, and thy soul received


The light reflected, as a light bestowed�


20 Of fancies fair, and milder hours of youth,


Hyblean3 murmurs of poetic thought


Industrious in its joy, in vales and glens


Native or outland, lakes and famous hills!


Or on the lonely high-road, when the stars


25 Were rising; or by secret mountain-streams,


The guides and the companions of thy way!


Of more than Fancy, of the Social Sense


Distending wide, and man beloved as man,


Where France in all her towns lay vibrating


30 Like some becalmed bark beneath the burst


Of Heaven's immediate thunder, when no cloud


Is visible, or shadow on the main.


For thou wert there, thine own brows garlanded,


Amid the tremor of a realm aglow,


35 Amid a mighty nation jubilant,


When from the general heart of human kind


Hope sprang forth like a full-born Deity!


Of that dear Hope afflicted and struck down,


So summoned homeward, thenceforth calm and sure


1. This was the poem (later called The Prelude), 2. Wordsworth had described the effect on his addressed to Coleridge, that Wordsworth had com-mind of the animating breeze ("vital breathings")


pleted in 1805. After Coleridge returned from in The Prelude 1.1^14. "Thoughts . . . words" ech-


Malta, very low in health and spirits, Wordsworth oes the last line of Wordsworth's "Intimations"


read the poem aloud to him during the evenings of ode. Coleridge goes on to summarize the major


almost two weeks. Coleridge wrote most of the themes and events of The Prelude.


present response immediately after the reading was 3. Sweet. Hybla, in ancient Sicily, was famous for


completed, on January 7, 1807. its honey.


.


472 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


40 From the dread watch-tower of man's absolute self,


With light unwaning on her eyes, to look


Far on�herself a glory to behold,


The Angel of the vision! Then (last strain)


Of Duty, chosen laws controlling choice,


45 Action and joy!�An Orphic song4 indeed,


A song divine of high and passionate thoughts


To their own music chanted!


O great Bard!


Ere yet that last strain dying awed the air,


With steadfast eye I viewed thee in the choir


so Of ever-enduring men. The truly great


Have all one age, and from one visible space


Shed influence! They, both in power and act,


Are permanent, and Time is not with them,


Save as it worketh for them, they in it.


55 Nor less a sacred roll, than those of old,


And to be placed, as they, with gradual fame


Among the archives of mankind, thy work


Makes audible a linked lay of Truth,


Of Truth profound a sweet continuous lay,


60 Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes!


Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn,


The pulses of my being beat anew:


And even as life returns upon the drowned,


Life's joy rekindling roused a throng of pains�


65 Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe


Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart;


And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope;


And hope that scarce would know itself from fear;


Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain,


70 And genius given, and knowledge won in vain;


And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild,


And all which patient toil had reared, and all,


Commune with thee had opened out�but flowers


Strewed on my corse, and borne upon my bier,


75 In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!


That way no more! and ill beseems it me,


Who came a welcomer in herald's guise,


Singing of glory, and futurity,


To wander back on such unhealthful road,


so Plucking the poisons of self-harm! And ill


Such intertwine beseems triumphal wreaths


Strewed before thy advancing!


Nor do thou,


Sage Bard! impair the memory of that hour


4. As enchanting and oracular as the song of the vision" (line 43) probably alludes to "the great legendary Orpheus. There may also be an allusion vision of the guarded mount" in Milton's "Lycidas,"


to the Orphic mysteries, involving spiritual death line 161.


and rebirth (see lines 61-66). "The Angel of the


.


EPITAPH / 473


Of thy communion with my nobler mind5


85 By pity or grief, already felt too long!


Nor let my words import more blame than needs.


The tumult rose and ceased: for peace is nigh


Where wisdom's voice has found a listening heart.


Amid the howl of more than wintry storms,


90 The halcyon6 hears the voice of vernal hours


Already on the wing. Eve following eve,7


Dear tranquil time, when the sweet sense of Home


Is sweetest! moments for their own sake hailed


And more desired, more precious for thy song,


95 In silence listening, like a devout child,


My soul lay passive, by thy various strain


Driven as in surges now beneath the stars,


With momentary stars of my own birth,


Fair constellated foam, still darting off


IOO Into the darkness; now a tranquil sea, Outspread and bright, yet swelling to the moon.


And when�O Friend! my comforter and guide!


Strong in thyself, and powerful to give strength!�


Thy long sustained Song finally closed,


105 And thy deep voice had ceased�yet thou thyself


Wert still before my eyes, and round us both


That happy vision of beloved faces�


Scarce conscious, and yet conscious of its close


I sate, my being blended in one thought


110 (Thought was it? or aspiration? or resolve?)


Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound�


And when I rose, I found myself in prayer. 1807 1817


Epitaph1


Stop, Christian Passer-by!�Stop, child of God,


And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod


A poet lies, or that which once seem'd he.�


O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.;


5 That he who many a year with toil of breath


Found death in life, may here find life in death!


