Coleridge's decline as a poet 9783111709956, 9789027934314

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STUDIES

IN ENGLISH Volume XCVIII

LITERATURE

COLERIDGE'S DECLINE AS A POET

by

L. D. BERKOBEN

1975

MOUTON THE HAGUE · PARIS

© Copyright 1975 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

ISBN 90 279 3431 2

Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Approach

7

1. Hooting at The Glorious Sun in Heaven: Sun and Weed Imagery in the Poems to Osorio

33

2. Osorio and The Necessity of E v i l . . . .

60

3. Varieties of Evil Experience, I: The Ancient Mariner .

73

4. Varieties of Evil Experience, II: Christabel

93

.

.

.

5. A Stately Pleasure-dome Decreed: "Kubla Khan" . 6. The Mad Lutanist: The "Dejection" Crisis

.

.

.

108 .121

7. Rage for Order and Harmony: Coleridge's Literary Criticism

142

Conclusion

152

Bibliography

166

Index

169

COLERIDGE'S DECLINE AS A POET

Dr. L. D. Berkoben Stanislaus State College Turlock, California

APPROACH

On a Sunday evening in April of 1802 Coleridge retired to his study in Greta Hall and composed a long verse letter to Sara Hutchinson. In its 340 lines Coleridge laid bare his personal problems, at times in a tone of self-pity blatant enough to embarrass the contemporary reader. Six months later, purged of its personal detail and self-pity, the poem was published in the Morning Post to coincide with Wordsworth's wedding and, incidentally, with the seventh anniversary of his own marriage to another Sara. Near the end of the verse letter Coleridge complains that visitations of distress which earlier were "but as the stuff / Whence Fancy made me dreams of Happiness" now rob him of his "shaping Spirit of Imagination". As an anodyne the poet asserts that he turned from poetic composition to the study of metaphysics. For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still & patient all I can; And haply by abstruse Research to steal From my own Nature all the Natural Man — This was my sole Resource, my wisest plan! And that, which suits a part, infects the whole, And now is almost grown the Temper of my Soul.1 Three months later in a letter to his friend and fellow poet, William Sotheby, Coleridge copied out a revised version of the verse letter, prefacing it with a remark which again laid the blame for his subdued literary effort upon the study of metaphysics. 1

Collected

Letters

of Samuel

Taylor

Coleridge,

II, ed. by E. L. Griggs

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956-1959), 797. Hereafter cited as CL.

8

APPROACH

. . . I wished to force myself out of metaphysical trains of Thought — which, when I trusted myself to my own Ideas, came upon me uncalled — & when I wished to write a poem, beat up Game of far other kind — instead of a covey of poetic Partridges with whirring wings of music, or wild Ducks shaping their rapid flight in forms always regular (a still better image of Verse) up came a metaphysical Bustard, urging it's [sic] slow heavy laborious, earth-skimming Flight, over dreary & level Wastes. . . . Sickness & some other far & worse afflictions, first forced me into downright metaphysics/ I believe that by nature I have more of the Poet in me/ (CL, II, 814) Yet the disclaimer itself is made in imaginative and poetic language, while after further revision the poem which followed the remark was to become one of the finest odes of the early nineteenth century. In the same letter Coleridge also demonstrates that he has not lost the power of acute perception vital to a poet. Ο t h a t . . . I could but send to you the Image now before my eyes — Over Bassenthwaite the Sun is setting, in a glorious rich brassy Light — on the top of Skiddaw, & one third adown it, is a huge enormous Mountain of Cloud, with the outlines of a mountain — this is of a starchy Grey — but floating fast along it, & upon it, are various Patches of sack-like Clouds, bags, & woolsacks, of a shade lighter than the brassy Light of the clouds that hide the setting Sun . . . and these the highest on this mountain-shaped cloud, & these the farthest from the Sun, are suffused with the darkness of a stormy color. Marvelous creatures! (CL, II, 819) In his description Coleridge judiciously singled out the significant detail of the landscape as seen from his study window, but equally important, he expressed his wonder in precise and concise diction, thus exhibiting both the sensitivity and articulation needed by a poet. But the faculties, for the most part, remained simply a potential to Coleridge; during the remaining thirty-two years of his life, he beat up few poetic partridges but a great many metaphysical bustards. The poet in Coleridge was muted but not entirely silent; he continued to write poetry but at a greatly diminished rate. During his most productive period - from 1797 to 1802 - he

APPROACH

9

wrote sixty-nine poems, exclusive of juvenilia, among them his major works: The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, "Kubla Khan", and "Dejection: an Ode". These make up two hundred pages of the standard edition of Coleridge's poetry edited by Ε. H. Coleridge. From 1802 until his death, he wrote eighty-eight poems, comprising 128 pages of the same edition. During seven of his late years Coleridge wrote (or published) no poems: 1816, 1818, 1819, 1821, 1822, 1831, 1834; while the other years show a slight or at best a moderate output.2 But the number of poems in a poet's canon is no sure index of his stature or merit; often a small collection of exquisite poems can assure the poet a continuing high reputation. But such was not the case during Coleridge's later years. The poems written then show a marked falling off of quality as well as noticeable shifts in theme and form. The poems written during Coleridge's annus mirabilis display a variety of forms and experiment in metrics - from the brilliant adaptation of the ballad form in The Ancient Mariner to the unique conversational mode of "Frost at Midnight". The later poems show no such virtuosity. As George Whalley notes in his study of the later verse: His poetic technique . . . becomes more learned and recondite, the ear less facile . . . He abandons blank verse almost entirely and turns often to couplets. He does not embark upon intricate stanzaic forms nor does he show any signs of an interest in mere artistry. He no longer experiments. Rather he seems to withdraw within the confines of a few plain and familiar forms . . .8 Early poems such as "The Eolean Harp" and The Ancient Mariner were grounded on the doctrines of immanence and pantheism; the later poems often treat of the abstract world of orthodox and spiritual Christianity.4 Most of the early poems are optimistic; their apparent themes picture man and Nature in harmony. In the later poems man is placed in a setting of evil, * I have followed the count done by George Whalley in " 'Late Autumn's Amaranth': Coleridge's Late Poems", Transactions of the Royal Society, Π (June, 1964), 163. * Whalley, 179. 4 James D. Boulger, Coleridge as Religious Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 197, 200.

10

APPROACH

both physical and metaphysical. Some titles suggest the pessimistic world of the later poems: "Ne Plus Ultra", "Work Without Hope", "Limbo". Coleridge assessed correctly the loss of his power to compose poems as excellent as those done before "Dejection", but can we accept his account of the underlying cause of the loss - that metaphysical pursuits sidetracked his poetry? The question has been asked before. In answering it Marshall Suther gathered together Coleridge's remarks on the subject and those of his friends in order to test the validity of the claim.5 He found that a number of Coleridge's acquaintances and friends did believe that Coleridge was essentially a poet, and that he had squandered his poetic talent on philosophical studies. For example, Robert Percival Graves in a letter to a friend shortly after the death of Coleridge wrote: Wordsworth, as a poet, regretted that German metaphysics had so much captivated the taste of Coleridge, for he was frequently not intelligible on this subject; whereas, if his energy and his originality had been more exerted in the channel of poetry, an instrument of which he had so perfect a mastery, Wordsworth thought he might have done more permanently to enrich literature, and so to influence the thought of the nation, than any man of his age.6 Coleridge himself frequently made the same assertion many times after 1800. In a comparison between himself and Wordsworth, he remarked, "As to our literary occupations they are still more distant than our residences - He is a great, a true Poet - I am only a kind of Metaphysician" (CL, I, 658). Yet Coleridge frequently asserted the opposite: that he was primarily a poet. In a letter of 1802 already quoted he wrote, "I believe that by nature I have more of the poet in me." In the light of contradictory and ambiguous statements by Coleridge, Suther examined the extent of Coleridge's metaphysical studies in relation to his poetic activities. He found that the "attacks" of metaphysics of which Coleridge complained 5

The Dark Night of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 13-24. • Quoted from Richard W. Armour and Raymond F. Howes, Coleridge the Talker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1940), 378.

APPROACH

11

occurred during the years of his most productive poetic composition, not between them. Throughout his lifetime Coleridge was deeply devoted to religious and philosophical study; such effort did not come upon him in spurts. In 1795 - two years before annus mirabilis - Coleridge delivered lectures in Bristol on theology; in 1796 he wrote to Thelwall: I am, & ever have been, a great reader — & have read almost every thing — a library-cormorant — I am deep in all out of the way books, whether of the monkish times, or of the puritanical aera — I have read & digested most of the Historical Writers — ; but I do not like History. Metaphysics, & Poetry, & 'Facts of mind' . . . are my darling Studies. (CL, I, 260) In the following year, while composing The Ancient Mariner, Coleridge was deep in the reading of Berkeley and Spinoza. Rather than thwarting poetic creativity, the metaphysical studies appeared instead to nourish his inspiration. I must concur with Suther's conclusion that "whatever the relation between his poetical and philosophical activities, the latter cannot be said to have intervened at some point and blighted his poetic gifts". 7 Remarks about metaphysics and poetry appear to have been applied as a veneer of reason over thoughts that were in fact emotional. If his composition of poetry was curtailed, he continued to write criticism, letters, religious tracts, and private notebooks. Throughout his lifetime, he left a full record of his intimate opinions. Much of his poetry, too, is highly subjective, for, unlike many of his eighteenth-century predecessors, Coleridge frequently wrote about personal incidents in his poetry without disguising the intimate detail by means of generalizations or formal tone. Often he named the occasion and the people involved, as in the following stanza from "To William Wordsworth: Composed on the night after his recitation of a poem on the growth of an individual mind": And when — Ο Friend! my comforter and guide! Strong in thyself, and powerful to give strength! — Thy long sustained Song finally closed, ι

The Dark Night, 24.

12

APPROACH

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 (Thought was it? or aspiration? or resolve?) Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound — And when I rose, I found myself in prayer.8

Coleridge explicitly named his friend and put forth his personal reaction to the situation: "I rose and found myself in prayer." He not only stated the reaction but also - in the rhetorical question: "thought was it? or aspiration? or resolve?" - analyzed its growth in his mind. When Coleridge thus poetically cogitated, the reader listens in as though he were eavesdropping on a soliloquy or a private conversation. He was apparently aware of the intimate tone, for he labeled "The Nightingale" a "conversation poem". As a critic Coleridge recognized the value of subjective treatment of the matter of poetry. He wrote that an elegy "may treat of any subject, but it must treat of no subject for itself; but always and exclusively with reference to the poet himself. . . . The true lyric ode is subjective too." 9 But he was also aware of the artistic danger in treating specific autobiographical material. In a letter to Wordsworth concerned with publishing the poem quoted above, he wrote: . . . since I lit on the first rude draught, and corrected it as best I could, I wanted no additional reason for its not being published in my Life Time, than its personality respecting myself. . . . It is for the Biographer, not the poet, to give the Accidents of individual life. Whatever is not representative, generic, may indeed be most poetically expresst, but it is not Poetry. (CL, IV, 572)

As a poet he believed that personal incidents must not be dealt with, that "where the subject is taken immediately from the 8

The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I, ed. by Ε. H. Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 408. Hereafter cited as PW. • Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, II (London: John Murray, 1835), 280-281.

APPROACH

13

author's personal sensations and experiences, the excellence of a particular poem is but an equivocal mark . . . of genuine poetic power".10 Yet as early as 1796 he recognized that his personal opinions and feelings were his poetic dish of tea. He wanted to achieve fame as a poet (and in order to write successful poems he had to draw on his personal feelings) yet he cringed from self-revelation, from indecent exposure, as it were. As he admitted, "My eloquence was most commonly exerted by the desire of running away and hiding myself from my personal feelings." 11 More than most poets, Coleridge has left a wealth of autobiographical writings, but a critic must approach them with extreme caution. Otherwise, as I. A. Richards notes in an article concerned with Coleridge's notebooks, the writers on Coleridge may reveal more about themselves than about the poet.12 If the abundance of biographical material presents a psychic danger to the critic, it also enables him to uncover hidden meanings and attitudes in Coleridge's poems. The critical techniques I shall use in the uncovering are taken from the "symbolic action" approach to literature, originated by Kenneth Burke and outlined in his book, The Philosophy of Literary Form. (In fact, Burke illustrated his critical method with examples from a fragmentary analysis of The Ancient Mariner.) The chief objective of the method is to understand the psychology of the poetic act - to determine the personal "situation" which the poet tries to "encompass" by means of the act of writing the poem.13 Thus the poem can be viewed as a "strategy" on the part of the poet 10

Biographia Literaria, II, ed. by J. Shawcross (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 14-15. Hereafter cited as BL. See also CL, II, 810. Writing of Gessner's Der Erste Schiffer, Coleridge notes that the heroines thoughts "are not the thoughts that a lonely Girl could have; but exactly such as a Boarding School Miss . . . would suppose her to s a y . . . . It is easy to cloathe Imaginary Beings with our own Thoughts and Feelings; but to send ourselves out of ourselves, to think ourselves in the Thoughts and Feelings of Beings in circumstances wholly & strangely different from our o w n / ad labor, hoc opus/ and who has atchieved [sic] it? Perhaps only Shakespeare." II Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, Π, ed. by Thomas Alsop (London: Frederick Farrah, 1864), 136. 18 "Coleridge, the Vulnerable Poet", Yale Review, XLVIII (New Series: June, 1959), 503. " (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), 61.

14

APPROACH

to relieve a particular psychological tension or to achieve a particular rhetorical end. The phase of Coleridge's "situation" most pertinent to the present study is his attitude toward the poetic process itself. Like many other poets of the early nineteenth century, he was preoccupied with the psychological origin of poetry and, in addition to introspective notebook jottings and criticism on the nature of poetry and art, he wrote a number of poems dealing directly or indirectly with the poetic act. By means of a close examination of his public and private writings, I shall attempt in the following chapters to ascertain what Coleridge expected the poetic act to do for him, and also how it related to his philosophical and religious postures. The sharp decline in his poetic activity after 1802 may result from the failure of his individual poetic expectations. Of the numerous critical techniques included in Burke's arsenal of symbolic action, two can be brought to bear most fruitfully upon Coleridge's works. The first of these, tracing associational clusters of images, is admirably suited to a study of Coleridge, for he employed the same imagery in his poetry, criticism, letters, religious tracts, and notebooks. Thus the clusters of images can form a bridge between his various interests. The image of the sun, for example, pervades his work from his juvenile poems to his late religious prose tracts. Particularly when used figuratively, the image carries with it the same significance and the same emotional import at various times and in diverse contexts. By finding out which ideas or images Coleridge habitually associated with the sun, we can determine his attitude toward the other members of the cluster, even though the attitude is not otherwise apparent. The second technique I have adopted is the examination of Coleridge's work for what Burke calls "watershed moments", i.e., abrupt changes in tone or progression of thought. At these points, especially, the writer lays bare the motivation of the poetic act. For example, one such watershed moment occurs in Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp". After picturing the serene setting beside his cottage, the poet describes the sound of his eolian harp. The melody leads him to conclude:

APPROACH

15

And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd 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? At this point, after being carried away by his pantheistic speculations, the watershed moment occurs: But thy more serious eye of mild reproof Darts, Ο beloved Woman! nor such thoughts Dim and unhallow'd dost thou not reject, And biddest me walk humbly with my God. (PW, 1,102, lines 44-52) The sudden change of thought from pantheistic to Christian, and of tone from ecstatic to humble - occuring as it does under the watchful eye of Sara (his betrothed at the time of the composition of the poem) gives the critic a "way into" the poem and into Coleridge's philosophical and marital difficulties during August, 1795.14 In the chapters which follow, I shall pay particular attention to such watershed moments as this. The critical techniques of symbolic action which I have adopted are based upon the assumption that Coleridge's use of images in both his poetry and prose may be to some extent unconscious, particularly when the same images appear in seemingly diverse contexts. Yet, even if I were qualified to apply psychoanalytic methods to Coleridge's work (which I am not) I feel that for purposes of literary criticism a purely psychoanalytic investigation may be of questionable value to a literary scholar, for such a study may overlook the possibility that a poem can have several meanings, only one of which is its exposure of the mental structure of the poet through his poetry. It is the function of literary criticism to increase the possible significances of a poem rather than to limit its meaning to a "substitute gratification" - to use Freud's term - or - in Jungean terms - to an outgrowth of the "collective unconscious". Furthermore a post-mortem analysis of a poet's work entails special problems not present in analyses of non-poets. A poem 14

The passage will be analyzed at greater length below.

16

APPROACH

is not the same as a dream or a record left by a non-poet. Although they share the element of fantasy, and may have some symbolic equations in common, the poem is shaped by the artistic medium as well as by the poet's unconscious. The images in a poem must be analyzed with extreme caution, keeping in mind the artistic demands of the craft of poetry and the poetic conventions of the time of composition. Thus the psychoanalytic significance of an image may have little relevance to its function in a poem; in fact, its meaning to the poet may differ radically from its general psychoanalytic meaning. For a poet an image may have peculiar significance because of its rhyming ease, for example, or for other aesthetic characteristics. Another limitation of the psychoanalytic approach is that it concentrates on the subconscious origins of a literary work and largely overlooks a writer's later revisions, which with some poets are as creative and psychologically revealing as the background of the poem in the writer's experience. And a writer's experience may be conditioned by his art; his choice of activities is often governed by the demands of his art. He may consciously do things to gain material (or as background "research") for a particular poem or book. These strictures are not meant to question the validity of psychological studies of writers. Perhaps the ultimate reason for Coleridge's poetic decline can be explained in terms of the structure of his mind. Nonetheless, the reason for the poetic decline can also be explained in philosophical and aesthetic terms. The two lines of investigation are not mutually exclusive; each can be pursued with equal validity. As I noted above, Coleridge frequently wrote about personal incidents or ideas about which he felt strongly. If his revelations could be taken at face value, then a critic could simply glean his feelings and attitudes from the various documents and piece them together to form a biography, thus obviating a search for the psychology of the poetic act. But along with his compulsion to write about intimate matters, Coleridge felt an equally strong reluctance to divulge non-objective information. His ambivalent attitudes toward self-revelation forced him to practice evasions,

17

APPROACH

i.e., maneuvers designed to cover up autobiographical references - sometimes by means of watershed moments, sometimes by manuscript revisions, and sometimes by footnotes to his poems which direct the reader's attention away from embarrassing material. But an analysis of the symbolic action in the totality of Coleridge's works can "catch him with his guard down" and thus the critic can discern the underlying necessity for his practice of evasions. Coleridge composed his earliest extant poems while he was a charity boy at Christ's Hospital, where he was sent in 1782 after the death of his father. His earliest poems appear to have been school exercises, some of which have been preserved in albums prepared by his schoolmaster, James Boyer. The juvenile poems treat of subjects of appeal to schoolboys: Easter holidays, the dangers of a sailor's life, the persistence of hope, the misfortunes of a lover who knelt on his lady's lap dog.15 Frequently the poet ends his compositions with an explicit moral application; for example, in "Easter Holidays", after telling of the anticipated joys of the holiday, the young poet points out that "dire Misfortune's varied smarts" await the students in later years; yet he can find "heav'n-born Content" if only "steady Virtue guides his mind". In 1823 Coleridge wrote of one of his school exercises: . . . (it) does not contain a line that any clever schoolboy might not have written, and like most school poetry is a Putting of Thought into Verse; for such Verses as strivings of mind and struggles after Intense and Vivid are a fair Promise of better things.

(PW, I, 2, note 2) For the most part Coleridge's own evaluation can be accepted with the exception that the poems were productions of an exceptionally "clever schoolboy". Yet if the juvenilia lack the intensity and vividness of his later work, still some of their images 15

The analysis of the juvenile poems is not undertaken to demonstrate their poetic merit; the reader will be disappointed if he expects to see glimmerings of the brilliance of The Ancient Mariner. Instead, the analysis is included in order to identify Coleridge's early emotional attitude toward poetic composition - the typical situations which gave rise to the poems.

18

APPROACH

adumbrate the moods and emotional associations of his more successful poems. An image used frequently in the early poems - and throughout the body of Coleridge's work - is that of the eye. More so than most poets, Coleridge fills his poems with eye images, both psychological and figurative. At times the eye belongs to the personification of some principle or passion, as in "To the Muse", which begins: Tho' no bold flights to thee belong; And tho' thy lays with conscious fear, Shrink from Judgement's eye severe, Yet much I thank thee, Spirit of my song! For, lovely Muse! thy sweet employ Exalts my soul, refines my breast, Gives each pure pleasure keener zest, And softens sorrow into pensive Joy. (PW, I, 9, lines 1-8) At seventeen Coleridge could attribute healing powers to his "shaping spirit of the imagination": the poetic act then "softened sorrow into pensive Joy". Fifteen years later he was to celebrate the loss of joy in "Dejection", and was to announce the abandoment of his Muse. But in both poems the emotional associations are much the same; both appear in contexts of self-consciousness with implications of guilt or uneasiness. In the early poem the poet's lays "shrink from Judgement's eye severe"; in the later poem, the speaker himself gazes " - and with how blank an eye" - and cringes from a storm, representing his poetic inspiration. With the close associations in mind, tracing the eye images and their associated images may lead to an understanding of the poet's feelings about his relationship to his poetry. Self-consciousness and fear of criticism are also associated with the eye in another of Coleridge's short early poems, "An Invocation", in which the poet bids his muse: Now plume thy pinions, now exert each power, And fly to him who owns the candid eye. (PW, I, 16, lines 3 ^ )

APPROACH

19

Only if a smile of praise from the critic greets the Muse can it fly back to the poet; then its return will bring a "flush of Joy" to the poet's features. Here the candid eye exerts a largely inhibitory force on the poet's creativity, which suggests that the writing of poetry is not in itself justifiable; its raison d'etre is contingent upon the judgment of some outside source. After Coleridge left Christ's Hospital for Cambridge he continued to address his muse, who retains her pinions and fairy trappings. The first draft of "Lines: On an Autumnal Evening" (1793) begins: IMAGINATION, Mistress of my love! Where shall mine Eye thy elfin haunt explore? (PW, I, 49) The finished version reads: Ο THOU wild Fancy check thy wing! No more Those thin white flakes, those purple clouds explore! (PW, I, 51) Instead of actively pursuing his muse, the poet asks Fancy to " . . . bid the perish'd pleasures move / A shadowy train across the soul of Love!" The poetic vision, however, needs a particular locale; it cannot take place in the harsh sunlight. Now sheds the sinking Sun a deeper gleam, Aid, lovely Sorceress! aid thy poet's dream! With faery wand Ο bid the Maid arise, Chaste Joyance dancing in her bright-blue eyes; As erst when from the Muse's calm abode I came, with Learning's meed not unbestowed. (PW, I, 51, lines 13-18) I think it significant that the maiden, a former Love of the poet, must have chaste joyance in her eyes, that the poet insists on the absence of any untoward passion. Perhaps the poet protests too much; perhaps the modifier chaste indicates a feeling of guilt concerned with his poetic vision. Several lines later, when the vision of the maid does rise up, the same line is repeated: Ο dear Deceit! I see the Maiden rise, Chaste Joyance dancing in her bright-blue eyes!

20

APPROACH

When first the lark high-soaring swells his throat, Mocks the tired eye and scatters the loud note, I trace her footsteps on the accustom'd lawn, I mark her glancing mid the gleam of dawn.

(23-28) The poet's attitude toward the poetic vision is ambivalent; it is a "dear Deceit" - an experience to be desired yet one not to be trusted. Although syntactically the poet's "tir'd eye" is mocked by the high-soaring lark, the mocking reinforces the deceitfulness of the vision. Yet the poet feels compelled to "trace her footsteps" and "mark her glancing". Later the poet wishes to become an arbor in order to shield his vision "from the Noontide's sultry beam"; then . . . soar aloft to be the Spangled Skies, And gaze upon her with a thousand eyes!

(69-70) At this point, having completely surrendered himself to his vision, the poet abruptly turns from the fragile maid to an elaborate simile, which likens a Savage awakened from a "sunny hour of sleep" to himself, who with "eye reverted" remembers the scene where his vision occurred - a "dear native brook". The appearance of the sun in the poem marks the conclusion of the vision. The suddenness with which the progression of thought changes - in addition to marring the structure of the poem further points up the poet's divided attitude toward his poetic inspiration. The poet appears to be afraid to stay at the "end of the line" with his Muse. The poem concludes on a similar ambivalent note. Remembering the former scene which once brought hope, the poet gazes at the darkening sky: Scenes of my Hope! the aching eye ye leave Like yon bright hues that paint the clouds of eve! Tearful and saddening with the sadden'd blaze Mine eye the gleam pursues with wistful gaze: Sees shades on shades with deeper tint impend, Till chill and damp the moonless night descend.

(101-106)

21

APPROACH

Along with eye images, those of the sun and moon frequently appear in the context of poetic creation. In the passage cited the poet departs from the scene of his vision into a "moonless night". As Marshall Suther has shown in The Dark Night of Samuel Taylor Coleridge images of half lights, especially of moonlight, generally exert a benign influence on Coleridge's poetry; while references to the sun more often than not have an inhibitory effect on poetic creation.16 Both the images of sunlight and moonlight are often introduced by eye images, signaling a visionary poetic experience. The sonnet "To the Evening Star" (1790) opens with such a cluster: Ο meek attendant of Sol's setting blaze, I hail, sweet star, thy chaste efflugent glow; On thee full oft with fixed eye I gaze Till I, methinks, all spirit seems to grow. (PW, 1,16) The poet again initially insists upon the chasteness of the setting, and in the second quatrain compares the star to a maid who inspires "pure joy". By means of his overinsistence upon the purity of the experience, the poet may be attempting to purge his feelings of reluctance to enter into the poetic act. Another sonnet, "To the River Otter" (c. 1793), also contains elements of the eye-sun-moon cluster. In the poem his recollection of skipping flat stones across the surface of the stream and of counting them brings on even more memories: . . . yet so deep imprest Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes I never shut amid the sunny ray, But straight with all their tints thy waters rise, Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows grey, And bedded sand that vein'd with various dyes Gleam'd through thy bright transperence!.. . (PW, I, 48, lines 5-11) Only after shutting his eyes against the sun can the poet recall the pleasant visions of youth, memories which cannot be trusted, 16

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1960).

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APPROACH

for the poet continues: . . oft have ye beguil'd / Lone manhood's cares, yet waking fondest sighs." Coleridge's divided attitude toward the vision is apparent in the expression, "fondest sighs"; the experience is both enjoyable and painful. Eye images appear in most of Coleridge's early poems which treat of poetic inspiration. In "Songs of the Pixies" (1793) the "youthful Bard" can achieve the poetic vision only within a grotto hidden from the rays of the sun. Brought there by Indolence and Fancy, he: . . . heaves the gentle misery of a sigh Gazing with tearful eye . . . Weaving gay dreams of sunny-tinctur'd hue. (PW, I, 42, lines 38-39, 43) The poet's ambivalent feelings toward the dreams are pointed up in the oxymoron, "gentle misery of a sigh". Although the dream causes him misery, still the misery is a gentle one; and later the pixies shed their "soothing witcheries o'er his hush'd soul". "Songs of the Pixies" and most of Coleridge's poems dealing with poetic creation are pervaded with a tone of the supernatural - a feeling tantalizing yet faintly suggestive of evil. The spells are often cast by lovely sorceresses or wizards, and take place in grottoes under darkening skies. At the high point of the Pixies' revelry, Night comes on, described as the "Mother of wildly-working dreams" and as a "Sorceress". The Gothic setting of the sonnet, "To the Author of Robbers", was partly inspired by Coleridge's reading of Schillers' play in November, 1794. In a letter to Southey, he relates the effect of his first reading: 'Tis past one O'clock in the morning — I sate down at twelve O'clock to read the 'Robbers' of Schiller — I had read chill and trembling until I came to the part where Moor fires a pistol over the Robbers who are asleep. I could read no more. — My God! Southey! Who is this Schiller? This Convulser of the Heart. Did he write his Tragedy amid the yelling of Fiends? I should not like to be able to describe such Characters — I tremble like an Aspen Leaf — Upon my Soul, I write to you because I am frightened — I had better go to bed. (CL, I, 122)

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The poem written shortly afterwards opens with the description of a scene from the play - that of a famished father crying out at midnight from a dungeon. The poet conjectures that if he had written the scene, he would then wish to die, for later, "aught more mean might stamp me mortal!" Coleridge feels that the incident in the play is even more powerful than the supernatural: . . . A triumphant shout Black Horror scream'd, and all her goblin rout Diminish'd shrunk from the more withering scene! (PW, I, 73, lines 6 - 8 )

The poet then wishes for the same power: Ah! Bard tremendous in sublimity! Could I behold thee in thy loftier mood Wandering at eve with finely-frenzied eye Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood! Awhile with mute awe gazing I would brood: Then weep aloud in a wild ecstasy! (9-14)

Schiller's sublime mood focuses in his "finely-frenzied eye"; the English poet would achieve his ecstasy by gazing with mute awe. Yet the ecstasy may perhaps bring with it some pain, for the poet's initial reactions would be to "weep aloud". Further credence for the poet's equivocal attitude is provided by the initial feeling of "mute awe", an emotion both frightening and marvelous. In "Lines on a Friend" (November, 1794), Coleridge sees his own fate in that of a vicar of Ottery St. Mary who died in August of a fever. Although the poem does not specifically deal with poetic composition, a passage from it containing introspective musings can shed light on the poet's evaluation of his own personality. The poem begins with an eye image: Edmund! Thy grave with aching eye I scan, And inly groan for Heaven's poor outcast — Man! (PW, I, 76)

Then, called to Pleasure's bower, the poet views the personified miseries to which Man is susceptible, rising from the ground at

24

APPROACH

the command of the shade of the dead friend. In viewing the forms of misery common to mankind, Coleridge falls into conventional eighteenth-century diction, somewhat like that of Gray. Nonetheless, the personifications occasionally come alive, in part because the poet stresses the act done by the personification. For example: . . . Shall Slander squatting near Spit her cold venom in a dead man's ear?

(19-20) When Coleridge turns to the pain which his friend's death caused to him personally, the scene becomes more detailed, and the emotion at times more fully realized: As oft at twilight gloom thy grave I pass, And sit me down upon its recent grass, With introverted eye I contemplate Similitude of soul, perhaps of — Fate! To me hath Heaven with bounteous hand assign'd Energetic Reason and a shaping mind, The daring ken of truth, the Patriot's part, And Pity's sigh, that breathes the gentle heart — Sloth-jaundic'd all! and from my graspless hand Drop Friendship's precious pearls, like hour-glass sand. I weep, yet stoop not! the faint anguish flows, A dreamy pang in Morning's feverous doze.

(35—46) The setting of Coleridge's reflections and the inclusion of an eye image ("introverted eye") parallel those generally associated with poetic creation in his poems. Because it has not been prepared for, the poet's speculation upon a death like his friend's is unconvincing: "Similitude of soul, perhaps of - Fate!" The exclamation mark following fate and the dash before merely call attention to its inappropriateness, for at this point in the poem the reader knows nothing about the friend except that he died of a fever - and knows still less of the poet. The middle section, which lists the poet's inherited abilities, gives little insight into the poet's psychological situation. His rationalization of his unfulfilled potential does not explain his inertia; it simply describes it. The abstraction, "sloth-jaundic'd",

APPROACH

25

is merely a quality common to each unfulfilled potential. The concluding section of the passage, in which the poet figuratively demonstrates his torpor, also sheds little light on the source of his procrastination: . . . and from my graspless hand Drop Friendship's precious pearls, like hour-glass sand. I weep, yet stoop not! the faint anguish flows, A dreamy pang in Morning's feverous doze. (43-46)

The poet weeps over his lost opportunities, yet does nothing. His stasis leads to anguish and a pang of pain, but only faint anguish and a dreamy pain. The conflict between his sense of duty to bountiful Heaven and his inability to use his gifts resolves itself into a troubled sleep. Like many of the sensations associated with Coleridge's eye images, these are like the feverish symptoms of sickness, not altogether unpleasant. Perhaps the perverse pleasure which results from his conflicts is a desirable end in itself. Coleridge's perverse pleasure is not unique nor is it peculiar to the early nineteenth century. In The Romantic Agony Mario Praz has noted that the "mysterious bond between pleasure and suffering has always existed";17 however, the masochistic tendency - if it did not become more widespread — at least became more public among writers of the Romantic and Victorian periods. The sonnet, "Pantisocracy", was written in October, 1794, to commemorate the proposed colony of poets and their friends, who planned to emigrate to the banks of the Susquehana in order to found a communistic community. The poet opens by renouncing both past joys and his present evil and shame. He plans to cross the seas and "seek a cottag'd dell": Where Virtue calm with careless step may stray And dancing to the moonlight roundelay The wizard Passions weave an holy spell. Eyes that have ached with Sorrow! Ye shall weep Tears of doubt-mingled joy. (PW, I, 69, lines 6-10) "

(New York: Meridian Books, 1951), xiv.

