The rest seems to have reached
a fatal facility of jingling, at the heels whereof followed Scott.
a fatal facility of jingling, at the heels whereof followed Scott.
Coleridge - Poems
But, alas!
Most of Myself I thought: when it befell
That the sooth Spirit of the breezy wood
Breath'd in mine ear--"All this is very well;
But much of _one_ thing is for _no_ thing good. "
Ah! my poor heart's inexplicable swell!
II
TO SIMPLICITY
O! I do love thee, meek _Simplicity_!
For of thy lays the lulling simpleness
Goes to my heart and soothes each small distress,
Distress though small, yet haply great to me!
'Tis true on Lady Fortune's gentlest pad
I amble on; yet, though I know not why,
So sad I am! --but should a friend and I
Grow cool and _miff_, O! I am _very_ sad!
And then with sonnets and with sympathy
My dreamy bosom's mystic woes I pall;
Now of my false friend plaining plaintively,
Now raving at mankind in general;
But, whether sad or fierce, 'tis simple all,
All very simple, meek Simplicity!
III
ON A RUINED HOUSE IN A ROMANTIC COUNTRY
And this reft house is that the which he built,
Lamented Jack! And here his malt he pil'd,
Cautious in vain! These rats that squeak so wild,
Squeak, not unconscious of their father's guilt.
Did ye not see her gleaming thro' the glade?
Belike, 'twas she, the maiden all forlorn.
What though she milk no cow with crumpled horn,
Yet _aye_ she haunts the dale where erst she stray'd;
And _aye_ beside her stalks her amorous knight!
Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn,
And thro' those brogues, still tatter'd and betorn,
His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white;
As when thro' broken clouds at night's high noon
Peeps in fair fragments forth the full--orb'd harvest-moon!
1797.
LIMBO
Tis a strange place, this Limbo! --not a Place,
Yet name it so;--where Time and weary Space
Fettered from flight, with night-mare sense of fleeing,
Strive for their last crepuscular half-being;--
Lank Space, and scytheless Time with branny hands
Barren and soundless as the measuring sands,
Not mark'd by flit of Shades,--unmeaning they
As moonlight on the dial of the day!
But that is lovely--looks like human Time,--
An old man with a steady look sublime,
That stops his earthly task to watch the skies;
But he is blind--a statue hath such eyes;--
Yet having moonward turn'd his face by chance,
Gazes the orb with moon-like countenance,
With scant white hairs, with fore top 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!
No such sweet sights doth Limbo den immure,
Wall'd round, and made a spirit-jail secure,
By the mere horror of blank Naught-at-all,
Whose circumambience doth these ghosts enthral.
A lurid thought is growthless, dull Privation,
Yet that is but a Purgatory curse;
Hell knows a fear far worse,
A fear--a future state;--'tis positive Negation!
1817.
METRICAL FEET
LESSON FOR A BOY
[** Macron and breve accent marks have been left off, see the note
in the Forum. ]
Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot! yea ill able
Ever to come up with Dactyl trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long;--
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapaests throng;
One syllable long, with one short at each side,
Amphibrachys hastes with a stately stride;--
First and last being long, middle short, Amphimacer
Strikes his thundering hoofs like a proud highbred Racer.
If Derwent be innocent, steady, and wise,
And delight in the things of earth, water, and skies;
Tender warmth at his heart, with these metres to show it,
With sound sense in his brains, may make Derwent a poet,--
May crown him with fame, and must win him the love
Of his father on earth and his Father above.
My dear, dear child!
Could you stand upon Skiddaw, you would not from its whole ridge
See a man who so loves you as your fond S. T. COLERIDGE.
1803.
THE HOMERIC HEXAMETER
DESCRIBED AND EXEMPLIFIED
[FROM SCHILLER]
Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows,
Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean.
? 1799.
THE OVIDIAN ELEGIAC METRE
DESCRIBED AND EXEMPLIFIED
[FROM SCHILLER]
In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column;
In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.
? 1799.
CATULLIAN HENDECASYLLABLES
[FROM MATTHISON]
Hear, my beloved, an old Milesian story! --
High, and embosom'd in congregated laurels,
Glimmer'd a temple upon a breezy headland;
In the dim distance amid the skiey billows
Rose a fair island; the god of flocks had blest it.
From the far shores of the bleat-resounding island
Oft by the moonlight a little boat came floating,
Came to the sea-cave beneath the breezy headland,
Where amid myrtles a pathway stole in mazes
Up to the groves of the high embosom'd temple.
There in a thicket of dedicated roses,
Oft did a priestess, as lovely as a vision,
Pouring her soul to the son of Cytherea,
Pray him to hover around the slight canoe-boat,
And with invisible pilotage to guide it
Over the dusk wave, until the nightly sailor
Shivering with ecstasy sank upon her bosom.
? 1799.
TO ----
I mix in life, and labour to seem free,
With common persons pleased and common things,
While every thought and action tends to thee,
And every impulse from thy influence springs.
? 1796.
EPITAPH
ON A BAD MAN
Under this stone does Walter Harcourt lie,
Who valued nought that God or man could give;
He lived as if he never thought to die;
He died as if he dared not hope to live!
1801.
THE SUICIDE'S ARGUMENT
Ere the birth of my life, if I wish'd it or no,
No question was asked me--it could not be so!
If the life was the question, a thing sent to try,
And to live on be Yes; what can No be? to die.
NATURE'S ANSWER
Is't returned, as 'twas sent? Is't no worse for the wear?
Think first, what you are! Call to mind what you were!
I gave you innocence, I gave you hope,
Gave health, and genius, and an ample scope.
Return you me guilt, lethargy, despair?
Make out the invent'ry; inspect, compare!
Then die--if die you dare!
1811.
THE GOOD, GREAT MAN
"How seldom, friend! a good great man inherits
Honour or wealth with all his worth and pains!
It sounds like stories from the land of spirits
If any man obtain that which he merits
Or any merit that which he obtains. "
REPLY TO THE ABOVE
For shame, dear friend, renounce this canting strain!
What would'st thou have a good great man obtain?
Place? titles? salary? a gilded chain?
Or throne of corses which his sword had slain?
Greatness and goodness are not _means_, but _ends_!
Hath he not always treasures, always friends,
The good great man? _three_ treasures, LOVE, and LIGHT,
And CALM THOUGHTS, regular as infant's breath:
And three firm friends, more sure than day and night,
HIMSELF, his MAKER, and the ANGEL DEATH!
Morning Post, Sept. 23,1802.
INSCRIPTION FOR A FOUNTAIN ON A HEATH
This Sycamore, oft musical with bees,--
Such tents the Patriarchs loved! O long unharmed
May all its aged boughs o'er-canopy
The small round basin, which this jutting stone
Keeps pure from falling leaves! Long may the Spring,
Quietly as a sleeping infant's breath,
Send up cold waters to the traveller
With soft and even pulse! Nor ever cease
Yon tiny cone of sand its soundless dance,
Which at the bottom, like a Fairy's Page,
As merry and no taller, dances still,
Nor wrinkles the smooth surface of the Fount.