Mercy for praise�to be forgiven for2 fame


He ask'd, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same! 1833 1834


5. I.e., during the early association between the One version that he sent in a letter had as a title: two poets (1797-98). "Epitaph on a Poet little known, yet better known


6. A fabled bird, able to calm the sea where it by the Initials of his name than by the Name nested in winter. Itself."


7. The evenings during which Wordsworth read 2. "For" in the sense of "instead of" [Coleridge's his poem aloud. note].


1. Written by Coleridge the year before he died.


.


474 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


Biographia Literaria In March 1815 Coleridge was preparing a collected edition of his poems and planned to include "a general preface .. . on the principles of philosophic and genial criticism." As was typical for Coleridge, the materials developed as he worked on them until, on July 29, he declared that the preface had expanded to become a book in its own right, an "Autobiographia Literaria." In a characteristic Romantic reinvention of autobiography, the work merged personal experience with philosophical speculation, as well as with what Coleridge identified as "digression and anecdotes." It was to consist of two main parts, "my literary life and opinions, as far as poetry and poetical criticism [are] concerned" and a critique of Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction. This work was ready by September 17,1815, but the Biographia Literaria, in two volumes, was not published until July 1817. The delay was caused by a series of miscalculations by his printer, which forced Coleridge to add 150 pages of miscellaneous materials to pad out the length of the second volume.


Coleridge had been planning a detailed critique of Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction ever since 1802, when he had detected "a radical difference in our theoretical opinions respecting poetry." In the selection from chapter 17, Coleridge agrees with Wordsworth's general aim of reforming the artifices of current poetic diction, but he sharply denies Wordsworth's claim that there is no essential difference between the language of poetry and the language spoken by people in real life. The other selections printed here are devoted mainly to the central principle of Coleridge's own critical theory, the distinction between the mechanical "fancy" and the organic imagination, which is tersely summarized in the conclusion to chapter 13. The definition of poetry at the end of chapter 14, develops at greater length the nature of the "synthetic and magical power .. . of imagination," which, for Coleridge, has the capacity to dissolve the divisions (between, for instance, the perceiving human subject and his or her objects of perception) that characterize human beings' fallen state.


From Biographia Literaria From Chapter 4


[MR. WORDSWORTH'S EARLIER POEMS]


* * * During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, I became


acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication, entitled Descriptive


Sketchesand seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius


above the literary horizon more evidently announced. In the form, style, and


manner of the whole poem, and in the structure of the particular lines and


periods, there is a harshness and acerbity connected and combined with words


and images all a-glow which might recall those products of the vegetable world,


where gorgeous blossoms rise out of the hard and thorny rind and shell within


which the rich fruit was elaborating. The language was not only peculiar and


strong, but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength;


while the novelty and struggling crowd of images, acting in conjunction with


the difficulties of the style, demanded always a greater closeness of attention


than poetry (at all events than descriptive poetry) has a right to claim. It not


seldom therefore justified the complaint of obscurity. In the following extract


1. Published 1793, the year before Coleridge left tour in the Alps in 1790. Wordsworth describes the Cambridge; a long descriptive-meditative poem in same tour in The Prelude, book 6.


closed couplets, recounting Wordsworth's walking


.


BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA / 47 5


I have sometimes fancied that I saw an emblem of the poem itself and of the


author's genius as it was then displayed:


'Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour,


All day the floods a deepening murmur pour;


The sky is veiled, and every cheerful sight:


Dark is the region as with coming night;


And yet what frequent bursts of overpowering light!


Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,


Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form;


Eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine


The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline;


Wide o'er the Alps a hundred streams unfold,


At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;


Behind his sail the peasant strives to shun


The West, that burns like one dilated sun,


Where in a mighty crucible expire


The mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire.2 The poetic Psyche, in its process to full development, undergoes as many


changes as its Greek namesake, the butterfly.3 And it is remarkable how soon


genius clears and purifies itself from the faults and errors of its earliest prod


ucts; faults which, in its earliest compositions, are the more obtrusive and


confluent because, as heterogeneous elements which had only a temporary


use, they constitute the very-ferment by which themselves are carried off. Or


we may compare them to some diseases, which must work on the humors and


be thrown out on the surface in order to secure the patient from their future


recurrence. I was in my twenty-fourth year when I had the happiness of know


ing Mr. Wordsworth personally;4 and, while memory lasts, I shall hardly forget


the sudden effect produced on my mind by his recitation of a manuscript poem


which still remains unpublished, but of which the stanza and tone of style


were the same as those of The Female Vagrant as originally printed in the first


volume of the Lyrical Ballads,5 There was here no mark of strained thought or


forced diction, no crowd or turbulence of imagery, and, as the poet hath him


self well described in his lines on revisiting the Wye,6 manly reflection and


human associations had given both variety and an additional interest to natural


objects which in the passion and appetite of the first love they had seemed to


him neither to need or permit. The occasional obscurities, which had risen


from an imperfect control over the resources of his native language, had almost


wholly disappeared, together with that worse defect of arbitrary and illogical


phrases, at once hackneyed and fantastic, which hold so distinguished a place


in the technique of ordinary poetry and will, more or less, alloy the earlier


poems of the truest genius, unless the attention has been specifically directed


to their worthlessness and incongruity. I did not perceive anything particular


in the mere style of the poem alluded to during its recitation, except indeed


such difference as was not separable from the thought and manner; and the


Spenserian stanza which always, more or less, recalls to the reader's mind


2. Descriptive Sketches (1815 version), lines manuscript until Wordsworth published a revised 332ff. version in 1842 under the title "Guilt and Sorrow." 3. In Greek, Psyche is the common name for the An excerpt from Salisbury Plain was printed as soul and the butterfly [Coleridge's note]. "The Female Vagrant," in Lyrical Ballads (1798). 4. The meeting occurred in September 1795. 6. Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," lines 76ff. 5. Salisbury Plain (1793-94), which was left in


.


