Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  In silence listening, like a devout child,

  My soul lay passive, by thy various strain

  Driven as in surges now beneath the stars,

  With momentary stars of my own birth,

  Fair constellated foam, still darting off

  Into the darkness; now a tranquil sea,

  Outspread and bright, yet swelling to the moon.51

  In these contrasted metaphors of passivity and power, of childlike submission and elemental force, Coleridge defined some essential paradox in his relations with Wordsworth. The poem also celebrated the “dear tranquil time” of their evenings together, and the “sweet sense of Home” he had found at Coleorton, in that “happy vision of beloved faces” sitting round the room. Yet it ends, unlike the previous Conversation Poems so long ago in the Quantocks, with a movement of withdrawal into himself, the feeling of spiritual struggles yet to come.

  And when O Friend! my comforter and guide!

  Strong in thyself, and powerful to give strength! –

  Thy long sustained Song finally closed,

  And thy deep voice had ceased – yet thou thyself

  Wert still before my eyes, and round us both

  That happy vision of beloved faces –

  Scarce conscious, and yet conscious of its close

  I sate, my being blended in one thought

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

  Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound –

  And when I rose, I found myself in prayer.52

  Neither Wordsworth nor Dorothy left any record of their reactions to Coleridge’s poem, though four years later Wordsworth would try to prevent its publication. What made him uneasy was not Coleridge’s praise, but the extremely emotional nature of Coleridge’s description of their friendship. Rightly, perhaps, he felt that it left him vulnerable. Coleridge himself had no such qualms, regarding it as leaving a great deal unsaid, as his Notebooks would show.

  But Wordsworth did measure the transformation that was coming over their friendship in a short, cruelly effective, lyric entitled “A Complaint”. In it, he uses the image of the fountain of love, which Coleridge had originally addressed to Asra in his sonnet of 1804. But now it is the love directed towards Wordsworth which is in question.

  There is a change – and I am poor;

  Your Love hath been, nor long ago,

  A Fountain at my fond Heart’s Door,

  Whose only business was to flow…

  Now for this consecrated Fount

  Of murmuring, sparkling, living Love,

  What have I? Shall I dare to tell?

  A comfortless and hidden WELL.53

  Wordsworth did not hesitate to publish his poem only four months later. Indeed this was a highly productive time for him at Coleorton, during which he prepared the most important collection of his lifetime, the Poems in Two Volumes, issued by Longman in May 1807. Coleridge encouraged him with this, also writing detailed notes and editorial suggestions for Book VI of The Prelude, and stiffening Wordsworth’s resolve against anticipated criticism. When he received destructive reviews later in the summer, Wordsworth was able to write with lofty confidence to Lady Beaumont: “never forget what I believe was observed to you by Coleridge, that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished. My flesh is as insensible as iron to these petty stings.”54

  But Coleridge, driven by opium and unhappiness, was as sensitive as water. “If I appear little (fretful and sullen concerning Trifles),” he confided to his Notebook, “O! consider Asra that this is only, because my intense Love makes even Trifles that relate to Wordsworth (= the Tree that fixes its root even deeper than the grave) so great to me, that Wealth & Reputation, become trifles compared to it.”55

  In a series of short poems written during January and February, most of them not published until after his death, Coleridge agonized over his feelings for Wordsworth and Asra, which were now inextricably involved. One, composed in Latin, “Ad Vilmum Axilogum”, asked bitterly why Wordsworth should command him to endure Asra’s neglect. “Why do you not also command me, William, to suffer my bowels to be pierced with a sword and then to pretend that it does not hurt?”56

  In another, “The Tropic Tree”, he appears to use the image of Wordsworth as the rooted tree by a river bank to summon up some nameless act of submission and worship:

  As some vast Tropic tree, itself a wood,

  That crests its head with clouds, beneath the flood

  Feeds its deep roots, and with the bulging flank

  Of its wide base controls the fronting bank –

  (By the slant current’s pressure scoop’d away

  The fronting bank becomes a foam-piled bay)