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Here the "holy spell" can be cast only when Virtue goes astray, and the effect of the spell - like that of the poems considered earlier, is equivocal: the tears it brings about are "tears of doubt-mingled joy". The poet however, does succumb to the spell, but holds reservations about its purity. "Pantisocracy" continues with a three-line simile, comparing the poet's tears to those of a sleeper awakening from a nightmare; then (with the verb "see" syntactically parallel with "weep" in line eight) concludes with a further elaboration upon the experience: And see the rising Sun, and feel it dart New rays of pleasance trembling to the heart. (13-14) The poet's mixed feelings about the spell again occur in conjunction with the sun, which itself darts both pleasant and exquisitely painful rays. If the poem casts doubts on the complete purity of poetic experience, it also gives us an insight into Coleridge's visionary plans for the pantisocratic scheme. The poem first appeared in a letter to Robert Southey, dated September 18, 1794, in which Coleridge reviewed the events of the preceding months, and became ecstatic over the plan for emigration. Since I quitted this room what and how important Events have evolved! America! Southey! Miss Fricker! [his fiancee] — Yes — Southey — you are right — Even Love is the creature of strong Motive — I certainly love her — . . . Pantisocracy — 0 1 shall have such a scheme of it! My head, my heart are all alive — I have drawn up my arguments in battle array — thy shall have the Tactician Excellence of the Mathematician with the Enthusiasm of the Poet — The Head shall be the Mass — the Heart the fiery Spirit, that fills, informs, and agitates the whole. (CL, 1,103) Upon the urging of Southey, Coleridge had become engaged to Sara Fricker because it was agreed that only married couples could form the colony; thus Coleridge could speak of love as a "creature of strong Motive". The complete optimism of the letter is curiously at odds with the qualified "doubt-mingled Joy" of the poem contained in the letter. Six weeks later, in another letter to Southey, Coleridge raises his first explicit doubts

APPROACH

27

over the success of the venture, chiding Southey for his proposal to keep servants in America, then probing his own feelings: There is a feverish distemperature of Brain, during which some horrible phantom threatens our Eyes in every corner, until emboldened by Terror we rush on it — and then — why we return, the Heart indignant at its own palpitation! Even so will the greater part of our mental Miseries vanish before an Effort. Whatever the mind we will to do, we can do! What then palsies the Will? The Joy of Grief! A mysterious Pleasure broods with dusky Wing over the tumultuous Mind — 'and the Spirit of God moveth on the darkness of the Waters'! She [Mary Evans] WAS VERY lovely, Southey! We formed each other's minds — our ideas were blended — Heaven bless her! I cannot forget her — every day her Memory sinks deeper into my heart — Nutrito vulnere tabens Impatiensque mei, feror, undique, solus, et excors, Et desideriis pascor! — I wish, Southey! in the stern severity of Judgment, that the two Mothers were not to go and that the children stayed with them. . . . That Mrs. Flicker — we shall have her teaching the Infants Christianity, — I mean — that mongrel whelp that goes under its name — teaching them by stealth in some ague-fit of superstition. (CL, I, 123) The free-association of ideas so characteristic of Coleridge's prose provides a key to solving the riddle of his mixed feelings about his fiancee, and perhaps about his poetic creativity. The horrible phantom which threatened his eyes appears to be related to his poetic muse or the "wizard passions". Its conjunction with the eye and with a fever heightens the relationship. In the passage cited the phantom is equated with the "mysterious pleasure brooding with dusky wing" and with "the spirit of God". Just as he can exorcise the phantom by sheer will-power, so his mental miseries, too, can be done away with - but the miseries are masochistically pleasant: They arouse "the Joy of Grief". By implication, the phantom, too, shares the divided feelings; the poet has difficulty dispelling it because it, too, may bring a type of joy - joy which grows out of the "distemperature of brain". The reason for Coleridge's mental miseries becomes apparent

28

APPROACH

with the abrupt allusion to Mary Evans, whom he could not forget in spite of his betrothal to Sara Fricker. The conflict between his duty to Sara and his continued love for Mary brought him a perverse joy. The reason for his troubled thoughts about his poetry may also lie in a conflict - a conflict between the vague mysticism into which his poetry led him and his views on Christianity. The sudden introduction of Mrs. Fricker's mongrel Whelp Christianity - following his blessing of Mary Evans, the source of his exquisite joy - makes the association probable. A similar cluster of images occurs in "The Eolian Harp", composed in the following August. Coleridge was still engaged to Sara Fricker (because of his "Schematic passion" for Pantisocracy) but he was admittedly still in love with Mary Evans. The poem, however, was addressed to "my pensive Sara". The first eleven lines set a tranquil scene. Sara and the poet sit beside their cottage at eventide, looking at the evening star and listening to the murmur of the sea. The next fourteen lines describe the sound of an aeolian harp placed in the casement. The poet then recalls his earlier thoughts, while lying alone on a hillside, in terms of the harp, and then concludes: And what if all of animated nature, Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd 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? (PW, I, 102, lines 44-18)

But under Sara's "more serious eye a mild reproof / Darts" and the poet rejects "these shapings of the unregenerate mind": For never guiltless may I speak of him, The Incomprehensible! save when with awe I praise, and with faith that inly feels. (58-60)

Some critics interpret the poem as a record of the early influence of German metaphysics on Coleridge's philosophy, as a rejection of Hartley for Kant.18 This approach, although it describes 18

Η . N . Fairchild, Religious

Trends

Columbia University Press, 1949), 287.

in English

Poetry,

ΠΙ (New York:

APPROACH

29

Coleridge's philosophy, does not adequately explain the poet's abrupt rejection of the ideas in lines 44-48. By treating only the metaphysical implications in the poem critics overlook the fact that Coleridge's "philosophical opinions are blended with or deduced from [his] feelings" (CL, I, 164). In order to fully explain Coleridge's rejection, an interpretation must include both his personal and his philosophical attitudes. Sara Fricker represents the personal situation in the poem. It is through her darting "mild reproof" that the poet is reminded that he is a "sinful and most miserable man". (The passage recalls Milton's "great task-Master's eye".) A few months earlier, Coleridge wrote to Southey about his forthcoming marriage to Sara: To lose her! [Mary Evans] — I can rise above that selfish Pang. But to marry another — Ο Southey! bear with my weakness. Love makes all thing pure and heavenly like itself: — but to marry a woman whom I do not love — to degrade her, whom I call Wife, by making her the instrument of low Desire — and on the removal of a desultory Appetite, to be perhaps not displeased with her Absence! — Enough! — These refinements are the wildering Fires, that lead me into Vice. Mark you, Southey! / will do my duty. (CL, I, 145)

Even before his marriage, Coleridge associated Sara with obligations, with a reluctant surrender of a desirable partner for a less desirable one. In "The Eolian Harp" Sara becomes the instrument of his declining a type of pantheism for "The family of Christ". The poet's diction changes with the change of philosophical camps. In the lines quoted above (44-48) the thought proceeds smoothly and logically. For the most part, the meter emphasizes the important words. But in the lines immediately following, the progression of thought is interrupted by a parenthetical expression (O beloved Woman), by an inversion (thoughts / Dim and Unhallow'd), and by a double negative: But thy more serious eye a mild reproof Darts, Ο beloved Woman! nor such thoughts Dim and unhallow'd dost thou not reject, And biddest me walk humbly with my God. (49-52)

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The implication is that the poet feels uncomfortable in Sara's pew. If the poet was reluctant to embrace orthodoxy, then why did he submit? Why did he shrink from the "one intellectual breeze"? Part of the answer lies in a note printed with the poem, meant to clarify the following lines: For never guiltless may I speak of him, The Incomprehensible! save when with awe I praise him, and with faith that inly feels L'athee n'est point ä mes yeux un faux esprit; je puis vivre avec lui aussi bien et mieux qu'avec la devot, car il raisonne davantage, mais il lui manque un sens, et mon ame ne se fond point entirement avec la sienne: il est froid au spectacle le plue ravissant, et il cherche un syllogiame lorsque je rends une action de grace. 'Appel a l'impartiale posterite, par la Citoyenne Roland, troisieme partie, p. 67.

The effect of the note is to head off any possible charge of atheism, for unlike an atheist, he can react to delightful sights, he can "inly feel". The footnote and some of Coleridge's private writings suggest that he felt that atheism was the logical conclusion to his pantheistic speculations, which were intimately connected with his vaguely mystical conception of the poetic experience. Several months after the composition of the poem he wrote to John Edwards: How is it that Dr. Priestley is not an atheist? — He asserts in three different places, that God not only does, but is everything. — But if God be every Thing, every Thing is God — : which is all, the Atheists assert — , An eating, drinking, lustful God — with no unity of Consciousness — these appear to me the unavoidable Inferences from his philosophy. Has not Dr. Priestly forgotten that Incomprehensibility is as necessary an attribute of the First Cause, as Love, or Power, or Intelligence? (CL, I, 192-193)

And several years later he confided to his notebook: And we recede from anthropomorphitism [sic] we must go either to the Trinity or to a Pantheism — The Fathers who were Unitarians were Anthropomorphites.19 18

The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I, ed. by Kathleen Coburn (New York: Pantheon Books, 1957), entry 922.

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31

In her note to the entry Miss Coburn states that "He probably began to write 'atheism' (at the canceled A) and changed to 'Pantheism'." The quotations point up Coleridge's philosophical and religious dilemma: he wanted to believe that life was harmonious, that his mind was attuned to Nature in a give-and-take relationship, yet he realized that at the end of such speculation lay either the Trinity or atheism, both of which were at this time repugnant to him.20 In the latter part of "The Eolian Harp" - possibly to avoid the opprobrium of atheism - he reluctantly chose a type of Trinity, and characteristically placed the responsibility for the unpleasant decision on someone else, his beloved Sara. In the following December Coleridge cited the lines in connection with a discussion of the meaning of spiritual life. After differentiating between animal and spiritual life, he introduced lines 44-48 (with "thought" underscored): "Monro believes in a plastic immaterial nature - all pervading." But apparently he repudiated his lines, for he went on by refuting, in turn, Blood, the orthodox Soul, and Plato's Harmony to arrive at this conclusion: "On the whole, I have rather made up my mind that I am a mere apparition - naked Spirit - And that Life is I myself I! which is a mighty clear account of it" (CL, I, 294-295). A mighty clear account indeed! Even after making allowances for his levity, the evasiveness of his definition suggests that Coleridge had not yet solved his dilemma. The conflict between Coleridge's religious views and the nature of his poetic vision is further elaborated upon in a letter written to John Thelwall in April, 1796. Although Coleridge had not yet met Thelwall, he was corresponding with him in hopes of arranging a meeting. After speaking of the poetry he had already written, Coleridge continues: I build all m y poetic pretentions o n the Religious Musings — w h i c h y o u will read with a Poet's Eye, with the same unprejudicedness, I 80

Coleridge frequently shifted his ground in his speculations on the relationship between pantheism and atheism. As late as 1816 he continued to tiptoe around the prickly concept: "Pantheism is therefore not necessarily irreligious or heretical; though it may be taught atheistically" (BL, I, 169170). See also Notebooks, I, 1379.

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wish, I could add, the same pleasure, with which the atheistic Poem of Lucretius. (CL, I, 205) Thelwall, too, had written verse, which Coleridge read earlier. Coleridge here considers the Poet's Eye (and perhaps the poetic inspiration) to be divided. Such poems as his "Religious Musings", a not too orthodox Unitarian poem, can be read with unprejudicedness, while a poem such as the "atheistic Poem of Lucretius" can be read with pleasure. Although in the passage cited Coleridge ascribes the division to another poet who was an avowed atheist, it has been demonstrated in the analyses above that the same division was associated with Coleridge's own conception of poetic creation. The forbidden, the skeptical, brought the "Joy of Grief".

1. HOOTING AT THE GLORIOUS SUN IN HEAVEN: SUN AND WEED IMAGERY IN THE POEMS TO OSORIO

The conflict between religious views and poetic composition is evident not only in Coleridge's letters and in footnotes to poems but also in image clusters in his poems and prose. In the poems dealing with poetic creation considered earlier, the appearance of the sun in an eye image cluster frequently marked the end of the poet's impulse to create. It will be recalled that the poetic experiences took place in the evening after sundown, or in spots sheltered "from the Noon-tide's sultry beam"; or that the poet had to shut his eyes "amid the sunny ray" before the vision could appear. Half-lights or moonlight, however, most often enhanced the vision. The sun has been traditionally equated with kings and with God. Its use in the former sense can be illustrated by a passage form Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I, in which Bolingbroke admonishes Hal for his over-familiarity with common people: . . . seen, but with such eyes As, sick and blunted with community, Afford no extraordinary gaze, Such as is bent on sun-like majesty When it shines seldom in admiring eyes. (Ill, 76-80) Coleridge, too sometimes equates the sun with the throne. For example, in "Religious Musings" one of the political digressions concerns "the wretched many! Bent beneath their loads", who "gape at pageant Power...", Coleridge continues ironically: . . . Blessed Society! Fitliest depictured by some sun-scorched waste,

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HOOTING AT THE GLORIOUS SUN IN HEAVEN

Where oft majestic through the tainted noon The Simoon Sails, before whose purple pomp W h o falls not prostrate dies.

(PW, I, 118-119, lines 265-269) Here the poet associates the king both with the simoom, a hot and violent desert wind, and with the sun, which has scorched the land. Other sun-king images are more explicit. The following appeared in the second edition of the Watchman: N o w as the Sun of the planetary, so is the Court, the centre of the ecclesiastical system; and its centripetal force is its power of conferring good livings and lucrative dignities. The Bishops are the larger bodies in this system, some at greater, some at lesser distances, but all revolving round their Sun, and rejoicing in the heat and radiance of ministerial favour. 1

But the sun-king symbolism is rare in Coleridge's writings. When used symbolically, the sun generally extends the traditional identification with God to include not only the godhead but religion as well. Explicit sun-religion symbolism occurs in "Religious Musings", which Coleridge began on Christmas Eve, 1794, and finally published in 1796. As its title suggests, "Religious Musings" is an attempt to set in order the poet's religious beliefs.2 Near the beginning of the long poem (419 lines), Coleridge attempts to explain the reason for the punishment of man by God. According to the poet, God's wrath is "salutary"; it can lead the believer to virtue: Thus from the Elect, regenerate through faith, Pass the dark Passions and what thirsty cares Drink up the s p i r i t . . . . (88-90)

In a footnote to the passage, Coleridge illustrates the thorny theological point with a simile: Our evil Passions, under the influence of Religion, become innocent, and may be made to animate our virtue — in the same manner as the 1

"A Defence of the Church Establishment", Watchman, II (March 9, 1796), in Essays on His Own Times, I, ed. by Sara Coleridge (London: John Murray, 1850), 128-129. * In a later section of the present study, the religious doctrines of the poem will be closely analyzed; at this point I shall examine only the sun images contained in the poem.

HOOTING AT THE GLORIOUS SUN IN HEAVEN

35

thick mist melted by the Sun, increases the light which it had before excluded.

In this instance the sun and religion are explicitly correlated. Other passages in the poem contain the same symbol, but the referent of religion is sometimes obscured by Coleridge's obfuscatory religious terminology. In speaking of the nature of faith, for example, Coleridge represents God first as "one omnipresent Mind", then as Love, and finally as "Truth of sublimine import!" In describing the believer's way of life, he turns to sun imagery: He from his small particular orbit f l i e s , . . . Stands in the sun, and with no partial gaze Views all creation; and he loves it all, And blesses it and calls it very good! (109,11-113)

A few lines later, the poet expands upon the effects of the religious life: . . . 'Tis the sublime of man, Our noontide Majesty, to know ourselves Parts and proportions of one wondrous whole. (126-128)

Here the knowledge that he is at one with God and all creation forms the believer's "noontide Majesty"; the knowledge of his pantheistic state is the sun which makes the possessor godlike. Similarly, the final sun-religion image in the poem illustrates the changes wrought by contemplation of Love, the divine essence. Before joining "The mystic choir" the poet resolves to discipline his thoughts: And aye on Meditation's heaven-ward wing Soaring aloft I breathe the empyreal air Of Love, omnific, omnipresent Love, Whose day-spring rises glorious in my soul As the great Sun, when he his influence Sheds on the frost-bound waters — The glad stream Flows to the ray and warbles as it flows. (413-419)

The inclusiveness of the metaphor of the sun - encompassing

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HOOTING AT THE GLORIOUS SUN IN HEAVEN

as it does, both the study (Meditation) and practice of divine principles - can lead to the interpretation of the sun as religion in general, and not simply the godhead. The sun-religion must have held a strong appeal for the poet, for although his publicly held religious views changed frequently, the metaphor retained its meaning throughout his lifetime. In "The Destiny of Nations", composed shortly after "Religious Musings", the sun holds its association with religion, but takes on a number of Platonic trappings. Near the beginning of the poem, after the invocation to "the Great F a t h e r . . . the One", the poet seeks to praise God by utilizing all his earthly gifts. As an illustration of the relationship of the mundane to the divine, Coleridge alludes to Plato's allegory of the cave. "All that meets the bodily sense" the poet believes to be "Symbolical, one mighty alphabet for infant minds": . . . and we in this low world Placed with our backs to bright Reality, That we may learn with young unwounded Ken The substance from the shadow. Infinite Love Whose latence is the plenitude of All, Thou with retracted beams, and self-eclipse Veiling, revealest thine eternal Sun. (PW, 1,132, lines 20-26)

The passage illustrates several doctrines. The material world is spoken of in terms of Plato's Theory of Ideas. The world (shadow) is but an imperfect imitation of a perfect original (sun). The believer can comprehend the world of forms only partly by the use of his lesser powers of reason. The mundane world, however, does reflect the ideal world. Coleridge refers to the reflection as the Sun's "self-eclipse". The passage also embodies the Unitarian doctrine of accommodation, i.e., God accommodates himself to human reason by revealing only part of his essence. The Unitarian and Platonic metaphors of the sun dovetail with Coleridge's personal signification. In his vocabulary of religious terms "Infinite Love" often embraced both God and the practice of religion. Here it is equated with the sun.

HOOTING AT THE GLORIOUS SUN IN HEAVEN

37

While composing "The Destiny of Nations" Coleridge apparently agreed with both Unitarian and Platonic principles, for the invocation emphasizes the unity and paternalism of God, while the borrowing from the allegory of the cave reflects Platonism; and other passages, too, reveal Coleridge's belief in nature as an extension of God, or of the divine energy. As a Unitarian, Coleridge found sufficient philosophical latitude to encompass contradictory concepts. Within a decade Coleridge abandoned Unitarianism and his beloved Hartley for the orthodox Anglican church and Kantian metaphysics. Between the two religious camps lay his greatest poetry and also his severest personal sufferings. If his philosophic basis for his religious beliefs sometimes varied, his religious symbolism remained fixed. In 1798 Coleridge still found "religious meanings in the forms of Nature"; nonetheless, in "Fears in Solitude" contemplation of natural forms brought only political and economic injustice to the poet's mind. Even faith doth reel" under the evils, and its opponents become bold: . . . the owlet Atheism, Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, Drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close, And hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, Cries out, 'Where is it?' (PW, I, 259, lines 82-86)

Significantly, the image of the eye appears in the same cluster with both religion and atheism. Just as the introduction of the sun-religion image frequently inhibits the poetic creation, so the appearance of the eye image in passages concerning religious faith often accompanies a conflict between religion and atheism. The sun retains its religious significance in a fragment, to which Ε. H. Coleridge ascribes the date, 1803: Bright clouds of reverence, sufferably bright, That intercept the dazzle, not the Light; That veil the finite form, the boundless power reveal, Itself an earthly sun of pure intensest white. (PW, II, 998)

38

HOOTING AT THE GLORIOUS SUN IN HEAVEN

The "earthly sun" has as its referent the "boundless power", i.e., the faith of Christian believers. The same imagery appears in another fragment, written in 1816: O! Superstition is the giant shadow Which the solicitude of weak mortality, Its back toward Religion's rising sun, Casts on the thin mist of th' uncertain future. (PW, II, 1007)

In his prose works, too, the sun-religion metaphor comes up frequently. Writing of the truth of religion, Coleridge turns to the accustomed metaphor - this time contrasting the light of the sun with that of the moon, which was earlier shown to be benign to poetic creation: The light of religion is not that of the moon. . . . Religion is the sun, whose warmth indeed swells, and stirs, and actuates the life of nature, but who at the same time beholds all the growth of life with a master eye, makes all objects glorious on which he looks, and by that glory visible to all others.3 A pure Conscience, that inward something . . . I say, bears the same relation to God, as an accurate Timepiece bears to the Sun. The Time-piece merely indicates the relative path of the Sun, yet we can regulate our plans and proceedings by it with the same confidence as if it was itself the cause of light, heat, and the revolving seasons.4

In the latter passage, Coleridge extends the significance of the sun to include the dictates of conscience, and thus brings the symbolic action of the poems dealing with poetic creation into sharper focus. As the poet's conscience, the sun stands in opposition to the moon; his religious views oppose his poetic creation. (Other explicit references to the sun as religion are contained in the following: "The paternal and filial duties discipline the heart and prepare it for the love of all mankind. The intensity of private attachments encourages, not prevents, universal benevolence. The nearer we approach to the sun, the more intense his heat: yet what corner of the system does he not cheer and vivify." 5 Speaking of the British practice of encouraging 8

The Friend (Burlington, Vermont, 1831), 86. The Friend, 126-127. 5 Condones and Populum, "Introductory Address", in Essays on His Own Times, I, 25.

*

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scalping in America: "The sun of enquiry shone full and fierce upon it, and the blood of the innocent was steaming up to heaven!" 6 Granted that such a conflict exists, the reason for Coleridge's poetic decline still remains hidden. Conflicts do not necessarily end creative activity; in fact, some poets base their work on the agony growing out of a clash between divided loyalties. John Donne, for example, was torn between allegiance to the church and sensuality. Hopkins, too, was attracted to the church, but at the same time felt compelled to revolt from its discipline. The record of both poets' ambivalent interests forms much of their total work. Coleridge, however, wrote no poetry explicitly concerned with the conflict between his religious views and poetic composition. Perhaps he refused to acknowledge their incongruity. The ambivalence is apparent only upon an analysis of symbolic action. The relationship between Coleridge's discordant views and his poetic decline can be determined only after reaching an understanding of the nature of the poet's spiritual beliefs and his emotional attitudes toward religion. For poetry and religion are not always at odds. An analysis of Coleridge's particular beliefs may uncover the cause of his individual problem. Determining the nature of anyone's theology presents complex problems of methodology and influence. Coleridge's theology is no exception; in fact, an investigation of Coleridge's religious thinking presents unique difficulties. One of these has been alluded to earlier, i.e., the frequent variation in both his publicly held beliefs and in the philosophic bases of his religion. The speculations of Hartley, Priestley, Boehme, and Kant danced through Coleridge's mind, and were duly entered into his notebooks. The shifts in philosophic thinking can be traced with some degree of assurance, for the poet left a clearly marked trail in notebook entries, letters, and essays. In fact, the multiplicity of his philosophic and religious jottings presents another problem in itself - the poet, in explaining his beliefs to different people, •

"On the Present War", in Essays on His Own Times, I, 37.

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sometimes contradicts himself. The critic is then placed in the perplexing position of deciding which - if any - of the expressed religious views Coleridge did in fact embrace. Concerning the efficacy of prayer, for example, Coleridge's beliefs were mercurial, to say the least. In December, 1794, he included a poem, "To a Friend", in a letter sent to Charles Lamb. The poem contained the following lines: He knows (the Spirit that in secret sees, Of whose omniscient and all-spreading Love Aught to implore were impotence of mind). (PW, I, 79, lines 26-28)

Thus late in 1794 Coleridge apparently held prayer in contempt. But when the poem appeared in Poems, 1797, the lines were amended by a footnote: I utterly recant the sentiment contained in the lines, — it being written in Scripture, 'Ask, and it shall be given you,' and my human reason being moreover convinced of the propriety of offering petitions as well as thanksgivings to Deity.

Between the composition of the poem and the addition of the footnote, Coleridge's attitude toward prayer vacillated several times. In March, 1796, in a letter addressed to a Unitarian minister, he appears to approve of prayer, but the flippant tone of the passage forces the reader to question the writer's real feeling: I am all one Tremble of sensibility, Marriage having taught me the wonderful uses of the vulgar article, yclept BREAD . . . I know you do not altogether approve of direct Petitions to Deity — but in case there should be an efficacy in them, out of pity to the Guts of others pray for the Brains of your Friend. (CL, 1,192)

Later in the year after the birth of a son made his need for bread even greater, Coleridge recorded an unsuccessful attempt to pray. He describes the situation in a letter to his close friend, Thomas Poole: I was quite annihlated with the suddenness of the information —

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and retired to my room to address myself to my Maker — but I could only offer up to him the silence of stupified Feelings. (CL, I, 236)

Two months later, in "Ode to the Departing Year", Coleridge could speak of his acts of prayer with no such misgivings: Away, my soul, away! I unpartaking of the evil thing. With daily prayer and daily toil Soliciting for food my scanty soil, Have wail'd my country with a loud Lament. (PW, I, 168, lines 1 5 3 - 1 5 7 )

Confronted with such a bewildering array of intellectual and emotional attitudes, the reader may easily throw up his hands in despair at Coleridge's caprice; or like Η. N. Fairchild, he may ascribe the poet's irresolution to his changing psychological fortunes. Fairchild believes that when Coleridge faced personal or economic misfortune, he then turned to orthodox religion; but when fortune smiled on him, he turned away from orthodoxy toward the benevolent naturalism of the early eighteenth century.7 Fairchild, however, imposes a too rigid pattern upon the poet's religious attitudes. Much of his evidence is gathered from Coleridge's letters, in which contradictions are most likely to occur. Coleridge was sensitive to the personalities and opinions of his readers, and often attempted to please them by conforming to their views. Thus Coleridge's letters to different correspondents sometimes range in tone from obsequious to arrogant, and in religious sentiment from orthodox to secular. For example, in letters to his brother George, an Anglican clergyman, Coleridge, in an abject tone, often alludes to his sins and guilt; while his letters to Thelwall, a professed atheist, sometimes verge on apostasy. The variation between Coleridge's public and his private views also makes evaluation echinate. In published material Coleridge tended to express fewer heterodox views than he did Religious Trends in English Poetry, ΠΙ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 238. 7

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in his private notebooks and marginalia, where he tended to question orthodoxy closely. Such a dichotomy occurs between the published version of "The Raven" and a manuscript note to the poem. The original version, first published in the Morning Post in 1798, narrates the tale of the sinking of a ship with the loss of all hands at the instigation of a raven, whose nest had been destroyed when the tree was chopped down to furnish planks for the ship. The raven then flies off, meeting Death on a cloud: And he [the raven] thank'd him again and again for this treat: They had taken his all, and REVENGE IT WAS SWEET! (PW, L, 171, lines 43-44) As the poem first appeared its theme was strongly naturalistic. Fate - if not malevolent, acted at least indifferently to all concerned. In a later published version, Coleridge added the following lines, which undercut the original sentiment: We must not think so; but forget and forgive, And what Heaven gives life to, we'll still let it live. (PW, 1,171, note to line 44) The fairy tale ending was not the last word: in a manuscript note to the additional lines, Coleridge explained the reason for their inclusion: Added thro' cowardly fear of the Goody! What a Hollow, where the Heart of Faith ought to be, does it not betray? this alarm concerning Christian morality that will not permit even a Raven to be a Raven, nor a Fox a Fox, but demands conventicular justice to be inflicted on their unchristian conduct, or at least an antidote to be annexed. (PW, I, 171, note to line 44) Despite his marginal mutterings, Coleridge did publish the lines which betrayed "a Hollow, where the Heart of Faith ought to be". If the manuscript note had not been preserved, the later published version could be cited as evidence for a reversal of Coleridge's views on nature - he himself would be classed with the "Goody". The contradictory beliefs contained in various letters and

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published and unpublished poetry should make the critic aware of the complexity of the task of arriving at generalizations concerning Coleridge's faith. Coleridge's sincerity - or lack of it is not the issue. Only Coleridge himself could know at the time of writing whether or not he meant what he wrote. Instead of probing for flaws in the poet's moral character, the critic should try to learn the reasons for the apparent contradictions, and their effect on his poetry. Instead of simply classifying the poet's faith according to its adherence to points of doctrine, the critic - if his chief concern is interpretation of poetry - should find the major premises of the poet's beliefs, the basic relationships between God and man, for these are the stuff of poetry. Minor points of Christian doctrine, such as virgin birth or baptism, are of interest to the religious historian, not to the literary critic. Coleridge attempted to embody his beliefs in "Religious Musings" published in 1796. Apparently he was deeply preoccupied with the poem, for he often wrote of its progress to his correspondents, and spoke highly of its merit. In October, 1795, before its publication, he wrote of it to Joseph Cottle, his publisher: The Nativity ["Religious Musings"] is not quite three hundred lines — it has cost me much labor in polishing, more than any poem I ever wrote — and I believe, deserves it more. (CL, 1,162)

Coleridge's estimate of the poem may be gathered from a letter to Benjamin Flower, a Cambridge friend and editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer: "I rest for all my poetical credit on the Religious Musings" (CL, I, 197). Within a month, however, Coleridge qualified his earlier praise. To Thomas Poole, he wrote that it contained "instances of vicious affectation in the phraseology" and that its "versification is not equally rich". A few months later he could speak of the poem's obscurity. More readers today agree with Coleridge's latter estimate than with the former. "Religious Musings" is studded with personifications and epithets not now appreciated. In fact, most of the poems

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in which Coleridge explicitly treats religion are thought of as somewhat flat today. Part of the reason for the obscurity of the poem may lie in the diversity of subject matter. Along with the religious speculations on the uses of evil, the character of the Elect, and the Millennium, Coleridge interjected a number of political topics: the French Revolution, the war with France, and the origin and uses of property. In the early editions the poem was prefixed with an Argument, which labeled the political matter as a Digression. The extent of the departure can be measured by the fact that Coleridge included over a hundred lines of the poem in the Watchman under the title, "The Present State of Society". The lack of fusion between the political and religious elements creates some confusion about the author's chief theme. Although the title prepares the reader for a spiritual meditation, and the number of lines devoted to religion per se outnumber those on politics, still the extra-religious lines receive rhetorical emphasis out of proportion to their number. In the sections dealing with the French Revolution and the war with France, Coleridge attacked particular rulers, dealing in tangibles; while the religious portions contain vague generalizations and personifications of abstractions. Coleridge's numerous footnotes also add to the vividness of the political passages, while the religious footnotes, largely based on the Book of Revelations, are as bewildering as the phrases they are meant to clarify. The apparent care given to the political passages leads one to suspect that the religious passages served simply as a vehicle to convey his political ideas - and at the same time to clothe his unpopular anti-war sentiment with the respectability of religion. He freely admitted injecting politics into sermons which he preached while seeking subscribers for the Watchman. To Josiah Wade he wrote that his . . sermons, (a great part extempore) were preciously peppered with Politics" (CL, I, 176). Two weeks later he wrote to a Unitarian minister: "I was not sorry for the application (to preach) - as the Sacred may eventually help off the profane - and my Sermons spread a sort of sanctity over my Sedition" (CL, I, 179). If he sought to reconcile

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his republican beliefs with Christian dogma, the attempt was unsuccessful, for the two remain disparate. Coleridge had not yet hit upon a means of objectifying his religious feelings - of embodying them in appropriate symbols or allegories. Later, in such poems as "Frost at Midnight" he found a way to express his inner feelings about the relationship between nature and man; but when faced with the problem of depicting positive and assertive aspects of nature, Coleridge at this time turned to stilted personifications. The nearly mechanical effect of such personifications as "mitred Atheism" and "Embattling Interests" suggests an immaturity of poetic craftsmanship and of religious thinking. In spite of the obscurity and deviation of "Religious Musings", several religious principles dominate the poem. One of these, the unity of the godhead, has been discussed earlier. Coleridge embraced Unitarianism while at Cambridge, probably at the prompting of his schoolmate, William Frend. By 1795-96 he had considered accepting a position as a Unitarian minister. The theme of God's unity appears early in the poem. Although the subtitle - "Written on the Christmas Eve of 1794" anticipates a joyful poem on the nativity, Coleridge merely alludes to Christ's birth, then pictures Christ's crucifixion. In the first published version, the insistence on the mortal nature of Christ is stronger than in later versions. In the 1797 edition Coleridge omitted such lines as the following: . . . Ο thou meekest Man! Meek Man and lowliest of the Sons of Men! who thee beheld thy imag'd Father saw. (PW, I, 109, lines 25-27) The revision of lines five to twenty-five includes a figure of repetition known as expanadiplosis (the recapitulator) strongly reminiscent in its imagery of Milton's brilliant figure in Book IV of Paradise Lost, lines 641-656. Coleridge's figure compares the light of the sun and stars ("True impress each of their creating Sire!") to Christ and finds them less brilliant. The revision removes the emphasis on the mortal nature of Christ, although it does retain the phrases: "the oppressed good man" and "the

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scourged saint". Between 1796 and 1797 Coleridge began to turn away from the Unitarian doctrine of the unity of the godhead. The next stanza elaborates upon another Unitarian premise cosmic oneness. All thoughts and associations begin in and ultimately return to a loving God. As we approach nearer to God, the crude passions are refined and a moral sense emerges; finally a state of theophany can be achieved: And first by Terror, Mercy's startling prelude, Uncharm'd the Spirit spell-bound with earthy lusts. Till of its nobler nature it 'gan feel Dim recollections; and thence soared to Hope,. . . From Hope and stronger Faith to perfect Love Attracted and absorbed . . . Till by exclusive consciousness of God All self-annihilated it shall make God its Identity. (note to line 32)

To give scientific support to an obviously transcendental process, Coleridge cited several pages from Hartley's Observations on Man, and notes by Pistorius which "freed (Hartley) from the charge of Mysticism". Unlike the Victorian poets of the following century, Coleridge felt no acute conflict between his religion and "scientific" psychology, since Hartley could encompass both mysticism and mechanism in his scheme. Hartley provided a necessitarian rationale for Coleridge's platonic doctrine. Yet the poet's insistence on mustering scientific evidence suggests an uneasiness over the credibility of cosmic oneness. Coleridge restated the doctrine of theophany in the following stanza - this time without footnotes, but with strong allusions to Plato. The elect of Heaven, Coleridge felt, with "their strong eye darting through the deeds of men", can "Patiently ascend": Treading beneath their feet all visible things As steps, that upward to their Father's throne Lead gradual — else nor glorified nor loved. (51-53)

Having reached the mystic destination, the elect can realize in

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retrospect that the seeming evil in the world was in reality God's "salutary wrath", that the earthly distinction between good and evil is fallacious, for in God's sight, all is pure. For they [the elect] dare know of what may seem deform The Supreme Fair sole operant: in whose sight All things are pure, his strong controlling love Alike from all educing perfect good. (55-58)

Yet in spite of his assertion that good can be educed from evil, Coleridge continued to grope for assurance; he attempted to fit political evils into his framework of universal love. A footnote to the next section of the poem equates the Anglo-French war and the slave trade with Superstition, which "films the eye of Faith / Hiding the present God." . . . he who wishes to estimate the evils of Superstition, should transport himself, not to the temple of the Mexican Deities, but to the plains of Flanders, or the coast of Africa. (note to line 133)

The poem continues with a shrill passage, recounting the horrors of the war, and condemning its instigators. Catherine II, Empress of Russia, is personified as that "foul Woman of the North"; Frederick William II, King of Prussia, as a "conatural Mind". Britain, itself, is castigated for waging war in the name of Christianity. Coleridge then abruptly drops his vitriolic tone, and returns to his religious meditations: These, even these, in mercy did'st thou form, Teachers of Good through Evil, by brief wrong Making truth lovely, and her future might Magnetic o'er the fixed untrembling heart. (194-197)

The declaration, however, fails to convince. The poet had pictured the evils too emotionally and too vividly to call them now merely "brief wrong"; the rulers emerged as too ruthless and vile to be lightly dismissed as "teachers of Good through Evil". The anticlimactic passage suggests the moral which Coleridge added to "The Raven" as a sop to the Goody: "We must not think so, but forget and forgive."