476 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


Spenser's own style, would doubtless have authorized in my then opinion a more frequent descent to the phrases of ordinary life than could, without an ill effect, have been hazarded in the heroic couplet. It was not however the freedom from false taste, whether as to common defects or to those more properly his own, which made so unusual an impression on my feelings immediately, and subsequently on my judgment. It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world, around forms, incidents, and situations of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the luster, had dried up the sparkle and the dewdrops. "To find no contradiction in the union of old and new, to contemplate the Ancient of Days and all his works with feelings as fresh as if all had then sprang forth at the first creative fiat,7 characterizes the mind that feels the riddle of the world and may help to unravel it. To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar;


With sun and moon and stars throughout the year,


And man and woman;8


this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talents. And therefore it is the prime merit of genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them, and that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental no less than of bodily convalescence. Who has not a thousand times seen snow fall on water? Who has not watched it with a new feeling from the time that he has read Burns' comparison of sensual pleasure


To snow that falls upon a river


A moment white�then gone forever!9


In poems, equally as in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission. Truths of all others the most awful and mysterious, yet being at the same time of universal interest, are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the life and efficiency of truth and lie bedridden in the dormitory of the soul side by side with the most despised and exploded errors." The Friend, p. 76, no. 5.1


[ON FANCY AND IMAGINATION THE INVESTIGATION OF THE DISTINCTION IMPORTANT TO THE FINE ARTS]


This excellence, which in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings is more or less predominant and which constitutes the character of his mind, I no sooner felt than I sought to understand. Repeated meditations led me first to suspect (and a more intimate analysis of the human faculties, their appropriate marks, functions, and effects, matured my conjecture into full conviction) that fancy and


7. The first divine command: "Let there be light." 9. Altered from Burns's "Tam o' Shanter," lines 8. Altered from Milton's sonnet "To Mr. Cyriack 61-62. Skinner upon His Blindness." 1. A periodical published by Coleridge (1809-10).


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BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA / 47 7


imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being,


according to the general belief, either two names with one meaning, or at


furthest the lower and higher degree of one and the same power. It is not, I


own, easy to conceive a more apposite translation of the Greek phantasia than


the Latin imaginatio; but it is equally true that in all societies there exists an


instinct of growth, a certain collective unconscious good sense working pro


gressively to desynonymize those words originally of the same meaning which


the conflux of dialects had supplied to the more homogeneous languages, as


the Greek and German: and which the same cause, joined with accidents of


translation from original works of different countries, occasion in mixed lan


guages like our own. The first and most important point to be proved is, that


two conceptions perfectly distinct are confused under one and the same word,


and (this done) to appropriate that word exclusively to one meaning, and the


synonym (should there be one) to the other. But if (as will be often the case


in the arts and sciences) no synonym exists, we must either invent or borrow


a word. In the present instance the appropriation had already begun and been


legitimated in the derivative adjective: Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley


a very fanciful, mind. If therefore I should succeed in establishing the actual


existence of two faculties generally different, the nomenclature would be at


once determined. To the faculty by which I had characterized Milton we


should confine the term imagination; while the other would be contra


distinguished as fancy. Now were it once fully ascertained that this division is


no less grounded in nature than that of delirium from mania, or Otway's Lutes, lobsters, seas of milk, and ships of amber,2 from Shakespeare's What! have his daughters brought him to this pass?3 or from the preceding apostrophe to the elements, the theory of the fine arts


and of poetry in particular could not, I thought, but derive some additional


and important light. It would in its immediate effects furnish a torch of guid


ance to the philosophical critic, and ultimately to the poet himself. In energetic


minds truth soon changes by domestication into power; and from directing in


the discrimination and appraisal of the product becomes influencive in the


production. To admire on principle is the only way to imitate without loss of


originality. * * *


From Chapter 13


[ON THE IMAGINATION, OR ESEMPLASTIC 4 POWER]


* * 4 * The IMAGINATION, then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is 2. Thomas Otway, in Venice Preserved (1682), 4. Coleridge coined this word and used it to mean wrote "laurels" in place of "lobsters" (5.2.151). "molding into unity."


3. King Lear 3.4.59.


.


478 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify.


It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and


dead.


FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with but fixities and


definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated


from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that


empirical phenomenon of the will which we express by the word CHOICE. But


equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.5* * *


Chapter 14


OCCASION OF THE LYRICAL BALLADS, AND THE OBJECTS ORIGINALLY PROPOSED PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION THE ENSUING CONTROVERSY, ITS CAUSES AND ACRIMONY PHILOSOPHIC DEFINITIONS OF A POEM AND POETRY WITH SCHOLIA. 6


During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours,7 our


conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the


power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the


truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying


colors of imagination.8 The sudden charm which accidents of light and shade,


which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape,


appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the


poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recol


lect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the


incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excel


lence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dra


matic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations,


supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human


being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself


under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen


from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be


found in every village and its vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling


mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves. In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads; in which it was agreed


that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural,


or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human


interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of


imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which con


stitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to


himself as his object to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and


to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's


attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and


5. Coleridge conceives God's creation to be a con-manipulate' "fixities and definites" that, linked by tinuing process, which has an analogy in the cre-association, come to it ready-made from percep


ative perception ("primary imagination") of all tion.


human minds. The creative process is repeated, or 6. Additional remarks, after a philosophic dem


"echoed," on still a third level, by the "secondary onstration.


imagination" of the poet, which dissolves the prod-7. At Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, Somerset, in


ucts of primary perception to shape them into a 1797.


new and unified creation�the imaginative passage 8. Cf. Wordsworth's account in his Preface to Lyr


or poem. The "fancy," on the other hand, can only ical Ballads (p. 262).


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BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA / 47 9


the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which,


in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes


yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.9


With this view I wrote The Ancient Mariner, and was preparing, among other


poems, The Dark Ladie, and the Christabel, in which I should have more nearly


realized my ideal than I had done in my first attempt. But Mr. Wordsworth's


industry had proved so much more successful and the number of his poems


so much greater, that my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared


rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter.1 Mr. Wordsworth added two


or three poems written in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty, and


sustained diction which is characteristic of his genius. In this form the Lyrical


Ballads were published; and were presented by him, as an experiment,2


whether subjects which from their nature rejected the usual ornaments and


extra-colloquial style of poems in general might not be so managed in the


language of ordinary life as to produce the pleasurable interest which it is the


peculiar business of poetry to impart. To the second edition3 he added a pref


ace of considerable length; in which, notwithstanding some passages of appar


ently a contrary import, he was understood to contend for the extension of


this style to poetry of all kinds, and to reject as vicious and indefensible all


phrases and forms of style that were not included in what he (unfortunately,


I think, adopting an equivocal expression) called the language of real life. From


this preface, prefixed to poems in which it was impossible to deny the presence


of original genius, however mistaken its direction might be deemed, arose the


whole long-continued controversy.4 For from the conjunction of perceived


power with supposed heresy I explain the inveteracy5 and in some instances,


I grieve to say, the acrimonious passions with which the controversy has been


conducted by the assailants. Had Mr. Wordsworth's poems been the silly, the childish things which they


were for a long time described as being; had they been really distinguished


from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness6 of language and


inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more than what is found


in the parodies and pretended imitations of them; they must have sunk at


once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion, and have dragged the preface


along with them. But year after year increased the number of Mr. Words


worth's admirers. They were found too not in the lower classes of the reading


public, but chiefly among young men of strong sensibility and meditative


minds; and their admiration (inflamed perhaps in some degree by opposition)


was distinguished by its intensity, I might almost say, by its religious fervor.


These facts, and the intellectual energy of the author, which was more or less


consciously felt where it was outwardly and even boisterously denied, meeting


with sentiments of aversion to his opinions and of alarm at their consequences,


produced an eddy of criticism which would of itself have borne up the poems


by the violence with which it whirled them round and round. With many parts


of this preface, in the sense attributed to them and which the words undoubt


edly seem to authorize, I never concurred; but, on the contrary objected to


them as erroneous in principle, and as contradictory (in appearance at least)


9. Cf. Isaiah 6.9-10. 3. Published in 1800. 1. The first edition of Lyrical Ballads, published 4. The controversy over Wordsworth's theory and anonymously in 1798, contained nineteen poems poetical practice in the literary journals of the day.


by Wordsworth, four by Coleridge. 5. Deep-rooted prejudice.


2. Experiments was the word used by Wordsworth 6. Vulgarity. in his Advertisement to the first edition.


.


48 0 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


both to other parts of the same preface and to the author's own practice in


the greater number of the poems themselves. Mr. Wordsworth in his recent


collection7 has, I find, degraded this prefatory disquisition to the end of his


second volume, to be read or not at the reader's choice. But he has not, as far


as I can discover, announced any change in his poetic creed. At all events,


considering it as the source of a controversy in which I have been honored


more than I deserve by the frequent conjunction of my name with his, I think


it expedient to declare once for all in what points I coincide with his opinions,


and in what points I altogether differ. But in order to render myself intelligible


