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.

“Monk” Lewis, Mr. Coleridge, and Popular Taste

     Matthew Lewis’ The Monk has been popular since its publication over two hundred years ago. A contemporary American may recognize the pleasure it yields as a “good read” and its secure place in the “Gothic novel” chapter of literary histories while feeling that the very qualities that make it enduringly popular bar it from what critics may regard as the more sublime higher reaches of Parnassus. Coleridge’s early review of the book [1] defines its strengths and weaknesses with considerable insight but his analysis is marred by his expressed distaste for the norms of popular art. Coleridge looks with condescension on characteristics that belong to popular art, failing to understand that reaffirming people’s received ideas is as great a part of literature as challenging them, and that the “cheap thrills” of the book are appropriate to its genre.
     Coleridge’s essay does open with a consideration of the book’s widespread appeal, noting that “the horrible and the preternatural have usually seized on the popular taste, at the rise and decline of literature. Most powerful stimulants, they can never be required except by the torpor of an unawakened, or the languor of an exhausted, appetite. The same phaenomenon, therefore, which we hail as a favourable omen in the belles lettres of Germany, impresses a degree of gloom in the compositions of our countrymen.” One wonders whether this unabashed nationalism and condescension toward literary popularity can be unrelated to envy of the younger author’s higher sales.
     After all, in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth had explained his own role in his collaboration with Coleridge as the description of “incidents and situations from common life,” though he sought “to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.” In a clear division of labor, while his colleague sought to heighten the everyday, Coleridge took the opposite role of rendering believable “persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic.” [2] Coleridge’s own use of the fantastic, the miraculous, the sensational and the exotic, not to mention his enthusiasm for German literature might have made Coleridge a likely natural advocate for Lewis, yet his review of The Monk is decidedly ambivalent, and Coleridge strays toward hostility on the very point at which his ideas are least supportable. [3]
     He suggests (with a rhetorical shudder of horror) that Lewis shows signs of being less than an orthodox Christian, based primarily on the novel’s passing ironic comments about the Bible’s tales of immorality. Coleridge is greatly concerned about this though, for some reason, he provides a reference to what strikes him as the dirtiest passage in scripture (Ezekiel XXIII). Probably the one line in the review that has attracted the greatest amount of attention is his claim that “the Monk is a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter, he might reasonably turn pale.” Coleridge doubtless had in mind not only the waggish comments on sexual themes in the Bible but also certain seduction scenes in the novel itself. Yet Monk’s jest about the Bible was flippant if daring and the author had, after all, consistently catered to British religious opinion in depicting Catholicism as superstitious and corrupt and foreign lands as realms of injustice and tyranny.
     In the first place, Coleridge is of course out of step with contemporary standards which would find neither the religious opinions nor the erotic scenes (more often implied than enacted) objectionable. Further, many readers would consider Coleridge himself far from averse to the use of an appeal to the sensational. The more significant problem with this stricture, however, is that it belies the popular character of Lewis work, and the book was immensely popular. It went through edition after edition, both authorized and pirated, and inspired stage and film adaptations as well as an opera. Almost apologetically, Coleridge says that he has only come to write about the book because of “the unusual success which it has experienced.”
     The reading audience, predominantly bourgeois and largely female, may have indeed been intrigued by the claims of Coleridge and the book’s other opponents. Lewis’ biographer drily notes that, the public had heard that The Monk was “horrible, blasphemous, and lewd, and they rushed to put their morality to the test.” [4] Indeed, criticism so abashed the author that he apologized to his family and his readers and expurgated later editions in a response to the opprobrium.
     While high art often interrogates and challenges received ideas, popular literature typically reinforces them. To be truly popular a work may flirt with transgression in a titillating manner, but it must ultimately strengthen rather than overturn the reader’s preconceptions. While it is true that the redoubtable Marquis de Sade (whose Justine may have influenced Lewis and who may have been influenced in turn) [5] wanted to think Lewis’ book “revolutionary,” but in fact the author’s subsequent disavowal of such an aim was no more than candid.
     Perhaps the most intensely erotic image in the entire book is the “daemon” conjured by Matilda: “It was a Youth seemingly scarce eighteen, the perfection of whose form and face was unrivalled. He was perfectly naked: A bright Star sparkled upon his forehead . . .” [6] Yet in spite of this clearly homoerotic image in a book full of cross-dressing and androgyny, the issue of homosexuality in lived experience never arises. This pattern is paradigmatic for The Monk as a whole. A sexy youth is a moment’s marvel. A joke about religion is only a joke. In the end, once the reader has relished scenes of women subjected to ravishment and naked appetite, the vicious suffer for their sins, Ambrosio most dramatically.