Here twilight is and coolness: here is moss,
A soft seat, and a deep and ample shade.
Thou may'st toil far and find no second tree.
Drink, Pilgrim, here! Here rest! and if thy heart
Be innocent, here too shalt thou refresh
Thy spirit, listening to some gentle sound,
Or passing gale or hum of murmuring bees!
1802.
INSCRIPTION FOR A TIME-PIECE
Now! it is gone. --Our brief hours travel post,
Each with its thought or deed, its Why or How:--
But know, each parting hour gives up a ghost
To dwell within thee-an eternal NOW!
? 183O.
A TOMBLESS EPITAPH
'Tis true, Idoloclastes Satyrane!
(So call him, for so mingling blame with praise
And smiles with anxious looks, his earliest friends,
Masking his birth-name, wont to character
His wild-wood fancy and impetuous zeal)
'Tis true that, passionate for ancient truths,
And honouring with religious love the Great
Of older times, he hated to excess,
With an unquiet and intolerant scorn,
The hollow puppets of an hollow age,
Ever idolatrous, and changing ever
Its worthless idols! Learning, power, and time,
(Too much of all) thus wasting in vain war
Of fervid colloquy. Sickness, 'tis true,
Whole years of weary days, besieged him close,
Even to the gates and inlets of his life!
But it is true, no less, that strenuous, firm,
And with a natural gladness, he maintained
The citadel unconquered, and in joy
Was strong to follow the delightful Muse.
For not a hidden path, that to the shades
Of the beloved Parnassian forest leads,
Lurked undiscovered by him; not a rill
There issues from the fount of Hippocrene,
But he had traced it upward to its source,
Through open glade, dark glen, and secret dell,
Knew the gay wild flowers on its banks, and culled
Its med'cinable herbs. Yea, oft alone,
Piercing the long-neglected holy cave,
The haunt obscure of old Philosophy,
He bade with lifted torch its starry walls
Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame
Of odorous lamps tended by Saint and Sage.
O framed for calmer times and nobler hearts!
O studious Poet, eloquent for truth!
Philosopher! contemning wealth and death,
Yet docile, childlike, full of Life and Love!
Here, rather than on monumental stone,
This record of thy worth thy Friend inscribes,
Thoughtful, with quiet tears upon his cheek.
? 1809.
EPITAPH
Stop, Christian passer-by! --Stop, child of God,
And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod
A poet lies, or that which once seem'd he. --
O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C. ;
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 ask'd, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same!
_9th November 1833_.
NOTES
I am indebted to Mr. Heinemann, the owner of the copyright of Dykes
Campbell's edition of Coleridge's Poetical Works (Macmillan & Co. , 1893)
for permission to use that text (one of the most carefully edited texts of
any English poet) in this volume of selections. My aim, in making these
selections, has been to give every poem of Coleridge's that seems to me
really good, and nothing else. Not every poem, none perhaps of those in
blank verse, is equal throughout; but I think readers of Coleridge will be
surprised to find how few of the poems contained in this volume are not of
almost flawless workmanship, as well of incomparable poetic genius.
Scarcely any English poet gains so much as Coleridge by not being read in a
complete edition. The gulf between his best and his worst work is as wide
as the gulf between good and evil. Even Wordsworth, even Byron, is not so
intolerable to read in a complete edition. But Coleridge, much more easily
than Byron or Wordsworth, can be extricated from his own lumber-heaps; it
is rare in his work to find a poem which is really good in parts and not
really good as a whole. I have taken every poem on its own merits as
poetry, its own technical merits as verse; and thus have included equally
the frigid eighteenth-century conceits of "The Kiss" and the modern
burlesque license of the comic fragments. But I have excluded everything
which has an interest merely personal, or indeed any other interest than
that of poetry; and I have thus omitted the famous "Ode on the Departing
Year," in spite of the esteem in which Coleridge held it, and in spite of
its one exquisite line--
"God's image, sister of the Seraphim"--
and I have omitted it because as a whole it is untempered rhetoric,
shapeless in form; and I have also omitted confession pieces such as that
early one which contains, among its otherwise too emphatic utterances, the
most delicate and precise picture which Coleridge ever drew of himself:
"To me hath Heaven with bounteous hand assigned
Energic Reason and a shaping mind,
The daring ken of Truth, the Patriot's part,
And Pity's sigh, that breathes the gentle heart--
Sloth-jaundiced 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 feverish doze. "
Every poem that I have given I have given in full, and, without exception,
in the form in which Coleridge left it. The dates given after the poems are
Dykes Campbell's; occasionally I have corrected the date given in the text
of his edition by his own correction in the notes.
p. I. _The Ancient Mariner_. The marginal analysis which Coleridge
added in reprinting the poem (from the _Lyrical Ballads_) in
_Sibylline Leaves_, has been transferred to this place, where it can
be read without interrupting the narrative in verse.
PART I
An ancient Mariner meeteth three Gallants bidden to a wedding-feast, and
detaineth one.
The Wedding-Guest is spell-bound by the eye of the old sea-faring man, and
constrained to hear his tale.
The Mariner tells how the ship sailed southward with a good wind and fair
weather, till it reached the Line.
The Wedding-Guest heareth the bridal music; but the Mariner continueth his
tale.
The ship driven by a storm toward the south pole.
The land of ice, and of fearful sounds where no living thing was to be
seen.
Till a great sea-bird, called the Albatross, came through the snow-fog, and
was received with great joy and hospitality.
And lo! the Albatross proveth a bird of good omen, and followeth the ship
as it returned northward through fog and floating ice.
The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen.
PART II
His shipmates cry out against the ancient Mariner, for killing the bird of
good luck.
But when the fog cleared off, they justify the same, and thus make
themselves accomplices in the crime.
The fair breeze continues; the ship enters the Pacific Ocean, and sails
northward, even till it reaches the Line.
The ship hath been suddenly becalmed.
And the Albatross begins to be avenged.
A Spirit had followed them; 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. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element
without one or more.
The shipmates, in their sore distress, would fain throw the whole guilt on
the ancient Mariner:
In sign whereof they hang the dead sea-bird round his neck.
PART III
The ancient Mariner beholdeth a sign in the element afar off.
At its nearer approach, it seemeth him to be a ship; and at a dear ransom
he freeth his speech from the bonds of thirst.
A flash of joy;
And horror follows. For can it be a ship that comes onward without wind or
tide?
It seemeth him but the skeleton of a ship.
And its ribs are seen as bars on the face of the setting Sun.
The Spectre-Woman and her Death-mate, and no other on board the skeleton-
ship.
Like vessel, like crew!
Death and Life-in-Death have diced for the ship's crew, and she (the
latter) winneth the ancient Mariner.
No twilight within the courts of the Sun.
At the rising of the Moon,
One after another,
His shipmates drop down dead.
But Life-in-Death begins her work on the ancient Mariner.
PART IV
The Wedding-Guest feareth that a Spirit is talking to him;
But the ancient Mariner assureth him of his bodily life, and proceedeth to
relate his horrible penance.
He despiseth the creatures of the calm.
And envieth that they should live, and so many lie dead.