I must previously, in as few words as possible, explain my ideas, first, of a POEM; and secondly, of POETRY itself, in kind, and in essence. The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction; while it


is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself constantly aware that


distinction is not division. In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth,


we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the tech


nical of philosophy. But having so done, we must then restore them in our


conceptions to the unity in which they actually coexist; and this is the result


of philosophy. A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition;


the difference therefore must consist in a different combination of them, in


consequence of a different object proposed. According to the difference of the


object will be the difference of the combination. It is possible that the object


may be merely to facilitate the recollection of any given facts or observations


by artificial arrangement; and the composition will be a poem, merely because


it is distinguished from prose by meter, or by rhyme, or by both conjointly. In


this, the lowest sense, a man might attribute the name of a poem to the well-


known enumeration of the days in the several months: Thirty days hath September,


April, June, and November, etc. and others of the same class and purpose. And as a particular pleasure is found


in anticipating the recurrence of sounds and quantities, all compositions that


have this charm superadded, whatever be their contents, may be entitled


poems. So much for the superficial form. A difference of object and contents sup


plies an additional ground of distinction. The immediate purpose may be the


communication of truths; either of truth absolute and demonstrable, as in


works of science; or of facts experienced and recorded, as in history. Pleasure,


and that of the highest and most permanent kind, may result from the attain


ment of the end; but it is not itself the immediate end. In other works the


communication of pleasure may be the immediate purpose; and though truth,


either moral or intellectual, ought to be the ultimate end, yet this will distin


guish the character of the author, not the class to which the work belongs.


Blessed indeed is that state of society in which the immediate purpose would


be baffled by the perversion of the proper ultimate end; in which no charm of


diction or imagery could exempt the Bathyllus even of an Anacreon, or the


Alexis of Virgil,� from disgust and aversion! But the communication of pleasure may be the immediate object of a work


not metrically composed; and that object may have been in a high degree


7. Poems, 2 vols., 1815. a Greek lyric poet (ca. 560^175 B.C.E.); Alexis was 8. The reference is to poems of homosexual love. a young man loved by the shepherd Corydon in Bathyllus was a beautiful boy praised by Anacreon, Virgil's Eclogue 2.


.


BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA / 48 1


attained, as in novels and romances. Would then the mere superaddition of


meter, with or without rhyme, entitle these to the name of poems? The answer


is that nothing can permanently please which does not contain in itself the


reason why it is so, and not otherwise. If meter be superadded, all other parts


must be made consonant with it. They must be such as to justify the perpetual


and distinct attention to each part which an exact correspondent recurrence


of accent and sound are calculated to excite. The final definition then, so


deduced, may be thus worded. A poem is that species of composition which


is opposed to works of science by proposing for its immediate object pleasure,


not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it


is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is com


patible with a distinct gratification from each component part. Controversy is not seldom excited in consequence of the disputants attach


ing each a different meaning to the same word; and in few instances has this


been more striking than in disputes concerning the present subject. If a man


chooses to call every composition a poem which is rhyme, or measure, or both,


I must leave his opinion uncontroverted. The distinction is at least competent


to characterize the writer's intention. If it were subjoined that the whole is


likewise entertaining or affecting as a tale or as a series of interesting reflec


tions, I of course admit this as another fit ingredient of a poem and an addi


tional merit. But if the definition sought for be that of a legitimate poem, I


answer it must be one the parts of which mutually support and explain each


other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose


and known influences of metrical arrangement. The philosophic critics of all


ages coincide with the ultimate judgment of all countries in equally denying


the praises of a just poem on the one hand to a series of striking lines or


distichs,9 each of which absorbing the whole attention of the reader to itself


disjoins it from its context and makes it a separate whole, instead of a har


monizing part; and on the other hand, to an unsustained composition, from


which the reader collects rapidly the general result unattracted by the com


ponent parts. The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by


the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final


solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of


the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the


emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air; at


every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement


collects the force which again carries him onward. "Praecipitandus est liber


spiritus,"' says Petronius Arbiter most happily. The epithet liber here balances


the preceding verb; and it is not easy to conceive more meaning condensed in


fewer words. But if this should be admitted as a satisfactory character of a poem, we have


still to seek for a definition of poetry. The writings of Plato, and Bishop Taylor,


and the Theoria Sacra of Burnet,2 furnish undeniable proofs that poetry of the


highest kind may exist without meter, and even without the contradistinguish


ing objects of a poem. The first chapter of Isaiah (indeed a very large propor


tion of the whole book) is poetry in the most emphatic sense; yet it would be


9. Pairs of lines. (1613�1667), author of Holy Living and Holy1. "The free spirit [of the poet] must be hurled Dying. Coleridge greatly admired the elaborate and onward." From the Satyricon, by the Roman satirist sonorous prose of both these writers. He took from Petronius Arbiter (1st century C.E.). a work by Burnet the Latin motto for The Rime of 2. Thomas Burnet (1635?�1715), author of The the Ancient Mariner. Sacred Theory of the Earth. Bishop Jeremy Taylor


.


482 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


not less irrational than strange to assert that pleasure, and not truth, was the


immediate object of the prophet. In short, whatever specific import we attach


to the word poetry, there will be found involved in it, as a necessary conse


quence, that a poem of any length neither can be, nor ought to be, all poetry.