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Coleridge wanted to believe that the universe was entirely pure - that good could come out of evil, but the difficulty he had in integrating the political and religious elements in "Religious Musings" suggests that he might have had misgivings about the benignity of the universe. Part of the difficulty in assimilation can be attributed to his uncongenial literary form. The abstract and spiritual come across less vividly in personifications than do the tangible embodiments of evil. Even Milton's God in Paradise Lost is generally thought to be less credible than Satan. Several months after publishing the poem, Coleridge admitted that it contained "vicious affectation in phraseology". Readers may well feel uneasy when the final destruction - "the blackvisaged, red-eyed Fiend", and the French Revolution - "the old Hag, unconquerable, huge, / Creation's eyeless drudge" are made to serve an omnific and benevolent God. Apparently Coleridge pondered the problem of the existence of evil often. Writing on the evils of the slave trade in the Watchman he quoted a passage from "Religious Musings" which included the line: "Wide-wasting ills! yet each the immediate source / Of mightier good!" Following the passage Coleridge continues, casting doubts on the soundness of his convictions: I have the firmest Faith, that the final cause of all evils in the moral and natural world is to awaken intellectual activity. Man, a vicious and discontented animal, by his vices and discontent is urged to develop the powers of the Creator, and by new combinations of those powers to imitate his creativeness. And from such enlargement of mind benevolence will necessarily follow. . . . In my calmer moments I have the firmest faith that all things work together for good. But alas! it seems a long and dark process. 8

Similar doubts are expressed in a notebook entry, recorded about this time: "Bad means for a good end - I cannot conceive [there can be] any road to Heaven through Hell - " 9 Even more evidence of a difference between his publicly stated views on universal benevolence and his private reserva8

Watchman, IV (March 25, 1796), in Essays on His Own Times, I, 139140. • Notebooks, I, 56.

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tions is found in "Ode to the Departing Year", written late in December, 1796. Like "Religious Musings", it is an attempt to explain the evils of the slave trade and the war with France in terms of God's "salutary wrath". Coleridge prefixed the ode with an Argument addressed "to the Divine Providence that regulates into one vast harmony all the events of time, however calamitous some of them may appear to mortals" (PW, I, 160). In the first strophe the poet, with his "eye fix'd on Heaven's unchanging clime", sees a vision of the Departing Year. After calling on men to serve the cause of Justice and Truth, the poet marks the evils of the past year: the death of the "insatiate Hag" (Empress of Russia) and the slaughter of soldiers on the continent. In the first and second antistrophes the Planetary Angel of the Earth addresses God, imploring him to take vengeance, to "open thine eye of fire". The poem concludes with a prophecy of the destruction of Albion, and the disengagement of the poet: Away, my soul, away! I unpartaking of the evil thing, With daily prayer and daily toil Soliciting for food my scanty soil, Have wail'd my country with a loud Lament. Now I recentre my immortal mind In the deep Sabboth of meek self-content.

(153-159) As the summary suggests, Coleridge devoted the bulk of the poem to calamitous events and the wrath of God, while he merely implied the regulation "into one vast harmony". Its tone of disillusionment is enhanced by several allusions and short quotations from the Book of Ecclesiastes, which Coleridge entered in his notebook, presumably before they found their way into the poem. Coleridge's footnotes to the poem also stress only the punitive nature of God. The note to the passage invoking destruction to Albion, for example, reads in part: Such wickedness cannot pass unpunished. We have been proud and confident in our alliance and our fleets — but God has prepared the

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canker-worm, and will smite the gourds of our pride. (note to line 135) Coleridge concludes his dire prediction with a passage from the Book of Nahum, in which the prophet threatens the Israelites with the punishment of the God of the Old Testament. Aware, perhaps, of the punitive tone of the ode, Coleridge inserted the following remark in the Preface to the 1796 edition: I am more anxious lest the moral spirit of the Ode should be mistaken. You, I am sure, will not fail to recollect that among the Ancients, the Bard and the Prophet were one and the same character; and you know, that although I prophesy curses, I pray fervently for blessings. (PW, II, 1114) The Preface could have been placed at the head of the poem to misdirect the reader's emphasis - to focus his attention on the minor theme of the emergence of good from evil. But even with the prefatory note in mind, the reader cannot overlook the poem's major theme: the vindictiveness of God and the iniquity of man. Coleridge later renounced his Unitarianism in favor of a belief in the Trinity; however, he continued to affirm his conviction in the One and the Good. In "Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni" he made one more significant attempt to state his public views in verse. Although the poem was composed in 1802 - six years after "Ode to the Departing Year" - its analysis is included here to demonstrate the growing conflict between Coleridge's optimistic religious views and his poetic vision. The conflict is seen in the poet's maneuvers by which he hoped to conceal his misgivings. "Hymn before Sun-rise" deals with the poet's reactions upon gazing at Mt. Blanc. The mountain inspired "mute thanks and secret ecstasy". In an explanatory note to the poem, Coleridge vividly described the high Alpine valley in terms which suggested that he had viewed it at first hand. He described the valley as "a kind of fairy world, in which the wildest appearances (I had almost said horrors) of Nature alternate with the softest and most beautiful". After picturing the indigenous gentian as "an affecting emblem of

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human hope", he continued: "If any of the readers of the Morning Post [in which the poem was published] have visited this vale in their journeys among the Alps, I am confident that they will not find the sentiments and feelings expressed . . . in the following poem, extravagant" (PW, I, 377). Now Coleridge had never seen the valley, but from his detailed notes and the patronizing allusion to the reader's experience, the reader had to assume his first-hand knowledge. Although he had not viewed the valley, Coleridge had viewed a poem about the valley (Frederika Brun's "Chamouny beym Sonnenqufgange") and had silently used both its structure and some freely translated lines. On the day before the poem was published Coleridge acknowledged to William Sotheby that he had lit on "a short Note in some Swiss Poems" (CL, II, 86). It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the lengthy explanatory note and a short footnote to line thirty ("I had written a much finer line when Sca'Fell was in my thoughts") were designed to cover up the borrowings. The decoys worked, for the unacknowledged obligation remained hidden until 1834, when DeQuincey brought it to light. With the advantage of hindsight, a reader can find a certain irony in line sixteen: "I worshipped the Invisible alone." Perhaps Coleridge's borrowing from Brun indicates that his own muse could no longer satisfactorily supply him with material for an affirmative statement of God's goodness. Evidence for this conclusion can be derived from a comparative analysis of Coleridge's "Hymn" and its source. Both poems deal with a poet's reactions upon viewing Blanc. Brun's "Chamouny" abruptly dismisses a psychological analysis (lines 3-4) and devotes the following lines to a series of rhetorical questions, which concern the creation of the mountain and its streams, stars, and flowers. In the final four lines, the mountain answers: 'Jehovah! Jehovah' Kracht's im berstenden Eis: Lawinendonner rollen's die Kluft hinab: Jehovah Rauscht's in den hellen Wipfeln, Flustert's an rieselnden Silberbachen. (PW, II, 1131)

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Although Coleridge expanded the twenty line original to eightyfive lines, the " H y m n " follows the structure of its source. The first twenty-three lines tell of the poet's response to the sight of Blanc. The poet gazed upon the mountain until . . . still present to the bodily sense, [It] Did'st vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer I worshipped the Invisible alone . . . Thou, the meanwhile, wast blending with my Thought, Till the dilating Soul, enrapt, transfused, Into the mighty vision passing — there As in her natural form, swelled vast to Heaven! (PW, I, 377-378, lines 14-16,19-22) The lines are an elaboration of "Ahndend mein Geist ins Unendliche schwebet". Departing from "Chamouny", Coleridge then provided transition to the rhetorical questions by rejecting mere passive praise and "secret ecstasy", and bidding the vales and cliffs to join his hymn. The next forty lines elaborate upon Brun's questions and answers; then the poet returns to his secret ecstasy and concludes: Great Hierarch! tell thou the silent sky, And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God. (83-85) Coleridge's version is clearly an improvement on its source. Even so, the " H y m n " falls far short of greatness. Its tone is shrill and hollow rather than affirmative. Coleridge supplies no adequate connection between the poet's inner state and the appearance of the natural scenery. Instead of picturing his emotions as he felt them, he analyzed them as though from the outside. Without a successful correspondence to nature, the pathetic fallacies are unsuccessful - the answers rendered by the mountains and streams have not been prepared for in the mind of the reader: Who bade the sun Clothe you with rainbows? Who with living flowers Of lovliest blue, spread garlands at your feet? — God, let the torrents, like a shout of nations,

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Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God! (55-59)

Coleridge's earlier natural descriptions were generally successful. "Kubla Khan" and "The Nightingale" demonstrate his facility. His failure in the "Hymn" indicates that he chose an uncongenial source - that Frederika Bran's attitude toward mountains and God was not his own. Since he had never climbed Blanc, Coleridge's attitude toward it must remain conjectural. But in the month before the publication of the "Hymn" he took a walking tour to Scafell, and recorded his impressions of the mountains in letters to Sara Hutchinson and in his private notebooks. And while on a similar tour three years earlier, he recorded his impressions, some of which might have found their way into the poem. For the most part the entries are matter of fact; they record stops at inns, accounts of ruined buildings, and detailed remarks about topography. Among the literal notes, Coleridge included his emotional responses to what he saw. For example, he recorded his "secret ecstasy" after a narrow escape during a descent from Broad-crag: . . . the sight of the Crags above me on each side, & the impetuous Clouds just over them, posting so luridly and so rapidly northward, overawed me. I lay in a state of almost prophetic Trance & Delight — & blessed God aloud. . . . Ο God, I exclaimed aloud — how calm, how blessed am I now. (CL, II, 842)

And like Frederika Brun he saw the mountains as proof of God's creation. He noted that a cataract was "an awful image & shadow of God & the world" (CL, II, 854). He mentioned them as one of his projected works: On the mountains directly opposite to our House . . . the Clouds lay on two ridges. . . . Blessings on the mountains! to the Eye & Ear they are always faithful. I have often thought of writing a set of Play-bills for the vale of Keswick — for every day in the year — announcing each Day the Performances by his Supreme Majesty's Servants, Clouds, Waters, Sun, Moon, Stars, &c. (CL, II, 825)

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Four years earlier the Ancient Mariner had blessed the water snakes. Like the snakes the mountains, too, were horrible, but delightful: . . . the mountains at the head of this Lake & West-dale are the Monsters of the Country, bare bleak Heads, evermore doing deeds of Darkness, weather-plots, & storm-conspiracies in the Clouds. (CL, II, 836-837) His similes also reveal terror: " . . . passed by Scale Force, the white downfall of which glimmered thro' the Trees, that hang before it like bushy Hair over a madman's eyes" (CL, II, 835). In both the "Hymn" and notebook and letter accounts of the mountains, Coleridge clearly attempted to achieve the sublime: both the poem and private correspondence stress the terror and beauty which the landscape inspires. But the poem and notebooks share more than a similar tone: certain images - not found in Brun - appear in both, indicating that Coleridge turned to his notebooks for material for the poem. Notebook 5, which Coleridge took with him on a walking tour in November, 1799, contains three images found in the poem published in September, 1802. The first of these is that of a wedge: From Ouse bridge, from the Inn Window, the whole length of Basenthwait, a simple majesty of water & mountains — & in the distance the Bank rising like a wedge — & in the second distance the Crags of Derwenter.10 A similar image appears in the "Hymn" (lines 8-10, my italics): Deep in the sky, and black: transpicuous, deep, An ebon mass: me thinks thou piercest it, As with a wedge!

The other images are those of goats and eagles: Two years ago one friendly Farmer saw Eagles — One took off a fullfed Harvest Goose, bore it away, whelped when weary, & a second came & relieved it. on the left hand of the Lake, as you ascend up it, the rubbishy Crag with sheep picturesque as Goats & as perilous feeding . . . u 10 11

Notebooks, I, 536. Notebooks, I, 540, 541.

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These found their way into the poem as follows (lines 65-66): Ye wild goats bounding by the eagle's nest! Ye eagles, play-mates of the mountain blast! By themselves the images provide little support for Coleridge's reliance upon the notebook for material. Eagles and goats are stock features of the picturesque, while the occurrence of the wedge in both poem and notebook entry could be coincidental. But it should be noted that the image of the eagle occurs elsewhere in only two poems, while "goat" appears elsewhere but once. The notebooks, however, contain more conclusive evidence that Coleridge used his 1799 notebook as a source of the "Hymn". In Notebook 21, in which Coleridge recorded his walking tour of August, 1802, he transcribed an entry which he had made in 1799, and which appears shortly after the three images in question. Apparently Coleridge deliberately returned to the earlier notebook in order to seek out records of his own experience to use as poetic material. The transcription was done in late August or early September, 1802, at the time of the composition of the "Hymn". The entry is as follows: Ghost of a mountain — the forms seizing my Body, as I passed & became realities — I, a Ghost, till I had reconquered my Substance.12 Only one change was made during the transcription. Coleridge prefixed the note with the word "Poems". It was presumably his intention to compose a poem about a genii loci, a subject which interested him for many years. Like many of his projects, the poem about the spirit of a mountain never reached completion, yet the first section of the "Hymn" might have been composed according to his original plan. The first twenty-five lines of the "Hymn" can be interpreted dramatically - as the poet's confrontation with the ghost of the mountain. That the mountain acts supernaturally is made clear by the implicit affirmative answer to the opening rhetorical question: "Hast thou a charm to stay the morning-star / In his steep course?" In contrast to its tumultous and stormy sur12

Notebooks,

I, 523. Cf. 1241.

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roundings, the mountain in the "Hymn" is silent and serene, occupying the sky as its "habitation from eternity". In the notebook entry the mountain spirit seized the poet's body, which lost its substance. The poem describes an incident much like that in the notebook: Ο dread and silent form! I gazed upon thee, Till thou, still present to my bodily eye, Dids't vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer I worshipped the INVISIBLE alone. (13-16) The mystic experience continued until the poet's soul "swelled vast to Heaven". In both the notebook entry and the "Hymn" the trance ends abruptly. The note concludes: "I - a Ghost, till I had reconquered my substance", while the poem begins a new verse paragraph: But I awake, and with a busier mind, And active will self-conscious, offer now Now as before, involuntary pray'r And passive adoration! Hand and voice Awake, awake! (note to line 19) Thus the first twenty-three lines of the "Hymn" appear to be an elaboration of the notebook entry - Coleridge's outline of a poem about a genii loci. The first part of the poem corresponds more closely to the notebook entry than to Brun's first stanza; nowhere in her poem does the poet return to bodily form: 'Aus tiefem Schatten des schweigenden Tannenhains Erblick' ich bebend dich, Scheitel der Ewigkeit, Blendenden Gipfel, von dessen Hohe Ahndend mein Geist ins Unendliche schwebet! (PW, I, 1131, lines 1-4) In the remaining sixty lines of the "Hymn" Coleridge apparently followed the structure of Brun's poem, having abandoned his original conception. Coleridge's independent conception of the poem adds weight

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to R. C. Bald's conjecture that Coleridge might have written fragments of a manuscript of the poem, then adapted them to the framework supplied by Brun. Bald pointed out that the note to the manuscript sent to Sir George and Lady Beaumont - "I had written a much finer line when Sca'Fell was in my thoughts" - implies that "Coleridge had, at the very least, told the Beaumonts that there had been a version of the poem earlier than any now known, a n d . . . it confirms his earlier statement to Sotheby that the 'Hymn was involuntarily poured forth' on Scawfell, but that later he thought 'the ideas, etc., disproportionate to our humble mountains.'" 13 Four years earlier, using somewhat similar supernatural themes, Coleridge created his masterpieces - The Ancient Mariner and Christabel. But in 1802 his feeling about nature had become so divided that his own experience could not provide satisfactory material for a poem in praise of God. Coleridge's divided feelings toward nature were certainly not unusual. In "Tintern Abbey" and "The Prelude" Wordsworth vacillated between moods of terror, fear, and exultation; and Shelley celebrated both the awe and serenity of mountains in "Mount Blanc". But in his religious poems Coleridge attempted to express only the benign aspect of nature; in fact, by evasions and misdirected emphasis, he attempted to exclude any element of doubt of God's benevolence. The failure of his religious poems, both poetically and rhetorically, indicates that his poetic vision encompassed a less benignant universe, one in which God plays a role different from the one in which Coleridge cast him publicly. God in Coleridge's poetic universe inspired fear and terror. Coleridge's attitude in 1797 toward nature and the existence of evil can be further derived from the poems of that year which deal with subjects other than religion, poems in which Coleridge felt no obligation to support his religious beliefs. One such poem, "The Raven", was begun in 1797 and published in March, 1798. It has been mentioned earlier in the present study in connection with the variation in Coleridge's public and private 15

JEGP, XLHI (1944), 136-137.

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views. The reader may recall that in the poem the raven's mate and young ones were killed when a woodsman cut down the tree in which the birds were nesting. The tree was cut into boards and fashioned into a ship. When the ship was launched the raven followed and flew round and round, cawing. Then as a storm arose: "He heard the last shriek of the perishing souls", and thanked Death riding home on a cloud, " . . . and REVENGE it was sweet." Instead of illustrating universal benevolence, the poem assumed a naturalistic universe, one in which fate - if not malevolent, was at least indifferent. Neither the woodcutter nor the sailors intended to harm the raven; in fact, the woodsman probably did not know of its nest, and the sailors were merely accessories far removed from an inadvertency. Yet the latter were drowned by Death, whom the Raven "thank'd again and again for this treat". Whether Death acted upon the Raven's prompting (as is implied), or sank the ship in a moment of caprice, the intervention of a supernatural power denies to the poem any necessitarian or Christian basis. The theme of revenge was strong medicine for readers of the Morning Post, but naturalistic revenge in which the sailors were killed gratuitously would have been too bitter for occasional reading. To soften the theme (and perhaps to misdirect the reader's attention) Coleridge included a subtitle and an introductory letter. The subtitle: "A Christmas Tale, told by a school-boy to his little brothers and sisters" - absolves the author from responsibility by making the tale the product of a school-boy's imagination. The short introductory letter is even more evasive: Sir, — I am not absolutely certain that the following was written by E D M U N D SPENSER, and found by an Angler buried in a fishing box. . . . But a learned Antiquarian of my acquaintance has given it as his opinion that it resembles SPENSER'S minor Poems as nearly as Vortigen and Rowena the Tragedies of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE — The poem must be read in recitative, in the same manner as the Aegloga Secunda of the Shepherd's Calendar. Cuddy

(PW,1,169)

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The letter is a masterpiece of misdirection. By elfin self-effacement and paradox, Coleridge implied that "The Raven" was to be a playful imitation of Spenser's "Second Eclogue" - the Tale of the Oak and the Briar. If Coleridge's readers of 1798 were as gullible as I, then they concentrated only upon the first part of "The Raven", trying to tie in Spenser's theme of youth and age with the cutting down of Coleridge's oak tree. Failing in that, the readers might vainly attempt to relate Vortigen, W. H. Ireland's Shakespearean pastiche, to "The Raven", all the while overlooking the latter half of the poem. Perhaps Coleridge did have subtle correspondences in mind, but the effect of the letter is to divert attention to the chopping episode, and away from the death of the sailors. By undercutting the moral, Coleridge seriously weakened the poem. Read without his letter and the added lines, the poem has the impersonality and dramatic contrast of a popular ballad. Read with the misplaced emphasis, the poem loses the singleness of effect, and becomes either a literary acrostic or simply a tale told by a confused schoolboy. Whatever their effect on "The Raven's" poetic merit, by prefixing the evasive letter and later adding the negating lines, Coleridge revealed his uneasiness over the naturalistic theme.

2. OSORIO AND THE NECESSITY OF EVIL

While writing "The Raven", Coleridge was also working on a play, Osorio, at the suggestion of Richard Sheridan. It occupied much of Coleridge's time from March until June of 1797, when he wrote to John Estlin: "I shall have quite finished my Tragedy in a day or two"; however, in August he was still bringing it to a close, and resolved to "stick to my Tragedy". Finally, in October he wrote to Bowles: "It is done: and I would rather mend hedges & follow the plough, than write another" (CL, I, 327, 344, 356). Sheridan rejected the tragedy. In a letter to Thomas Poole, Coleridge wryly commented on Sheridan's decision: " . . . his sole objection is - the obscurity of the last three acts" (CL, I, 358). Coleridge subsequently refurbished the play - beginning perhaps as early as 1800 - and under the title of Remorse it enjoyed a successful run of twenty nights in 1813, earning four hundred pounds for the playwright. The revisions need not concern us here. Osorio remained substantially the same, the alterations apparently having been made to conform to the demands of the stage rather than to change the theme of the tragedy. For the names of his characters and the setting (Granada under Philip II, 1571) Coleridge went to Robert Watson's The History of the Reign of Philip the Second. Much of the necromancy in Osorio is closely paralleled by that of the Sicilian's tale in Schiller's Der Geisterseher-, some of the Gothic trappings might have been borrowed from Schiller's Die Rauber. But the uncovering of parallels in particular sources - however tantalizing to the critic - sheds light on the theme of the

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play; for at the time of the composition of Osorio, Coleridge was immersed in Gothic literature, both English and German. In a letter to Bowles, announcing his commission from Sheridan, Coleridge complained of the drudgery of writing reviews of Gothic tales "in all of which dungeons, and old castles, & solitary Houses by the Sea Side, & Caverns, & Woods, & extraordinary characters, & all the tribe of Horror & Mystery have crowded on me - even to surfeiting" (CL, I, 318). In view of Coleridge's cormorant reading and his eclectic mind, it is probable that he was influenced more by the tone of Sturm-undDrang drama and the Gothic novel than by plots of particular works. An outline of the play can only suggest the atmosphere of Osorio, but it can show the obscurity of the plot and theme. The action takes place against the background of the Roman Catholic persecution of the Moors. Albert, the elder son of a Spanish nobleman, returns to Granada, disguised as a Moor, in order to lead his younger brother, Osorio, to repentance. During Albert's three-year absence, Osorio, for no apparent reason, attempted to have him assassinated by Ferdinand, a Moor. But Ferdinand allowed Albert to live, while reporting his death at the hands of pirates. Maria, Albert's plighted, continues to hope for his return and rejects Osorio's advances. In order to convince Maria of Albert's death, Osorio asks Ferdinand to pose as a wizard. During a seance, Ferdinand is to produce a picture of Albert (conveniently left with Osorio for safekeeping by his brother). Fearful of the inquisition, Ferdinand refuses the request, but suggests as an alternate, a Moor who can by his own admission, bring the dead to life. Unknown to either Osorio or Ferdinand, the Moor is Albert, who has lived in a nearby cave, roaming the countryside gathering herbs. During his absence from Granada, Albert has aged considerably, as a result of his suffering and imprisonment. Thus, during an interview in Albert's cave Osorio does not recognize his brother, and arranges to have Albert practice necromancy with Maria in attendance. Even at this point, Albert still believes that Maria has conspired with Osorio against him. Only during

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the seance does he learn of her innocence and faithfulness. He then shows a picture to her of his attempted assassination. Both she and Albert are so overcome by the meeting that Osorio suspects that Ferdinand and Albert, disguised as the Moor, are plotting against his life. To thwart the suspected plot, Osorio has Albert thrown into the family dungeon by the Inquisitor, and kills Ferdinand in a cave in the mountains. Ferdinand's wife, Alhadra, suspects treachery and follows her husband to the cave, only to see Osorio leaving, and to hear her husband's dying groans. She then rouses the Moors to revolt against the Christians who have oppressed them. Meanwhile Osorio descends to the dungeon in order to poison Albert. The disguised brother reveals himself and tries to persuade Osorio to repent of his evil deeds. Unrepentant, Osorio attempts to stab Albert but is foiled by Maria, who has come to release the disguised Albert. Only then, after remembering the death of Ferdinand, does Osorio feel remorse of sorts, and he begs forgiveness. Too late, for Alhadra and the Moors burst into the cell. Despite Maria's pleas for mercy on behalf of Osorio, he is dragged off to his death. Much of the obscurity which Sheridan complained of results from Osorio's lack of initial motivation and in the inconclusiveness of the ending. The play is open-ended, as it were. Nowhere does the reader learn of the source of Osorio's misanthropy; in fact, shortly before his attempt on Albert's life, Osorio has risked drowning to save him from a shipwreck. The attempted assassination and his subsequent villainy appear to be gratuitous or to grow out of an inherent perversity. In the concluding scene, when at last Osorio recognizes his brother and confesses to the killing of Ferdinand, the cause of his remorse is equivocal; instead of resulting from genuine regret, his remorse could have been brought on by the fear of the unavoidable consequences of his crimes. Osorio exclaims to his brother: "Forgive me Albert! - Curse me with forgiveness!" To add to the ambiguity of Osorio's remorse, another determinant is suggested - that of the supernatural or hallucinatory. Before his declaration of re-

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morse, Osorio sees the ghost of Ferdinand, whom he has killed: Osorio (pointing at vacancy).

Yes, mark his eye! there's fascination in it. Thou said'st thou did'st not know him. That is he! He comes upon me! (PW, II, 594)

Coleridge himself recognized the amorphous character of his villain. In a preface added later to the manuscript and sent to Sheridan, Coleridge outlined some of the defects of the play: Worse than all, the growth of Osorio's character is nowhere explained — and yet I had most clear and psychologically accurate ideas of the whole of it. A man, who from constitutional calmness of appetites, is seduced into pride and the love of power, by these into misanthropism, or rather a contempt of mankind, and from thence, by the cooperation of envy, and a curiosly modified love for a beautiful female (which is nowhere developed in the play), into a most atrocious guilt. (PW, II, 1114)

In the play itself Coleridge was unable to embody his "clear and accurate ideas". The philosophic ambiguity in Osorio is a dramatic reflection of the conflict within Coleridge's mind between the principles of necessitarianism and of moral freedom throughout much of 1797. Earlier he wrote to Southey that he was "a complete necessitarian . . . and believed the corporeality of thought, namely, that it is motion". By 1797, however, Coleridge had become disenchanted with his mentors, Hartley and Godwin. While composing Osorio he wrote to his publisher: "I employ myself now on a book of Morals in answer to Godwin, and on my Tragedy." Like many of his projects, the book of morals never saw the light of day; but Nature in Osorio appears to have been conceived, in part, as an answer to Godwin's system. Coleridge vacillated between the concept of Nature as the naturalistic and causitive principle behind all things in the universe and the concept of Nature as a manifestation of God's benevolent design. On the one hand, Coleridge could ascribe to Albert - his ostensible spokesman - a highly deterministic position:

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The Past lives o'er again In its effects, and to the guilty spirit, The ever guilty Present is its image. (p. 531, II.

285-288, MS III)

On the other hand, Albert invokes Nature to exert its benign influence over the errant Osorio: Ο Nature Healest thy wandering and distempered child: Thou pourest on him thy soft influences, Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets, Till he relent, and can no more endure To be a jarring and dissonant thing Amid this general dance and minstrelsy; But bursting into tears, wins back his way, His angry spirit heal'd and harmoniz'd By the benignant touch of love and beauty. (p. 587, II. 126-136)

But if the concept of Nature itself remains ambiguous, Coleridge makes a consistent distinction between Nature and a Supreme being. In his earlier poetry, Coleridge had toyed with the pantheism, by turns embracing the concept and feeling repulsion from it. Osorio marks the end of his flirtation with a doctrine which he felt was akin to atheism. Still Coleridge had not yet established the relationships between Nature and the deity; in a significant passage Alhadra merely complicates the functions of Nature and God: And that Being Who made us, laughs to scorn the lying faith, Whose puny precepts, like a wall of sand, Would stem the full tide of predestined Nature. (p. 586, 1192-95)

If the play suffers from obscurity and ambiguity of theme, still its very defects can illustrate Coleridge's attitudes toward the nature of evil. Each of the major characters in one way or another takes a philosophical position; each comments on the relationship of good and evil, both explicitly by their actions and by implication in the image clusters associated with them.

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Before Osorio appears in person, Maria suggests his unwholesome character in botanical terms. To his father, who wishes her to marry Osorio, Maria pleads: For mercy's sake Press me no more. I have no power to love him! His proud forbidding eye, and his dark brow Chill me, like dew-damps of the unwholesome night. My love, a timorous and tender flower, Closes beneath his touch.

(I, 78-83) Shortly afterwards, the Inquisitor comments on Osorio's battles against the Moors: A likely story, said I, that Osorio, The gallant nobleman, who fought so bravely Some four years past against these rebel Moors; Working so hard from out the garden of faith To eradicate these weeds detestable; That he should countenance this vile Moresco. (1,124-129)

The passage is clearly dramatically ironic. The Moors have been victims of unjust persecution; thus Osorio's complicity with the Inquisitor, by inversion, implicates him with "weeds detestable". In fact, each of Osorio's evil deeds is associated with weeds or mould or some pestiferous growth. The weed image occurs when Osorio presses Ferdinand to play the role of a wizard in order to convince Maria that Albert has been slain by pirates: Osorio. You have it in your power to serve me greatly. Ferdinand. As how, my lord? I pray you name the thing! I would climb up an ice-glaz'd precipice to pluck a weed you fancied. (II, 11-14)

In the same scene Osorio pleads ignorance of the attempted killing of Albert. He hopes to convince Ferdinand that he has mistaken Albert for another of Maria's lovers. In feigned shock of learning the truth, Osorio exclaims: What if I went And liv'd in a hollow tomb and fed on weeds?