  High in the Fork the uncouth Idol knits

  His channel’d brow; low murmurs stir by fits

  And dark below the horrid Faquir sits…57

  But there were also several pure love-lyrics to Asra, which suggest moments of great tenderness and intimacy in the gardens at Coleorton. One, “An Angel Visitant”, describes them sitting together within the “circling hollies woodbine-clad” on the estate. Another, “You mould my Hopes”, evokes her as the “love-throb” in his heart and the revivifying light of dawn. In these poems he “blessed” the destiny that had made him fall in love with her.58

  …You lie in all my thoughts like Light,

  Like the fair Light of Dawn, or summer Eve,

  On rippling stream, or cloud-reflecting lake;

  And looking to the Heaven that bends above you,

  How oft! I bless the lot that made me love you.59

  Listening to the hesitant birdsong of early spring, he found an image for these precious fragments of poetry.

  The spruce and limber Yellow Hammer

  In dawn of Spring, in the sultry Summer,

  In hedge, or tree his hours beguiling

  With notes, as of one that Brass is filing.60

  When snow fell in mid-February he stood by the gate on the Ashby road, looking back at Coleorton Farm, and noted the icicles in the hedge, “the cavernlets of Snow”, and the marks of the wind like “eagle’s claws” brushed across the white fields. “Can even the Eagle soar without Wings? And the wings given by thee to my soul – what are they, but the Love and Society of that Beloved?” In a long meditation on Asra’s power to inspire his work, as he hoped, he summoned up a memory from his West Country days, to produce a beautiful image of psycho-sexual potency. “I have, like the Exeter Cathedral Organ, a pipe of far-sounding Music in its construction, yet it is dumb, a gilded Tube, till the Sister pipe be placed in correspondence. O Beloved! Beloved! – ah! what are Words but air? & impulses of air?”61

  At night, he fell asleep dreaming of Asra; or sometimes went out to wander through the moonlit grounds, to look back at her window. On one occasion, plunging into the pitch blackness under some low trees, a “sudden flash of Light darted down as it were, upon the path close before me, with such rapid and indescribable effect, that my whole life seem snatched away from me”. For a moment it seemed as if the moon itself had struck him “a Violent Blow” of admonition. But glancing up he found it was caused by “some very large Bird, who, scared by my noise, had suddenly flown upwards, and by the spring of his feet or body had driven down the branch on which he was a-perch,” so letting in the terrifying semaphore of admonitory light.62

  10

  To the outside world, the old Lake District circle had reestablished itself and Coleridge was being successfully “managed”. Dorothy wrote at length to Mrs Clarkson of country walks and fireside study. Wordsworth wrote meticulous pages of horticultural advice to Sir George Beaumont. Even Coleridge wrote to Southey: “I am considerably better in health; and as one proof of it, have written between 4 and 500 verses, since I have been here; besides going on with my Travels. I felt as a man revisited by a familiar Spirit the first morning, that I felt that sort of stirring warmth abou
t the Heart, which is with me the robe of incarnation of my genius, such as it is.”63 But much of this, like the number of Coleridge’s verses, was an illusion.

  With his plans for the London lectures still suspended, and the future of his children unclear, Coleridge cast around for some new shape to his life. Believing that Southey intended to leave Greta Hall, he wrote to his wife asking if she too intended to return to Bristol, only to receive a “frantic” reply that no such move could be contemplated. Dorothy was “called up stairs” to read this letter, and was secretly relieved that the idea of them all moving back together to Keswick was now “out of the question”. But she realized that Mrs Coleridge had still not really accepted the separation: “as to poor Mrs Coleridge, I cannot but pity her, because she does suffer; though I feel and know that wounded pride and the world’s remarks, are all that give her pain.”64

  Some time in March Coleridge received “a most affectionate Letter” from his brother George at Ottery, who had heard of his Italian adventures from young Russell. George knew nothing of the separation, and hearing of Coleridge’s residence at Sir George’s country estate, assumed his brother was now living well and happily with a wealthy patron. George himself was in grave difficulties with the Ottery school, and now wondered if Coleridge could come down to help him the following summer. This letter was to be the cause of much misunderstanding and bitterness subsequently within the family.