Yet if a harmonious whole is to be produced, the remaining parts must be


preserved in keeping3 with the poetry; and this can be no otherwise effected


than by such a studied selection and artificial arrangement as will partake of


one, though not a peculiar, property of poetry. And this again can be no other


than the property of exciting a more continuous and equal attention than the


language of prose aims at, whether colloquial or written. My own conclusions on the nature of poetry, in the strictest use of the word,


have been in part anticipated in the preceding disquisition on the fancy and


imagination. What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a


poet? that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. For


it is a distinction resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and


modifies the images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet's own mind. The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into


activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their


relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends


and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power to


which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power,


first put in action by the will and understanding and retained under their


irremissive,4 though gentle and unnoticed, control (laxis ejfertur habenis)5


reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant quali


ties:6 of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea,


with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty


and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emo


tion, with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-


possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it


blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to


nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sym


pathy with the poetry. "Doubtless," as Sir John Davies observes of the soul


(and his words may with slight alteration be applied, and even more appropriately, to the poetic IMAGINATION):


Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns


Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange,


As fire converts to fire the things it burns,


As we our food into our nature change.


From their gross matter she abstracts their forms,


And draws a kind of quintessence from things;


Which to her proper nature she transforms,


To bear them light on her celestial wings.


Thus does she, when from individual states


She doth abstract the universal kinds;


3. A term from the theory of painting for the main-became central to the American New Critics of the tenance of the harmony of a composition. mid-20th century, that the best poetry incorpo


4. Continuous. rates and reconciles opposite or discordant ele5. Driven with loosened reins (Latin). ments. 6. Here Coleridge introduces the concept, which


.


BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA / 48 3


Which then reclothed in divers names and fates


Steal access through our senses to our minds.7


Finally, GOOD SENSE is the BODY of poetic genius, FANCY its DRAPERY,8 MOTION its LIFE, and IMAGINATION the SOUL that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.


From Chapter 17


[EXAMINATION OF THE TENETS PECULIAR TO MR. WORDSWORTH]


As far then as Mr. Wordsworth in his preface contended, and most ably


contended, for a reformation in our poetic diction, as far as he has evinced


the truth of passion, and the dramatic propriety of those figures and metaphors


in the original poets which, stripped of their justifying reasons and converted


into mere artifices of connection or ornament, constitute the characteristic


falsity in the poetic style of the moderns; and as far as he has, with equal


acuteness and clearness, pointed out the process by which this change was


effected and the resemblances between that state into which the reader's mind


is thrown by the pleasurable confusion of thought from an unaccustomed train


of words and images and that state which is induced by the natural language


of impassioned feeling, he undertook a useful task and deserves all praise,


both for the attempt and for the execution. The provocations to this remon


strance in behalf of truth and nature were still of perpetual recurrence before


4


and after the publication of this preface. 4 *


My own differences from certain supposed parts of Mr. Wordsworth's theory


ground themselves on the assumption that his words had been rightly inter


preted, as purporting that the proper diction for poetry in general consists


altogether in a language taken, with due exceptions, from the mouths of men


in real life, a language which actually constitutes the natural conversation of


men under the influence of natural feelings.9 My objection is, first, that in any


sense this rule is applicable only to certain classes of poetry; secondly, that


even to these classes it is not applicable, except in such a sense as hath never


by anyone (as far as I know or have read) been denied or doubted; and, lastly,


that as far as, and in that degree in which it is practicable, yet as a ride it is


useless, if not injurious, and therefore either need not or ought not to be


practiced. * * *


[RUSTIC LIFE (ABOVE ALL, LOW AND RUSTIC LIFE) ESPECIALLY UNFAVORABLE TO THE FORMATION OF A HUMAN DICTION THE BEST PARTS OF LANGUAGE THE PRODUCTS OF PHILOSOPHERS, NOT CLOWNS 1 OR SHEPHERDS]


As little can I agree with the assertion that from the objects with which the


rustic hourly communicates the best part of language is formed. For first, if


to communicate with an object implies such an acquaintance with it, as ren


ders it capable of being discriminately reflected on; the distinct knowledge of


an uneducated rustic would furnish a very scanty vocabulary. The few things,


and modes of action, requisite for his bodily conveniences, would alone be


7. Adapted from John Davies's Nosce Teipsum a state of vivid sensation. . . . Low and rustic life ("Know Thyself"), a philosophical poem (1599). was generally chosen. . . . The language, too, of


8. Clothing. these men is adopted." 9. Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads 1. Rustic people. (1800): "A selection of the real language of men in


.