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Ay! That's the road to heaven! (II, 111-113)

With each simultaneous occurrence of rank plants and evil deeds, the weed images take on further sinister connotations. After the seance, when Osorio believes that Ferdinand has plotted against him, he contemplates murdering the Moor: The tongue can't stir when the mouth is fill'd with mould. A little earth stops up most eloquent mouths. OH, 259-260)

Later he has the Inquisitor seize Albert (disguised as a wizard) and imprison him in the dungeon, thinking that he has conspired to win Maria's love during the seance. When alone he muses on the supposed cabal; first quoting Ferdinand: 'The stranger, that lives nigh, still picking weeds! And this was his friend, his crony, his twin-brother! Ο! I am green, a very simple stripling — . . . By Heaven, 'twas well contrived! and I, forsooth, I was to cut my throat in honour of conscience. (Ill, 290-292, 294-295)

Here the mention of weeds and the allusions to simples (herbs) and greens further ties in weeds with evil. The cluster gains further coherence from Albert's method of gathering weeds: he picks only those on which moonlight has fallen. The contiguity of Albert's artistic talents and his attraction to weeds parallels Coleridge's feelings toward the writing of poetry. Both Albert and his creator partake of evil through the association. Albert directs his artistic talents to the unwholesome practice of necromancy, while Coleridge links his poetic impulse (symbolized by moonlight) to the evil of the weeds. The weed cluster is intercalated into significant passages and scenes, implying a sub-theme of the ambiguity of evil, and running counter to the apparent theme of the play, i.e., the redemption brought about by the example of a forgiving Natuxe. The various characters, however, see different aspects of Nature (considered as both natural scenery and as fate). Osorio projects his own perversity into the motives of his fellow men

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and his destiny. When he first supposes that Albert and Ferdinand conspire against him, Osorio comments on their duplicity: Hatred and love. Strange things! both strange alike! What if one reptile sting another reptile, Where is the crime? The goodly face of Nature Hath one trail less of slimy filth upon it. Are we not all predestined rottenness And cold dishonour? (Ill, 212-217)

Although Osorio here views Nature's "goodly face", elsewhere he sees it as less than benign. In the third person he speaks of himself: Nature had made him for some other planet, And pressed his soul into a human shape By accident or malice. (IV, 88-90)

Osorio's crimes, in part, may be the result of his deterministic point of view. Believing all men equal to himself in potential evil, he has no qualms about his ill will. And believing Nature indifferent to all, he considers hatred and love to be all one. Albert's motives appear to be purely altruistic. If Osorio's character is made up of unmixed evil, his elder brother acts out of purely good motives. Yet the melodramatic alignment is complicated by Albert's association with weeds and mould, the overtones of which implicate him with evil. In the declaration cited above, he prays that Maria may "new-mould his canker'd heart". "New-mould", of course, can mean to form anew, but in conjunction with "canker'd" it could also mean to cover with mould. Albert uses the image again when speaking of the effect of imprisonment on a criminal: So he lies Circled with evil, till his very soul Unmoulds its essence. 1 (V, 122-124) 1

Notebook entry 251, which Miss Coburn dates June-September, 1797, is apparently a rough draft of several passages of Osorio, particularly III, 254-255, in which Osorio directs his servant to Ferdinand's cave. In the

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Albert's puns tentatively link him with depravity, but an even more important connection is his habit of gathering weeds and herbs. When suggesting to Osorio that Albert play the role of a sorcerer, Ferdinand describes him as: A stranger that lives nigh, still picking weeds, N o w in the swamp, now on the walls of the ruin. (Π, 127-128)

Osorio, too, notes Albert's collection of weeds: "from a ruin'd abbey / Pluck'd in the moonlight." His unexplained intimacy with weeds suggests that goodness cannot be unmixed - that true virtue can be attained only by a knowledgeable choice between good and evil. A notebook entry from 1796 shows that Coleridge was thinking along these lines: "A State of Compulsion, even tho that Compulsion be directed by perfect Wisdom, keeps Mankind stationary - for whenever it is withdrawn, after a lapse of ages, they have yet to try evil in order to know whether or not it be not good." 1 The weed cluster spreads its sinister influence to other concepts in the play, especially to creative activity illustrated in the character of Albert. Among his other talents, Albert is an artist. His servant describes his ability, and as a corollary to it, he mentions Albert's obsession for herbs: final version the servant replies: "Why, now I think on't, at this time of year / Tis hid by vines." The notebook entry reads in part: Sancho Why now I think on't at this time of the year 'Tis hid by vines, I am glad he is proud therewith It had been a damning thing to have remained An opium chewer with such excellent grapes Over his cottage. Another allusion to opium occurs in a speech of Alhadra, Ferdinand's wife. On the way to Osorio's palace, after finding her husband dead, she passed a ruined abbey in the forest, and commented to her companion: "On that broad wall / I saw a skull; a poppy grew beside it. / There was a ghastly solace in the sight." The references to opium and wine suggest a tentative equation of the weed-cavern cluster with Coleridge's laudanum addiction. Tantalizing though the suggestion may be, I have been unable to find enough corroborating evidence from the play or from other works written about this time, to justify further explorations. * Notebooks, I, 150.

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You are a painter — one of many fancies — You can call up past deeds, and make them live On the blank canvas, and each little herb, That grows on mountain bleak, or tangled forest, You've learnt to name — 01, 180-184) Albert's seance has a strange power over Maria: . . . this strange man has left me Wilder'd with wilder fancies than yon moon Breeds in the love-sick maid — who gazes at it Till lost in inward vision, with wet eye She gazes idly! (IV, 165-169) The conjunction of weeds with moonlight and the eye - both of which have been shown to signal poetic experience - lends to Albert's creative talent the qualities of poetic creativity. Its effect on Maria is much like that described by the poet in his earlier poems dealing with the poetic experience. As Osorio wades deeper into crime, the weed images become increasingly vivid. He tricks Ferdinand into a cave in the mountains, a cave, inside of which is a deep chasm, a "hellish pit". After Osorio's entrance, Ferdinand is startled by a sound from the chasm: Ferdinand. I swear, I saw a something moving there! The moonshine came and went, like a flash of lightning. I swear I saw it move! (Osorio goes into the recess, then returns and with great scorn.) Osorio. A jutting clay-stone Drips on the long lank weed that grows beneath; And the weed nods and drips. (IV, 16-19) Mention of the weed in connection with the chasm foreshadows Osorio's deed. He runs Albert through with his sword and tosses the still living body into the cavern. The chasm is further described as a "groaning well";

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. . . which never A living thing came near; unless, perchance, Some blind-worm battens on the ropy mould, Close at its edge. (IV, 45-48)

The weed and mould images, appearing as they to coincident to Osorio's evil musings, heighten the enormity of his crimes, suggesting malignity and decay and virulence. By means of their association with other images and characters, the weed and mould images extend their import and thus affect the meaning of the play. The apparent theme of the play - Nature's role in leading the wicked to penitence - is thus put in doubt. Albert took on the task of aiding Nature. After his first meeting with Maria (whom he believes to be wedded to Osorio), he declares his aim: I'll haunt this scene no more — live she in peace! Her husband — ay her husband! May this Angel New-mould this canker'd heart! Assist me Heaven! That I may pray for my poor guilty brother! (I, 371-374)

Albert, on the other hand, feels that Nature can win Osorio to genuine repentance, that it can lead "his angry spirit [to be] heal'd and harmonized / By the benignant touch of love and beauty." Yet Nature's healing influence is shown to be problematic, for although Osorio suffers remorse, his fear of conscience pangs outweighs his sorrow over his misanthropy. And if the Nature in which Albert believed is the fate in the tragedy, its "benignant touch" results in the death of the villain, not in his reinstatement into harmony. Alhadra's opinion of Nature conforms closest to that which is demonstrated in the play. Through her agency Osorio is put to death. To her, Nature can cause suffering, but contains the seeds of its own cure: Know you not What Nature makes you mourn, she bids you heal? Great evils ask great passions to redress them, And whirlwinds fitliest scatter pestilence. (I, 229-232)

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71

To her, Nature can reflect grief but cannot undo its cause. But like Albert she deludes herself into believing that Nature is careful of its inhabitants. Following the death of her husband, her initial frenzy gives way to grief and to a type of forgetfulness. Her friend Naomi describes her state as follows: Yet each strange object fix'd her eye: for grief Doth love to dally with fantastic shapes, And smiling, like a sickly moralist, Gives some resemblance of her own concerns.. To the straws of chance, and things inanimate. 'Tis thus by nature Wisely ordain'd, that so excess of sorrow Might bring its own cure with it. (V, 10-14, 24-26)

Alhadra's cure is temporary. Remembering her orphaned children, she rouses herself, and with the Moors, takes Osorio captive. To Maria's pleading to spare his life, she replies with a choice of alternatives similar to those which the Ancient Mariner faced when Death and Death-in-Life rolled dice for his future: And is it then An enviable lot to waste away With inward wounds, and like the spirit of chaos To wander on disquietly thro' the earth, Cursing all lovely things? to let him live — It were a deep revenge!

After Osorio is taken to his death she concludes: I thank thee, Heaven! thou hast ordain'd it wisely, That still extremes bring their own cure. (V, 295-300, 307-308)

The "cure" is indeed an extreme one. Nature concentrates upon punishment rather than on redemption or grace. Nature, or Heaven, in Osorio punishes wrongdoers, but at the same time, allows injustice to run its destructive course. Once set in motion, the evil must of necessity run to its extreme - at which point certain punishment is administered. The existence of evil, the source of the cycle, is nowhere explained. Perhaps it could be taken as the natural state of man. If Osorio possessed free will,

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he could practice it only within the limits of the predetermined cycle of extremities. Osorio failed as a tragedy for the same reasons that Coleridge's early religious poems fail to convince the reader. In addition to crudities of diction in both, the dramatic alignment of representatives of good and evil is too distinct - the issues are depicted as either black or white. In both Osorio and "Religious Musings" Coleridge oversimplified complex philosophical questions, forcing the reader to choose between arrant villains and impeccable heroes. The diagrammatic disjunction of good and evil in his poems leaves the reader with the impression that Coleridge assumed a ready-made ethical system, then forced his personified abstractions and Gothic protagonists to demonstrate the validity of his premises. Yet in spite of the poet's optimistic premises, the conclusions are pessimistic, or at best, indeterminate. Between his premises and conclusions lay an undistributed middle: the tenor of his poetic vision.

3. VARIETIES O F EVIL EXPERIENCE, I: THE ANCIENT MARINER

Before Coleridge completed Osorio, the Wordsworths settled at Alfoxden, near Coleridge's cottage at Stowey. The proximity of the poets' dwellings made possible frequent visits between Coleridge and William and Dorothy. The closeness of their friendship and Coleridge's attitude toward natural scenery are seen in several of Coleridge's poems composed when the Wordsworths held their lease at Alfoxden. In "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" the poet imagines the natural scenes which his friends enjoy, while he must remain in a bower near his cottage as a result of "an accident, which disabled him from walking during the whole time of their stay" (his wife had spilt boiling milk on his leg). His reflections on the sky and trees lead him to conclude: Henceforth I shall know 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! (PW, 1,181, 59-64) At first glance the poet's assertion appears to contradict the view of a less benignant Nature expressed in Osorio. The reader may recall that in the tragedy Nature was ineffectual in bringing Osorio to repentance and love of his fellow man; in fact, Nature pre-determined punishment for him instead of forgiveness. Yet Coleridge's poem, in spite of its explicit affirmation of the positive side of Nature, does share with Osorio the pessimistic view of Nature.

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The similarity in attitude can be inferred from the images of weeds which occur in both the tragedy and the poem. In Act IV of Osorio shortly before he is murdered in the mountain cave, Ferdinand is startled by a movement at the edge of the chasm further within the mountainside. Osorio enters the inner cave to investigate, "then returns and (says) with great scorn": A jutting clay-stone Drips on the long lank weed that grows beneath; And the weed nods and drips. (II, 563-564)

The same cluster appears near the beginning of "This LimeTree Bower My Prison". The poet pictures his friends wandering joyfully "along the hilltop edge" then descendidg into a "roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep" in which there grows a "branchless ash, unsunn'd and damp." There his 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. Now, my friends emerge Beneath the wide wide Heaven — (17-22)

Similarities of diction in the two passages suggest that while revising the poem for publication Coleridge had in mind the passage from Osorio and with it the pernicious associations which clung to images of weeds. But images of weeds are not the only correspondences between the passages. The incidents related in both take place in chasms. In Osorio the chasm is contained within a cave, while in the poem, the dell is enclosed: "O'erwooded... and only speckled by the mid-day sun", and the trunk of the ash tree arches "like a bridge". Even without the mediation of the weed cluster the passage itself subverts the stated theme of the immanence of Nature. The scene stands in striking contrast to the heath and hilltop which precede it and to the "wide wide Heaven" which follows. The abrupt movement from the gloomy dell to "wide wide Heaven"

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heightens the contrast and implies that Nature has two faces: the one kindly and joyous, the other menacing and dark. The sequence of scenes further suggests that in order to look on the bright face of Nature and "perceive the Almighty's presence" one must first recognize its dark side. In order to interpret the poems written during 1797-1798, particularly The Ancient Mariner, in terms of the total symbolic action, we must ascertain Coleridge's then current attitudes toward free will and toward the nature of evil. The religious views which Coleridge expressed at this time varied from those he stated earlier. His letters reflect both economic and ethical uncertainty. In October he confided to John Thelwall: I suppose, that at last I must become a Unitarian minister as a less evil than starvation — for I get nothing by literature — & Sara is in the way of repairing the ravages of war, as much as in her lies. — You have my wishes, & what is very liberal in me for such an atheist reprobate, my prayers. (CL, I, 349)

The epithet, "atheist reprobate", was probably penned in a spirit of levity, since his correspondent acknowledged himself to be an atheist. But Coleridge's hesitancy to enter the ministry and his faint praise of the calling ("a less evil than starvation") betray a less than enthusiastic adherence to Unitarian doctrine. Nonetheless Coleridge persisted in his attempts to secure a pulpit. To complicate matters, offers of financial assistance came from two secular sources. In November the proprietor of the Morning Post requested him to submit verse and political essays, and in the following month Thomas and Josiah Wedgwood sent him a draft for one hundred pounds to "enable [him] to defer entering into an engagement", presumably the pulpit at Shrewsbury, and two weeks later extended the offer to an annuity of one hundred and fifty pounds (CL, I, 359-360). Even during placid periods Coleridge seldom came to quick decisions; thus when faced with a number of alternatives, each fraught with ethical responsibilities, he vacillated even more than usual. Apparently for several weeks he did write for the Morning Post, but found the occupation to be "only not the worst occu-

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pation for a man who would wish to preserve any delicacy of moral feeling" (CL, I, 361). Several days after receiving the initial offer from the Wedgwoods he answered in a letter, thanking the brothers for relieving him "from a state of hesitation and perplexity" (CL, I, 365). On the same evening the pulpit of the Shrewsbury congregation was profferred to him, contingent upon the congregation's approval of his preaching. Coleridge thereupon returned the draft to the Wedgwood brothers. The justification for his action contained in his letter to them sheds light on Coleridge's ethical dilemma. To preserve therefore our moral feelings without withdrawing ourselves from active life we should, I imagine, endeavor to discover those evils in society which are the most pressing, and those of which the immediate Removal appears the most practicable: to the removal of these we should concenter our energies. . . . In other things we must compound with a large quantity of evil — taking care to select from the modes of conduct . . . those in which we can do the most good with the least evil. (CL, I, 364-365)

Coleridge then went on to evaluate the relative merits of journalism and the ministry and concluded that the press presented opportunities for "greater temptations - & this is not a controversy concerning absolute but concerning comparative good" (CL, I, 366). Coleridge subsequently declined the offer from Shrewsbury in favor of the Wedgwood annuity. But the grounds for his initial short-lived decision to accept the ministerial charge are an index to Coleridge's current thinking on morality. There can be little doubt that his choice was based largely on ethical considerations. In letters to his brother and John Estlin and Josiah Wade, Coleridge explained his motives in much the same terms as he did to the Wedgwoods. Furthermore, his acceptance of the Shrewsbury invitation would have forced him to leave Stowey and his closest friend, Thomas Poole, who tried to convince him to stay. As Coleridge wrote to John Estlin: . . . I shall have left him [Poole] unconvinced of the expediency of

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my going, public or personal. — I could not stay with an easy conscience; but whether I shall be happy so far removed from any who love me, I know not. This I know — I will make myself contented by struggling to do my Duty. — (CL, I, 368)

His vacillation, uncertainty, and final resolution stemmed from a belief that any profession he chose - even the ministry - would produce some evil. Politics was out of the question as an occupation, for he confided to John Estlin that he "never knew a passion for politics [to] exist for a long time without swallowing up, or absolutely excluding, a passion for Religion" (CL, I, 338). Even retirement from society could prove harmful, for as he wrote to Josiah Wedgwood, "it would be slothful and cowardly to retire from an employment, because tho' there are no temptations at present, there may be some hereafter" (CL, I, 366). Coleridge apparently believed that evil was not merely an outgrowth of society's institutions; it was endemic in the hearts of men. Early in March, before the completion of The Ancient Mariner, Coleridge wrote to his brother George, renouncing his former political activities and turning his back on the French Revolution. The letter contains a number of passages in which Coleridge indulges in feelings of guilt over past follies. The following are typical: I am prepared to suffer without discontent the consequences of my follies & mistakes — : and unable to conceive how that which I am, of Good could have been without that which I have been of Evil, it is withheld from me to regret any thing: I therefore consent to be deemed a Democrat & a Seditionist . . . but I have snapped my squeaking baby-trumpet of Sedition & the fragments lie scattered in the lumber-room Penitence. Of GUILT I say nothing; but I believe most steadfastly in original Sin; that from our mothers' wombs our understandings are darkened. (CL, I, 396-397)

The latter passage, with its admission of an adherence to the Doctrine of Original Sin can, perhaps, be discounted as an exaggeration designed to please his brother, an Anglican minister. Perhaps in the letter Coleridge's "chariot wheels caught fire by their own motion". Over twenty years later in Aids to Reflection

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he again stated his belief in original sin, but in March, 1798, his self-abnegation had not yet completely encompassed the doctrine. But the fact that the doctrine came to his mind reveals the depth of his self-reproach and preoccupation with sin and evil. It was against this background of a sense of personal guilt that The Ancient Mariner was composed. The project was originally conceived as a poem about the sin, suffering, and expiation of Cain. Coleridge's choice of the initial subject shows that guilt and expiation was already in his mind in November, 1797, when he and William and Dorothy Wordsworth began their tour from Alfoxden to Linton and the Valley of Stones. To a large extent the Mariner's experience reflects the poet's fears and sense of guilt. Coleridge feared the implication of evil in any occupation; the Mariner suffered the consequences of an act, which by most moral standards, would be considered trivial. Coleridge confessed to a belief in inherent evil in men; the Mariner demonstrated a perverse nature by arbitrarily shooting an innocent bird which had accepted the hospitality of the crew. In "The Mariner and the Albatross", George Whalley attempts to examine the poem in part "to show how and to what extent Coleridge's inner life is revealed in The RimeCiting Coleridge's letters and notebooks, Whalley ably demonstrates that the poet projected into the poem his "intense personal suffering, perplexity, loneliness, longing, horror, fear". 2 Since the publication of Whalley's article, additional evidence from the Notebooks for Coleridge's identification with the Mariner has come to light. His sea voyage to Malta recalled the movement of the Mariner's ship to the pole, the rotting deck of the ship, and the star-dogged moon. 3 Of particular interest is Coleridge's account of the attempted shooting of a hawk which tried to rest on board the vessel bound for Malta: Hawk with ruffled Feathers resting on the Bowsprit — Now shot at & did not move — how fatigued — a third time it made a gyre, a short circuit, & returned again/ 5 times it was thus shot at/ left the » The University of Toronto Quarterly, XVI (July, 1947), 381-398. * The University of Toronto Quarterly, XVI, 381. * Notebooks, II, 1996, 2052.

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Vessel/ flew to another/ & I heard firing, now here, now there/ & nobody shot it/ but probably it perished from fatigue, & the attempt to rest upon the wave! — Poor Hawk! Ο strange Lust of Murder in Man! — It was not cruelty/ it is mere non-feeling from non-thinking.4

In her note to the entry, Miss Coburn noted that "the exegesis of The Ancient Mariner in the last sentence has both critical and autobiographical interest". The autobiographical relevance at the time of the Malta trip will be considered in a later section of the present study. Suffice it to say that between the time of the composition of the poem and Coleridge's own sea voyage his identification with the Mariner became increasingly close. The final link between the Mariner and Coleridge to be considered is found in "The Foster-Mother's Tale", a self-contained eighty line narrative poem originally written for Act IV of Osorio but published separately in Lyrical Ballads, 1798. The tale is told to Maria by her foster-mother, and has little relation to the play; the tale appears to have been "ready-made" and gratuitously inserted between significant scenes. In brief, the poem recounts the adventures of a foundling who was discovered in the forest and adopted by Lord Velez, Osorio's father. In his youth the foundling cared only for play in the woods; praying and religious services were foreign to his nature. But a friar met the boy and taught him to read at the convent and the castle. he read, and read, and read Till his brain turn'd — and ere his twentieth year, He had unlawful thoughts of many things: And though he prayed, he never lov'd to pray With holy men, nor in a holy place — {PW, I, 183, 42-46)

One day while he talked with Lord Velez, an earthquake rocked the chapel near which they were standing. As a result of the earthquake - "this judgment" - the youth confessed to all of his "heretical and lawless talk" and was thrown into a dungeon. Later Maria's foster-father secretly released him, and:

4

He went on shipboard With those bold voyagers, who made discovery Notebooks, II, 2090.

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Of golden lands. (72-74)

Once in the new world, the youth: . . . seized a boat, And all alone, set sail by silent moonlight Up a great river, great as any sea, And ne'er was heard of more: but 'tis suppos'd He liv'd and died among the savage men. (77-81)

The dramatic fragment apparently had special significance for Coleridge, for he included it in the play despite its irrelevance to the plot. Its special appeal resulted, perhaps, from parallels between the experience of the foundling and that of his creator. Like the youth in the poem, Coleridge was in a sense a foundling, since his father died when he was nine, and he then left home for Christ's Hospital. Like the foundling, Coleridge learned to read at an early age; in fact, he spent much of his youth reading NeoPlatonic philosophers. Both Coleridge and the youth found it difficult to pray in an orthodox manner. The foundling sailed to the new world and "liv'd and died among the savage men"; Coleridge in 1794 envisioned establishing a colony of likeminded Pantisocreats on the banks of the Susquehanna. "The Foster-Mother's Tale" - itself autobiographical also links Coleridge more closely to the Mariner. Parts IV and VI of The Ancient Mariner contain strong echoes of the poem written several months earlier. In Part VI the Mariner returns to the harbor of his own country, where he is met by the Pilot and a Hermit, who, the Mariner hopes, will shrieve him and "wash away the Albatross's blood". In both the dramatic fragment and the ballad, holy men appear, and in each case neither could prevent punishment from befalling their charges. There are also a number of similarities between the Mariner and the foundling. Neither could pray to an orthodox God. At an early age the foundling "never learnt a prayer, nor told a bead"; later "though he pray'd, he never loved to pray with holy men, nor in a holy place". After his crew-mates died, the Mariner

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. . . 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. (PW, I, 197, 244-247)

Only when he was moved by the natural beauty of the watersnakes could the Mariner pray, and then it was an unconscious act: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed then unaware. (284—285)

Furthermore, both the Mariner and the youth explore new worlds after leaving their own countries. As noted above, the youth was one of "those bold voyagers, who made discovery of golden lands". The Mariner and his crew, after passing through the straits of Magellan, were "the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea". Similarity of incidents is not the only vinculum between the two poems; they are also brought together by the intervention of the weed cluster. In The Ancient Mariner images of weeds, with the suggestion of evil, are associated with the Hermit, who lives in the woods: He kneels at morn, and noon, and eve — He hath a cushion plump: It is the moss that wholly hides The rotted old oak-stump. (My italics)

(519-522)

Here the moss suggests concealment, deceit, and malignancy. Later the Hermit compares the weathered sails on the Mariner's ship to: Brown skeletons of leaves that lag My forest-brook along: When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow, And the owlet whoops to the wolf below, That eats the she-wolf's young. (My italics)

(533-557)

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The "skeletons of leaves" further suggest decay and malignancy, while the ivy-tod and owlet bring in associations of the supernatural. In "The Foster-Mother's Tale" images of weeds occur in conjunction with both the friar and the youth. The baby was found: . . . wrapt in mosses, lined With thistle-beards, and such small locks of wool As hang on brambles. (My italics) (PW, I, 183, 24-26)

As he grew older, the boy delighted in roaming through the woods, mimicking the notes of birds. And all the autumn 'twas his only play To get the seeds of wild flowers, and to plant them With earth and water, on the stumps of trees. (My italics)

(33-36)

If the weed images link the Hermit and his religion with evil, then they also tie in the boy and his natural religion; for he, too, partakes of the mood of the weed cluster. Like the Hermit's stump, he was first found mysteriously wrapped in moss, and later the boy planted wild flowers, presumably in the rotting wood of tree stumps. The Friar also joins the weed cluster in that the "grey-haired m a n . . . gather'd simples in the wood". Through his direction the youth learned to read, which turned his mind to heretical thoughts.6 Thus the baleful connotations of the weed cluster center on representatives of religious views: the Hermit and friar (orthodox religion) and the foundling (pantheistic religion of Nature). The youth is punished severely for his heterodox views. As a sign of supernatural disfavor, the "earth heav'd under them", the boy confessed to his heresy, and was immediately cast into a s

Cf. Coleridge's letter to the Courier, December 9, 1809, in which he speaks of the place of Philip II in Spanish history: "By the industry of the Inquisition, and by executions amounting to massacres, the tyrant had eradicated from his Spanish dominions the weeds of heresy ..." (Coleridge's italics). Just as the sun retained its significance of religion until late in the poet's life, so weeds retained their associations of evil, in many cases, heresy.

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dungeon. The Mariner also confesses shortly after an earthquake "split the bay" and took his ship to the bottom. In the gloss Coleridge ominously relates the confession: "The Ancient Mariner earnestly entreateth the Hermit to shrieve him; and the penance of life falls on him" (PW, I, 208). The exact nature of the Mariner's sin is not made clear in the poem. Although his suffering and penance are spelled out in detail, neither the Mariner's motives for shooting the albatross nor the significance of the incident is explained. In view of Coleridge's identification with both the Mariner and the foundling, and in view of close parallels of incident and imagery in the passages, can we not ascribe the foundling's crime of heresy to the Mariner? While composing the poem, Coleridge felt remorse for his previous political and religious views and vowed to return to the practice of religion. In a letter to John Estlin written two months before the completion of The Ancient Mariner, Coleridge stated his intention to assist two nearby Unitarian ministers, in spite of his decision to withdraw from the candidacy at Shrewsbury. His religion, it appears, would supercede all other activities: To the cause of Religion I solemnly devote all my best faculties — and if I wish to acquire knowledge as a philosopher and fame as a poet, I pray for grace that I may continue to feel what I now feel, that my greatest reason for wishing the one & the other, is that I may be enabled by my knowledge to defend Religion ably. (CL, I, 372)

Whether or not he fulfilled his vows is incidental to the interpretation of the poem. The cogency of the passage lies in its tone of humility and in the implication that his former philosophical speculations rein counter to his practice of religion. Three years later Coleridge continued to regard his earlier studies in philosophy as heretical. From Keswick he wrote to his friend, Thomas Poole: If I do not greatly delude myself, I have not only completely extricated the notions of Time, and Space; but have overthrown the doctrine of Association, as taught by Hartley, and with it all the irreligious metaphysics of modern Infidels — especially, the doctrine of Necessity. (CL, II, 706)

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Thus far the evidence presented for the Mariner's crime of heresy has been largely extrinsic in that it has been gathered from Coleridge's letters and notebooks and contemporaneous poems. The assumption remains to be tested within the symbolic action of the poem itself. In light of the numerous and lively studies of the poem, varying from the allegorical to the Freudian, it may clear the air to restate the critical assumptions on which the present study is based, and in so doing, to lay down ground rules, as it were, for the interpretation of a poem different from others in the Coleridge canon. It is assumed that the poem is a "strategy" on the part of the poet to encompass a psychological situation, in this case, Coleridge's feelings of guilt which arose from his supposed heresy. Although the poet may reveal his "burden" in many ways, the chief points of critical interest are "watershed moments", i.e., abrupt breaks in structure or changes in tone. Because of Coleridge's close identification with the Mariner, watershed moments will be of particular importance in the study to follow. The Ancient Mariner poses special problems for analysis of image clusters. In it Coleridge apparently manipulated the key images of the sun and the moon for various poetic effects, ranging from the literal cartographic use of the sun to locate the position and movement of the ship ("The Sun came up upon the left") to its figurative use to suggest supernatural intervention: Nor dim nor red, like God's own head, The glorious Sun uprist. It has been established that to Coleridge the sun frequently signified religion and conscience, while the moon in a poem generally suggested a benign mood or situation for poetic creation; however, because of the frequency of their appearance and the variety of contexts in which they occur in The Ancient Mariner, the critic can assign symbolic significance to the sun and moon only with extreme caution. Some critics have thrown caution to the winds by assigning single referents to the images of the sun and the moon. Kenneth Burke, for example, in The Philosophy of Literary Form includes moonlight in Coleridge's opium cluster,

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and thus suggests that The Ancient Mariner can be read as a "ritual for the redemption of the drug".® Robert Penn Warren, on the other hand, noting that good events take place under the aegis of the moon, and the bad under that of the sun, goes on to equate the moon with the imagination and the sun with the understanding, the reflective faculty that partakes of death. In their strivings for consistency both critics fail to give due weight to occurences of the images or incidents in the poem which contradict what they consider to be the theme - Burke by ignoring contradictory evidence; Warren by appealing to ironic reversal of meaning. Yet for uncovering both the poet's situation and the theme of the poem the critic must interpret the poem by means of the total symbolic action, for by means of the watershed moments the poet lays bare the conflicts which gave rise to the poem. Warren himself has admitted as much.7 With these methodological strictures in mind we may follow the Mariner and his creator on their singular voyage over "strange seas of thought". The poem opens with the alienation of the Wedding-Guest from the communion of his fellows. With his skinny hand and glittering eye the Mariner prevents him from attending the celebration of the sacrament of marriage. The framework of the narrator-listener already looks ahead to the alienation of the Mariner from his crewmates and his religion in the tale. With the Wedding-Guest under his spell, the Mariner begins the account of the voyage: 'The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared, — Merrily did we drop Below the kirk, below the hill, Below the lighthouse top. (PW, I, 187, 2 1 - 2 4 )

In terse, telegraphic fashion the Mariner makes it known that the ship dropped below the horizon, not by explicitly stating his direction as such, but by relating his impressions as he experi8

(Vintage Books: New York, 1957), 81. "A Poem of Pure Imagination, an Experiment in Reading", in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with an Essay by Robert Penn Warren (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946), 64. 7

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enced them. Moving away from shore, one would lose sight of the lowest object first (kirk) and the highest last (the lighthouse). His subjective method of narration adds to the sense of the tale's immediacy, allowing the reader to project himself into the story. The selection of the kirk as a landmark is of significance to the theme of apostasy and reconciliation. At the outset of the journey the Mariner first loses sight of his church and perhaps of the religion it objectifies. At its first appearance the sun performs a reckoning function: by rising on the Mariner's left it indicates that the ship is heading south, and by appearing "over the mast at noon", it places the ship on the equator. But even in its cartographic role the sun begins to take on punitive associations, for immediately following its initial appearance the Mariner relates: 'And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he Was tyrannous and strong: He struck with his o'er taking wings, And chased us south along. (41-44)

Because of its contiguity to the story, the sun-religion cluster appears to be the source of the punishment. Coming as it does before the commission of the crime, the chastening by the storm suggests that the Mariner had incurred the Sun's wrath prior to the arrival of the albatross, perhaps upon his departure from the harbor and kirk. Interpreted in this light, the shooting of the albatross cannot be said to represent an act of heresy, but to result from it. The entire voyage then becomes symbolic of leaving and returning to religion, leaving and returning to the kirk of the Mariner's own country. When the albatross does appear, it does so in Christian trappings: As if it had been a Christian soul, We hailed it in God's name. In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud, It perched for vespers nine. (65-68)

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Other allusions link the bird to the crucifixion of Christ: At length did cross an albatross. With my cross-bow I shot the ALBATROSS. Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung. (My italics)

(63, 81-82, 141-142)

The Sacrament of Holy Communion is also hinted at: "It ate the food it ne'er had eat." The associations of the bird to Christianity are particularly relevant to Coleridge's religious beliefs. As a Unitarian he held that Christ was not divine but mortal. Apparently Coleridge felt that some Unitarians could object to his religious principles. When seeking the pulpit at Shrewsbury, he first wished to learn "whether the congregation liked me, and would endure my opinions, which softened & modified as they had been, did retain a degree of peculiarity" (CL, I, 362). One of these peculiarities was his skepticism of the value of the Sacrament of Holy Communion. Several months before beginning The Ancient Mariner he confided his views to John Estlin: I cannot as yet reconcile my intellect to the sacramental Rites; but as I do not see any ill-effect which they produce among the Dissenters, and as you declare from your own experience that they have good effects, it is painful to me even simply to state my dissent — ... I cannot, I must not, play the hypocrite — If I performed or received the Lord's supper, in my present state of mind, I should indeed be eating & drinking condemnation. (CL, I, 337-338)

Coleridge apparently felt that the peculiarities of his beliefs could lead to his eternal damnation. It is significant that he stressed only the punitive side of the sacrament; he could emotionally fear damnation but could not intellectually bring himself to accept its power to "strengthen and preserve him steadfast in the faith". Perhaps Coleridge's exegesis on the poem written during the Malta voyage describes his and the Mariner's dilemma: "It [shooting the hawk] is mere non-feeling from non-thinking."