But the curse liveth for him in the eye of the dead men.
In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon,
and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and everywhere the
blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native
country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords
that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.
By the light of the Moon he beholdeth God's creatures of the great calm.
Their beauty and their happiness.
He blesseth them in his heart.
The spell begins to break.
PART V
By grace of the holy Mother, the ancient Mariner is refreshed with rain.
He heareth sounds and seeth strange sights and commotions in the sky and
the element.
The bodies of the ship's crew are inspired, and the ship moves on;
But not by the souls of the men, nor by daemons of earth or middle air, but
by a blessed troop of angelic spirits, sent down by the invocation of the
guardian saint.
The lonesome Spirit from the south-pole carries on the ship as far as the
Line, in obedience to the angelic troop, but still requireth vengeance.
The Polar Spirit's fellow-daemons, the invisible inhabitants of the element,
take part in his wrong; and two of them relate, one to the other, that
penance long and heavy for the ancient Mariner hath been accorded to the
Polar Spirit, who returneth southward.
PART VI
The Mariner hath been cast into a trance; for the angelic power causeth the
vessel to drive northward faster than human life could endure.
The supernatural motion is retarded; the Mariner awakes, and his penance
begins anew.
The curse is finally expiated.
And the ancient Mariner beholdeth his native country.
The angelic spirits leave the dead bodies,
And appear in their own forms of light.
PART VII
The Hermit of the Wood,
Approacheth the ship with wonder.
The ship suddenly sinketh.
The ancient Mariner is saved in the Pilot's boat.
The ancient Mariner earnestly entreateth the Hermit to shrieve him; and the
penance of life falls on him.
And ever and anon throughout his future life an agony constraineth him to
travel from land to land,
And to teach, by his own example, love and reverence to all things that God
made and loveth.
p. 27. _Christabel_. Coleridge at his best represents the imaginative
temper in its essence, pure gold, with only just enough alloy to give it
firm bodily substance. "Christabel" is not, like "Kubla Khan," a
disembodied ecstasy, but a coherent effort of the imagination. Yet, when we
come to the second part, the magic is already half gone out of it. Rossetti
says, in a printed letter, with admirable truth: "The conception, and
partly the execution, of the passage in which Christabel repeats by
fascination the serpent-glance of Geraldine, is magnificent; but that is
the only good narrative passage in part two.
The rest seems to have reached
a fatal facility of jingling, at the heels whereof followed Scott. " A few
of the lines seem to sink almost lower than Scott, and suggest a Gilbert
parody:
"He bids thee come without delay
With all thy numerous array.
* * * * *
And he will meet thee on the way
With all his numerous array. "
But in the conclusion, which has nothing whatever to do with the poem,
Coleridge is his finest self again: a magical psychologist. It is
interesting to know that Crashaw was the main influence upon Coleridge
while writing "Christabel," and that the "Hymn to the Name and Honour of
the admirable S. Teresa" was "ever present to his mind while writing the
second part. "
p. 61. _Love_. This poem was originally published, in the _Morning
Post_ of December 21, 1799, as part of an "Introduction to the Tale of
the Dark Ladie. " This introduction begins:
"O leave the lily on its stem;
O leave the rose upon the spray;
O leave the elder-bloom, fair maids!
And listen to my lay.
A cypress and a myrtle bough
This morn around my harp you twined,
Because it fashion'd mournfully
Its murmurs in the wind.
And now a tale of love and woe,
A woeful tale of love I sing;
Hark, gentle maidens! hark, it sighs
And trembles on the string. "
p. 65. _The Three Graves_. Coleridge only published what he calls "the
following humble fragment" of what was to have been a poem in six parts;
but he wrote an imperfect sketch of the first two parts, which was
published from the original MS. by Dykes Campbell in his edition. The poem
as Coleridge left it is sufficiently complete, and I have ventured to
divide it into Part I. and Part II. , instead of the usual Part III. and
Part IV. It is Coleridge's one attempt to compete with Wordsworth on what
Wordsworth considered his own ground, and it was first published by
Coleridge in _The Friend_ of September 21, 1809, on the advice of
Wordsworth and Southey. "The language," we are told in an introductory
note, "was intended to be dramatic; that is, suited to the narrator; and
the metre corresponds to the homeliness of the diction. It is therefore
presented as the fragment, not of a poem, but of a common Ballad-tale.
Whether this is sufficient to justify the adoption of such a style, in any
metrical composition not professedly ludicrous, the Author is himself in
some doubt. At all events, it is not presented as poetry, and it is in no
way connected with the Author's judgment concerning poetic diction. Its
merits, if any, are exclusively psychological. " Exclusively, it would be
unjust to say; but to a degree beyond those of any similar poem of
Wordsworth, certainly.
p. 78. _Dejection_. This ode was originally addressed to Wordsworth,
but before it was published in its first form, the "William" of the still
existing MS. was changed to "Edmund"; in later editions "Edmund" was
changed to "Lady," except in the seventh stanza, where "Otway" is
substituted. The reference in this stanza is to Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray,"
and the germ of the passage occurs in a letter of Coleridge to Poole,
printed by Dykes Campbell in the notes to his edition: "Greta Hall, Feb. 1,
1801. --O my dear, dear Friend! that you were with me by the fireside of my
study here, that I might talk it over with you to the tune of this night-
wind that pipes its thin, doleful, climbing, sinking notes, like a child
that has lost its way, and is crying aloud, half in grief, and half in the
hope to be heard by its mother. "
p. 9O. _Fears in Solitude_. Coleridge, who was so often his own best
critic, especially when the criticism was to remain inactive, wrote on an
autograph copy of this poem now belonging to Professor Dowden: "N. B. --The
above is perhaps not Poetry,--but rather a sort of middle thing between
Poetry and Oratory--_sermoni propriora_. --Some parts are, I am
conscious, too tame even for animated prose. " It is difficult to say
whether, in such poems as this, Coleridge is overtaken by his besetting
indolence, or whether he is deliberately writing down to the theories of
Wordsworth. Another criticism of his own on his early blank verse, where he
speaks of "the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead
_plumb down_ of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle and
sinew in the single lines," applies only too well to the larger part of
his work in this difficult metre, so apt to go to sleep by the way.
p. 1O7. _Hymn before Sun-rise_. Coleridge was never at Chamouni, and
the suggestion of his poem is to be found in a poem of twenty lines by a
German poetess, Frederike Brun. Some of the rhetoric of his poem Coleridge
got from the German poetess; the imagination is all his own. It is perhaps
a consequence of its origin that the imagination and the rhetoric never get
quite clear of one another, and that, in spite of some magical lines
(wholly Coleridge's) like:
"O struggling with the darkness all the night,
And visited all night by troops of stars:"
the poem remains somewhat external, a somewhat deliberate heaping up of
hosannas.
p. 114. _The Nightingale_. The persons supposed to take part in this
"conversation poem" are of course William and Dorothy Wordsworth.
p. 134. _A Day-Dream_. "There cannot be any doubt, I think, that the
'Asra' of this poem is Miss Sarah Hutchinson; 'Mary,' her sister (Mrs.