     The reader thinks about Lewis’ attitude in parliament and in private business toward slavery. While claiming an enlightened “modern” attitude and opposing slavery at home, the inheritor of sizable Indies plantations wished to maintain ownership of his own slaves. In the end, though more liberal than some, he took his position with the ruling class.
     Carnival thrill houses and horror films likewise must provide carefully regulated safe fear for people’s amusement in precisely the same way that sentimental stories like “tear-jerker” movies evoke strong but shallow levels of emotion. Lewis’ extravagant evocation of the supernatural as spectacle has a different character sixty years after the statute against witchcraft was repealed, when most educated people no longer believed in ghosts or sorcerers or raising the devil. Lewis may achieve Guignol-style shocks (such as Agnes holding the body of her baby), but he never rises to the true tragedy of Marlowe’s Faustus. Ambrosio, in contrast, can excite only curiosity and perhaps, from the soft-hearted, pity. He is a singularly weak diabolist, constantly wavering and acting more out of impulse than decided will.
     Ambrosio’s character strikes Coleridge as deeply implausible, and here he has a point. He finds the transition from a “man who had been described as possessing much general humanity, a keen and vigorous understanding, with habits of the most exalted piety” into “an uglier fiend than the gloomy imagination of Dante would have ventured to picture” altogether incredible. To Coleridge the monk’s character lacked a sufficient “semblance of truth . . . to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.” [7] It is surely a fact that Ambrosio is a two-dimensional slave to the narrative, though this is generally the case in popular genres (and in folk stories where character depth is nonexistent).
     The enjoyment of naughty stories that conclude with the most conventional of morals extends from the account of hot times in Sodom in the medieval Pearl-poet’s Clannesse through Moll Flanders and Reefer Madness. Coleridge faults this technique, claiming that Lewis has gone too far. “The sufferings which he describes are so frightful and intolerable, that we break with abruptness from the delusion, and indignantly suspect the man of a species of brutality, who could find a pleasure in wantonly imagining them.” Such righteous indignation only flare the higher if the indignant reader is aware of his own participation in sado-masochistic pleasure.
     Coleridge says that in a book like The Monk “the order of nature may be changed wherever the author's purposes demand it . . . For the same reasons a romance is incapable of exemplifying a moral truth.” He might more generally have said that a romanced cannot support a theme implying something about lived experience, as it need not coincide even with a single person’s impression of reality. With the inclusion of supernatural cause and effect, “all events are levelled into one common mass, and become almost equally probable, where the order of nature may be changed wherever the author's purposes demand it.” This allows a certain irresponsibility for which the compensating value must be neither more nor less that its “having given pleasure during its perusal,” what moderns might call a beach or an airplane book. With the same envious condescension a professor might use in ridiculing Stephen King, he comments on the cheapness of the Gothic: “the public will learn . . . with how little expense of thought or imagination this species of composition is manufactured.” “Figures that shock the imagination, and narratives that mangle the feelings, rarely discover genius, and always betray a low and vulgar taste.
     Vulgar it may be in the literal sense, but, as Seldes said, outstanding popular art is far preferable to mediocre high art. Though Coleridge conceded that Lewis displayed “an imagination rich, powerful, and fervid,”(and that last adjective suggests pathological excess), he failed to understand the role of popular literature. People have always demanded such work, filled with sensation as contemporary popular movies are filled with cars crashing through windows and glimpses of naked breasts. Such pandering does indeed correspond to themes that reinforce rather than challenge the reader’s ideas, but this, too, is an important role of art. Popular art like Lewis’ The Monk transmit culture no less than oral folk-tales in preliterate societies. Though powerful art always contains ambivalences, mysteries, and contradictions, such cues suggesting a critical attitude toward what “all the world” thinks have only recently come to the fore in the narratives people have always invented to occupy their leisure. The Monk is indeed unrealistic and sensational; these are appropriate generic characteristics. It titillates readers into thinking it transgressive while in fact reinforcing their pre-existing opinions.



1. Coleridge, review of Matthew G. Lewis, The Monk, The Critical Review, Feb. 1797, pp.. 194-200. Oddly Coleridge in this review refers to the main character as Antonio, not Ambrosio. Subsequent references to this same review will not be separately noted.

2. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Ch. XIV.

3. There is little doubt that Wordsworth would have shared Coleridge’s opinion of The Monk. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads he frames his project in direct opposition to what he considers the coarsening of taste which he attributes to urbanization and which has resulted in a “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation.” He would surely have considered Monk one of those writers have supplied the public’s desire through the “application of gross and violent stimulants.”

4. Peck, Louis (1961). A Life of Matthew G. Lewis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 28.

5. Horner, Avril. European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange 1760-1960. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 39 ff.

6. Chapter 7.

7. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Ch. XIV.