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Because of his non-thinking about the benefits of the sacrament, Coleridge - if he administered the sacrament (and as a Dissenting minister he would be obliged to), risked eternal damnation. In a moment of caprice the Mariner killed the bird and did indeed suffer eternal punishment, passing "like night, from land to land". Now I am not positing simple equations. The albatross does not equal Christ or the sacrament. Nor does the Mariner's crime equal Coleridge's skepticism of the divinity of Christ and the benefit of the sacrament. The incident cannot bear the weight of an elaborate allegory. The point I wish to make is that Coleridge apparently had his religious dilemma in mind when he composed the ending of Part I. True, the suggestion for the incident was made by Wordsworth, but the Christian allusions rose out of Coleridge's "situation". How well the poem encompassed the situation (as an oyster encompasses a grain of sand) remains to be seen. Part I ends with the dramatic revelation: '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. (PW, 1,189, 79-82)

Part II begins: The Sun now rose upon the right: Out of the sea came he, Still hid in mist, and on the left Went down into the sea. (83-86)

The immediate appearance of the sun-religion cluster following the revelation of the Mariner's crime binds it to the albatross and further strengthens the interpretation of the crime as that of heresy against orthodox religion. But the punishment for the crime is not meted out until the ship reaches the equator, the "courts of the sun". Living up to its reputation as a bird of good omen, the albatross had brought with it a south wind, which pushed the ship

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along through the Straits of Magellan. The sun now brings on the breeze: 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. The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free. (97-102)

If the apparently gracious intervention of the sun mars the consistency of a critic's interpretation of an otherwise punitive solar function, it certainly was consistent with Coleridge's plot structure; for the sun-wind sequence in the Pacific Ocean parallels that of the Atlantic. In both cases punishment is inflicted only at the equator, while the crime is committed in the polar region. The geographic location of the Mariner's crime fits in with the interpretation of the act as an embodiment of Coleridge's sin of heresy. When the ship leaves the Antarctic, it is followed by the Polar spirit, which, as Coleridge explains in a gloss, is "one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels; concerning whom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted" (190). Lowes has traced Coleridge's reading through the Neoplatonists - Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblicus, Proclus, Julian, Hermes, and Marsilio Ficino.8 I do not presume to follow him through Coleridge's mazy library excursions, which revealed his curiosity about the rites and the mysteries of ancient cults.® Suffice to say that Coleridge summoned up his Polar Daemon from his Neo-Platonic lore and placed it in opposition to the equatorial regions and the religiously orientated sun. When the ship reaches the equator the sun begins to exact its condign retribution. The Mariner and the crew initially suffer from heat and thirst: There passed a weary time. Each throat Was parched, and glazed each eye. (PW, I, 192, 143-144) 8

•

The Road to Xanadu (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), 212. The Road to Xanadu, 490, note 35.

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But their ultimate fates are decided by the spectre crew of Death and Life-in-Death in a game of change: The naked hulk alongside came, And the twain were casting dice; "The game is done! I've won! I've won!" Quoth she [Life-in-Death], and whistles thrice. (195-198)

In his recent penetrating article on The Ancient Mariner, Edward E. Bostetter cites the incident and observes: "But the most disturbing characteristic of this universe is the caprice that lies at the heart of i t . . . . Surely it [the dice] game knocks out any attempt to impose a systematic philosophical or religious interpretation, be it necessitarian, Christian, or Platonic, upon the poem." 10 The determination of the Mariner's fate and that of the crew is indeed capricious and irrational; in fact, the rulers of the universe deal with the Mariner in much the same way he dealt with the albatross: both inflict punishment wantonly and arbitrarily. We are forced to ask with Bostetter: "How responsible is the Mariner ultimately for his act of evil? How much is his act simply the reflex of a universal pattern of action?" 11 After the spectre-ship departs - and with it the sun - the Mariner blesses the water-snakes unaware and receives tempoary relief. His Holy Mother sends "Gentle sleep from heaven" and life-giving rain, but the hierarchy of the guardian saint, the angels, and the Blessed Virgin nonetheless submits to the Polar spirit, who demands "penance long and heavy". Upon the Mariner's return to his own country, he entreats the Hermit to shrieve him. Instead of absolution the Mariner was struck with the first of his "agonies": Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched With a woeful agony, Which forced me to begin my tale; And then it left me free. (578-581) 10

"The Nightmare World of The Ancient Mariner", Studies in Romanticism, I (Summer, 1962), 244. 11 Ibid.

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In the gloss Coleridge spells out the Mariner's fate: "And ever and anon throughout his future life an agony constraineth him to travel from land to land." The universe of capricious cause and grim consequence into which the Mariner sailed differs greatly from the ordered and harmonious universe of Coleridge's beloved Hartley, or of the unified and idealistic world of Plotinus. In abandoning what he felt to be heretical doctrines, Coleridge turned to predestination (the dice game) and original sin. As Bostetter has noted, the "Mariner's blessing of the snakes is like the evangelistic moment of conversion", which "though it reveals the Mariner as one of the Elect and promises his ultimate salvation, does not free him from pain and penance". 12 Yet the poem ends with a benevolent and moral tag. Just before he departs, leaving the Wedding-Guest "stunned" and of "sense forlorn", the Mariner advises: He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all. (612-615)

The about-face in the moral tag brings to mind the lines which Coleridge added to "The Raven": We must not think so; but forget and forgive, And What Heaven gives life to, we'll still let it live. (p. 171, note to line 44)

It will be recalled that in "The Raven" the crew drowned simply because they manned a ship fashioned from the nesting raven's tree. Coleridge admitted that to "The Raven" he added the couplet "thro' cowardly fear of the Goody". Here the couplet served as strategy to encompass his readers' offended sensibilities. In light of his close identification with the Mariner, I feel that Coleridge concluded The Ancient Mariner with a pious "

Bostetter, 244.

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moral through fear that the punitive universal laws which the Mariner's crime set in motion operated outside of the magic circle of the poem. The moral tag served as a strategy to encompass his own fear and sense of guilt. But his misgivings and guilt feelings continued. Two months after completing the poem he confessed to John Estlin: I have been too neglectful of practical religion — I mean, of actual & stated prayer. . . . Tho' Christianity is my Passion, it is too much my intellectual Passion: and therefore will do me little good in the hour of temptation & calamity. (CL, I, 407)

His "intellectual Passion" could dictate a pious moral tag, but his emotions could dictate only a dice game with high stakes. In his prose writings Coleridge would again affirm an ordered and benevolent universe; in fact, he based his philosophical speculations upon such a world. But when he went to affirm such a universe in his poetry, the harmony of its world was jarred.

4. VARIETIES OF EVIL EXPERIENCE, II: CHRISTABEL

Nearly twenty years after the publication of The Ancient Mariner, Coleridge commented upon his purpose in writing the poem: . . . my endeavors 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 constitutes poetic faith. . . . 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. (BL, II, 6)

In The Ancient Mariner we have seen how Coleridge transferred from his own inward nature a sense of guilt and fear of heresy into the Mariner. Surely much of the vividness which compels the reader to accept the supernatural machinery must stem from the poet's own close identification with his creation. But in Christabel Coleridge provided no central character into which he could project his "inward nature"; instead he delineated two opposing psychological symbols: Christabel, who represents good, and Geraldine, who represents evil. Yet as generations of readers can testify, Christabel does indeed fulfill Coleridge's stated purpose. In spite of its basis in the occult, Christabel does achieve "suspension of disbelief", and, at the same time, it explores the relationship between good and evil. One of the means by which Coleridge achieved his aim is the use of a dramatic speaker to tell the tale. The reader sees the events through the eyes of an anonymous narrator, who, with

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limited omniscience, can relate the incidents as they happen and can conjecture upon motive, but cannot look into the minds of the characters. The narrator takes no part in the action of the tale; with few exceptions he simply relates the events as they might have been witnessed by a particularly matter-of-fact observer. The reader is thus forced to draw his own conclusions from the events of the tale, and in so doing involves himself in the working out of the plot. Having formed his own opinion, the reader is not likely to disbelieve the incidents in the tale which went into his ratiocination. The narrator, furthermore, sometimes speaks in the first person, thus establishing intimacy with the reader. With intimacy follows credibility. The point of view is established early in the poem: 'Tis the middle of the night by the castle clock, And the owls have awakened the crowing cock; Tu-whit! — Tu-whoo! And hark, again! the crowing cock, How drowsily it crew. (My italics) (PW, I, 215, 1-5)

Like a stage director the narrator calls the reader's attention only to particulars of setting which contribute to a mood of mystery and strangeness. Following the crowing of the cock at an unusual hour, the narrator notes another item of the setting: the howling of Sir Leoline's "mastiff bitch": 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. (9-13)

Close attention to detail and the prosaic tone in the first four lines of the passage set up the reader for the startling suggestion of the occult in the final line. Like Gulliver's literal-mindedness and consistency of scale in Lilliput - which form the basis for the reader's acceptance of the existence of diminutive people so the narrator's exactitude about the liming of the howls of the mastiff prepares the reader to "suspend his disbelief" of the

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dog's supernatural visions. Furthermore, even in the final line the narrator remains noncommittal: "Some say, she sees my lady's shroud" (my italics). He repeats, rather naively, what he hears people say - repeats it without being aware of the implications. He attributes the conclusion to others, who, perhaps, are more qualified than he to judge the validity of the occult. The narrator's apparent objectivity conditions the reader to believe in the events to follow. In addition to enhancing verisimilitude, the passage gives one of the few clues to the character of the narrator. In the final line the narrator speaks of "my lady's shroud": thus we can infer that he is acquainted with Sir Leoline's household. But he never reveals his rank or his duties. Another clue to his personality appears in the next stanza: The night is chill, the cloud is gray: 'Tis a month before the month of May And the Spring comes slowly up this way. (20-22)

From his intimacy with the changing seasons we may assume that he is a long-time resident of the area. But the reader is given no further information concerning the dramatic speaker. If the narrator's character is obscure, his attitude toward Christabel is well defined. Upon her first appearance she is described as: The lovely lady, Christabel, Whom her father loves so well.

(23-24) Throughout the tale Christabel is shown to be devout and innocent. The narrator frequently uses the epithet "sweet" to describe her, and relates her prayers to the Virgin. The narrator clearly admires Christabel's virtue and innocence, but at the same time, he constantly fears for her safety, as though virtue alone cannot protect the possessor from evil. When Christabel reaches the wood: She kneels beneath the huge oak tree, And in silence prayeth she.

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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... . Hush, beating heart of Christabel! Jesu, Maria, shield her well! She folded her arms beneath her cloak, And stole to the other side of the oak. (35-46)

When Christabel finds Geraldine on the other side of the tree, she too asks for protection: Mary mother, save me now! (Said Christabel,) And who art thou? (69-70)

Many of the narrator's editorial comments which he injects into the tale concern Christabel's innocence and helplessness. For example, after Christabel has brought Geraldine to the castle and into her chamber Geraldine disrobes. The narrator then calls attention to the incident: Behold! her bosom and half her side — A sight to dream of, not to tell! Ο shield her! shield sweet Christabel! (252-254)

Later, when Christabel recalls the incident: . . . a vision fell Upon the soul of Christabel, The vision of fear, the touch and pain! She shrunk and shuddered, and saw again — (Ah, woe is me! Was it for thee, Thou gentle maid! such sights to see?) (451-456)

Still later, when Geraldine has persuaded Sir Leoline to return her to her father, she "looked askance at Christabel", the "maid devoid of guile and sin", and the narrator pleas: "Jesu, Maria, shield her well!" In spite of the narrator's interjections and prayers, Christabel remains powerless under the spell of the lady whom she befriended.

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Toward Geraldine the narrator holds an ambivalent attitude. When he first introduces her, the narrator stands in awe of her beauty: . . . a damsel bright, Drest in a silken robe of white, 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 The gems entangled in her hair. I guess, 'twas frightful there to see A lady so richly clad as she — Beautiful exceedingly! (My italics)

(58-68)

Throughout the tale the narrator calls attention to Geraldine's brightness and the glitter of her clothing. The emphasis on her dress and external appearance contrasts sharply with the description of her bosom, which has the power to work a spell on Christabel. In a variant reading the narrator remarks: Behold! her bosom and half her side — Are lean and old and foul of hue. (note to line 252)

Following the revelation the narrator continues to refer to her as "so bright a dame" and "fair Geraldine" with "large bright eyes divine". When Sir Leoline meets her he "deemed her sure a thing divine". The reactions suggest the attractiveness and ambiguity of evil. By a curious inversion the occult and evil are linked with brightness and light rather than with darkness, the traditional association. The narrator does not attempt to explain the workings of Geraldine's spell; he is content to describe it. After Christabel takes on Geraldine's serpentine traits, he notes: The maid, alas! her thoughts are gone. She nothing sees — no sight but one! The maid, devoid of guile and sin, I know not how, in fearful wise, So deeply had she drunken in

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That look, those shrunken serpent eyes, That all her features were resigned To this sole image in her mind: 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. (597-589) If the narrator does not explain the phenomenon, the symptoms he notes suggest a natural psychological process. In the spring of 1798, while composing Christabel, Coleridge was also working on "The Three Graves", which, as he termed it, was "the fragment, not of a poem, but of a common Ballad-tale". The tale concerns the sympathetic illness induced by a mother's curse on her daughter and son-in-law. In the preface to the poem, Coleridge expressed the reason for his choice of the bizarre subject: I had been reading Byran Edward's account of the effects of the Oby witchcraft on the Negroes in the West Indies . . . and I conceived the design of shewing that instances of this kind are not peculiar to savage or barbarous tribes, and of illustrating the mode in which the mind is affected in these cases, and the progress and symptoms of the morbid action of the fancy from the beginning. (269) In some ways Christabel displays "sympathetic symptoms of the morbid action of the fancy". Only she can discern Geraldine's "look of dull and treacherous hate". Bard Bracy and Sir Leoline see her as a beautiful and innocent maiden. Their counterobservations suggest the possibility that Christabel's reaction stemmed from her initial shock of seeing Geraldine disrobed: Again she saw that bosom old, Again she felt that bosom cold, And drew in her breath with a hissing sound. (457-459) I am not suggesting that Christabel considers Geraldine to be a type of Obi spirit come to torment her and that the tale has a completely rational basis; for Geraldine does possess super-

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natural powers. She has the ability to drive off the Guardian spirit of Christabel: 'Off, wandering mother! Peak and pine! I have power to bid thee flee.'. .. Off, woman, off! this hour is mine — Though thou her guardian spirit be, Off, woman, off! 'tis given to me.' (205-206, 211-213)

The incredulous narrator intimates that Geraldine holds unnatural powers: Alas! what ails poor Geraldine? Why stares she with unsettled eye? Can she the bodiless dead espy? (207-209)

Characteristically, the narrator merely implies that Geraldine can communicate with the dead; the reader must draw his own conclusions about the occult by answering the rhetorical question in the affirmative. The duality of Geraldine's character - the vacillation between the occult and the natural keeps the reader in suspense: he is never entirely led into the spiritual world, yet it pervades the universe of the poem. Although Geraldine is never clearly labeled a daemon or a vampire or a "loathly lady", she possesses the characteristics of each. The deliberate ambiguity of her evil nature adds to the richness of the poem's meaning, complicating the relationship between good and evil. Geraldine's motives, too, are shown to be ambiguous, Shortly before she casts her spell over Christabel, she hesitates as though proceeding against her will: 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, And eyes the maid the seeks delay. (255-259)

But she does make Christabel her victim and in so doing forces her to assume her own evil characteristics. Christabel's corrup-

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tion begins when she and Geraldine fall asleep after the spell has been cast. Christabel, the innocent maiden, displays signs of guilt: Asleep, and dreaming fearfully, Fearfully dreaming, yet I wis, Dreaming that alone, which is — Ο sorrow and shame! Can this be she, The lady, who knelt at the old oak tree? (293-297)

While Geraldine, the agent of evil, apparently enjoys the sleep of the innocent: And lo! the worker of these harms, That holds the maiden in her arms, Seems to slumber still and mild, As a mother with her child. (298-301)

On the following day when Christabel introduces Geraldine to Sir Leoline and Bard Bracy, the inversion of good and evil continues. The Baron, believing that Geraldine is the daughter of an estranged friend, orders Bracy to ride to Tryermaine to inform Geraldine's father that she is safe and that she and Sir Leoline's retinue will meet him along the way. Bard Bracy demurs, giving as his reason an ill omen he had seen in a dream at midnight, the same hour in which Christabel discovered Geraldine in the wood. In his dream he saw a dove (like that which Christabel kept as a pet and which bore her name) caught by a 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! (550-554)

The incident adumbrates the evil which is to befall Christabel. Shortly following Bard Bracy's recounting of his dream she detects a serpentine look in Geraldine's eyes, falls into a trance, and imitates the snake:

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And drew in her breath with a hissing sound. Stumbling on the unsteady ground Shuddered aloud, with a hissing sound.

(My italics) (459, 590-591) Christabel's reaction to the vision clearly echoes Geraldine's earlier working of the spell. The narrator described Geraldine disrobing in much the same terms: Then drawing in her breath aloud, Like one that shuddered, she unbound The cincture from beneath her breast.

(My italics) (247-249) In the interaction between Christabel and Geraldine, the latter consistently dominates. By means of her seeming virtue, Geraldine wins the respect and love of Sir Leoline; while Christabel, because she recognizes evil in Geraldine and responds by imitating it, receives only scorn and anger from her puzzled father. The evil which she takes on is ultimately contingent upon an act of good - her hospitable protection of Geraldine. At their meeting Geraldine twice elicits her aid: Have pity on my sore distress, I scarce can speak for weariness: Stretch forth thy hand, and have no fear!

(273-275) After relating how she was abducted by five warriors, Geraldine again pleads: (My italics)

Stretch forth thy hand (thus ended she), And help a wretched maid to flee. Then Christabel stretched forth her hand, And comforted fair Geraldine. (My italics)

(103-106)

The repetition of the request and its echo in Christabel's response underscores the innocence of her involvement with evil. Yet her act of mercy sets off a chain reaction of evil in which she and her father become alienated. Geraldine, on the other hand, remains unchanged by her contact with virtue; the exchange between good and evil is unilateral.

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Incidents alone do not bear the theme of evil echoing good; the imagery, too, embodies the "echo motif". Christabel opens with the crowing of a cock at midnight in answer to the hoot of owls. Although neither bird holds a benign position in folk lore, the auroral cock, when he crows in the middle of the night, portends greater harm than his nocturnal counterpart. At the same instant, the "mastiff bitch . . . maketh answer to the clock". Her response derives less from the sound of the clock's bell than from her uncanny ability to see the shroud of her mistress. In both images the response carries with it greater associations of evil than the stimulus. By the end of the first stanza the images have begun to form a pattern which Christabel and Geraldine will substantiate. With the introduction of the protagonists the echo motif takes on a new component - the query and answer of the narrator's rhetorical questions. Frequently the implied or stated answer to the question introduces the unexpected or fearful. Upon Christabel's first appearance, the narrator asks: 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 weal of her lover that's far away. (25-30) In his answer the narrator merely hints at the evil which may befall Christabel's knight, and leaves to the reader the task of filling in the content of the portentous dream. The narrator poses the next rhetorical question when Christabel is startled by a strange sound while praying: 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 From the lovely lady's cheek — There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can,

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Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky. (43-52)

Instead of answering his question, the narrator gratuitously interjects details of setting which enhance the mood of loneliness and desolation and echo ChristabeFs sense of imminent evil. By means of their oscillatory effect on the reader, these and many other rhetorical questions intensify the interaction between the protagonists, acting contrapuntally, as it were, to develop the echo motif.1 Perhaps the most explicit image in the echo cluster is that which opens Part II. It too concerns the castle bell - the same chimes which elicited a response from the Baron's mastiff. Part II begins with the peal of the matin bell in the morning following Christabel's enchantment. The sound, however, carries a peculiar meaning: Each matin bell, the Baron saith, Knells us back to a world of death. (332-333)

Normally the matinal bell and service of the Morning Prayer mark the beginning of the life of a new day, but in the universe of Christabel they signal the reverse: the beginning of death in life. The Baron's remark was prompted by the death of his lady many years earlier, which led him to inaugurate the custom of having the sacristan tell forty-five beads between each stroke, thus making of the matin bell a "warning knell". If its intention is to remind the living of their mortality, its effect is far different: Saith Bracy the bard, So let it knell! And let the drowsy sacristan Still count as slowly as he can!.. . In Langdale Pike and Witch's Lair, And Dungeon-ghyll 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, The death-note to their living brother; And oft too, by the knell offended, 1

See also lines 14-17,148-153, 206-213, 327-331, 405-410, 621-625, 673-677.

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Just as their one! two! three! is ended. The devil mocks the doleful tale With a merry peal from Borodale, (345-359)

The efforts of a living, virtuous sacristan result in a knell of death echoed by sinful ghosts, while the moral and sober purpose of the peal of bells is distorted by the devil, the chief agent of evil. This image and others in the echo cluster picture a moral universe gone awry - a universe in which evil is a reflection of good, in which virtue is indistinguishable from vice. The distorted and ambiguous echo imagery serves as an apt backdrop for Christabel's corruption, and dovetails neatly with the action of the tale. The devil's "merry peal from Borodale" awakens Geraldine: . . . 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. (360-364)

Dressed in colors representative of purity, Geraldine then goes on to pervert the guileless Christabel. Both imagery and incident in Christabel force the reader to ask why evil should fall on the innocent. The question posed in Christabel is different from that presented in The Ancient Mariner, for regardless of the inadvertency of his act, the Mariner did indeed aggressively defy the harmony of the universe by shooting the albatross. True, the Mariner's punishment proved disproportionate to the crime, and his wanton slaying has been shown to conform to the pattern of dice-throwing caprice which governs the universe of the poem. Nonetheless, his punishment conforms to a relentless, if arbitrary, system of cause and consequence. In Christabel the very existence of a logical system of ethics is questioned. In a universe in which the distinctions between good and evil are blurred, moral responsibility lacks cogency, and evil - if it exists - can exist only in the eyes of the beholder.

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Yet in spite of Christabel's demonstration to the contrary, Coleridge insisted that moral logic did govern his poetic universe, and that good and evil were separable. Geraldine affirmed as much shortly before disrobing and casting her spell: '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 befel, Even I in my degree will try, Fair maiden, to requite you well. (227-232)

Geraldine's method of retaliation lends a tone of bitter irony to the passage. She did repay Christabel for her virtue and hospitality, but not necessarily in kind. But it is unlikely that Coleridge intended "requite" to carry a double meaning, for the dialogue throughout the poem is generally straightforward: the characters mean only what they say. Furthermore, the narrator, whose matter-of-factness would seem to preclude irony, also asserts that evil may be a permitted privation of ontological good. After speculating upon the nature of Christabel's dream after she is entranced, he concludes, ending Part I: But this she knows, in joys and woes, That saints will aid if men will call: For the blue sky bends over all! (329-331)

The passage bears the same relationship to Christabel as the concluding moral tag of The Ancient Mariner bears to the latter: both appear to be attempts on the part of the poet to explain away the anomalous features of his creation. The passage might also look ahead to Coleridge's projected conclusion of the final three of Christabel's intended five parts. Although the final three parts never reached completion, Coleridge outlined several versions of the final chapters later in life to his associates. He related one of these to Gillman, who included it in his biography: 2

James Gillman, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I (London, 1838), 283. See also "Preface", in Poems, ed. by Derwent and Sara Coleridge (London, 1868), xlii, note, and Gillman, 301-302.

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The story of the Christabel is partly founded on the notion, that the virtuous of this world save the wicked. The pious and good Christabel suffers and prays for "The weal of her lover that is far away," exposed to various temptations in a foreign land; and she thus defeats the power of evil represented in the person of Geraldine. This is one main object of the tale.2

The various versions share one essential, viz., that the trials of the virtuous ultimately redeem the wicked. Whether or not Coleridge could have pictured Geraldine's redemption convincingly must remain unanswered. Fulfilling his stated purpose might have proved difficult, for the framework of moral ambiguity constructed in the completed parts might not have allowed Geraldine to change her nature without the intervention of a deus ex machina. We have seen how Coleridge struggled with a similar problem in Osorio and failed to solve it, allowing Osorio to die unrepentant. Although he never finished Christabel, from Coleridge's numerous references to it we can conclude that he worried more about it than about any other of his poems. For example, in 1800, shortly before sending Part I to the printer, he wrote to James Tobin: The delay in Copy has been owing in part to me, as the writer of Christabel — Every line has been produced by me with labor-pangs. I abandon Poetry altogether — I leave the higher & deeper Kinds to Wordsworth, the delightful, popular & simply dignified to Southey; & reserve for myself the honorable attempt to make others feel and understand their writings . . . (CL, I, 623)

It may be significant that Coleridge linked his struggles to conclude Christabel with his determination to abandon poetry in favor of criticism. The implications of the passage must await further investigation in the next chapter. Suffice it to say that by 1800 the problem of evil in Coleridge's life had become even more intense than during his annus mirabilis, and he had not yet answered the question raised in Christabel: "Why does evil be-

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fall the innocent?" In "The Pains of Sleep" Coleridge again asked plaintively: . . . 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? (PW, I, 390-391, 43-52)

5. A STATELY PLEASURE-DOME DECREED: "KUBLA KHAN"

Among Coleridge's poems only The Ancient Mariner has received more critical attention than "Kubla Khan". Since the publication of The Road to Xanadu in 1927 by John Livingston Lowes 1 (the folk-hero of Coleridgean scholars), two books and dozens of essays have appeared. Intense interest in "Kubla Khan" has been aroused by the various problems which it poses, particularly the nature of its composition, the assignment of its date, and, of course, its interpretation. It is not my intention to present a review of the scholarship to date on "Kubla Khan"; such a task would demand a monograph in itself. Instead, I shall note only those studies which bear directly upon the problem dealt with in the present study.2 Through an investigation of clinical evidence Elizabeth Schneider has demonstrated convincingly that, in spite of Coleridge's notorious preface to the 1816 edition, "Kubla Khan" did not grow out of an opium dream; in fact, the preface - like others by Coleridge - was probably written to account for his inability to complete the poem and to arouse the reader's interest, while at the same time it intended to extricate the poem from serious literary criticism.3 But if Miss Schneider dispelled once and for all the myth of unconscious composition, she also 1

(New York: Viking Books, 1959). Because of the numerous studies of the poem, some points of my interpretation are bound to parallel or overlap those of other critics. Rather than construct an elaborate cross reference of footnotes, I shall acknowledge only direct indebtedness. a Coleridge, Opium and "Kubla Khan" (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953). 8

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renewed the controversies surrounding both the date on which the poem was written and whether or not the poem is a fragment. On the basis of Coleridge's statements and of his reading, she ascribes a date of 1799 or 1800 - much later than the traditional date of May, 1798. Furthermore she eschews any symbolic interpretation which would make the poem complete in itself; to her it is merely a fragment with a postscript. Fortunately neither issue substantially affects the interpretation to follow below. Its date is inconsequential since Coleridge used the major images in "Kubla Khan" in his writings throughout his poetically productive years; and although its fragmentary status may concern critics dealing with the poem as an aesthetic entity, the present study is concerned with a different matter: what the poem reveals about Coleridge's attitude toward poetic composition. I have mentioned Miss Schneider's book because it put "Kubla Khan" on an equal footing with Coleridge's other poems; thus it can be treated in the context of his earlier poems and writings. In a more recent book, Marshall Suther explores the meaning of "Kubla Khan" by means of an analysis of recurrent images in all of Coleridge's poems and notebooks.4 Suther uncovers half a dozen levels of significance: 'the autobiographical reading, with Sara Fricker as the woman wailing for her demon lover"; the reading as a love poem; a political poem; as "an introspective account of the elements of personality involved in the poetic experience"; as "the poem as symbol, partaking of the reality it would render intelligible, being what it is about"; and finally as "a description of mountain scenery".6 In relentless detail Suther hunted down all images connected with the poem, and in so doing enriched our understanding of many of Coleridge's less successful poems. Although Suther's critical technique is in many respects like the one used in the present study (with the exception that he admits images into his clusters on the strength of faint echoes or connotation), still his interpretation differs from mine because of our differing focuses. * «

Visions of Xanadu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). Visions of Xanadu, 287-288.

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The large number of persuasive yet often contradictory interpretations of "Kubla Khan", with their various critical techniques, should convince the reader of the complexity of the poem and should caution him against hasty and simplified conclusions. From the point of view of symbolic action, a remark by G. Wilson Knight may map out the smoothest road to Xanadu. In The Starlit Dome Knight speaks of Kubla as "God - or at least one of those 'huge and mighty forms' or other intuitions of gigantic mountainous power, in Wordsworth." He then qualifies his remark by comparing Kubla's function to that of Prospero in The Tempest and to Yeats' emperor in Byzantium* But Kubla as persona plays a small part in Knight's interpretation; in fact, he suggests that Kubla could even be dropped from the analysis: We can provisionally — not finally, as I shall show — leave him out, saying that the poet's genius, starting to describe an oriental monarch's architectural exploits, finds itself automatically creating a symbolic and universal panorama of existence.7

In that Knight correlates Kubla with the author of the poem, I concur with his ascription of godlike powers to the emperor, and I would go even further - making Kubla the central figure in the poem. Kubla is no mere mortal; he has the power of divine creation. The grammatical periodicity of the opening lines forces the emphasis to fall on the final word: "decree". In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: (PW, I, 297, lines 1-2)

"Decree", here, would appear to have a theological rather than civil significance. The decree is proclaimed in hallowed territory, beside Alph, "the sacred river". The garden, furthermore, is: as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover! (14-16)

The supernatural woman and her demon lover lend further β

τ

(London: Oxford University Press, 1941), 93. Ibid.

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spiritual connotations to the setting and to Kubla. And finally the creation of the pleasure-dome appears in significant structural positions: at the beginning and end of the first section. Initially it was decreed; at the conclusion its creation was miraculous - "a miracle of rare device". In poems other than "Kubla Khan" Coleridge more often than not also used "decree" in its theological sense. Its earliest appearance is in "The Sigh", written late in 1794 after his engagement to Sara Fricker. The poet sighs because he is fated to be absent from his beloved. I yielded to the stern decree Yet heav'd a languid sigh for thee. (PW, I, 63, lines 16-17) "Decree", in this instance, bears the meaning of preordination, for as a result of circumstances beyond his control, the poet was forced to be parted from his betrothed. In a more cogent example, Coleridge applies the term to the prophet of Allah, Mohammed, who, like Kubla, is a potentate. The poet invokes his soul to sing of "the flight and return of Mohammed", who will crush "huge wasteful empires". For veiling the Gospel of Jesus, They, the best corrupting, had made it worse than the vilest. Wherefore Heaven decreed th' enthusiast warrior of Mecca, Choosing good from iniquity rather than evil from goodness. (PW, I, 329, lines 5-8) It should be noted, by the way, that the decree by heaven need not be universally good; in this instance Heaven chose as its agent a pagan leader. Although Coleridge completed only nine lines of the narrative poem, the thematic statement of the opening suggests that the earthly paradise which Mohammed hoped to establish would of necessity have been imperfect and transient. Coleridge sometimes associates the fiat with violence or supernatural evil. For example, in a sonnet addressed to Mrs. Siddons, published in 1796, Coleridge describes the effect on him ("shiv'ring Joys") of her performance.