Wordsworth); 'our sister and our friend,' Dorothy and William Wordsworth. "
(DYKES CAMPBELL. )
p. 142. _Work without Hope_. "What could be left to hope for when the
man could already do such work? " asks Mr. Swinburne. With this exquisite
poem, in which Coleridge's style is seen in its most faultless union of his
finest qualities, compare this passage from a letter to Lady Beaumont,
about a year earlier: "Though I am at present sadly below even _my_
par of health, or rather unhealth, and am the more depressed thereby from
the consciousness that in this yearly resurrection of Nature from her
winter sleep, amid young leaves and blooms and twittering nest-building
birds, the sun so gladsome, the breezes with such healing on their wings,
all good and lovely things are beneath me, above me, and everywhere around
me, and all from God, while my incapability of enjoying, or, at best,
languor in receiving them, is directly or indirectly from myself, from past
procrastination, and cowardly impatience of pain. " It was always upon some
not less solid foundation that Coleridge built these delicate structures.
p. 147. _Phantom_. This, almost Coleridge's loveliest fragment of
verse, was composed in sleep, like "Kubla Khan," "Constancy to an Ideal
Object," and "Phantom or Fact? " There is a quality, in this and some other
poems of Coleridge, which he himself has exquisitely rendered in the
passage on Ariel in the lectures on Shakespeare: "In air he lives, from air
he derives his being, in air he acts; and all his colours and properties
seem to have been obtained from the rainbow and the skies. There is nothing
about Ariel that cannot be conceived to exist either at sunrise or sunset:
hence all that belongs to Ariel belongs to the delight the mind is capable
of receiving from the most lovely external appearances. "Coleridge is the
Ariel of English Poetry: glittering in the song from "Zapolya," translucent
in the "Phantom," infantine, with a note of happy infancy almost like that
of Blake, in "Something Childish, but very Natural. " In these poems, and in
the "Ode to the Rain," and the "Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath,"
there is a unique way of feeling, which he can render to us on those rare
occasions when his sensations are uninterrupted; by thought, which clouds
them, or by emotion, which disturbs them. He reveals mysterious intimacies
with natural things, the "flapping" flame or a child's scarcely more
articulate moods. And in some of them, which are experiments in form, he
seems to compete gaily with the Elizabethan lyrists, doing wonderful things
in jest, like one who is for once happy and disengaged, and able to play
with his tormentor, verse.
p. 153. _Forbearance_. "Gently I took that which urgently came" is
from Spenser's "Shepherds' Calendar": "But gently tooke that ungently
came. "
p. 154. _Sancti Dominici Pallium_. The "friend," as Dykes Campbell
points out, was Southey, whose "Book of the Church" had been attacked by
Charles Butler. This is one of Coleridge's most masterly experiments in
dealing with material hardly possible to turn into poetry. What exquisite
verse, and what variety of handling! The eighteenth-century smooth force
and pungency of the main part of it ends in an anticipation of the
burlesque energy of some of Mr. George Meredith's most characteristic
verse. Anyone coming upon the lines:
"More than the Protestant milk all newly lapt,
Impearling a tame wild-cat's whiskered jaws,"
would have assigned them without hesitation to the writer of "A Certain
People" and other sonnets in the "Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth. "
p. 158. _Ne plus ultra_. This mysterious fragment is one of the most
original experiments which Coleridge ever made, both in metre and in
language (abstract terms becoming concrete through intellectual passion)
and may seem to anticipate "The Unknown Eros. "
p. 164. _The Pains of Sleep_. In a letter to Sir George and Lady
Beaumont, dated September 22, 1803, Coleridge wrote, describing his journey
to Scotland: "With the night my horrors commence. During the whole of my
journey three nights out of four I have fallen asleep struggling and
resolving to lie awake, and, awaking, have blest the scream which delivered
me from the reluctant sleep. . . . These dreams, with all their mockery of
guilt, rage, unworthy desires, remorse, shame, and terror, formed at the
time the subject of some Verses, which I had forgotten till the return of
my complaint, and which I will send you in my next as a curiosity. "
p. 169. _Names_. Coleridge was as careless as the Elizabethans in
acknowledging the originals of the poems which he translated, whether, as
in this case, he was almost literal, or, as in the case of the Chamouni
poem, he used his material freely. The lines "On a Cataract" are said to be
"improved from Stolberg" in the edition of 1848, edited by Mrs. H. N.
Coleridge; and the title may suit the whole of them.
p. 182. Answer to a Child's Question. I have omitted the four lines,
printed in brackets in Campbell's edition, which were omitted, I think
rightly, by Coleridge in reprinting the poem from the _Morning Post_
of October 16, 1802.
p. 183. _Lines on a Child_. This exquisite fragment is printed in
Coleridge's works in a prefatory note to the prose "Wanderings of Cain. " It
was written, he tells us, "for the purpose of procuring a friend's judgment
on the metre, as a specimen" of what was to have been a long poem, in
imitation of "The Death of Abel," written in collaboration with Wordsworth.
"The Ancient Mariner was written instead. "
p. 188. _The two Round Spaces on the Tombstone_. This poem was printed
in the _Morning Post_ of December 4, 180O, under the title: "The two
Round Spaces: a Skeltoniad;" and it is this text which is here given, from
Campbell's edition. The "fellow from Aberdeen" was Sir James Mackintosh.
Coleridge apologised for reprinting the verses, "with the hope that they
will be taken, as assuredly they were composed, in mere sport. " No apology
was needed; they are the most rich, ripe, and Rabelaisian comic verses he
ever wrote, full-bodied and exultant in their exuberance of wayward and
good-humoured satire.
p. 192. _Sonnets Attempted in the Manner of Contemporary Writers_.
Dykes Campbell quotes a letter of Coleridge to Cottle, which he attributes
to the year 1797, in which Coleridge says: "I sent to the _Monthly
Magazine_ three mock sonnets in ridicule of my own Poems, and Charles
Lloyd's, and Charles Lamb's, etc. etc. , exposing that affectation of
unaffectedness, of jumping and misplaced accent, in commonplace epithets,
flat lines forced into poetry by italics (signifying how well and
mouthishly the author would read them), puny pathos, etc. etc. The
instances were all taken from myself and Lloyd and Lamb. I signed them
'Nehemiah Higginbottom. ' I think they may do good to our young Bards. "
Coleridge's humour, which begins as early as 1794, with the lines on
"Parliamentary Oscillators," is one of the outlets of an oppressively
ingenious mind, over-packed with ideas, which he cannot be content to
express in prose. He delights, as in an intellectual exercise, in the
grapple with difficult technique, the victorious wrestle with grotesque
rhymes. All the comic poems are unusually rich and fine in rhythm, which
seems to exult in its mastery over material so foreign to it.
Yet he has not always or wholly command of this humour. The famous "Lines
to a Young Ass" were first written as a joke, and there is some burlesque
strength in such lines as:
"Where Toil shall wed young Health, that charming Lass!
And use his sleek cows for a looking-glass. "
But the mood went, the jest was so far forgotten as to be taken seriously
by himself, and turned into the sober earnest which it remains; a kind of
timidity of the original impression crept in, and we are left to laugh
rather at than with the poet.