484 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


individualized; while all the rest of nature would be expressed by a small


number of confused general terms. Secondly, I deny that the words and com


binations of words derived from the objects, with which the rustic is familiar,


whether with distinct or confused knowledge, can be justly said to form the


best part of language. It is more than probable that many classes of the brute


creation possess discriminating sounds, by which they can convey to each


other notices of such objects as concern their food, shelter, or safety. Yet we


hesitate to call the aggregate of such sounds a language, otherwise than meta


phorically. The best part of human language, properly so called, is derived


from reflection on the acts of the mind itself. It is formed by a voluntary


appropriation of fixed symbols to internal acts, to processes and results of


imagination, the greater part of which have no place in the consciousness


of uneducated man; though in civilized society, by imitation and passive


remembrance of what they hear from their religious instructors and other


superiors, the most uneducated share in the harvest which they neither sowed


or reaped. * * *


[THE LANGUAGE OF MILTON AS MUCH THE LANGUAGE OF REAL LIFE, YEA, INCOMPARABLY MORE SO THAN THAT OF THE COTTAGER]


Here let me be permitted to remind the reader that the positions which I


controvert are contained in the sentences�"a selection of the REAL language


of men"; "the language of these men (i.e., men in low and rustic life) I propose


to myself to imitate, and as far as possible to adopt the very language of men."


"Between the language of prose and that of metrical composition there neither


is, nor can be any essential difference." It is against these exclusively that my


opposition is directed. I object, in the very first instance, to an equivocation in the use of the word


"real." Every man's language varies according to the extent of his knowledge,


the activity of his faculties, and the depth or quickness of his feelings. Every


man's language has, first, its individualities; secondly, the common properties


of the class to which he belongs; and thirdly, words and phrases of universal


use. The language of Hooker, Bacon, Bishop Taylor, and Burke2 differs from


the common language of the learned class only by the superior number and


novelty of the thoughts and relations which they had to convey. The language


of Algernon Sidney3 differs not at all from that which every well-educated


gentleman would wish to write, and (with due allowances for the undeliber


ateness and less connected train of thinking natural and proper to conversa


tion) such as he would wish to talk. Neither one nor the other differ half as


much from the general language of cultivated society as the language of Mr.


Wordsworth's homeliest composition differs from that of a common peasant.


For "real" therefore we must substitute ordinary, or lingua communis,4 And


this, we have proved, is no more to be found in the phraseology of low and


rustic life than in that of any other class. Omit the peculiarities of each,


and the result of course must be common to all. And assuredly the omissions


and changes to be made in the language of rustics before it could be trans


ferred to any species of poem, except the drama or other professed imitation,


2. Richard Hooker (1554-1600), author of The prose styles. Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity; Francis Bacon (1561� 3. Republican soldier and statesman (1622� 1626), essayist and philosopher, and Jeremy Taylor 1683), author of Discourses Concerning Govern- were all, together with the late-18th-century poli-ment, executed for his part in the Rye House Plot tician and opponent of the French Revolution to assassinate Charles II.


Edmund Burke (1729-1797), lauded for their 4. The common language (Latin).


.


BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA / 48 5


are at least as numerous and weighty as would be required in adapting to the


same purpose the ordinary language of tradesmen and manufacturers. Not to


mention that the language so highly extolled by Mr. Wordsworth varies in every


county, nay, in every village, according to the accidental character of the cler


gyman, the existence or nonexistence of schools; or even, perhaps, as the excise-


man, publican, or barber happen to be, or not to be, zealous politicians and


readers of the weekly newspaper pro bono publico.5 Anterior to cultivation the


lingua communis of every country, as Dante has well observed, exists every


where in parts and no where as a whole.6


Neither is the case rendered at all more tenable by the addition of the words


"in a state of excitement."7 For the nature of a man's words, when he is strongly


affected by joy, grief, or anger, must necessarily depend on the number and


quality of the general truths, conceptions, and images, and of the words


expressing them, with which his mind had been previously stored. For the


property of passion is not to create, but to set in increased activity. At least,


whatever new connections of thoughts or images, or (which is equally, if not


more than equally, the appropriate effect of strong excitement) whatever gen


eralizations of truth or experience the heat of passion may produce, yet the


terms of their conveyance must have pre-existed in his former conversations,


and are only collected and crowded together by the unusual stimulation. It is


indeed very possible to adopt in a poem the unmeaning repetitions, habitual


phrases, and other blank counters which an unfurnished or confused under


standing interposes at short intervals in order to keep hold of his subject which


is still slipping from him, and to give him time for recollection; or in mere aid


of vacancy, as in the scanty companies of a country stage the same player pops


backwards and forwards, in order to prevent the appearance of empty spaces,


in the procession of Macbeth or Henry Vlllth. But what assistance to the poet


or ornament to the poem these can supply, I am at a loss to conjecture. Noth


ing assuredly can differ either in origin or in mode more widely from the


apparent tautologies of intense and turbulent feeling in which the passion is


greater and of longer endurance than to be exhausted or satisfied by a single


representation of the image or incident exciting it. Such repetitions I admit to


be a beauty of the highest kind; as illustrated by Mr. Wordsworth himself from


the song of Deborah. "At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet


he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down dead."8 1815 1817


From Lectures on Shakespeare' [FANCY AND IMAGINATION IN SHAKESPEARE'S POETRY] In the preceding lecture we have examined with what armor clothed and


with what titles authorized Shakespeare came forward as a poet to demand


the throne of fame as the dramatic poet of England; we have now to observe


5. For the public welfare (Latin). ness of "impassioned feelings." 6. In De Vulgari Eloquentia ("On the Speech of 1. Although Coleridge's series of public lectures the people") Dante discusses�and affirms�the on Shakespeare and other poets contained much


fitness for poetry of the unlocaiized Italian vernac-of his best criticism, he published none of this


ular. material, leaving only fragmentary remains of his


7. Wordsworth: "the manner in which we associ-lectures in notebooks, scraps of manuscript, and ate ideas in a state of excitement." notes written in the margins of books. The follow


8. Judges 5.27. Cited by Wordsworth in a note to ing selections, which develop some of the principal The Thorn as an example of the natural repetitious-ideas presented in Biographia Literaria, reproduce


.