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A s when a child on some long Winter's night Affrighted clinging to its Grandam's knees With eager wondring and pertubr'd delight Listens strange tales of fearful dark decrees. (PW, I, 85, lines 1 ^ 0

Granted that the term might have been decreed by the need of a word to rhyme with "knees", still it was kept as such throughout its many appearances in print. As late as 1827 Coleridge, continued to use "decree" in its divine sense.8 In "The Improvisatore" Coleridge, speaking of himself in the guise of a Friend, recounts metaphorically the decline of poetic powers, "The meteor offspring of the brain". Yet the poet does not despair of the loss of Fancy, which, at any rate, was a substance only in that "it intercepted Reason's light"; for he has been given the compensation of contentment, late autumn's Amaranth. I shall quote at length in order to include all of the images which parallel those of "Kubla Khan". Ο bliss of blissful hours! The boon of Heaven's decreeing, While yet in Eden's bowers Dwelt the first husband and his sinless mate! The one sweet plant, which, piteous Heaven agreeing, They bore with them thro' Eden's closing gate! Of life's gay summer tide the sovran rose! Late autumn's Amaranth. (PW, I, 468, lines 49-56)

Like Eden, Kubla's garden was enclosed with a wall; both gardens also were created by executive order. But more important, the poet has been barred from both gardens - from Eden presumably because he is unable to revive poetic inspiration. Both poems deal with the power of creativity and its subsequent loss. I have traced the appearance of "decree" at some length in order to substantiate the sacred overtones of Kubla's act of creation. Exotic and powerful though he was, Kubla was nonetheless a mortal usurping God's function. I shall return to this 8

Besides those cites above, "Decree" or variations of the word appear in the following: "Robespierre", 1.142, 2.40; 'Taste of the Times", 7; Triumph oj Loyalty, 212.

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point after exploring parts of Kubla's garden - by now heavily populated with critics. Not all of the features of the garden are cogent to the present study. I am concerned primarily with only those images which closely bear upon creativity, particularly poetic composition. Thus the river Alph, the walls and towers, the sinuous rills, the incense-bearing tree - none of these need detain us. However, to a symbolist critic concerned with an all-embracing interpretation, all, or at least, most of the inhabitants of the garden and its appointments should be made to fit into a consistent scheme. This study, leaving loose ends, will single out the deep romantic chasm and the mighty fountain for scrutiny. Here are the lines: But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover. And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, A mighty fountain momently was forced: 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. (12-24)

Chasms in Coleridge's poetry - as we have noted earlier (in Osorio and "The Lime-tree Bower my Prison") - are often suggestive of both beauty and terror. Suther has traced the incidences of chasms through Coleridge's writings and has shown convincingly that "Coleridge's tendency is certainly to fuse the contradictions",» and in this he agrees in part with the majority of critics who feel that "the chasm is in some way the origin or locus of potentiality, of creativity, either in spite of or somehow because of its sinister elements".10 Regardless of its potential, the chasm in Xanadu appears in the poem because it furnishes the setting for the mighty fountain, the source of the sacred river. • 19

Suther, Visions of Xanadu, 226. Suther, 222.

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Coleridge frequently used images of fountains with the traditional symbolism of birth and often with the added associations of poetic creativity. Suther has pointed out that most of these fountains "are likely to present the ambiguity essential to all created life". He cites "Religious Musings" in which spirits brood over "the immeasurable fount / Ebullient with creative Diety" and in which Property is a "twy-streaming fount, / Whence Vice and Virtue flow, honey and Gall." He notices also in the lines: Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:

that "in keeping with the duality of the whole scene, one of these is a destructive image, the other productive, the former 'wholly natural', the latter an instance of cooperation between nature and man".11 Following several more illustrations Suther concludes that the chasm (with its fountain) is "both ominous and attractive, ominous because it seems incomprehensible and uncontrollable, attractive because its mysterious vitality is just what must be comprehended and controlled in some measure if the imaginative paradise is to be r e a l . . . " 1 2 Suther equates the creativity embodied in Kubla's decree with the creativity inherent in the symbolic fountain, and sees in both a "combination of the natural and the supernatural, of evil and good". It is the function of the poet, he continues, to "find the supernatural in nature, to experience it in the act of creation (and usually to make it manifest in poems)". Because the evil in nature is intertwined with the good, an attempt to "reach for the absolute in or behind nature is attended by fear or peril, even by a sense of sin". Still equating Kubla's decree with the natural creativity of the fountain, Suther concludes: Kubla's decree, like the decree of every 'creator,' is at the same time the most periously presumptuous of all acts, and the act to which man is ineluctably called if he is to realize his highest possibility as a man.13 11 11 13

Suther, 236-238. Suther, 240. Suther, 240-241.

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Rather than put Kubla's decree on par with the surge of the fountain, I would point to the differences between the two types of creativity. Rather than search for a fusion within the poem, I would stress the contrasts between spurious or pseudo-creation by Kubla and the natural or fundamental workings of the fountain. Therein may lie the key to the symbolic action in the poem and a partial explanation of Coleridge's inability to continue the initial description beyond "a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice". Obviously Kubla is a mortal drawn from history, and as such, his acts of creation must differ markedly from an archetypal creation flowing from the fountain. The fountain makes up part of an everlasting cycle of birth and death, of creation and destruction. It is the origin of the sacred river of life, and with cosmis irony, the fountain contains within itself the seeds of death. The fountain is elemental - a process analogous to cycles of seasons. Kubla, on the other hand, like a drop in the river (or a short duration of time) constitutes only a small part of the cycle; indeed, he is one of its products. Thus any artifact which he may decree must be at best a by-product, and the process of creation, at best imitative. Even if we ignore the symbolism of the fountain and instead interpret Xanadu literally, the distinctions between the two kinds of creation insist themselves. The fountain and the river predated the Khan; his act of creation was superimposed upon an already existent plot of ground with trees, a fountain, a river, and measureless caverns. They are "natural" in the sense that they were created by some agency other than man. The second appearance of the dome: The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. (31-34)

depends entirely upon the river; it is merely a shadow or image reflected upon the surface. It is simply a single element in a much larger landscape, perhaps containing within itself the

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means of its own destruction: the opposition of heat and cold, sun and ice. That the dome of pleasure may be spurious can be further supported by Lowes' account of an important source of the poem, Aloadinee's "Paradise" which Coleridge found in Purchas' Pilgrimes. I do not wish to interpret "Kubla Khan" as simply a paradigm of Purchas' Pilgrimes or of any of all of Coleridge's reading for that matter. To do so would deny the excellences peculiar to the poem and would make of the mind of the poet little more that a sieve which catches particularly compelling images. This study of sources hopefully will suggest or support an interpretation based on more extensive evidence. In Purchas' account, Aloadine had built for him a palace "because Mahomet had promised such a sensuall Paradise to his devout followers..." The emperor then daily instructed bold youths in the joys awaiting them after their deaths, and those who showed most promise he: caused to be carryed into divers Chambers of the said Palaces, where they saw the things aforesaid as soone as they awaked: each of them having those damosels to minister Meates and excellent Drinkes, and all varieties of pleasures to them; insomuch that the Fooles thought themselves in Paradise indeed. When they had enjoyed those pleasures four or five days, they were againe cast in a sleepe, and carryed forth againe. After which, hee . . . questioned where they had beene, which answered, by your Grace, in Paradise . . . Then the old man answered, This is the commandement of our Prophet, that whosoever defends his Lord, he make him enter Paradise.14 The parallels between Kubla and Aloadine are too close to ignore; Purchas' account emphasizes the sensual delights 'which await the youths, while each mention of Kubla's edifice in the first part of the poem is coupled with the word "pleasure". Between 1795 and 1800 Coleridge had not yet determined the role of pleasure in the aesthetic experience; he used the term in his poems equivocally. The term which Coleridge used more specifically in connection with poetry is "joy", an analysis of which will follow in the consideration of "Dejection: an Ode". Perhaps by the time Coleridge came to write his poem, Aloadines' sensual 14

Lowes, The Road to Xanadu, 330.

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pleasure had been refined or purified into something "less gross than bodily". Whatever the degree of sensuality, Kubla's dome, like the paradise of Aloadine, contains hints of deception or trickery. Lowes uncovered still more parallels in Purchas' travels. Earlier in the account of Aloadine, Purchas wrote of other occupants of the "paradise". There by divers Pipes answering divers parts of those Palaces were seene to runne Wine, Milke, Honey, and cleere Water. In them hee had placed goodly Damosels skilfull in Songs and Instruments of Musicke and Dancing and to make Sports and Delights unto men whatsoever they could imagine. They were also fairely attyred in Gold and Silke, and were seene to go continually sporting in the Garden and Palaces.1®

We can now turn to the second part of the poem: A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

(37-47) Again the correspondences are striking. The Abyssinian maid with her dulcimer, the symphony and song, the desire to return to the once-tasted paradise, the milk and honey - all parallel Purchas' tale of the spurious paradise. Surely the parallel must extend also to Kubla's pleasure-dome, which the poet wishes to recreate but cannot. That the second part of the poem is a comment on the poetic process, even critics as far apart as Suther and Miss Schneider agree. The dramatic shift to the first person announces the entrance of the poet himself; the song which he yearns to revive "

Ibid.

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refers to the earlier description of Xanadu. But the poet does not wish to recreate the entire plot of ground; he specifies only "that dome in the air, / That sunny dome! those caves of ice!" He ignores the fountain and all the natural scenery of the visionary land, and instead singles out the alien element in the landscape - the one unholy spot in an otherwise perfectly balanced paradise. The poet longs to achieve Kubla's god-like feat by means of his art. The poem concludes: 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! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise. (46-54)

If the poet could recapture his vision, its effect on him and his auditors would be awesome indeed. Miss Schneider has pointed out parallels between this frenzied poet and the ancient conventional portraits of poets possessed by the god in Dionysius worship and the Orphic cults, notably in Plato's Ion. The parallels include flashing eyes, floating hair, milk and honey, holiness and dread, but most important, the inspiration needed for poetic inspiration. In the Ion poets compose their poems only "because they are inspired and possessed"; they are "not in their right mind"; the poet is "a light and winged and holy thing".18 Might not some of the qualities of Plato's intoxicated poet adhere to Kubla's decree of a pleasure-dome in an enchanted land? Yet the description of the maddened poet is hortative and provisional. Even as he wishes that he could "build that dome in air", the tone of the passage signals failure. The long concessive clause beginning "Could I revive within me" controls the entire statement and deeply qualifies the periodic conclusion: "I would build that dome in air." The reader senses the small likeli14

Quoted from Scheider, Coleridge, Opium and "Kuhla Kahn", 245-246.

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hood of the poet's feeding on honey-dew and the milk of Paradise in order to fulfill his intention. There are many possible reasons for Coleridge's inability to complete "Kubla Khan", some of which might have inhibited him simultaneously. Perhaps, as Miss Schneider suggests, the description of Xanadu is too rich and sensuous to be maintained throughout the length demanded in a narrative; perhaps Coleridge did indeed experience the stimulus for the poem in some sort of reverie - if not in an opium dream - and subsequently forgot it. But one deep-seated cause may well have been Coleridge's reluctance to emulate Kubla in his god-like arrogance. Long after the composition of "Kubla Khan" Coleridge read Church of England Homilies, in which, on the flyleaf, he jotted down a lengthy annotation to a passage on the nature of prayer in mixed English, Latin, and Greek - a form of composition which he often used when agitated or when attempting to conceal deeply-felt but upsetting insights. Coleridge begins by rejecting the worship of a God with whom one can equate "sensible Nature", for to do so would make of Nature nothing more than a "subtle and exquisite Machine" and worship, nothing more than "a deathly Superstition". Coleridge continues: "To speak aloud to God and by the sound and meaning of our words to suppose ourselves influencing him as we in this way influence our fellow men, - this is a delirious superstition." Coleridge then equates prayer with self-deification (apotheosis) and by analogy relates prayer and the composition of his early poetry. Through both prayer and poetic composition the subjective desire became objective, the applicant took on the qualities of the benefactor. He concludes: "But as the adorable Object, so must Prayer be, at once scheme and energy, ideal and real, final and medial, object and efficient." Shocked, perhaps, by the revelation, he appended this anguished prayer: I believe, Lord, help my unbelief I pray: Ο enable me to pray! Ο Word, Ο Spirit of the Lord, be ye unto me, as Aaron and Hur, unto Moses on the Mountain. Ο stay up my hands until the going down of the Sun, the day-star of my mortal Life, lest Amalek and his people, even they that are within me, prevail against me! — I would

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fain hold up my hands — I faint, I let my hands down — Ο stay up my hands — Ο gracious Word and Ο unbreathed Wisdom! Ο Light! Ο life of God — Ο light of Man! Ye stayed up my hands even when they were sinking, and in my utter Fainting ye did live in me, yea, for me and instead of me — otherwise I had been utterly discomfited! — Lo, I pray! Ο that I had the power of supplication! I believe! Ο lord — help my unbeliefs.17 Although the insight and its remorse became conscious long after Coleridge abandoned "Kubla Khan", I feel that his fear of self-deification through the agency of poetic composition thwarted his attempts to "build that dome in the air".

17

Critical Annotations (Harrow, 1889), 47.

by S. T. Coleridge,

ed. by William F. Taylor

6. THE MAD LUTANIST: THE "DEJECTION" CRISIS

With the exception of Part II of Christabel Coleridge wrote few significant poems between his annus mirabilis and 1802, the year in which he composed "Dejection: An Ode". For the most part he devoted his literary talent to free translations from German poetry and to political essays and occasional verse for the Morning Post. Furthermore, he did a substantial translation of Wallenstein, probably a substitute for creative work. The period of poetic drought coincided with a number of personal misfortunes which fell upon him in both Germany and England. In August, 1798, accompanied by William and Dorothy Wordsworth, he sailed to Germany in order to learn to speak and read German and to study at the university in Gottingen. Coleridge left his wife and children at Stowey under the care of Thomas Poole. In February, while Coleridge was attending a series of lectures in Gottingen, his son, Berkeley, died of consumption. Following the advice of Poole, Sara did not break the news of the child's death to her husband until the following month, hoping by the delay to allow Coleridge to continue his studies uninterruptedly. When Coleridge finally did learn of the death, he attempted to comfort his wife with assurances that the infant died in accord with a divine plan: . . . only in states of Society in which the revealing voice of our most inward & abiding nature is no longer listened to, . . . only then we say it [the life of a child] ceases! I will not believe that it ceases — in this moving stirring and harmonious Universe I cannot believe it! (CL, I, 481) Coleridge appears to be consoling his wife less than trying to

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convince himself of divine goodness and mercy, and by so doing to put his personal grief into a larger context and thus diminish his sorrow. Nevertheless the question of God's indifference to man's fate does arise: And shall we who are Christians, shall we believe that he himself uses his own power vainly? — That like a child he builds palaces of mud and clay in the common road, and then destroys them, as weary of his pastime, or leaves them to trod under by the Hoof of Accident? (CL, I, 482)

Coleridge answered his own question in the negative, asserting the existence of a personal God, and casting doubts on the validity of the philosophy of Priestley: I confess that the more I think, the more I am discontented with the doctrines of Priestley. He builds the whole and sole hope of future existence on the words and miracles of Jesus — yet doubts or denies the future existence of Infants — only because according to his own System of Materialism he has not discovered how they can be made conscious — But Jesus has declared that all who are in the grave shall arise — (CL, I, 482)

Here Coleridge bases his faith and consolation on the promises of scripture rather than on his beloved philosophical speculations. Yet the involved circumlocutions and personified abstractions throughout infuse the letter with an "Estecian" tone of hollowness, as though the author were conducting a dialogue with himself in which the affirmative conclusion has been predetermined. His letter to Thomas Poole written two days earlier expresses his feelings more clearly. He wrote that parenthood to him was "a fable wholly without meaning except in the moral which it suggests - a fable of which the Moral is God" (CL, I. 478). After affirming that an innate faith is proof against the despair of skepticism, he continues: I find it wise and human to believe, even on slight evidence, opinions, the contrary of which cannot be proved, & which promote our happiness without hampering our Intellect. — My Baby has not lived in vain. (CL, I, 479)

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Thus he admits the expediency of his falling back on a faith in a merciful God; but even the stance he assumed could not shield him from emotional misgivings. In the same letter he discloses his feelings: Oh! this strange, strange, strange Scene-shifter, Death! that giddies one with insecurity, & so unsubstantiates the living Things that one has grasped and handled! (CL, I, 479)

By his choice of a metaphor from the theater Coleridge betrays an uneasiness toward the benevolence of fate. If death is a sceneshifter, then life must be a drama, played in accordance to a script written beforehand with the actors no more than pawns in the hands of fate, the producer. Immediately following the metaphor Coleridge cited one of Wordsworth's "Lucy poems", "Epitaph", presumably as a summary of his own feelings. The second of its two stanzas reads: No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees, Mov'd round in Earth's diurnal course With rocks, & stones, and trees! (CL, I, 480)

Coleridge could find little consolation in the concept of an afterlife expressed in "Epitaph". If he equated his infant with the girl in the poem, then little Berkeley would indeed have lived in vain, for he has lost the unique qualities which made him human. Death made him insensate, depriving him of the power of sight and hearing; but even more brutally, death has reduced him to the level of inanimate objects, cataloguing him with rocks and stones and trees. In a single letter Coleridge vacillated between an affirmation of a personal God and an admission of a materialistic universe - one in which living things and inorganic matter alike get the same consideration. Yet both conclusions grew out of his need to justify intellectually a universe in which the innocent and guilty share the same fate. His casting about for explanations stemmed also from deep-

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seated emotional needs. In his next letter to Poole, Coleridge again reflected on the death of his son: There are moments in which I have such a power of Life within me, such a conceit of it, I mean — that I lay the Blame of my child's Death to my absence — not intellectually; but I have a strange sort of sensation, as if while I was present, none could die whom I intensely loved — (CL, I, 490)

He ends the letter plaintively: My dear Poole! don't let little Hartley die before I come home. — That's silly — true — & I burst into tears as I wrote it. (CL, I, 495)

In moments of stress Coleridge's deep sense of guilt and unworthiness came to the surface. Confronted with the death of his child, he could draw no emotional support from his philosophical concepts; nor could the merciful God of the New Testament completely lighten his burden of blameworthiness. Coleridge felt much the same emotion three years earlier when his son, Hartley, was born. Then, too, he was away from his family during a crisis, because, as he explained: "my Sara had strangely miscalculated". He expressed his feelings in a sonnet: "On Receiving a Letter Informing one of the Birth of a Son", which he spoke of as "a most faithful picture of my feelings on a very interesting event". The sonnet lays bare Coleridge's attitude toward his "Eternal Sire": When they did greet me father, sudden awe Weigh'd down my spirit: I retired and knelt Seeking the throne of grace, but inly felt N o heavenly visitation upwards draw My feeble mind, nor cheering ray impart. Ah me! before the Eternal Sire I brought Th' unquiet silence of confused thought And shapeless feelings: my o'erwhelmed heart Trembled, and vacant tears stream'd down my face. And now once more, Ο Lord! to thee I bend, Lover of souls! and groan for future grace, That ere my babe youth's perilous maze have trod,

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Thy overshadowing Spirit may descend, And he be born again, a child of God. (PW, I, 152-153)

Instead of arousing sentiments of elation or thanksgiving, the news forced him to his knees to seek grace, the first time without success because of the supplicant's unworthiness - his "feeble mind" and "unquiet silence of confused thought". In his second attempt at prayer he "groaned for future grace", hoping to protect his child from future ills and to give him spiritual preference. The God to whom the poet prayed - in spite of the appellation "lover of souls" - emerges as a righteous and demanding taskmaster, one who lays out a "perilous maze" for the child to tread. Coleridge betrayed his religious apprehensions in another sonnet concerned with the birth of his first son: "Composed on a Journey Homeward; the Author having Received Intelligence of a Birth of a Son." The poet had premonitions of his son's death: Ο my sweet baby! when I reach my door, If heavy looks should tell me thou art dead, (As sometimes, through excess of hope, I fear) I think that I should struggle to believe Thou wert a spirit, to this nether sphere Sentenc'd for some more venial crime to grieve; Did'st scream, then spring to meet Heaven's quick reprieve, While we wept idly o'er thy little bier! (PW, I, 154)

With its suggestion of predestination and spiritual damnation, the passage carries overtones of fervid Calvinism. The poet imagines that even an innocent babe bears guilt for "some more venial crime" (perhaps that of original sin) and must suffer in order to expiate the transgression. The passage brings to mind the macabre sermons of Jonathan Edwards or the lurid experiences of Cowper. Even the tentative faith in the infant's translation into heaven cannot console the bereaved parents, who "wept idly o'er the little bier". In both 1796 and 1799, crises in Coleridge's family educed from him expressions of a latent sense of guilt and fear of a

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vindictive God. But family crises were not the only afflictions which tormented Coleridge at the turn of the century. He was also periodically ill with rheumatism which robbed him of vigor and forced him to take opium to alleviate the chronic pain. By May of 1801 his drug habit was probably fairly well established. In a letter to Poole he outlined the course of his illness during 1800 and 1801, and ended onimously: . . . the attacks on my stomach, & the nephritic pains in my back which almost alternated with the stomach fits — they were terrible! The Disgust, the Loathing, that followed these Fits & no doubt in part too the use of the Brandy & Laudanum which they rendered necessary — this Disgust, Despondency, & utter Prostration of Strength, & the strange sensibility to every change in the atmosphere even while in bed — enough! (CL, II, 731)

In addition to his illness and opium addiction, Coleridge was disturbed by his increasing incompatibility with his wife. By October, 1801, the domestic discord became so apparent that Coleridge contemplated separating from her. He suggested the possibility to his brother-in-law, Southey: Sara — alas! we are not suited to each other. . . . I will go on believing that it will end happily — if not, if our mutual unsuitableness continues and (as it assuredly will do, if it continue) increases & strengthens, why then, it is better for her & my children, that I should live apart, than that she should be a Widow & they Orphans. Carefully have I thought thro the subject of marriage & deeply am I convinced of its's [sic] indissolubleness. (CL, II, 767)

Coleridge's domestic situation was not improved by his strong attachment to Sara Hutchinson, whom he met in October, 1799, and visited frequently thereafter. His hopeless love for Sara Hutchinson has been discussed in detail;1 suffice to say that it was one of the clusters of emotional and physical adversities of Coleridge's "dejection period". The poems which Coleridge wrote between 1798 and 1802 - exclusive of occasional pieces and adaptations from the 1

See George Whalley, Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson Poems (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1955).

and the Asra

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German - differ sharply from those written during his annus mirabilis. With the exception of the setting in "The Mad Monk" the supernatural or Gothic elements disappeared, and even the single exception Coleridge acknowledged to be derivative in the subtitle: "An Ode in Mrs. Radcliff's Manner". Coleridge found no single theme or subject to exploit; instead he wrote on a variety of subjects ranging from the pleasures of sea bathing to a recantation of his earlier support of the French Revolution. Yet many of the diverse poems share a singular motif. It often takes the form of a protected bower or sheltered spot in which the poet insulates himself from hostile surroundings or inward uneasiness. In "Fears in Solitude", for example, the poet seeks peace of mind after contemplating the threat of an invasion and England's corrupt political practices. He finds such a place: A green and silent spot, amid the hills, A small and silent dell! O'er stiller place No singing sky-lark ever poised himself. . . . Oh! 'tis a quiet spirit-healing nook! (PW, I, 256-257, lines 1-3, 12)

In "Lines Composed in a Concert-Room" the poet also seeks solitude. He wishes to shun "scented Rooms": . . . where to a gaudy throng, Heaves the proud Harlot, her distended breast, In intricacies of laborious song. (PW, I, 324, lines 2-4)

Rather than the "buzz of Vanity and Hate", the poet prefers a solitary setting in which to enjoy music: Ο let me hide, Unheard, unseen, behind the alder-trees For round their roots the fisher's boat is tied, On whose trim seat doth Edmund stretch at ease, And while the lazy boat sways to and fro, Breathes in his flute sad airs, so wild and slow, That his own cheek is wet with quiet tears. (22-28)

Coleridge's "bower poems" differ from traditional descriptivereflective poetry in that the discovery of a delightful and shel-

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tered nook - with the mood of languor it instills - is an end in itself; reflections on the outside world are added gratuitously. In most descriptive-reflective poetry the pastoral setting, with its contrast to urban life, merely serves as a vehicle for the poet's moral conclusions. The setting predominates in Coleridge's "The Snow-Drop", in which the speaker imagines himself in a place where: . . . by cypresses o'erhung The heavenly Lethe steals. A sea-like sound the branches breathe, Stirr'd by the Breeze that loiters there; And all that stretch their limbs beneath, Forget the coil of mortal care. (PW, I, 358, lines 39-44) The passages cited and a number of others deal with situations somewhat like that of "Dejection". 2 In the minor poems Coleridge seldom divulges the source of his lassitude, or when he does, it turns out to be a general and conventional distaste of city life. But in the early version of "Dejection" he enumerates the particular determinants which he believes brought about the loss of his poetic stimulus. The immediate source of the poem was Sara Hutchinson's illness, which Coleridge felt had been brought on by his depressing letters to her. The verse "Letter" sent to Sara in April, 1802, consists of 340 lines (compared to 139 lines of the receptus textus, "Dejection: An Ode") arranged in sixteen verse paragraphs, varying in length from seven to forty-seven lines. Except for minor revisions the first fifty lines of the "Letter" correspond to those of "Dejection" and will be discussed later. The next 134 lines do not appear in "Dejection". In them the poet cites the reason for sending Sara the "Letter". His earlier messages which spelled out his sorrow had affected her too deeply: For O! was this an absent Friend's Employ To send from far both Pain & Sorrow thither Where still his Blessings should have call'd down Joy! 4

See also "Inscriptions for a Seat", "Ode to Tranquility", "Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath", "A Day Dream" and "The Picture".

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129

I read thy guileless letter O'er again — I hear thee of thy blameless Self complain — And only this I learn — & this, alas! I know — That thou art weak & pale with Sickness, Grief, & Pain — And I — I made thee so! (CL, II, 793)

If the earlier correspondence with its pain and sorrow prostrated Sara, the "Letter" was ill-designed to raise her spirits; for it, too, dwells on Coleridge's personal afflictions. He regrets his inability to share fully in the domestic tranquillity which she and William and Dorothy Wordsworth enjoy: To see thee, hear thee, feel thee — then to part Oh! — it weighs down the Heart! To visit those, I love, as I love thee, Mary, & William, & dear Dorothy, It is but a temptation to repine — The transientness is Poison in the Wine, Eats out the pith of Joy, makes all Joy hollow, All Pleasure a dim Dream of Pain to follow. (CL, II, 794)

His family life is far different from theirs: My own peculiar Lot, my house-hold Life It is, & will remain Indifference or strife.... those habitual ills That wear out Life, when two unequal Minds Meet in one House, & two discordant Wills — This leaves me, where it finds, Past cure, & past Complaint — a fate austere Too fix'd & hopeless to partake of Fear! (CL, II, 794, 796)

In the "Letter" Coleridge attributes chiefly to his marital difficulties the loss of "Joy", the condition necessary for poetic creation. In order to test the validity of his assertion, we must first determine the peculiar significance which Coleridge attached to the concept and the conditions which he felt could make it possible. In both the "Letter" and the "Ode" he describes it as a psychological state which allows the poet to project his ideas into the natural world and to receive back fused im-

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pressions.3 Coleridge illustrates the condition metaphorically: Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power, Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower A new Earth and new Heaven, Undreampt 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 of ear or sight, And melodies the echoes of that voice, All colours a suffusion from that light. (PW, I, 366, lines 67-75; CL, II, 798) Earlier in the poem Coleridge stressed the importance of the poet's inner life as a force to animate Nature. Without Joy even the most acute perception cannot gain "the passion and the life, whose fountains are within". Several months after composing the "Letter" Coleridge elaborated upon the concept in a letter to the poet, Sotheby. Coleridge took exception to Bowles' technique of fixing upon a situation from Nature as simply a parallel with human life or morality: . . . never to see or describe any interesting appearance in nature, without connecting it by dim analogies with the moral world, proves faintness of Impression. Nature has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes & feels, that every Thing has a Life of it's [sic] own, & that we are all one Life. A poet's Heart & Intellect should be combined,

intimately

combined & unified with the great

appearances in Nature — & not merely held in solution & loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal Similies — (CL, II, 864) Joy could give the poet that proper balance between the subjective and the objective; it could "humanize nature, infusing the thoughts and passions of man into every thing which is the object of his contemplation" (BL, II, 253). In 1802 Coleridge had just begun to formulate the critical concept; later the reconciliation of the subjective and objective would form the basis of his critical thinking. Fifteen years later, after having studied the German philosophers closely, he would expand and elaborate the idea to embrace the arts in general: 3

See Μ. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1958), 67-69.