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Most of Myself I thought: when it befell
That the sooth Spirit of the breezy wood
Breath'd in mine ear--"All this is very well;
But much of _one_ thing is for _no_ thing good. "
Ah! my poor heart's inexplicable swell!
II
TO SIMPLICITY
O! I do love thee, meek _Simplicity_!
For of thy lays the lulling simpleness
Goes to my heart and soothes each small distress,
Distress though small, yet haply great to me!
'Tis true on Lady Fortune's gentlest pad
I amble on; yet, though I know not why,
So sad I am! --but should a friend and I
Grow cool and _miff_, O! I am _very_ sad!
And then with sonnets and with sympathy
My dreamy bosom's mystic woes I pall;
Now of my false friend plaining plaintively,
Now raving at mankind in general;
But, whether sad or fierce, 'tis simple all,
All very simple, meek Simplicity!
III
ON A RUINED HOUSE IN A ROMANTIC COUNTRY
And this reft house is that the which he built,
Lamented Jack! And here his malt he pil'd,
Cautious in vain! These rats that squeak so wild,
Squeak, not unconscious of their father's guilt.
Did ye not see her gleaming thro' the glade?
Belike, 'twas she, the maiden all forlorn.
What though she milk no cow with crumpled horn,
Yet _aye_ she haunts the dale where erst she stray'd;
And _aye_ beside her stalks her amorous knight!
Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn,
And thro' those brogues, still tatter'd and betorn,
His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white;
As when thro' broken clouds at night's high noon
Peeps in fair fragments forth the full--orb'd harvest-moon!
1797.
LIMBO
Tis a strange place, this Limbo! --not a Place,
Yet name it so;--where Time and weary Space
Fettered from flight, with night-mare sense of fleeing,
Strive for their last crepuscular half-being;--
Lank Space, and scytheless Time with branny hands
Barren and soundless as the measuring sands,
Not mark'd by flit of Shades,--unmeaning they
As moonlight on the dial of the day!
But that is lovely--looks like human Time,--
An old man with a steady look sublime,
That stops his earthly task to watch the skies;
But he is blind--a statue hath such eyes;--
Yet having moonward turn'd his face by chance,
Gazes the orb with moon-like countenance,
With scant white hairs, with fore top 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!
No such sweet sights doth Limbo den immure,
Wall'd round, and made a spirit-jail secure,
By the mere horror of blank Naught-at-all,
Whose circumambience doth these ghosts enthral.
A lurid thought is growthless, dull Privation,
Yet that is but a Purgatory curse;
Hell knows a fear far worse,
A fear--a future state;--'tis positive Negation!
1817.
METRICAL FEET
LESSON FOR A BOY
[** Macron and breve accent marks have been left off, see the note
in the Forum. ]
Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot! yea ill able
Ever to come up with Dactyl trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long;--
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapaests throng;
One syllable long, with one short at each side,
Amphibrachys hastes with a stately stride;--
First and last being long, middle short, Amphimacer
Strikes his thundering hoofs like a proud highbred Racer.
If Derwent be innocent, steady, and wise,
And delight in the things of earth, water, and skies;
Tender warmth at his heart, with these metres to show it,
With sound sense in his brains, may make Derwent a poet,--
May crown him with fame, and must win him the love
Of his father on earth and his Father above.
My dear, dear child!
Could you stand upon Skiddaw, you would not from its whole ridge
See a man who so loves you as your fond S. T. COLERIDGE.
1803.
THE HOMERIC HEXAMETER
DESCRIBED AND EXEMPLIFIED
[FROM SCHILLER]
Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows,
Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean.
? 1799.
THE OVIDIAN ELEGIAC METRE
DESCRIBED AND EXEMPLIFIED
[FROM SCHILLER]
In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column;
In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.
? 1799.
CATULLIAN HENDECASYLLABLES
[FROM MATTHISON]
Hear, my beloved, an old Milesian story! --
High, and embosom'd in congregated laurels,
Glimmer'd a temple upon a breezy headland;
In the dim distance amid the skiey billows
Rose a fair island; the god of flocks had blest it.
From the far shores of the bleat-resounding island
Oft by the moonlight a little boat came floating,
Came to the sea-cave beneath the breezy headland,
Where amid myrtles a pathway stole in mazes
Up to the groves of the high embosom'd temple.
There in a thicket of dedicated roses,
Oft did a priestess, as lovely as a vision,
Pouring her soul to the son of Cytherea,
Pray him to hover around the slight canoe-boat,
And with invisible pilotage to guide it
Over the dusk wave, until the nightly sailor
Shivering with ecstasy sank upon her bosom.
? 1799.
TO ----
I mix in life, and labour to seem free,
With common persons pleased and common things,
While every thought and action tends to thee,
And every impulse from thy influence springs.
? 1796.
EPITAPH
ON A BAD MAN
Under this stone does Walter Harcourt lie,
Who valued nought that God or man could give;
He lived as if he never thought to die;
He died as if he dared not hope to live!
1801.
THE SUICIDE'S ARGUMENT
Ere the birth of my life, if I wish'd it or no,
No question was asked me--it could not be so!
If the life was the question, a thing sent to try,
And to live on be Yes; what can No be? to die.
NATURE'S ANSWER
Is't returned, as 'twas sent? Is't no worse for the wear?
Think first, what you are! Call to mind what you were!
I gave you innocence, I gave you hope,
Gave health, and genius, and an ample scope.
Return you me guilt, lethargy, despair?
Make out the invent'ry; inspect, compare!
Then die--if die you dare!
1811.
THE GOOD, GREAT MAN
"How seldom, friend! a good great man inherits
Honour or wealth with all his worth and pains!
It sounds like stories from the land of spirits
If any man obtain that which he merits
Or any merit that which he obtains. "
REPLY TO THE ABOVE
For shame, dear friend, renounce this canting strain!
What would'st thou have a good great man obtain?
Place? titles? salary? a gilded chain?
Or throne of corses which his sword had slain?
Greatness and goodness are not _means_, but _ends_!
Hath he not always treasures, always friends,
The good great man? _three_ treasures, LOVE, and LIGHT,
And CALM THOUGHTS, regular as infant's breath:
And three firm friends, more sure than day and night,
HIMSELF, his MAKER, and the ANGEL DEATH!
Morning Post, Sept. 23,1802.
INSCRIPTION FOR A FOUNTAIN ON A HEATH
This Sycamore, oft musical with bees,--
Such tents the Patriarchs loved! O long unharmed
May all its aged boughs o'er-canopy
The small round basin, which this jutting stone
Keeps pure from falling leaves! Long may the Spring,
Quietly as a sleeping infant's breath,
Send up cold waters to the traveller
With soft and even pulse! Nor ever cease
Yon tiny cone of sand its soundless dance,
Which at the bottom, like a Fairy's Page,
As merry and no taller, dances still,
Nor wrinkles the smooth surface of the Fount.
Here twilight is and coolness: here is moss,
A soft seat, and a deep and ample shade.
Thou may'st toil far and find no second tree.
