Every Reader's Coleridge

      This is the eighteenth in a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. Consult the Index for the current month under Blog Archive on the right.  An introduction called “Why Read Poetry?” is available at http://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2018/05/why-read-poetry.html. 

     In this series I limit my focus to the discussion, often including a close paraphrase, of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. The poems discussed are all readily available on the internet. 

 

      Samuel Taylor Coleridge is known to most readers through a few poems so widely anthologized and reprinted in textbooks that students often encounter them in classrooms.   Then, too, he has a reputation both as a poetic innovator, the founder with Wordsworth of the theory and practice of English Romanticism, and as a drug addict.  Lyrical Ballads, the ground-breaking book that proclaimed the new style in 1798 included poems by both writers.  In the introduction Wordsworth, the nature poet who was said by his friend De Quincey to be addicted not to drugs or alcohol but to hiking, declared his aim “to make the incidents of common life interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature.”  They agreed that Coleridge would adopt the complementary technique: to write about the supernatural “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 [the first use of this term] for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”  Wordsworth meant to defamiliarize commonplace experience by seeing deeply into it, while Coleridge would indicate the symbolic relevance of the exotic and extraordinary.

     Times may have changed, but in my day at least, it was all but impossible to avoid getting “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” in school.  Its emphatic, if somewhat muddy, moral theme and its archaizing trappings (including the spelling of the title and the marginal notes) made it popular among pedagogues and its narrative ballad-like stanzas seemed more approachable than odes.  Folksong, which had been dismissed as sub-literary, was embraced by the Romantics such as Bishop Percy and Robert Burns in Britain and  Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano in Germany.  The form particularly suited Coleridge’s project because the supernatural often plays a role in English ballads, though his own story is recognizably in the "gathic" style of the late eighteenth century and has little in common with the Middle Ages. 

     This passage includes perhaps the poem’s most well-known lines (“Water, water, every where,/ Nor any drop to drink”) before indulging in horror movie scares in which “slimy things” dance about in lurid special effects.

 

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

 

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

 

The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea.

 

About, about, in reel and rout

The death-fires danced at night;

The water, like a witch's oils,

Burnt green, and blue and white. (115-130)

 

The poem invokes a kind of Calvinist divine judgement in which the mariner is punished for his violence against the albatross, though, of course, the crew also perishes in collateral damage, while the protagonist goes on to work out his cursed destiny rather like the Wandering Jew.  The moral, when it arrives, seems facile:

 

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.

                                    (614-617)

 

     A careful reader is likely to find this an inadequate theme.  Surely the story suggests not only a deep love for the entire creation, hence pacifism and vegetarianism and true Christian nonresistance, but also the unknown impact of casual choices, a sort of tragic fate or ἀνάγκη..  When the mariner shoots the albatross, no motive is given.  The act is as gratuitous as Meursault’s  killing in The Stranger, yet, once done, it determines his entire destiny.  There is as much of the absurd as there is of retributive justice in the story.

     In fact the supernatural element, not the theme, is the heart of the poem’s appeal.  The “special effects” quoted above are expanded to cover a prolonged agony in which the crews’ souls go whizzing by as they die one by one, apparently having become mere aspects of the mariner’s punishment.  (The image reminds me of the skeleton sent over the heads of his audiences for showings of House on Haunted Hill [1959]).  Yet in spite of the mariner’s repentance, he must ever wander on, cautioning others to have compassion.  Very like William Castle’s modern horror movie, the creepy and mysterious thrills are the principal point. 

     The supernatural is replaced by the fabulous and exotic in “Kubla Khan,” all the more fascinating when the author notes that its origin was “a sort of Reverie brought on, by two grains of Opium.”  Here Kubla Khan’s “pleasure-dome” is not just a luxury resort with its gardens and “many an incense-bearing tree”; it is at the same time “a savage place,” “haunted” and “filled with wails,” where tumultuous movements of the earth occur.  He hears then the melody of the “Abyssinian maid” whose song, if he could but remember, would allow him to “build that dome in air,/ That sunny dome! those caves of ice!”  Yet the music is not purely pleasurable; the sublime insights of art are menacing as well, even those from the most profound source.  The fruits of divine inspiration here seem dangerous, wrought about with magical protective ritual (“Weave a circle round him thrice”).  Yet, just as in  the “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” the primary significance is not in theme at all, but rather in the creation of a tone, a mood of dramatic portent, and the writer’s providing a strange and marvelous setting, a second-hand account of an obscure passage brought to life in a drug dream.  The “person from Porlock” who interrupts his reverie is in fact oneself, the reader, for whom the poem was set down, the spectator who may experience the weird at second-hand.  Again, the poem’s primary appeal is like that of science fiction or fantasy, the appeal of the strange.

     Though “Dejection: An Ode” deals with the natural phenomenon of depression, it associates the author’s low spirits with storms and opens with an archaizing, folk prognostication of impending severe weather from a stanza of an old ballad.  In his earlier poem “The Eolian Harp” (1796) the device (a passive musical instrument like wind chimes) had produced “a soft floating witchery of sound” which suggested. to him a magnificent song of the whole creation “Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,/ At once the Soul of each, and God of all.”  Here, however, the strains of the harp “better far were mute,” since, like the ominous moon, they presage disaster and thus “better far were mute.” 