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131

. . . to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature, — this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts. (BL, II, 258)

But in April, 1802, Coleridge was casting about for the precise statement of his views, explaining metaphorically what he would later develop literally in Biographia Liter aria and in his lectures. To determine what Coleridge considered to be the proper psychological conditions for Joy we must draw inferences from his use of the term in various contexts; for Coleridge concerned himself more with the function of the poetic power than with its origin. He used the term frequently in his poetry, letters, and notebooks. One of the contexts in which it often appears is that of health and physical well-being; for example, in July, 1800, he wrote to Samuel Purkis, describing his recent removal to Greta Hall: . . . now I am enjoying the Godlikeness of the Place, in which I am settled, with the voluptuous & joy-trembling Nerves of Convalescence — . . . Hartley is all Health & extacy — He is a Spirit dancing on an aspen Leaf — unwearied in Joy, from morning to night indefatigably joyous. (CL, I, 615)

Again from Greta Hall, Coleridge wrote to William Sotheby six months after completing the dejection "Letter": It is in very truth a sunny, misty, cloudy, dazzling, howling, onmiform, Day/ & I have been looking at as pretty a sight as a Father's eyes could well see — Hartley & little Derwent running in the Green, where the Gusts blow most madly — both with their Hair floating & tossing, a miniature of the agitated Trees below which they were playing/ inebriate both with the pleasure — Hartley whirling round for joy — Derwent eddying half willingly, half by the force of the Gust — driven backward, struggling forward, & shouting his little hymn of Joy. (CL, II, 871-872)

In the latter passage Coleridge ascribes Joy to his sons and makes the domestic situation a vital representation of his critical principles. The children parallel the forms of Nature around them: Hartley is "a miniature of the agitated trees", and

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Derwent eddies like the wind "half willingly, half by the force of the Gust". In their own fashions both children respond to the correspondent breeze: Hartley by whirling for joy and Derwent by "shouting his little hymn of Joy". Their Joy grows out of the spontaneity and innocence with which they give themselves over to the elements. If the incident demonstrates the working of Joy, it also furnishes a clue to one of its prerequisites. The poet can recognize Joy in others during moments of heightened perception - moments in which his surroundings impress themselves upon him forcibly, in which he can react to the "dazzling, howling, omniform, Day". The passage also illustrates another condition of Joy, i.e., a satisfying familial relationship. The Joy arising from parenthood is contingent upon a reciprocal marital love. In the dejection "Letter" Coleridge speaks of Joy again: My little Children are a Joy, a Love, A good Gift from A b o v e ! . . . With no unthankful Spirit I confess, This clinging Grief too, in it's [iic] turn, awakes That Love and Father's Joy; but O! it makes The Love the greater, & the Joy far less. (CL, II, 797)

In these and other passages, Joy is shown to arise largely from tranquil domestic life, from periods of physical soundness - the very things which Coleridge claimed to have lost during his dejection period. If we take his explanation at face value, then his loss of Joy and the consequent loss of poetic activity could be laid to ill health and particularly to quarrels with his wife. His decline as a poet could thus be said to have resulted from causes extrinsic to the poetic process itself. Yet upon close examination Coleridge's imputation can be seen to lack validity. For during the period in which he wrote his greatest poetry, he possessed none of the requisite conditions which he assigned to the psychological state conducive to the composition of poetry. In January, 1798, two months before the completion of The Ancient Mariner and shortly before he wrote "Frost at Midnight", Coleridge complained of his health:

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. . . after fluctuations of mind which have for nights together robbed me of Sleep, & I am afraid of Health, I have at length returned the order to Mr. Wedgwood. (CL, I, 369)

And while composing The Ancient Mariner he suffered from a fever brought on by a bad tooth: I have been confined to my bed for some days thro' a fever occasioned by the stump of a tooth which baffled chirugical efforts to eject it; & which by affecting my eye affected my stomach, & thro' my whole frame. I am better — but still weak in consequence of such long sleeplessness & wearying pains — weak, very weak. (CL, I, 390)

In another letter describing the same illness Coleridge mentioned the treatment of his symptoms: "Laudanum gave me repose, not sleep." During his lifetime Coleridge had few periods of uninterrupted sound health. As a charity boy and at Jesus College, Cambridge, he was often confined to his bed with rheumatic fever. If we accept Ε. H. Coleridge's date of the spring of 1798 for the composition of "Kubla Khan", then the poem must have been written at the time he took two grains of opium to relieve a dysentery. After Coleridge's dejection period, he recuperated rapidly - so much so that he could tour the Lake District, sometimes walking as much as thirty miles a day. In short, there is little correlation between Coleridge's health and his poetic output. Nor do the ups and downs of Coleridge's family life parallel his periods of poetic achievement. Coleridge's domestic difficulties did not begin in 1802 or in 1799 when he met Sara Hutchinson. They were long-standing. Five months after his marriage he began to have second thoughts about the advisability of the union, and aired his discontent to his publisher, Joseph Cottle. (The "specious rascal" to whom he refers is Robert Southey, who persuaded him to marry Sara Flicker.) I have left that ease which would have enabled me to secure a literary immortality at the price of pleasure. . . . and alas! for what . . . for a specious rascal who deserted me in the hour of distress. . . . So I am forced to write for bread. — write the high flights of poetic

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enthusiasm, when every minute I am hearing a groan of pain from my Wife — groans, and complaints & sickness! (CL, 1,185)

The character of the misunderstood husband which emerges from Coleridge's letters and notebooks is one of the less attractive of the many roles which he assumed. That Coleridge and Sara were mismatched is evident from his early lukewarm appraisals of his wife and from comments made by their friends. It is questionable that Coleridge ever had extended periods of the marital Joy which he claimed to have lost. During the early months of 1798, his prolific period coincided with his visits to the Wordsworths and their frequent excursions around Alfoxden. Sara, awaiting the birth of her second child, could not join them in their tours - even if she were disposed to observe Nature. If Coleridge's poetic outburst did not originate in marital or physical well-being, then his own account of the loss of Joy is suspect. Perhaps when writing the "Letter" he placed the responsibility for his dejection on his immediate psychological burdens and failed to recognize that his loss might have arisen from sources within the poetic experience itself. Although Coleridge did not treat of the possibility explicitly, he did explore the nature of his poetic process by means of the symbolic action within "Dejection". Up to this point the discussion has centered on the dejection "Letter" sent to Sara Hutchinson in April, 1802. In the analysis to follow I shall turn to the final version of "Dejection", the one included in Sibylline Leaves. Before July 19, Coleridge revised the "Letter" extensively for its appearance as "Dejection" in the Morning Post on October 4 - Wordsworth's wedding day and the seventh anniversary of Coleridge's wedding. The versions in the Morning Post and in Sibylline Leaves are similar, except that the former is addressed to Edmund, while the latter invokes a Lady. Revisions of the "Letter" include major deletions, a few additions, and rearrangement of stanzas. Most of the lines describing the poet's personal problems were left out, and along with them, the tone of petulance and self-pity. The exclusion of the poet's private dejections highlights the loss of Joy;

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thus the "I" of the ode becomes more than a misunderstood husband: he becomes Everyman. The "Ode" is prefixed by a stanza from the ballad of "Sir Patrick Spence": Late, late yesterday I saw the new M o o n , With the old M o o n in her arms; A n d I fear, I fear, m y Master dear! W e shall have a deadly storm. (PW, I, 362)

With its images of the moon and storm the epigraph sets the stage for the lines to follow, for the moon and storm are the dominant symbols of the "Ode". We have already seen that for Coleridge moonlight or half-lights created an atmosphere conducive to poetic experience. To examine the total symbolic action of the "Ode" it will be necessary to trace the significance of winds and storms to Coleridge, particularly during his dejection period. Wind has traditionally been associated with fertility and creativity, possibly because it resembles the breath of life and ushers in spring.4 It was used with such associations in early English poetry: Western wind, w h e n wilt thou blow? T h e small rain d o w n can rain. Christ that m y love were in m y arms A n d I in m y bed again.

Coleridge, too, identified the wind with creativity - especially with the creation of poetry. For Coleridge and other Romantic poets the wind-harp became an ubiquitous analogue of the poetic state of mind - a conciliator between the inner feelings and objective reality. In "The Eolian Harp" the wind-harp corresponded to Coleridge's own mind. His idle thoughts crossed his "passive brain": A s wild and various as the random gales That swell and flutter on this subject Lute. (PW, I, 102, lines 42^*3) For a concise outline of the meaning of the wind in Romantic poetry, see Μ. H. Abrains, "The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor", The Kenyon Review, XIX (1957), 113-130.

4

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The correspondences then become more far-reaching and embrace all living things: And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd. 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? (44-48)

The passage displays the pattern which the wind very often fills in Coleridge's poems. It arises as a still small movement, pleasantly exciting to the poet; then increases in velocity to become a destructive force both to external nature and to the analogous poetic mind. Beginning as a creator, the wind ends as a destroyer. In "Shurton Bars", for example, the sea breeze first "moans through you reft house", then "in bold ambitious sweep" it whips up the waves to wreck "some toiling tempest-shatter'd bark". The poet relates the storm to his "tumultuous evil hour". In Coleridge's early poetry winds at times seem to be last gasps of the sublime storms of the eighteenth-century nature poetry. But in his later work, he dropped the Gothic trappings and in so doing connected winds more intimately with his own poetic experience. When the image is recorded in his letters and notebooks, it seems to be based on his own observation. Several months before writing the dejection "Letter" Coleridge noted a wind metaphor of creativity: When in the strong & regular wind the Snow keeps weaving its strong Warp — and darting its white threads down its inclined Plane.5

Here the wind is both a loom and the weaver; the snow is both the warp and woof. The wind performs the same function as it does when attuning an eolian harp, but with the loom Coleridge turned away from the traditional harp or lyre to a personal metaphor, grounded, perhaps, in his own observation. Around the turn of the century the wind began to lose its generative power for Coleridge. He could recognize the wind's latent ability to stimulate, but was unwilling or unable to respond. * Notebooks, 1,1036.

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137

In one of the many passages which foreshadow the mood of "Dejection", he speaks of "mind shipwrecked by storms of doubt, now mastless, rudderless, shattered, - pulling in the dead swell of a dark & windless Sea".6 The cruel destructive force of the wind then came to Coleridge's mind more often than its quickening effect. At 2:00 a.m. on an October morning he jotted down his impression of a wind that "makes every now and then such a deep moan of pain, that I think it my wife asleep in pain - A trembling Oo! Oo! like a wounded man on a field of battle whose wounds smarted with the cold - ".7 Coleridge's letters furnish the closest symbolic equation between the wind and poetic inspiration. In one letter he links the wind to the composition of Part II of Christabel. When seeking the impetus to complete the poem, he testified to the inspirational value of the wind: . . . for I tried & tried, & nothing would come of it. I desisted with a deeper dejection than I am willing to remember. The wind from Skiddaw & Borrodale was often as loud as wind need be — & many a walk in the clouds on the mountains did I take; but all would not d

°

(CL, I, 643)

Thus for Coleridge the significance of the wind had run the full cycle - from the catalyst which enabled to see the one life within him and abroad to a "dull throbbing sound" which leaves him as lifeless as the nature he hoped to animate. With the symbolic equations of the wind in mind, we can return to "Dejection", which, like the wind which ventilates it, has "long raved unnoticed". Following the epigraph from "Sir Patrick Spence" the first stanza begins in a conversational tone, slightly patronizing to the ancient ballad maker: 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 Than those which mould yon cloud in lazy flakes, • Notebooks, I, 932. 7 Notebooks, I, 832. See also entries 714 and 1577; "Fears in Solitude", PW, I, 263, lines 197-202; "Wanderings of Cain", PW, I, 288, lines 32-35.

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Or the dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes Upon the strings of this Aeolian lute, Which better far were mute (1-8)

Apparently the speaker is fond of the Bard who could make a "grand old ballad", yet his affection does not prevent him from mischievously making a small joke at the expense of the Bard's old-fashioned meteorological lore. But his tongue-in-cheek deference to the quaint Bard changes abruptly when the poet turns from the old ballad to his immediate situation, from the "deadly storm" in "Sir Patrick Spence" to "this night". Enhanced by the understatement and double negative, the tone becomes increasingly foreboding as Coleridge associates the storm in the ballad to winds above him, "which mould yon cloud in lazy flakes", then to the "sobbing draft" closer at hand that moans through his wind-harp. The poet's psychological barometer dips lowest when he thinks of the wind-harp, which links his inner poetic energy to the force of the storm. He wishes that the windharp "better far were mute". The epigraph from "Sir Patrick Spence" provides a handy starting point from which the poet can "zero in" on his own feelings, but the ballad stanza is more than a way into the poem: it brings with it a tragic theme which parallels that of "Dejection". In the ballad while drinking blood red wine, the king capriciously ordered Sir Patrick out to sea during unseasonable weather to his inevitable death. The sailor's fate was sealed before he received the king's message. Like the ancient Mariner, he was a plaything of the wanton gods. In "Dejection" Coleridge deleted passages containing accounts of his personal trials thought by him to be undeserved; yet the implicit parallel between the poet and Sir Patrick brings to the "Ode" a sense of irrevocable and unjustified punishment. Furthermore, the ballad stanza introduces the second dominant image: "the new Moon / With the old Moon in her arms." Coleridge elaborates upon the lines with closely observed details: For lo! the New-moon winter-bright! And overspread with phantom light,

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(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.

(9-14) The moon of "Dejection" is pictured in its most ambiguous stage - at a period of transition between the old and the new and between the seasons of winter and spring. The moon contains within itself both promises of the regenerative spring and remembrance of the bleak winter months. Its unpredictable state corresponds to the poet's emotional situation; he dreads the coming of the storm, wishing that the harp were mute, yet he yearns for the stimulation it may bring: 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 wonted impulse give, Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live!

(15-20) Coleridge has not yet elucidated the grounds of his ambivalence toward the wind of poetic inspiration; nor does he do so at this point. Further explanation must await the reappearance of the storm later in the "Ode". Following the wish to "startle his dull pain", the speaker recounts the insensibility attendant upon the crippling of his poetic powers. He can see the yellow green western sky and the thin clouds and stars, but without Joy he can "see, not feel, how beautiful they are!". Before his loss of Joy his afflictions "were but as the stuff / Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness"; now his misfortunes suspend his "shaping spirit of imagination". Coleridge then takes heed of the wind "which long has raved unnoticed". As it mounts in force, the poet's thoughts, too, increase in intensity. The curve of the poet's imagination parallels the curve of the velocity of the wind, bringing to his mind progressively emotional associations:

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Thou Wind, that rav'st without, Bare crag, or mountain-tairn, or blasted tree, Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb, Or lonely house, long held the witches' home, Methinks were fitter instruments for thee, Mad Lutanist! who in this month of showers, Of dark-brown gardens, and of peeping flowers, Mak'st Devils' yule, with worse than wintry song, The blossoms, buds, and timorous leaves among. (99-107) The wind, which should blow softly, bringing with it fertile rain, instead rages fiercely through the tender plants, destroying rather than creating. Next the speaker correlates the wind with his "shaping spirit of Imagination", and illustrates the tenor of his own previous poetry: Thou mighty Poet, e'en to frenzy bold! What tell'st thou now about? 'Tis of the rushing of an 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! And all that noise, as of a rushing crowd, With groans, and tremulous shuddering — all is over — It tells another tale, with sounds less deep and loud! A tale of less affright, And tempered with delight, As Otway's 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, And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother hear. (109-125) At the peak of its fury the wind relates only tales of horror or pathos, of grim battlefields or a lost orphan who screams and moans. The incidents gain in ghastliness because of their contrast to the spring setting, ordinarily thought of in terms of happiness and reproduction.

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141

In the final stanza the poet returns once again to the concept of Joy - this time to pray for a vicarious Joy. The poet recalls the lady and wishes that the storm which rages about them both may prove kind to her: And may this storm be but a mountain-birth, May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling, Silent as though they watched the sleeping earth!... Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice; To her may all things live, from pole to pole, Their life the eddying of her living soul. (129-131, 134-136)

Because of the terror which accompanied the poetic experience, Coleridge despaired of ever again attaining the condition of Joy. For him writing poetry - like the wind in "Dejection" brought to the surface latent misgivings. When he found an objective correlative which released his deeply felt fears, his poetry pictured a universe gone awry - a moral world in which man possesses no freedom of will or action, and in which the distinctions between good and evil are blurred. Coleridge desperately strove to believe in a world of order and benevolence; in fact, his intense philosophical studies were largely devoted to proving to himself that man could mould his own destiny. Yet his poetic imagination prompted visions of the punitive fate of The Ancient Mariner and the moral ambiguity of Christabel. It is questionable that Coleridge ever lost his "shaping spirit of Imagination". The poem which celebrates its loss contradicts its own assumption. In the very act of mourning his death-in-life Coleridge demonstrated his vitality as a poet in one of his finest works. It is more likely that Coleridge suppressed his poetic urge, hoping thereby to protect his intellectual universe of harmony from his emotional world of guilt and chaos.

7. RAGE FOR ORDER AND HARMONY: COLERIDGE'S LITERARY CRITICISM *

Several months after the publication of "Dejection: An Ode", Coleridge wrote to Mary Robinson of his literary activities: . . . I have almost wholly weaned myself from the habit of making Verses, and for the last three years uninterruptedly devoted myself to studies only not quite incompatible with poetic composition. Poetic composition has become laborious & painful to me . . . (CL, II, 903)

Here Coleridge explained discursively what he embodied symbolically in "Dejection", i.e., poetic composition released painful emotional feelings which threatened his need for intellectual harmony and order. Perhaps to avoid the rigors of poetic creation - and to "explain away" his subversive emotions - he devoted many years to subjective observations of the aesthetic experience and to extensive study of German philosophers, particularly Kant and Schelling. That Coleridge perceived the subconscious origin of poetry is clear from notebook entries which record his introspection. In review of Coleridge's Notebooks, Miss Lore Metzger has called attention to an entry of 1804 which shows how "Coleridge's thoughts on the nature of poetry and art are colored by his troubled concern with conscious and subconscious feeling." 2 1

It is not my intention in this chapter to discuss the place of Coleridge in the history of criticism or to assess his achievement. I am interested in Coleridge's ideas only as they relate to his own function as a poet. Thus I shall pass over his seminal remarks on the imagination and the organic nature of poetry. * "The Workshop of Productive Electicism", Journal of the History of Ideas, X X I V (January-March, 1963), 146. Several critics have discussed Coleridge and the moral utility of literature. Rene Wellek, A History of

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Poetry a rationalized dream dealing to manifold Forms our own Feelings, that never perhaps were attached by us consciously to our own personal Selves.3

Coleridge's interest in the psychological origin of poetry is closely related to his analyses of dreams and nightmares which tormented him. He often set down in his notebooks his dreams and attempts at interpretation, many of which (as the editor of the Notebooks points out) anticipated Freud. Coleridge's explorations of the nature of his dreams point up the disparity between his conscious intellectual efforts and subconscious fears, while his efforts to articulate the relationship between his psychological states can be understood as a means of eliminating the terror of the unknown. Coleridge was intensely aware of the dominant influence exerted by his subconscious and of the "Link of Associations" between states of consciousness. In 1804 he noted " . . . the existence of a Feeling of a Person quite distinct at all times, & at certain times perfectly separable from, the Image of the Person".4 He continued by pointing out that the unconscious feeling can modify or distort the dream vision: And that this Feeling forms a most important Link of Associations — & may be combined with the whole Story of a long Dream just as well as with one particular Form no way resembling the true Image?5

He concluded the entry characteristically by suggesting to himself possible psychological ramifications of the interaction between the unconscious Feeling and conscious Image: Modern Criticism (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955), II, notes a tendency toward moralistic judgment in the criticism of Coleridge, attributing it to an attempt "to keep the empirical tradition intact in an idealistic scheme" (167). Richard Harter Fogle, The Idea of Coleridge's Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), exonerates Coleridge by failing to distinguish between means and ends of literature (119). Walter Jackson Bate, "Coleridge on the Function of Art", in Perspectives of Criticism, ed. Harry Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), concludes that Coleridge held that art should make "ultimate truth comprehensible and realizable to human response" (125). 3 Notebooks, II, 2086. < Notebooks, II, 2061. s Ibid.

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I seem to see, tho' darkly, that the Inferences hence are many & important/Madness — Bulls — Self — God — Past Life — Present; or Conscience, &c — β

Despite his subjective probings, Coleridge failed to exorcize the demons of his dreams; they continued to torment him until his death. In 1805, while in Malta, he listed the sources of guilt and dread in his life, chiefly the "(almost epileptic) night-horrors in my sleep / & since then every error I have committed, has been the immediate effect of the Dread of these bad most shocking Dreams - any thing to prevent them".7 Coleridge did not mold his psychological insights into a coherent system. When he wrote his essays on the nature of poetry he drew as much support from Kant and Schelling as from his own tentative investigations. Yet in the provocative notebook fragments he firmly linked poetry, the "rationalized dream", to his subconscious and the "Dread" of his "most schocking Dreams". If Coleridge could not impose order on the chaos of his emotional experience, he could satisfy the necessity for harmony intellectually by means of extensive reading and formulation of aesthetic and theological principles. To this end he delivered lectures on poetry and philosophy and published the Friend (a periodical), Biographical

Liter aria, Lay Sermon,

and Aids

to

Reflection. Of particular importance to the present study are the Biographia Literaria and his lecture notes and reports, for in these works he brought together his ideas on the nature and function of poetry. A comparison of Coleridge's critical theory with his poetic practice may disclose still another reason for the suppression of his poetic powers. Biographia Literaria is an exceedingly annoying book. Chapters dealing with literary theory are interspersed among biographical chapters or sections of applied criticism of Wordsworth's poetry. In Chapter XIII which deals with the poetic imagination, Coleridge interrupted a passage of definitions with a letter from a friend advising him to withhold further discussion for a future work. Coleridge, of course, wrote the letter himself, •

Ibid.

ι Notebooks, Π, 2398.

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and thus withheld crucial elaboration upon the concepts of the primary and secondary imaginations. As a further complication Coleridge drew distinctions between a poem and poetry, equating the latter with both the poetic process and the nature of the material within the composition: 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. (BL, II, 12)

By using his imagination the poet chooses his diverse material and "blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each. . . . " The imagination reveals itself - and the composition can be judged - by "the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities". Much of Biographia Literaria is devoted to the application of the critical principle of the reconciliation of opposites to the poetry of "myriad-minded" Shakespeare and to various other English poets. For the most part the remarks stem from the points of view of the poetic process and the poetic medium. Even in the definition of a poem, the medium assumes great importance: 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 compatible with a distinction gratification from each component part. (BL, II, 10)

The medium of the poem is thus the harmony of the parts to the whole which excites the reader. Its immediate object, or purpose, or end is pleasure. Throughout the critical chapters, Coleridge stresses the pleasure derived from the reader's ability to comprehend unity in multeity or in the reconciliation of opposites. Shortly before defining a poem, Coleridge stated that "truth, either moral or intellectual, ought to be the ultimate" end of poetry, but the force of the discussion centers upon the immediate end, pleasure.

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From the Biographia Literaria alone, a reader might conclude that the author concerned himself solely with Horace's dulce and excluded his utile - with the sweetness of poetry instead of its usefulness. Such a conclusion would seem unusual in the light of Coleridge's avowed penchant for reconciling opposites - for arriving at a synthesis from the dialectic of thesis and counterthesis. And he did indeed comment on the usefulness of poetry, not in the form of finished essays or treatises, but in ancillary remarks in his lecture notes and private correspondence. By gathering together the scattered extracts, we may educe the ultimate ends which he ascribed to literature. In his passages on literary purpose, Coleridge generally drew distinctions between occasional writing and works meant for posterity. He objected to periodicals devoted only to amusement or to reporting contemporary events. Even newspapers, he felt, should do more than entertain and inform. Looking back on his essays in the Morning Post, he confessed to Thomas Poole: "I cannot express to y o u . . . the loathing, which I once or twice felt, when I attempted to write, merely for the Bookseller, without any sense of the moral utility of what I was writing" (CL, II, 707). His own periodical, the Friend, would presumably have "moral utility", or as he put it, "Principle instead of mere expedience - & therefore Principles: Principles in Taste, (Poetry, Prose, Painting, Music, Dress &c &c &c) Principles in private morality - Principles in general Religion, as distinct from Superstition, from Enthusiasm, & from atheism..." (CL, III, 198). To what extent he fulfilled his aim can be gauged by the number of subscribers, who, like the leeches on the Leechgather's stick, dropped off one by one. From the various contributions to newspapers, he singled out book reviews for especial censure, labeling the "business of Reviewing-writing" an "immoral employment, unjust to the Authors of the Books reviewed, injurious in it's [sic] effects on the public Taste & Morality, and still more injurious in it's [sic] influences on the Head & Heart of the Reviewer himself" (CL, III, 316-317). Perhaps Coleridge was prompted to attack reviews with vehemence because he was stung by unjust criticism

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of himself and Wordsworth in the Edinburgh Review, nevertheless his charges against reviewers parallel those brought against occasional writing in general: in his estimation both failed to improve public morals. In fact, he was convinced that periodicals lowered the readers' morals by promulgating "false PRINCIPLES in Legislation, Philosophy, Morals", which, in the Friend he meant to "strangle... by the awakening of a nobler Germ in human nature" (CL, III, 141). The emphasis which he placed on the pragmatic importance of literature puts him in the same critical camp with Sidney, who considered the "right poets" to be those who "imitate both to delight and teach, and to move men to take that goodness in hande, which without delight they would flye as from a stranger. . . . " 8 Coleridge took exception to Sidney's concept of imitation and centered the poetic process midway between the poet and nature, and he also resented the restrictions of the unities of time and place; but in the moral response of the reader, Coleridge concurred. Coleridge's teleological view of literature was not confined to periodicals or occasional writing; it also embraced the novel. He put the "slothful" activity of reading novels in the same class with "gaming, swinging, or swaying on a chair or gate; spitting over a bridge; smoking; snuff-taking; tete-a-tete quarrels after dinner between husband and wife; conning word by word all the advertisements of a daily newspaper in a public house on a rainy day, «fee, «fee, &c" (CL, I, 34). The "pass-time or kill-time" or the reading of novels, he asserted, can "occasion in time the entire destruction of the powers of the mind. . . . " 9 Coleridge charged the novel with more serious faults than a needless expenditure of time. He felt that such reading could arouse untoward passions, especially in young readers. In a letter to Mary Robinson, he refused to contribute to an anthology because he would then be associated with novelists. (I quote the long passage in full in order to preserve its squeamish tone): 8

"An Apology for Poetry", in Elizabethan Critical Essays, I, ed. by G. G. Smith (London, 1904), 158. » Shakespearean Criticism, II, ed. Thomas M. Raysor (London: J. M. Dent, 1960), 33. Hereafter cited as SC.

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. . . I have a wife, I have sons, I have an infant Daughter — what excuse could I offer to my own conscience if by suffering my name to be connected with those of Mr. Lewis, or Mr. Moore, I was the occasion of their reading the Monk, or the wanton poems of Thomas Little Esqr? Should I not be an infamous Pander to the Devil in the seduction of my own offspring? — My head turns giddy, my heart sickens, at the very thought of seeing such books in the hands of a child of mine. (CL, II, 905)

Granted that in the above passage Coleridge did not attack the novel as a genre but chose on The Monk to keep out of the hands of his family. But his opinion of the morality of other novels was equally low. He held that Tristram Shandy, in spite of "individual and delightful" characterization of Trim and the two Shandys, was "scarcely readable by women", because "Sterne's morals are bad".10 And even Tom Jones, the plot of which he considered one of the "three most perfect plots ever planned", he found to contain improper incidents. In each of his strictures Coleridge assumed that fictional incidents which violate a moral code with impunity have no place in the novel. Like Plato, he held that such fictions nourished the base passions instead of drying them up. In his lectures on Shakespeare and the drama Coleridge also laid stress on the moral utility of literature - this time to the advantage of the playwright. The main object of his lectures in 1811-1812 on the Permanence of Poetry, he wrote, was "to enforce at various times and by various arguments and instances the close of reciprocal connections of just taste with pure morality" (SC, I, 226). To this end he defended his beloved Shakespeare from charges of licentiousness or immorality; for example, in the remarks concerning the courting scene at the beginning of the third act of The Tempest, Coleridge exclaimed effusively: O! with what exquisite purity this scene is conceived and executed! Shakespeare may sometimes be gross, but I boldly say that he is always moral and modest. (SC, 1,121)

And speaking of Venus and Adonis he averred that " . . . though »» Table Talk, Π (London: John Murray, 1835), 243.

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the very subject cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was poem less dangerous on a moral account" (BL, II, 16). If he admitted that dramatic poetry could debase the reader's character, he also allowed that it could purify the reader's morals. The improvement, he felt, could be achieved painlessly through the mediation of the delight growing out of the harmonious elements in the poem: Such are our imagination, our delight from the clear perception of truth, and our moral sense, including our awe for true greatness, our pity for suffering, and our indignation at wrongs. In short, has the pleasure you have received had any tendency to make you a better man, or to keep you a good one, or to reward you in part for having been so? (SC, I, 218) From the lecture platform in Bristol before a "tolerably attended" audience, Coleridge made clear what literature needed in order to effect a moral change in the reader. According to the reporter of the lecture, Coleridge concluded by testifying that by reading the plays of Shakespeare he "had acquired a habit of looking into his own heart, and perceived the goings on of his nature, and confident he was, Shakespeare was a writer of all others the most calculated to make his readers better as well as wiser" (SC, II, 219). His ultimate appeal to the "goings on of his nature" was not merely an intuitive appraisal of the plays. Earlier in the lecture he had enumerated what was natural or "legitimate" in the plays, chief of which was a clear differentiation between good and evil. Shakespeare, he stated, ". . . carried on no warfare against virtue, by which wickedness may be made to appear as not wickedness, and where our sympathy was to be entrapped by the misfortunes of vice; with him vice never walked, as it were, in twilight. He never inverted the order of nature and propriety" (SC, II, 218). The opinion of Coleridge on the proper balance of virtue and vice in Shakespeare's plays differed sharply from that of Dr. Johnson, who held that Shakespeare . . seems to write without any moral purpose" and "makes no just distribution of good

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and evil, nor is always careful to show in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked".11 But if their interpretations varied, both critics based their conclusions on the same premise: as Dr. Johnson asserted: "It is always a writer's duty to make the world better, and justice is a virtue independent on time and place." 12 Coleridge did not apply his teleological critical principles only in public lectures on Shakespeare; he also committed them to his private notebooks on the subject of literature in general. The proper material for books, he wrote, were . . the virtues of the Heart, of Habits of Feeling, & harmonious action, the music of the adjusted String at the impulse of the Breeze. . . . " 13 He then moved from the eolian harp metaphor (this time used to describe the poetic process in the reader) to the figure of a fountain: N o actions should be distinctly described out . . . such as manifestly tend to awaken the Heart to . . . efficient Feelings, whether of Fear or of Love, . . . actions that falling back on the Fountain (keep it full,) or clear out the mud from its pipes, & make it play in its abundance.. . 14

Thus the emotions aroused by descriptions of virtuous actions could scour the reader's psychic plumbing, leaving him in a state of inward peace and harmony much like the condition of Joy necessary to the creation of poetry. According to Coleridge poetry did not merely adjust the strings of the reader's emotions - it also forced the reader to convert his individual harmony into a feeling of oneness with all of humanity. Speaking of effects common to religion and poetry, Coleridge explained the process as follows: By placing them [readers] in certain awful relations it merges the individual man in the whole species, and makes it impossible for any one man to think of his future lot, or indeed of his present condition, without at the same time comprising in his view his fellow-creatures. (SC, II, 111) 11

Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. by Walter Raleigh (London: Oxford University Press, 1908), 20. 12 Johnson on Shakespeare, 21. » Notebooks, II, 2435. " Ibid.

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In its role as a mediator, poetry operated on various levels. It could produce inner tranquillity and could reconcile the reader with his fellows, but most important - the "deepest effect" was the establishment of cosmic harmony by demonstrating the proper relationship between man and nature. In his notes for the lectures of 1810 on Shakespeare's History Plays, Coleridge distinguished between the epic poem, in which "fate is represented as overruling the will, and making it instrumental to the accomplishment of its designs", and the drama: In the drama, the will is exhibited as struggling with fate, a great and beautiful instance and illustration of which is the Prometheus of Aeschylus; and the deepest effect is produced, when the fate is represented as a higher and intelligent will, and the opposition of the individual as springing from a defect. (SC, I, 125)

As a touchstone for the greatest poetry, Coleridge chose the depiction of a fate possessing justice and intelligence. Without such a universe the drama was judged inadequate. For example, he believed Oedipus to "have an obvious fault", for it pictured a man "oppressed by fate for a crime of which he was not morally guilty" (SC, II, 110). Thus his rage for order and harmony, which he could not embody in his own poetry, found its way into his criticism of the poetry of others. Coleridge's reputation as a critic admittedly does not rest on his comments on the pragmatic function of literature. The concept of the moral utility of poetry was not original with him nor does it form a major part of his total work. But the analysis has shown that his critical ideals ran counter to his poetic practice. Judged by his own standards, The Ancient Mariner, like Oedipus, must have "an obvious fault", for he, too, suffered at the hands of a capricious fate. Christabel would also be found lacking, for like the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher (which he deplored) it made "wickedness to appear as not wickedness" and made vice to "walk, as it were, in twilight" (SC, II, 218). The emotional practice of poetic composition could not confirm his faith in ultimate harmony and benevolence, but in the intellectual practice of criticism he circumvented his deep-seated fear of a blind fate.

CONCLUSION

In August, 1795, Coleridge, who was then twenty-two, wrote "Allegoric Vision", a preface to his First Theological Lecture on the origin of evil (PW, II, 1091-1096). The vision took place in the Valley of Life, in which Anglican ministers - "men clad in black robes" - were more "intent on gathering in their Tenths" than in the spiritual welfare of their charges. One of the ministers, after accepting offerings, guided the narrator to the Temple of Superstition, which represented the Church of England. The narrator fled from the temple, for the features of the Goddess "blended with the darkness" and were "terrible yet vacant". Once outside, the narrator encountered a woman with a "divine unity of expression" (orthodox Unitarianism) who permitted him to look through her optic glass at the Valley of Life, and beyond the limits of the valley to a place that was most glorious. Finally the narrator entered a gloomy cave, where an old man (Materialism) with dim eyes examined a misshapen statue named Nature with a microscope, muttering about causes and effects. The materialist explained causation by means of the example of "a string of blind men, the last of whom caught hold of the skirt of the one before him, he of the next, and so on till they were all out of sight". The narrator awakened in terror when he learned that the old man was Janus-headed. He was both Superstition and Materialism. The purpose of the preface and the lecture was "to uphold the golden mean of Unitarian orthodoxy as opposed to the Church on the one hand, and infidelity or materialism on the other".