48 6 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


and retrace the excellencies which compelled even his contemporaries to seat


him on that throne, although there were giants in those days contending for


the same honor. Hereafter we shall endeavor to make out the title of the


English drama, as created by and existing in Shakespeare, and its right to the


supremacy of dramatic excellence in general. I have endeavored to prove that


he had shown himself a poet, previously to his appearance as a dramatic poet�


and that had no Lear, no Othello, no Henry the Fourth, no Twelfth Night


appeared, we must have admitted that Shakespeare possessed the chief if not


all the requisites of a poet�namely, deep feeling and exquisite sense of beauty,


both as exhibited to the eye in combinations of form, and to the ear in sweet


and appropriate melody (with the exception of Spenser he is [the sweetest of


English poets]); that these feelings were under the command of his own will�


that in his very first productions he projected his mind out of his own particular


being, and felt and made others feel, on subjects [in] no way connected with


himself, except by force of contemplation, and that sublime faculty, by which


a great mind becomes that which it meditates on. To this we are to add the


affectionate love of nature and natural objects, without which no man could


have observed so steadily, or painted so truly and passionately the very min


utest beauties of the external world. Next, we have shown that he possessed


fancy, considered as the faculty of bringing together images dissimilar in the


main by some one point or more of likeness distinguished.2 Full gently now she takes him by the hand,


A lily prisoned in a jail of snow,


Or ivory in an alabaster band�


So white a friend engirts so white a foe. Still mounting, we find undoubted proof in his mind of imagination, or the


power by which one image or feeling is made to modify many others and by a


sort of fusion to force many into one�that which after showed itself in such


might and energy in Lear, where the deep anguish of a father spreads the


feeling of ingratitude and cruelty over the very elements of heaven. Various


are the workings of this greatest faculty of the human mind�both passionate


and tranquil. In its tranquil and purely pleasurable operation, it acts chiefly


by producing out of many things, as they would have appeared in the descrip


tion of an ordinary mind, described slowly and in unimpassioned succession,


a oneness, even as nature, the greatest of poets, acts upon us when we open


our eyes upon an extended prospect. Thus the flight of Adonis from the enam


ored goddess in the dusk of evening� Look how a bright star shooteth from the sky�


So glides he in the night from Venus' eye.3 How many images and feelings are here brought together without effort and


without discord�the beauty of Adonis�the rapidity of his flight�the yearn


ing yet hopelessness of the enamored gazer�and a shadowy ideal character


thrown over the whole.�Or it acts by impressing the stamp of humanity, of


human feeling, over inanimate objects * * *


the text of T. M. Raysor's edition�based on Cole-2. Coleridge here applies the distinction between


ridge's manuscripts and on contemporary reports� fancy and imagination presented in Biographia Lit- of Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism (1930); eraria, chap. 13, to a passage from the narrative four minor corrections in wording have been taken poem Venus and Adonis (lines 361�64). from R. A. Foakes's edition of Coleridge's Lectures 3. Venus and Adonis, lines 815�16. 1808-1819: On Literature (1987).


.


BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA / 48 7


Lo, here the gentle lark, weary of rest,


From his moist cabinet mounts up on high


And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast


The sun ariseth in his majesty; Who doth the world so gloriously behold


That cedar tops and hills seem burnished gold. And lastly, which belongs only to a great poet, the power of so carrying on the


eye of the reader as to make him almost lose the consciousness of words�to


make him see everything�and this without exciting any painful or laborious


attention, without any anatomy of description (a fault not uncommon in


descriptive poetry) but with the sweetness and easy movement of nature. Lastly, he previously to his dramas, gave proof of a most profound, energetic,


and philosophical mind, without which he might have been a very delightful


4,4


poet, but not the great dramatic poet. But chance and his powerful


instinct combined to lead him to his proper province�in the conquest


of which we are to consider both the difficulties that opposed him, and the


advantages.


1808


[MECHANIC VS. ORGANIC FORM] 4


The subject of the present lecture is no less than a question submitted to


your understandings, emancipated from national prejudice: Are the plays of


Shakespeare works of rude uncultivated genius, in which the splendor of the


parts compensates, if aught can compensate, for the barbarous shapelessness


and irregularity of the whole? To which not only the French critics, but even


his own English admirers, say [yes]. Or is the form equally admirable with the


matter, the judgment of the great poet not less deserving of our wonder than


his genius? Or to repeat the question in other words, is Shakespeare a great


dramatic poet on account only of those beauties and excellencies which he

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