     The poem proceeds to specify the sensations of a mind sunk in depression with vivid imagery.

 

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

         A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,

         Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,

                In word, or sigh, or tear—    (21-24)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

                My genial spirits fail;

                And what can these avail

To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?

                                          (39-41)

 Coleridge is very much the modern neurotic, a member of the “poor loveless ever-anxious crowd.” (52) Though he gazes at nature, it is with “how blank an eye” (30) and his mood is unrelieved.  He can only “see, not feel” (38) the charms of the creation.  He come then to realize that he “may not hope from outward forms to win/ The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.” (45-46)  The appreciation of the world is a reciprocal affair, “we receive but what we give,” (47)  In the end

 

from the soul itself must issue forth

A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud

           Enveloping the Earth—

                                        (53-55)

  

To regain access to the divine “Joy” love provides a route.  “This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,/

     This beautiful and beauty-making power” (62-63) arrives with a spiritual “wedding” (68).

 

 

  We in ourselves rejoice!

And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,

      All melodies the echoes of that voice,

All colours a suffusion from that light.

                                        (72-75)

 

 The poet finds refuge in love from the “viper thoughts, that coil around my mind/ Reality's dark dream!” (94-5), though these may arise from real conditions, the “groans” of “trampled men, with smarting wounds” that suffer “pain, and shudder with the cold.” (112-113)  He is thus able to conclude with a victorious wish for the high spirits of his beloved; in the warmth of human love he finds melancholy’s remedy.

 

           With light heart may she rise,

           Gay fancy, cheerful eyes,

      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!

      O simple spirit, guided from above,

Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice,

Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice.

                                              (132-139)

 

     This conclusion in felicity is often lacking in Coleridge, a man of decidedly depressive tendencies who served an addiction for much if his life.  His somber and intellectual vision is not to everyone’s taste.  Yet Coleridge contributed to the modern style by his objections to neo-Classicism including his insistence that poetry should not stray too far from the ordinary spoken language.  His fondness for the both the quaint and the tumultuous have aged less well.  Much of his work is too philosophical for many sensibilities.  A hostile critic once accused him of over-emotionalism, labeling him a member of "the School of whining and hypochondriacal poets that haunt the Lakes," but his poetic descendants have been only more self-interested and neurotic.   

     What the reader may make of his poetry, Coleridge is undeniably a substantial critic.  Though philosophers may differ on his significance in the history of ideas, in literature his Lectures on Shakespeare, Biographica Literaria, and  other criticism offer many influential ideas, not least the concept of the "willing suspension of disbelief" and the distinction between "imagination" and "fancy."  His adaptation of Schelling’s notion of Ineinsbildung for which he devised the ungainly term "esemplastic power" exemplifies at once the somewhat opaque vulnerability of his ratiocination and its accurate reflection of the poetic mind.

     If Coleridge is quite certain to be read in the future for his role in literary history, he is surely no less certain to impress new readers every year, even some who encounter him in classrooms, with his fondness for the strange fey quality he found provided  bit of the sublime, and for his pronounced rhythms that render his work always cadenced even when irregular. 

     The curious may visit Coleridge’s grave in  St. Michael’s Church in London to read the poet’s epitaph.  The verses are at first glance entirely conventional with the request for passers-by to pray for the departed and the author’s own hopes for salvation.

 

Stop, Christian passer-by!—Stop, child of God,

And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod

A poet lies, or that which once seemed he.

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

That he who many a year with toil of breath

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

Mercy for praise—to be forgiven for fame

He asked, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same!

 

     First of all, the reader is likely to be struck by the fact that Coleridge has here adopted the role of the Ancient Mariner, accosting others to awake them to truths more easily avoided.  Here the equivalent of the Mariner’s curse is life-long depression (“death in life”).  He expresses also a radical skepticism over his career and even his identity (“or that which once seemed he”).  The close inquirer will observe that the initials in the fourth line are not used solely for the convenient rhyme they allow.  The three English letters sound very much like the Greek word ἐστηση, “he has stood” and the same sounds echo repeatedly throughout the verses beginning with the first line (“Stop, Christian” and “Stop, child”) and continuing to the end ( “through Christ . . .same”).  The given name and the proximity to death suggest the book of Samuel in which David says (as part of the affecting story of his relationship with Jonathan) “there is but a step between me and death” (1 Samuel 20:3).  Later David laments his beloved friend, saying “How are the mighty fallen!” (II Samuel 1, 23-27).  David’s grief is ameliorated, however, by his Biblical confidence in the order of things, a certainty Coleridge may have desired, but never attained.  And so the poet elaborated his simple expression of desire, not so much for everlasting life as for a purchase on a certain truth, with elaborate flights of thought, sound patterns, word-play, and allusion, as though with art he could lift himself into the sublime.  In his weaknesses perhaps even more than in his strengths Coleridge was a harbinger of our belated age.