Drink, Pilgrim, here! Here rest! and if thy heart
Be innocent, here too shalt thou refresh
Thy spirit, listening to some gentle sound,
Or passing gale or hum of murmuring bees!
1802.
INSCRIPTION FOR A TIME-PIECE
Now! it is gone. --Our brief hours travel post,
Each with its thought or deed, its Why or How:--
But know, each parting hour gives up a ghost
To dwell within thee-an eternal NOW!
? 183O.
A TOMBLESS EPITAPH
'Tis true, Idoloclastes Satyrane!
(So call him, for so mingling blame with praise
And smiles with anxious looks, his earliest friends,
Masking his birth-name, wont to character
His wild-wood fancy and impetuous zeal)
'Tis true that, passionate for ancient truths,
And honouring with religious love the Great
Of older times, he hated to excess,
With an unquiet and intolerant scorn,
The hollow puppets of an hollow age,
Ever idolatrous, and changing ever
Its worthless idols! Learning, power, and time,
(Too much of all) thus wasting in vain war
Of fervid colloquy. Sickness, 'tis true,
Whole years of weary days, besieged him close,
Even to the gates and inlets of his life!
But it is true, no less, that strenuous, firm,
And with a natural gladness, he maintained
The citadel unconquered, and in joy
Was strong to follow the delightful Muse.
For not a hidden path, that to the shades
Of the beloved Parnassian forest leads,
Lurked undiscovered by him; not a rill
There issues from the fount of Hippocrene,
But he had traced it upward to its source,
Through open glade, dark glen, and secret dell,
Knew the gay wild flowers on its banks, and culled
Its med'cinable herbs. Yea, oft alone,
Piercing the long-neglected holy cave,
The haunt obscure of old Philosophy,
He bade with lifted torch its starry walls
Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame
Of odorous lamps tended by Saint and Sage.
O framed for calmer times and nobler hearts!
O studious Poet, eloquent for truth!
Philosopher! contemning wealth and death,
Yet docile, childlike, full of Life and Love!
Here, rather than on monumental stone,
This record of thy worth thy Friend inscribes,
Thoughtful, with quiet tears upon his cheek.
? 1809.
EPITAPH
Stop, Christian passer-by! --Stop, child of God,
And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod
A poet lies, or that which once seem'd he. --
O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C. ;
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 ask'd, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same!
_9th November 1833_.
NOTES
I am indebted to Mr. Heinemann, the owner of the copyright of Dykes
Campbell's edition of Coleridge's Poetical Works (Macmillan & Co. , 1893)
for permission to use that text (one of the most carefully edited texts of
any English poet) in this volume of selections. My aim, in making these
selections, has been to give every poem of Coleridge's that seems to me
really good, and nothing else. Not every poem, none perhaps of those in
blank verse, is equal throughout; but I think readers of Coleridge will be
surprised to find how few of the poems contained in this volume are not of
almost flawless workmanship, as well of incomparable poetic genius.
Scarcely any English poet gains so much as Coleridge by not being read in a
complete edition. The gulf between his best and his worst work is as wide
as the gulf between good and evil. Even Wordsworth, even Byron, is not so
intolerable to read in a complete edition. But Coleridge, much more easily
than Byron or Wordsworth, can be extricated from his own lumber-heaps; it
is rare in his work to find a poem which is really good in parts and not
really good as a whole. I have taken every poem on its own merits as
poetry, its own technical merits as verse; and thus have included equally
the frigid eighteenth-century conceits of "The Kiss" and the modern
burlesque license of the comic fragments. But I have excluded everything
which has an interest merely personal, or indeed any other interest than
that of poetry; and I have thus omitted the famous "Ode on the Departing
Year," in spite of the esteem in which Coleridge held it, and in spite of
its one exquisite line--
"God's image, sister of the Seraphim"--
and I have omitted it because as a whole it is untempered rhetoric,
shapeless in form; and I have also omitted confession pieces such as that
early one which contains, among its otherwise too emphatic utterances, the
most delicate and precise picture which Coleridge ever drew of himself:
"To me hath Heaven with bounteous hand assigned
Energic Reason and a shaping mind,
The daring ken of Truth, the Patriot's part,
And Pity's sigh, that breathes the gentle heart--
Sloth-jaundiced 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 feverish doze. "
Every poem that I have given I have given in full, and, without exception,
in the form in which Coleridge left it. The dates given after the poems are
Dykes Campbell's; occasionally I have corrected the date given in the text
of his edition by his own correction in the notes.
p. I. _The Ancient Mariner_. The marginal analysis which Coleridge
added in reprinting the poem (from the _Lyrical Ballads_) in
_Sibylline Leaves_, has been transferred to this place, where it can
be read without interrupting the narrative in verse.
PART I
An ancient Mariner meeteth three Gallants bidden to a wedding-feast, and
detaineth one.
The Wedding-Guest is spell-bound by the eye of the old sea-faring man, and
constrained to hear his tale.
The Mariner tells how the ship sailed southward with a good wind and fair
weather, till it reached the Line.
The Wedding-Guest heareth the bridal music; but the Mariner continueth his
tale.
The ship driven by a storm toward the south pole.
The land of ice, and of fearful sounds where no living thing was to be
seen.
Till a great sea-bird, called the Albatross, came through the snow-fog, and
was received with great joy and hospitality.
And lo! the Albatross proveth a bird of good omen, and followeth the ship
as it returned northward through fog and floating ice.
The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen.
PART II
His shipmates cry out against the ancient Mariner, for killing the bird of
good luck.
But when the fog cleared off, they justify the same, and thus make
themselves accomplices in the crime.
The fair breeze continues; the ship enters the Pacific Ocean, and sails
northward, even till it reaches the Line.
The ship hath been suddenly becalmed.
And the Albatross begins to be avenged.
A Spirit had followed them; 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. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element
without one or more.
The shipmates, in their sore distress, would fain throw the whole guilt on
the ancient Mariner:
In sign whereof they hang the dead sea-bird round his neck.
PART III
The ancient Mariner beholdeth a sign in the element afar off.
At its nearer approach, it seemeth him to be a ship; and at a dear ransom
he freeth his speech from the bonds of thirst.
A flash of joy;
And horror follows. For can it be a ship that comes onward without wind or
tide?
It seemeth him but the skeleton of a ship.
And its ribs are seen as bars on the face of the setting Sun.
The Spectre-Woman and her Death-mate, and no other on board the skeleton-
ship.
Like vessel, like crew!
Death and Life-in-Death have diced for the ship's crew, and she (the
latter) winneth the ancient Mariner.
No twilight within the courts of the Sun.
At the rising of the Moon,
One after another,
His shipmates drop down dead.
But Life-in-Death begins her work on the ancient Mariner.
PART IV
The Wedding-Guest feareth that a Spirit is talking to him;
But the ancient Mariner assureth him of his bodily life, and proceedeth to
relate his horrible penance.
He despiseth the creatures of the calm.
And envieth that they should live, and so many lie dead.
But the curse liveth for him in the eye of the dead men.
In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon,
and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and everywhere the
blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native
country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords
that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.