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Sixteen years later, Coleridge - now thirty-eight - revised the allegory slightly and published it in The Courier under the title, "An Allegoric Vision: Superstition, Religion, Atheism". Its purpose in The Courier was to attack the Roman Church and particularly the supporters of the Catholic Emancipation Bill. Six years later Coleridge included "Allegorical Vision" in his introduction to A Lay Sermon: Addressed to the Higher and Middle Classes. Then it was meant to point out the "Falsehood of extremes" in both spiritual and political thought. Religion became the golden mean between atheism and superstition, just as a righteous government is the golden mean between a selfinterested aristocracy and mob-rule. The varying purposes of the allegory can serve as a barometer for Coleridge's early religious thinking. In 1795 he looked to Unitarianism as the means of salvation; in 1811 the Church of England satisfied his need for spiritual grace; while in 1816 he could extend religious thinking to take in political matters. For each turn in religious thought, the same allegory served equally well. For if the players in the vision changed their uniforms or labels, the rules of the game remained the same. Throughout Coleridge's career as a critic or religious apologist, his beliefs grew out of the meeting of extremes and reconciliation of opposites; he sat on a fence dividing disparate points of view. After his discovery of Kant, whose philosophy "took possession of him as with a giant's hand", Coleridge attempted to consolidate his thinking into a magnum opus - a series of works which would integrate his views on theology, logic, the arts, morals, and psychology. At the core of the system of thought was to be his "dynamic philosophy", derived both from Kant and from his intimate knowledge of the Platonic, Neo-Platonic and British empirical philosophies. Characteristically, Coleridge wished to include in his dynamic philosophy the salient ideas of all of the widely divergent systems. Here, as in most of his speculations, the criterion of selection was not "either-or"; instead it was "both-and". In a recent critical biography of Coleridge (probably the most seminal study of Coleridge within a decade)

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Walter Jackson Bate summarizes the highlights of Coleridge's dynamic philosophy: . . . in the first place, the notion of all existence as having one substance or essence, what we may call the "one-substantiality" of being. (The word is coined in order to contrast with Coleridge's own puzzling and ambiguous word, "consubstantiality.") In the second place, there was the notion of reality as essentially process or act. "Objects" or "things" are only phases of energies or forces; they come into existence as "moments" of the dynamic equilibrium of interpenetrating polar forces. And finally, there was the conception of a teleological dynamism in nature as a whole, for the myriad forms of nature seemed plainly to exhibit an ascending scale of being, a direction toward greater organization and individuation.1

But Coleridge never incorporated his philosophy into a coherent system, although he labored at the task for twenty years. The chief obstacle which lay in the way of his magnum opus was the tendency of the "dynamic philosophy" to turn into pantheistic monism. To return to Bate: Try as he would to reinterpret it, dynamic philosophy seemed incorrigibly bent on becoming a pantheistic monism, wherein spirit is the sole substance or being and natural things are steps or stages in its ascending realization. But in such a universe there would be no personal and transcendent God.2

In order to lay the groundwork for a reconciliation of dynamic philosophy and Christianity, Coleridge first had to demonstrate the relationship between God and the universe, between Nature and man. Although he never fully developed a satisfactory epistomology, still in his attempts to establish a duality of Nature Coleridge filled notebooks and margins of books with highly complex - and often despairing - speculations. Many of his epistomological jottings took metaphorical form, often turning upon images of shadows or reflections or phantoms. Implied in the metaphor is the concept of man's mind as an apparatus for reflecting or recording events occurring in the body and brain, the reflections constituting conscious experience. In 1796, while holding Unitarian beliefs, Coleridge could think 1

*

Coleridge (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 215. Coleridge, 214.

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of Nature in Platonic terms; he could conceive of matter as imperfect spirit. Thus in "The Destiny of Nations" he alluded obviously to Plato's Allegory of the Cave: For all that meets the bodily sense I deem Symbolical one mighty alphabet For infant minds; and we in this low world Placed with our backs to bright Reality, That we may learn with young unwounded ken The substance from its shadow. (PW, I, 132)

Coleridge could not long embrace Platonism and Unitarianism partly because of his affinity to eighteenth century empiricism, partly because of his changing conception of the Christian religion. Coleridge came to apprehend a deep dualism between God and Nature; Unitarianism - along with Calvinism - posed a threat to his religious and philosophic system: The most fanatical of those [Calvinists] . . . are at worse but straw and stubble set in a blaze on the outside of the Temple Walls, and you mistake the reflection for a conflagration in the Temple itself . . . but the spirit of Unitarianism is the Dry Rot in the timbers of the Edifice, yea, in the very Beams and Rafters on the Roof of your Church. (Letters IV, 965-6)

In his later prose many of the metaphors of reflection elucidate religious concepts. For example, writing of a Calvinist who would look for the marks of Election within himself: ". . . he hoped to secure an insight into a nature which was neither an object of his senses, nor a part of his self-consciousness; and so leave him to ward off shadowy spears with the shadow of a shield".3 If Coleridge's later work tended toward the religious, still a number of purely epistemological speculations dot his notebooks, marginalia and Aids to Reflection. Of particular importance to an historian of early nineteenth-century philosophy, they are mentioned here only to put into context the reflective images relating to the composition of poetry. Suffice to say that the epistomological images illustrate Coleridge's attempt to discover * Aids to Reflection (London: E. Moxon, 1854), 127.

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a common ground upon which to integrate British empirical thought and the more recent German transcendentalism.4 As a preliminary to an analysis of the poetic images, a brief summary is needed of the importance Coleridge attached to the role of art, and of poetry in particular, in his dynamic philosophy. Coleridge agreed with the traditional concept that art imitates Nature; yet the imitation must be done organically, not as mere copy. To simply render a facsimile is to produce something dead and lifeless. One of the functions of art - and a criterion of beauty - is to demonstrate unity in multeity, the universal in the particular. In some respects the particular corresponds to matter, the universal to form. Universals, in a sense, impose form upon matter, or, at any rate, control it. As Coleridge put it: "Idea is the universal in the particular"; that is, universal principles are latently active. Organic form is the agency by which the material of art is "shaped as it develops itself from within". Organic form recreates Nature, "the prime genial artist". Form is "the physiognomy of the being within the true image reflected and thrown out of the concave mirror". Of chief significance is the role of art as the mediator between man and nature. Poetry especially is assigned this role since it unites "a more than ordinary sympathy with the objects, on a more than common sensibility, with a more than ordinary activity of . . . the imagination". Poetry thus results in "a more vivid reflection of the truths of nature and of the human heart, united with a constant activity modifying and correcting these truths". As a critic Coleridge is best known for his analysis of the psychology of poetic composition: of the human agency involved in the mediation of poetry between man and the truths of nature. He is less well known for analysis of the material of poetry - of the nature of Nature. With good reason, for he never resolved to his own satisfaction the relationship between the perceiver and objective reality, between subject and object. His uneasiness comes to the surface in a number of his later poems. The images of reflection or phantoms - especially when the vehicle is exter4

For example, see Notebooks, II, 2323, 2441, 2494 f 38; Letters, ΠΙ, 515, IV, 963; Aids to Reflection, 63, 244-245, 335.

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nal nature - imply that the poet was unsure of the validity of the truth which the poem was to mediate. If the poet is sometimes doubtful that the objects he perceives have an existence-in-themselves, that his sense impressions may differ radically from those of his reader, then his doubts may stultify the composition of poetry. In the following pages I shall analyze the later poems and other selected passages in light of images of reflection or phantoms. Although "Dejection: An Ode" is not always considered "late", nonetheless it provides a springboard to the poems written after 1802. The poem is rich in meaning - surely one of Coleridge's three or four greatest; thus it warrants consideration in this and in a preceding chapter. The image in question is adumbrated early in the poem, in fact, in the epigraph from "The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence": "Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon / With the old moon in her arms." The moon, which in the ballad promises a deadly storm, also promises the same for the poet: For lo! the New-moon winter-bright! 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. (PW, I, 363 lines 9-14)

The New-moon is clearly the result of earthshine, i.e., the reflection of light from the earth on part of the moon not illuminated by sunlight during a crescent or gibbous phase. The appearance of the satellite is thus made up of both light from the sun and reflected light from the earth, the latter "phantom light" of the New-moon described as such twice by the poet, perhaps to emphasize its ephemeral quality. The old Moon, on the other hand, is that part of the satellite seen as a direct reflection of the sun. In its crescent phase the moon stands as a symbol or emblem for the reciprocity between man and nature needed to sustain the condition of "Joy", so necessary to Coleridge for creativity. Nature (or things-in-themselves) can be apprehended as the old

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Moon, directly reflected from the sun. Man, however, must contribute or fill out or inform that which is objective, thus the moon "rimmed and circled by a silver thread". The Platonic overtones admittedly complicate the scheme; neither the Newmoon nor the old is perceived at first hand. But the image is included not so much for its diagrammatic correctness as for its capacity to demonstrate the importance which Coleridge placed upon man's interrelation with Nature. The reader may recall that in "Dejection" the moon became a portent of a violent storm, which, like his emotional conflicts, allegedly became the inspiration and material of his poems. Once they could send his "soul abroad"; now they "suspend what nature gave me at my birth / My shaping spirit of Imagination." One of the reasons for the suspension may be that Coleridge had ceased to have faith in an active universe, in the mind's ability to impose a unity on the multeity of sense impressions. The poet gazes at the stars, the sky, and crescent moon, but can only "see, not feel, how beautiful they are". Yet Coleridge did not give up the faith easily. At 2:00 a.m. on a Saturday in Malta nearly three years later, he gazed at a blue, cloudy sky, then wrote in his notebook: . . . Unconsciously I stretched forth my arms to embrace the Sky, and in a trance I had worshipped God in the Moon / the Spirit not the Form . . . Ο not only the Moon but the depth of the Sky! — the Moon was the Idea; but deep Sky is of all visual impressions the nearest akin to a Feeling / it is more a Feeling than a Sight / or rather it is the melting away and entire union of Feeling Sight / And did I not groan at my unworthiness, be miserable at my state of Health, its effects, and effect-trebling Causes? Ο yes! — Me miserable! Ο Yes! — Have mercy on me, Ο something out of me! For there is no power... in augth within me. Mercy! Mercy!

CNotebooks, II, 2453)®

Granted that Coleridge's impotence to leave off opium, and his absence from Sara Hutchinson contributed much to the despair at the conclusion of the entry; still both are reflected in and add to the resultant inability to feel at one with Nature. As in "De5

See also Notebooks, II, 2061 f 27 for another analysis of image and feeling.

159

CONCLUSION

jection" Coleridge made the distinction between dead and lifeless objects of sense and those invested with feeling. The reader can only speculate upon the implications of the symbols. Perhaps in the distinction between Ideal / Moon and Sky / Feeling, Coleridge suggests the faculties of the Understanding and the Reason, the former operating upon the objects of sense, the latter intuiting the supersensual - with the Imagination the agency of union. Significantly, Coleridge qualified his worship of "God in the Moon" by insisting that the object of devotion was "the Spirit not the Form". Perhaps he backed off from the inference of pantheistic monism which would deny a transcendent God; perhaps the Imagination went a step too far. Several of Coleridge's poems explore epistomological problems exclusively, and to these I shall turn shortly. But in order to mark the pervasiveness and variety of the reflective images, I shall briefly note their appearances in selected poems in which the image illustrates a peripheral theme. For example, "The Picture" (1802) is clearly a potboiler; it deals with thwarted love and makes use of Nymphs, Oreads, Feys, and a Love with "plumes haggard", all familiar and dear to readers of the Poetical Register

and Morning Post. The poem ends pleasantly,

with the anticipation of a pleasant domestic scene: the maid, a cottage, and on its porch a child with his pillowed on a sleeping dog. The poem becomes nearly memorable when the validity of the emotion of love is questioned. By a lake - reminiscent of Rydal Water - the lover sees (or thinks he sees or projects his ideal, perhaps) on the surface of the water: . . . he now With steadfast gaze and unoffending eye, Worships the watery idol, dreaming hopes Delicious to the soul, but fleeting, vain, E'en as that phantom world on which he gazed (PW, I, 371,11. 81-85)

But the maiden tosses her nosegay into the pool: "Then all the charm / Is broken - all that phantom world so fair / Vanishes." In a somewhat less sentimental vein, Coleridge writes of the mind's capacity to recall poignant experience. The poet and

160

CONCLUSION

Mary and Sara Hutchinson had been together on a warm June evening when "stars were round the crescent moon". Sitting beside a fountain, they saw an earthly counterpart of the celestial scene: A glow-worm fall'n, and on the marge remounting Shines, and its shadow shines, fit stars for our sweet fountain. (PW, I, 385,11. 17-18)

In his "daydream" (also the title of the poem) Coleridge can recapture the scene in his study from the reflections of his fire: The shadows dance upon the wall, By the still dancing fire-flames made; And now they slumber, moveless all! And now they melt to one deep shade! But not from me shall this mild darkness steal thee: I dream thee with mine eyes, and at my heart I feel thee! (PW, I, lines 25-30)

Even in minor occasional poetry, the same images form a cluster accompanying the theme of man's way of knowing external reality: the crescent moon, shadows, images of sight and feeling. Their connotations of insubstantiality raise questions about the validity of human experience, yet Coleridge often uses them as the building blocks of his poems. He ascribed the fruitful relationship to Wordsworth. In "To William Wordsworth: Composed on the Night after his Recitation of a Poem on the Growth of an Individual Mind" Coleridge characterized parts of The Prelude: . . . moments awful, Now in thy inner life, and now abroad. When power streamed from thee, and thy soul received The light reflected, as a light bestowed.

But Coleridge himself believed that he had lost the power. Later in the same ode, as a result of the contrast between himself and Wordsworth, he likens all of his achievements to flowers: Strewed on my corse, and borne upon my bier, In the same coffin, for the self-same grave! 01. 74-75)

CONCLUSION

161

Turning to the poems written after 1815, we find sterner stuff than the earlier occasional pieces. Several of these contain as the central theme epistomological problems. As one might expect, the diction becomes abstract and philosophical, while the forms become simple - almost bare. The tone of these poems is witty, bordering at times on the sardonic - perhaps the attitude, when pondering such subjects, best designed to preserve the writer's sanity. "Human Life: On the Denial of Immortality" (1815) opens with the bald statement: "If dead, we cease to be", then continues with a set of conditional questions: if total gloom annihilates life; if breathing is life itself; if even Milton's soul can die; then Ο Man! thou vessel purposeless, unmeant, Yet drone-hive strange of phantom purposes! Surplus of Nature's dread activity

Coleridge apparently believed the activities of bees to be purposeless, and their instincts to be non-teleological. (If the reader has ever watched a glass hive filled with bees moving in seemingly accidental circles, the image may strike him forcefully.) Nature's lack of design was also in Coleridge's mind years earlier when he wrote of bees in The Friend: Disturbed as by the obscure quickening of an inward birth; made restless by swarming thoughts, that, like the bees when they first miss the queen and mother of the hive, with vain discursion seek each in the other what is the common need of all; man sallies forth into nature — in nature, as in the shadows and reflections of a clear river, to discover the originals of the forms presented to him in his own intellect.®

The idea develops by association. "Swarming thoughts" leads to a swarm of bees; the restlessness of his thoughts suggests a swarm of bees without a leader from whom it may find direction; without a queen each drone sees its own frustration mirrored in his fellows. Finally, man, too. is said to lack direction, and seeks help by consulting natural forms, which turn out to be projections of his own intellect. Later in the poem man is an "Image of Image, Ghost of β

Found in Notebooks,

II, 2434n.

162

CONCLUSION

Ghostly Elf"; his emotions are "castless shadows of his shadowy self". Man is given no reason for "hollow joy or hollow good", for his "being's being is contradiction". Typically, Coleridge's poetic consideration of metaphysics ends with a denial of a meaningful universe. A note to the final poem of the group to be discussed, "Limbo", interjects a problem of the poet's intention. Appended to four lines of the poem (11. 6-10) is Coleridge's remark that the lines were directed against "the partisans of a crass and sensual materialism...." The question thus arises: Did Coleridge ascribe the sentiments in the poem to materialists only? or did he himself share in the sentiments? Although a definitive answer cannot be given (only Coleridge himself could know his intention) still corroboratory passages point to a reluctant emotional acceptance of the views - if not an intellectual one. I shall incorporate the passages in the discussion to follow. "Limbo" is the most metaphysical of Coleridge's later poems, both in its use of conceits and in its noumenal and speculations. He revised it several times, adding the introductory lines, and deleting lines which were grimly playful, particularly lines with triple rhymes and those with abrupt switches in level of image, for example: Tho' frus' Ghost itself he ne'er frown'd blacker on The skin and skin-pent Druggist cross'd the Acheron, Styx, and with Periphlegeton Cacytus, — (The very names, methinks, might frighten us) (FW, I, 29-430) In its final shape the poem accumulates meaning in a series of images - each progressively exploring the dimensions of Limbo, each questioning the reality of human experience. In Limbo's den lies "the sole true Something", an abstraction or inner fear which is both natural and supernatural: "It frightens Ghosts, as here Ghosts frighten men." This something, later teemed "positive Negation", annihilates souls: Even now it shrinks them — they shrink in as Moles (Nature's mute monks, live mandrakes of the ground)

CONCLUSION

163

Creep back from Light — then listen for its sound; — See but to dread, and dread they know not why — The natural alien of their negative eye. (lines 6 - 1 0 )

The image reduces man to the level of rodents; the reader is forced to admit his similarities to a mole: both, like monks, are hooded, silent, and drab. Both, like mandrakes, scream if taken from the ground; and like a mandrake, man is a forked creature. The image continues with a confusion of the senses — listening for light, and seeing though blind. The passage concludes with still further contradictions and a pun: "natural alien" and "negative eye". To the contemporary reader, the latter image drawn from photography adds still another paradox in that a negative, in order to reproduce an image, reverses light and darkness. Thus far the poem has dealt largely with the world of the senses, which to Coleridge and Kant was interpreted by the Understanding. Yet without Reason to complement the senses by intuitions of the divine, man lacks a rudder or insight. Coleridge likened the state to the condition of a mole: . . . the pure Reason, which dictates unconditionally, in distinction from the prudential understanding, which employing it's male Eyes in an impossible calculation of Consequences perverts and mutilates its own Being, untenanting the function which it is incapable of occupying. (Letters, III, 146)

In "Limbo" Reason's activity is denied; intuition - if it can be called such - arrives at contradictory conclusions. The state of Limbo contains "Lank Space, and sytheless Time with branny hands / Barren and soundless as the measuring sands." These personifications (perhaps allusions to Kant's Intuitions) are as meaningles as "moonlight on the dial of day". With less than subtle irony, the poet calls the macabre image "lovely"; for it "looks like Human Time". The associations of a nocturnal sundial and human time give rise to a follow-up image: a blind old man, who, like a statue stares at the skies:

164

CONCLUSION

Yet having moonward turn'd his face by chance, Gazes the orb with moon-like countenance, With scant white hairs, with foretop bald and high, He gazes still, — his eyeless face all eye; — As 'twere an organ full of silent sight, His whole face seemeth to rejoice in light! Lip touching lip, all moveless bust and limb — He seems to gaze at that which seems to gaze on him. (PW, I, lines 23-30)

Previous images personified moles (Natures mute monks) and the abstractions of Time and Place; this image blurs the distinctions between a moonbathed sundial, the moon itself, and Man, the perceiver. No, man the seeming perceiver; from the image are eliminated perception or recognition. Yet even the human perplexed condition is preferable to that of Limbo: "No such sweet sights doth Limbo den immure." The very thought of Limbo is lurid; it is a condition of "growthless dull Privation". But, the poet concludes, there is a fear even worse: "positive Negation". Not all of Coleridge's thoughts about existence and nonexistence took such witty turns. In a soulsearching letter written three years earlier, instead of studied paradox and elaborate conceit, Coleridge expressed his fears in agitated prose. Even so, he had in mind the image of blindness and light, later to appear in "Limbo": I have had more than a glimpse of what is meant by Death & utter Darkness, & the Worm that dieth not — and all the Hell of the Reprobate is no more inconsistent with the Love of God than the Blindness of one who has occasioned loathesome and guilty Diseases to eat out his eyes, is inconsistent with the Light of the Sun. But the consolations, at least the sensible sweetness, of Hope, I do not possess. On the contrary, the temptation, which I have contantly to fight up against is a fear that if Annihilation & the possibility of Heaven were offered to my choice, I should choose the former. (.Letters, III, 498)

In this and other late poems, Coleridge concedes that the universe is purposeless, that man is alienated from beatitude by the puzzle of evil. Man, too, is seen as separate from Nature; the material universe is no longer viewed as the mighty alphabet of God.

CONCLUSION

165

Man is "surplus of Nature's dread activity", and, as such, an alien. If Coleridge despaired of a harmonious universe in his later poetry, and admitted his earlier unconscious misgivings, he could still assign to poetry the task he had given it until 1802. In December, 1804, he confided to his notebook: Idly talk they who speak of Poets as mere Indulgers of Fancy, Imagination, Superstitution, &c — They are the Bridlers by Delight, the Purifiers, they that combine them with reason & order, the true Protoplasts, Gods of Love who tame the Chaos.7

Yet after 1802 the effort to impose harmony and order, to tame the chaos, became too great for Coleridge. He never lost his "shaping spirit of the Imagination"; it is likely that he suppressed it in hopes of protecting his religious and philosophic beliefs from his emotional world of guilt and Chaos.

•> Notebooks,

II, 2355.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abrams, Μ. Η., "The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor", The Kenyon Review, XIX (1957), 113-130. Reprinted in English Romantic Poets, ed. by Μ. H. Abrams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 37-54. , The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958). Armour, Richard W., and Raymond F. Howes, Coleridge the Talker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1940). Bate, Walter J., Coleridge (New York: Macmillan, 1968). Beer, John B., Coleridge, the Visionary (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959). Bonjour, Adrien, Coleridge's "Hymn Before Sunrise"; a Study of Facts Connected with the Poem (Lausanne: Imprimerie La Concorde, 1942). Bostetter, Edward E., "The Nightmare World of The Ancient Mariner", Studies in Romanticism, I (Summer, 1962), 241-254. Boulger, James D., Coleridge as Religious Thinker (= Yale Studies in English, vol. 151) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). Burke, Kenneth, The Philosophy of Literary Form (New York: Vintage Books, 1957). Campbell, James Dykes, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative of the Events in His Life (London and New York: Macmillan, 1894). Coburn, Kathleen, Inquiring Spirit, a New Presentation of Coleridge from His Published and Unpublished Prose Writings (London: Routledge and Paul, 1951). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Friend (Burlington, Vermont: Chauncey Goodrich, 1831). , Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols., ed. Η. N. Coleridge (London: John Murray, 1835). , Essays on His Own Times forming a second series of The Friend, ed. by Sara Coleridge (London: John Murray, 1850). , Letters, Conversations and Recollections, ed. by Thomas Alsop (London: Frederick Farrah, 1864). , Aids to Reflection, in Complete Works, I, ed. by W. G. T. Shedd (New York: Harper & Bros., 1871). , The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols., ed. by Ε. H. Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912). , Biographia Literaria, ed. by J. Shawcross (London: Oxford University Press, 1939).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

167

, Philosophical Lectures, ed. by Kathleen Coburn (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949). , Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 4 vols., ed. by E. L. Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956-1959). , The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols., ed. by Kathleen Coburn (New York: Pantheon Books, 1957-1961). , Shakespearean Criticism, 2 vols., ed. by Thomas M. Raysor (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1962). Fairchild, Η. N., Religious Trends in English Poetry, 4 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949). From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. by Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). Gillman, James, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1838). Hanson, Lawrence, The Life of S. T. Coleridge, the Early Years (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1962). House, Humphrey, Coleridge (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953). Johnson, Samuel, Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. by Walter Raleigh (London: Oxford University Press, 1908). Knight, G. Wilson, The Starlit Dome (London: Oxford University Press, 1941). Lowes, John Livingston, The Road to Xanadu (New York: Vintage Books, 1959). Metzger, Lore, "The Workshop of Productive Eclecticism", Journal of the History of Ideas, XXIV (January-March, 1963), 143-149. Muirhead, J. H., Coleridge as Philosopher (London: Macmillan, 1930). Praz, Mario, The Romantic Agony (New York: Meridian Books, 1951). Read, Herbert Edward, Coleridge as Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1949). Richards, I. Α., Coleridge on Imagination (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950). , "Coleridge, the Vulnerable Poet", Yale Review, XLVIII (New Series: June, 1959), 491-504. Scheider, Elisabeth, Coleridge, Opium, and "Kubla Khan" (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). Sidney, Sir Philip, "An Apology for Poetry", Elizabethan Critical Essays, I, ed. by G. G. Smith (London, 1904). Suther, Marshall, The Dark Night of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960). —, Visions of Xanadu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). Warren, Robert Penn, "A Poem of Pure Imagination, an Experiment in Reading", in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with an Essay by Robert Penn Warren (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946). Whalley, George, "The Mariner and the Albatross", The University of Toronto Quarterly, XVI (July, 1947), 381-398. , Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson and the Asra Poems (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1955). , " 'Late Autumn's Amaranth': Coleridge's Late Poems", Transactions of the Royal Society, II (June, 1964), 159-179.

INDEX

Bald, R. C., 57 Bate, Walter Jackson, 154-155 Bostetter, Edward E., 154-155 Boulger, James D., 9 Boyer, James, 17 Brun, Frederika, 51-53 Burke, Kenneth, analysis of The Ancient Mariner, 84-85; symbolic action, 13-15 Coburn, Kathleen, 67 n., 79 Coleridge, George, 77 Coleridge, S. T., art as mediator between man and nature, 156-157; Calvanistic tendencies, 155; death of his son Berkeley, 121-124; decline in number of poems, 9; difference between public and private views, 41; on Oedipus, 150; on dreams, 143; dynamic philosophy, 154; eye imagery, 18-25; on Holy Communion, 87; incompatability with Sarah Coleridge, 126, 134, on Original Sin, 77; on personal revelation in poetry, 12-13; reflective images in later poems, 159-160; on subconscious origin of poetry, 143; sun imagery, 33-38; Unitarianism, 36-37; vacillation on the idea of a personal God, 123 Works "Allegoric Vision," 152-153 The Ancient Mariner, compared to Christabel, 93; Coleridge's identification with, 80-81; image of the sun in, 86; moral tag, 91; theme of heresy, 89 Biographia Literaria, moral utility of literature, 146-147; pleasure the immediate object of poetry, 145, reconcilliation of opposites, 145 Christabel, ambivalent character of Geraldine, 97,99; character of Christabel, 96, completion projected, 105-107; dramatic speaker, 93-98; echo imagery, 102-104; inversion of good and evil, 104; suspension of disbelief, 93 "Composed on a Homeward Journey", 125 "Dejection: an Ode," concept of Joy, 130-132, epigraph, 138, moon symbolism, 157-158; revisions, 134-135; wind symbolism, 134-138 'The Destiny of Nations," 155 "Easter Holiday," 17

170

INDEX

"The Eolian Harp," 14-15; pantheism in, 28-31 "Fears in Solitude," 37, 127 "The Foster Mother's Tale," 79-82; weed cluster, 81-82 "Human Life," 161-162 "Hymn before Sunrise," borrowings, 51-52; inharmonious universe, 51-53; use of notebooks in its composition, 53-56 "The Improvisatoire," 112 "Kubla Khan," chasms, 113, 114; Coleridge's identification with the Khan, 119; as comment on the poetic process, 117; date, 109; fear of self-deification, 119-120; fountains, 115; meaning of the term decree, 110-112; Kubla and Aloadine, 116-117 A Lay Sermon, 153 Limbo, analysis of imagery, 162-164 "Lines Composed in a Concert Room," 127 "Lines: On an Autumnal Evening," 19-20 "Lines to a Friend," 23-25 "The Mad Monk," 127 "Ode to the Departing Year," 49-50 "On Receiving a Letter," 124-125 Osorio, lack of motivation 62-63; necessitarianism and moral freedom, 63; Nature, 64; outlined, 61-62; staged, 60; weed image cluster, 64-68 "The Pains of Sleep," 107 "Pantisocracy," 54 "The Picture," 159-160 "The Raven," compared to The Ancient Mariner, 91, marginal note, 42, naturalistic universe, 57-59 "Religious Musings," 33-36, 43-47 Shakespearean Criticism, 147-150 "Shurton Bars," 136 "The Snow-Drop," 128 "Songs of the Pixies," 22 Table Talk, 148 n. "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," 74 ' T o the Author of Robbers," 60 "To the Muse," 18 "To William Wordsworth," 11-12; reflective images, 160-161 "Verse Letter," 7, personal matter in, 129 Wallenstein, 121 Watchman, 48 Donne, John, 39 Evans, Mary, 28 Fairchild, Η. N., 41 Hartley, David, 39, 83 Hopkins, G. M., 39 Hutchinson, Sara, 128 Johnson, Samuel, 149 Kant, Immanuel, 39, 153 Knight, G. Wilson, 110

INDEX

171

Lowes, John Livingston, 89, 108, 116 Metzger, Lore, 142-143 Pantisocracy, 26 Plato, 118, 148; theory of ideas, 36 Poole, Thomas, 60, 121, 122 Praz, Mario, 25 Priestly, Joseph, 39, 122 Psychoanalytic criticism, 15-16 Schneider, Elizabeth, 108-109 Southey, Robert, 22 Suther, Marshall, chasms in "Kubla Khan," 114-115; images of half lights, 21; on "Dejection: an Ode," 10-11; on "Kubla Khan," 109-110 Thelwall, John, 31, 32, 41, 75 Unitarian Church, cosmic oneness, 46; doctrine of accommodation, 47 Warren, Robert Penn, 85 Wedgwood, Josiah, 75 Wedgwood, Thomas, 75 Whalley, George, 9, 78 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 78, 121 Wordsworth, 78, 121; "Epitaph" cited, 123

de proprietatibus litterarum Series 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 12 13 14 15 17 19 20 21 22 23 24 26 27 28 29 30 32 33 34 35 36 38 40 41 43 45 47 48

Practica

Cohn, R . G . : M a l l a r m £ ' s M a s t e r p i e c e H i e a t t , C . B . The R e a l i s m o f Dream V i s i o n Mogan, J . J . : Chaucer and t h e Theme o f M u t a b i l i t y N u s s e r , P . : M u s i l s Romantheorie P e r l o f f , Μ . : Rhyme and Meaning i n the P o e t r y of Yeats Cusac, M.H. N a r r a t i v e S t r u c t u r e i n t h e N o v e l s of S i r Walter Scott Newton, R . P . : Form i n t h e 'Menschheitsdämmerung 1 W o r t l e y , W . V . : T a l l e m a n t des RSaux Swanson, D . R . : T h r e e Conquerors Gopnik, I . : A Theory o f S t y l e and Richardson s Clarieea Feldman, S . D . : The M o r a l i t y - P a t t e r n e d Comedy o f t h e Renaissance' M i t c h e l l , G . : The A r t Theme i n J o y c e C a r y ' s First Trilogy · Ebner, D . : A u t o b i o g r a p h y i n S e v e n t e e n t h Century England B a l l , D . L . : Samuel R i c h a r d s o n ' s Theory o f Fiction Raymond, M.B.s Swinburne's P o e t i c s P o w e r s , ' D . C . : E n g l i s h Formal S a t i r e Schick, E . B . : Metaphorical Organicism i n Herder' s E a r l y Works Wood, H . : The H i s t o r i e s o f Herodotus Magner, J . E . : John Crowe Ransom L a a r , E.Th.M.van d e : The I n n e r S t r u c t u r e o f Withering Heights Einbond, B . L . : Samuel J o h n s o n ' s A l l e g o r y H a r d e r , W.T. : A C e r t a i n Order Vernier, R . : 'Poesie ininterrompue' e t l a p o S t i q u e de Paul Eluard 39 FF/ Hennedy, H . L . : U n i t y i n B a r s e t s h i r e McLean, S . K . : The "Bänkelsang" and t h e Work o f B e r t o l d Brecht I n n i s s , Κ . : D.H.Lawrence's B e s t i a r y G e o r g e , E . E . s H ö l d e r l i n ' s "Ars P o e t i c a " Sampson, H . G . : The A n g l i c a n T r a d i t i o n i n Eighteenth-Century Verse B l a k e , R . E . : The "Essays de m e d i t a t i o n s 49 FF/ p o S t i q u e s " o f F r e r e Z a c h a r i e de V i t r S Jakobson, R. and L . G . J o n e s : S h a k e s p e a r e ' s V e r b a l A r t i n Th'Expenae of Spirit Silverman, E . B . : P o e t i c Synthesis in S h e l l e y ' s "Adonais" D o u g h e r t y , A . : A Study o f Ehytmic S t r u c t u r e i n the Verse of W i l l i a m Butler Yeats E u s t i s , Α . : M o l i e r e as I r o n i c Contemplator Champigny, R . : Humanism and Human Racism Kopman, H . : Rencontres w i t h t h e Inanimate 31 FF/ i n P r o u s t ' s Recherahe H i l l e n , G. : Andreas G r y p h i u s ' Cardenio und Ce linde Ewton, R . W . : The L i t e r a r y T h e o r i e s o f August Wilhelm S c h l e g e l Todd, J . Ε . : Emily D i c k i n s o n ' s Use o f t h e Persona

Dfl. 24,18,30,22,48,24,34,24,24,22,18,18,22,36,36,30,25,32,18,40,18,28,25,28,54,28,96,48,32,10,20,38,40,18,20,22,22,22,-