By the light of the Moon he beholdeth God's creatures of the great calm.
Their beauty and their happiness.
He blesseth them in his heart.
The spell begins to break.
PART V
By grace of the holy Mother, the ancient Mariner is refreshed with rain.
He heareth sounds and seeth strange sights and commotions in the sky and
the element.
The bodies of the ship's crew are inspired, and the ship moves on;
But not by the souls of the men, nor by daemons of earth or middle air, but
by a blessed troop of angelic spirits, sent down by the invocation of the
guardian saint.
The lonesome Spirit from the south-pole carries on the ship as far as the
Line, in obedience to the angelic troop, but still requireth vengeance.
The Polar Spirit's fellow-daemons, the invisible inhabitants of the element,
take part in his wrong; and two of them relate, one to the other, that
penance long and heavy for the ancient Mariner hath been accorded to the
Polar Spirit, who returneth southward.
PART VI
The Mariner hath been cast into a trance; for the angelic power causeth the
vessel to drive northward faster than human life could endure.
The supernatural motion is retarded; the Mariner awakes, and his penance
begins anew.
The curse is finally expiated.
And the ancient Mariner beholdeth his native country.
The angelic spirits leave the dead bodies,
And appear in their own forms of light.
PART VII
The Hermit of the Wood,
Approacheth the ship with wonder.
The ship suddenly sinketh.
The ancient Mariner is saved in the Pilot's boat.
The ancient Mariner earnestly entreateth the Hermit to shrieve him; and the
penance of life falls on him.
And ever and anon throughout his future life an agony constraineth him to
travel from land to land,
And to teach, by his own example, love and reverence to all things that God
made and loveth.
p. 27. _Christabel_. Coleridge at his best represents the imaginative
temper in its essence, pure gold, with only just enough alloy to give it
firm bodily substance. "Christabel" is not, like "Kubla Khan," a
disembodied ecstasy, but a coherent effort of the imagination. Yet, when we
come to the second part, the magic is already half gone out of it. Rossetti
says, in a printed letter, with admirable truth: "The conception, and
partly the execution, of the passage in which Christabel repeats by
fascination the serpent-glance of Geraldine, is magnificent; but that is
the only good narrative passage in part two.
The rest seems to have reached
a fatal facility of jingling, at the heels whereof followed Scott. " A few
of the lines seem to sink almost lower than Scott, and suggest a Gilbert
parody:
"He bids thee come without delay
With all thy numerous array.
* * * * *
And he will meet thee on the way
With all his numerous array. "
But in the conclusion, which has nothing whatever to do with the poem,
Coleridge is his finest self again: a magical psychologist. It is
interesting to know that Crashaw was the main influence upon Coleridge
while writing "Christabel," and that the "Hymn to the Name and Honour of
the admirable S. Teresa" was "ever present to his mind while writing the
second part. "
p. 61. _Love_. This poem was originally published, in the _Morning
Post_ of December 21, 1799, as part of an "Introduction to the Tale of
the Dark Ladie. " This introduction begins:
"O leave the lily on its stem;
O leave the rose upon the spray;
O leave the elder-bloom, fair maids!
And listen to my lay.
A cypress and a myrtle bough
This morn around my harp you twined,
Because it fashion'd mournfully
Its murmurs in the wind.
And now a tale of love and woe,
A woeful tale of love I sing;
Hark, gentle maidens! hark, it sighs
And trembles on the string. "
p. 65. _The Three Graves_. Coleridge only published what he calls "the
following humble fragment" of what was to have been a poem in six parts;
but he wrote an imperfect sketch of the first two parts, which was
published from the original MS. by Dykes Campbell in his edition. The poem
as Coleridge left it is sufficiently complete, and I have ventured to
divide it into Part I. and Part II. , instead of the usual Part III. and
Part IV. It is Coleridge's one attempt to compete with Wordsworth on what
Wordsworth considered his own ground, and it was first published by
Coleridge in _The Friend_ of September 21, 1809, on the advice of
Wordsworth and Southey. "The language," we are told in an introductory
note, "was intended to be dramatic; that is, suited to the narrator; and
the metre corresponds to the homeliness of the diction. It is therefore
presented as the fragment, not of a poem, but of a common Ballad-tale.
Whether this is sufficient to justify the adoption of such a style, in any
metrical composition not professedly ludicrous, the Author is himself in
some doubt. At all events, it is not presented as poetry, and it is in no
way connected with the Author's judgment concerning poetic diction. Its
merits, if any, are exclusively psychological. " Exclusively, it would be
unjust to say; but to a degree beyond those of any similar poem of
Wordsworth, certainly.
p. 78. _Dejection_. This ode was originally addressed to Wordsworth,
but before it was published in its first form, the "William" of the still
existing MS. was changed to "Edmund"; in later editions "Edmund" was
changed to "Lady," except in the seventh stanza, where "Otway" is
substituted. The reference in this stanza is to Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray,"
and the germ of the passage occurs in a letter of Coleridge to Poole,
printed by Dykes Campbell in the notes to his edition: "Greta Hall, Feb. 1,
1801. --O my dear, dear Friend! that you were with me by the fireside of my
study here, that I might talk it over with you to the tune of this night-
wind that pipes its thin, doleful, climbing, sinking notes, like a child
that has lost its way, and is crying aloud, half in grief, and half in the
hope to be heard by its mother. "
p. 9O. _Fears in Solitude_. Coleridge, who was so often his own best
critic, especially when the criticism was to remain inactive, wrote on an
autograph copy of this poem now belonging to Professor Dowden: "N. B. --The
above is perhaps not Poetry,--but rather a sort of middle thing between
Poetry and Oratory--_sermoni propriora_. --Some parts are, I am
conscious, too tame even for animated prose. " It is difficult to say
whether, in such poems as this, Coleridge is overtaken by his besetting
indolence, or whether he is deliberately writing down to the theories of
Wordsworth. Another criticism of his own on his early blank verse, where he
speaks of "the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead
_plumb down_ of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle and
sinew in the single lines," applies only too well to the larger part of
his work in this difficult metre, so apt to go to sleep by the way.
p. 1O7. _Hymn before Sun-rise_. Coleridge was never at Chamouni, and
the suggestion of his poem is to be found in a poem of twenty lines by a
German poetess, Frederike Brun. Some of the rhetoric of his poem Coleridge
got from the German poetess; the imagination is all his own. It is perhaps
a consequence of its origin that the imagination and the rhetoric never get
quite clear of one another, and that, in spite of some magical lines
(wholly Coleridge's) like:
"O struggling with the darkness all the night,
And visited all night by troops of stars:"
the poem remains somewhat external, a somewhat deliberate heaping up of
hosannas.
p. 114. _The Nightingale_. The persons supposed to take part in this
"conversation poem" are of course William and Dorothy Wordsworth.
p. 134. _A Day-Dream_. "There cannot be any doubt, I think, that the
'Asra' of this poem is Miss Sarah Hutchinson; 'Mary,' her sister (Mrs.
Wordsworth); 'our sister and our friend,' Dorothy and William Wordsworth. "
(DYKES CAMPBELL. )
p. 142. _Work without Hope_. "What could be left to hope for when the
man could already do such work? " asks Mr. Swinburne. With this exquisite
poem, in which Coleridge's style is seen in its most faultless union of his
finest qualities, compare this passage from a letter to Lady Beaumont,
about a year earlier: "Though I am at present sadly below even _my_
par of health, or rather unhealth, and am the more depressed thereby from
the consciousness that in this yearly resurrection of Nature from her
winter sleep, amid young leaves and blooms and twittering nest-building
birds, the sun so gladsome, the breezes with such healing on their wings,
all good and lovely things are beneath me, above me, and everywhere around
me, and all from God, while my incapability of enjoying, or, at best,
languor in receiving them, is directly or indirectly from myself, from past
procrastination, and cowardly impatience of pain. " It was always upon some
not less solid foundation that Coleridge built these delicate structures.
p. 147. _Phantom_. This, almost Coleridge's loveliest fragment of
verse, was composed in sleep, like "Kubla Khan," "Constancy to an Ideal
Object," and "Phantom or Fact? " There is a quality, in this and some other
poems of Coleridge, which he himself has exquisitely rendered in the
passage on Ariel in the lectures on Shakespeare: "In air he lives, from air
he derives his being, in air he acts; and all his colours and properties
seem to have been obtained from the rainbow and the skies. There is nothing
about Ariel that cannot be conceived to exist either at sunrise or sunset:
hence all that belongs to Ariel belongs to the delight the mind is capable
of receiving from the most lovely external appearances. "Coleridge is the
Ariel of English Poetry: glittering in the song from "Zapolya," translucent
in the "Phantom," infantine, with a note of happy infancy almost like that
of Blake, in "Something Childish, but very Natural. " In these poems, and in
the "Ode to the Rain," and the "Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath,"
there is a unique way of feeling, which he can render to us on those rare
occasions when his sensations are uninterrupted; by thought, which clouds
them, or by emotion, which disturbs them. He reveals mysterious intimacies
with natural things, the "flapping" flame or a child's scarcely more
articulate moods. And in some of them, which are experiments in form, he
seems to compete gaily with the Elizabethan lyrists, doing wonderful things
in jest, like one who is for once happy and disengaged, and able to play
with his tormentor, verse.
p. 153. _Forbearance_. "Gently I took that which urgently came" is
from Spenser's "Shepherds' Calendar": "But gently tooke that ungently
came. "
p. 154. _Sancti Dominici Pallium_. The "friend," as Dykes Campbell
points out, was Southey, whose "Book of the Church" had been attacked by
Charles Butler. This is one of Coleridge's most masterly experiments in
dealing with material hardly possible to turn into poetry. What exquisite
verse, and what variety of handling! The eighteenth-century smooth force
and pungency of the main part of it ends in an anticipation of the
burlesque energy of some of Mr. George Meredith's most characteristic
verse. Anyone coming upon the lines:
"More than the Protestant milk all newly lapt,
Impearling a tame wild-cat's whiskered jaws,"
would have assigned them without hesitation to the writer of "A Certain
People" and other sonnets in the "Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth. "
p. 158. _Ne plus ultra_. This mysterious fragment is one of the most
original experiments which Coleridge ever made, both in metre and in
language (abstract terms becoming concrete through intellectual passion)
and may seem to anticipate "The Unknown Eros. "
p. 164. _The Pains of Sleep_. In a letter to Sir George and Lady
Beaumont, dated September 22, 1803, Coleridge wrote, describing his journey
to Scotland: "With the night my horrors commence. During the whole of my
journey three nights out of four I have fallen asleep struggling and
resolving to lie awake, and, awaking, have blest the scream which delivered
me from the reluctant sleep. . . . These dreams, with all their mockery of
guilt, rage, unworthy desires, remorse, shame, and terror, formed at the
time the subject of some Verses, which I had forgotten till the return of
my complaint, and which I will send you in my next as a curiosity. "
p. 169. _Names_. Coleridge was as careless as the Elizabethans in
acknowledging the originals of the poems which he translated, whether, as
in this case, he was almost literal, or, as in the case of the Chamouni
poem, he used his material freely. The lines "On a Cataract" are said to be
"improved from Stolberg" in the edition of 1848, edited by Mrs. H. N.
Coleridge; and the title may suit the whole of them.
p. 182. Answer to a Child's Question. I have omitted the four lines,
printed in brackets in Campbell's edition, which were omitted, I think
rightly, by Coleridge in reprinting the poem from the _Morning Post_
of October 16, 1802.
p. 183. _Lines on a Child_. This exquisite fragment is printed in
Coleridge's works in a prefatory note to the prose "Wanderings of Cain. " It
was written, he tells us, "for the purpose of procuring a friend's judgment
on the metre, as a specimen" of what was to have been a long poem, in
imitation of "The Death of Abel," written in collaboration with Wordsworth.
"The Ancient Mariner was written instead. "
p. 188. _The two Round Spaces on the Tombstone_. This poem was printed
in the _Morning Post_ of December 4, 180O, under the title: "The two
Round Spaces: a Skeltoniad;" and it is this text which is here given, from
Campbell's edition. The "fellow from Aberdeen" was Sir James Mackintosh.
Coleridge apologised for reprinting the verses, "with the hope that they
will be taken, as assuredly they were composed, in mere sport. " No apology
was needed; they are the most rich, ripe, and Rabelaisian comic verses he
ever wrote, full-bodied and exultant in their exuberance of wayward and
good-humoured satire.
p. 192. _Sonnets Attempted in the Manner of Contemporary Writers_.
Dykes Campbell quotes a letter of Coleridge to Cottle, which he attributes
to the year 1797, in which Coleridge says: "I sent to the _Monthly
Magazine_ three mock sonnets in ridicule of my own Poems, and Charles
Lloyd's, and Charles Lamb's, etc. etc. , exposing that affectation of
unaffectedness, of jumping and misplaced accent, in commonplace epithets,
flat lines forced into poetry by italics (signifying how well and
mouthishly the author would read them), puny pathos, etc. etc. The
instances were all taken from myself and Lloyd and Lamb. I signed them
'Nehemiah Higginbottom. ' I think they may do good to our young Bards. "
Coleridge's humour, which begins as early as 1794, with the lines on
"Parliamentary Oscillators," is one of the outlets of an oppressively
ingenious mind, over-packed with ideas, which he cannot be content to
express in prose. He delights, as in an intellectual exercise, in the
grapple with difficult technique, the victorious wrestle with grotesque
rhymes. All the comic poems are unusually rich and fine in rhythm, which
seems to exult in its mastery over material so foreign to it.
Yet he has not always or wholly command of this humour. The famous "Lines
to a Young Ass" were first written as a joke, and there is some burlesque
strength in such lines as:
"Where Toil shall wed young Health, that charming Lass!
And use his sleek cows for a looking-glass. "
But the mood went, the jest was so far forgotten as to be taken seriously
by himself, and turned into the sober earnest which it remains; a kind of
timidity of the original impression crept in, and we are left to laugh
rather at than with the poet.
End of Project Gutenberg's Poems of Coleridge, by Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
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