  As Coleridge recalled, George wrote of himself as “distressed by the desertion of my Brother Edward with regard to his School – & dwelt on the hope & idea of my coming to him & being an aid & comfort to him in such affecting language that I was exceedingly moved – being at that time very unhappy at Coleorton from causes, I cannot mention, after a thousand painful struggles I wrote to him to say, that I would come & should be happy to assist him for any number of months that might be of service to his Health.”65

  This letter was sent on 2 April 1807, after long discussions with Wordsworth. Coleridge believed that he and his brother could take on “50 scholars at 50 guineas a year”, and that Hartley and Derwent could now be educated at the Ottery school.66 It was not an unreasonable plan, though it suggests how low Coleridge’s professional expectations had fallen at Coleorton. He was now prepared to “strike root in my native place”, working as a simple country schoolmaster, and “pour his whole Heart” into George. But Coleridge also felt he must first explain his own domestic situation to George: “I could not bear to come into his presence and bring my wife with me, with such a load of concealment on my heart.” Accordingly, he described the “Trial” of his marriage, and how despite Mrs Coleridge’s “many excellent qualities, of strict modesty, attention to her children, and economy”, it was now “wholly incompatible with an endurable life”.67

  He also wished George to help smooth the parting from his wife, by receiving them all on a family visit in the early summer. “Mrs Coleridge wishes – & very naturally – to accompany me in to Devonshire that our separation may appear free from all shadow of suspicion of any other cause than that of unfitness and unconquerable difference of Temper.” He added that the resolution to settle himself so far from the Wordsworths had occasioned “one of the two or three very severe struggles of my life”.68

  But Coleridge’s fraternal letter contained some notable omissions. He did not mention that he was virtually penniless. He dropped no hint of ill-health, or opium; let alone Sara Hutchinson. Nor did he explain that on his instructions Mrs Coleridge, with Derwent and little Sara, were immediately setting out from Keswick for Bristol, on the assumption that George would acquiesce to this scheme.

  In the event, George was nervous of the potential scandal of this new situation, and loath to compound his own family difficulties, abruptly changed his mind, and on 6 April wrote a confused and painful letter of refusal. But this was sent, on Coleridge’s own instructions, to Josiah Wade’s in Bristol where it awaited collection for the next two months.69 This absurd and painful confusion was to become typical of Coleridge’s practical arrangements in the coming years, when unopened letters and delayed meetings would cause havoc among even his staunchest friends and supporters.

  At Coleorton it was decided that the whole household would go down to London in April for the publication of Wordsworth’s Poems in Two Volumes, while Coleridge and Hartley prepared for Bristol. Only Dorothy and the children remained behind, planning a return to the Lake District. Now, she did not regret Coleridge’s departure: “we had long experience at Coleorton, that it was not in our power to make him happy,” she wrote sadly to Mrs Clarkson.70

  Coleridge, in anticipation of the diplomatic visit to “Uncle G. Coleridge”, wrote some instructions for Hartley to be read over “every two or three days”, so that his behaviour at Ottery would be “such as to do yourself, and me and your dear Mother, credit”. They reflect equally upon the anxious father and the brilliant, but unruly son, and show Coleridge slowly accepting the unaccustomed role of paterfamilias.

  He wrote not in anger, but “on the contrary with great Love”. He felt Hartley’s nature was “very kind and forgiving, and wholly free from Revenge and Sullenness”; but equally he had “a very active & self-gratifying fancy, and such a high tide & flood of pleasurable feelings, that all unpleasant and painful Thoughts and events are hurried away upon it”. This led Hartley into “bad Habits” and a refusal to accept discipline. He stole food, picked and snatched up things he liked, interrupted his elders, spoke too loudly, and had a maddening way of standing in half-opened doors. “Come in – or go out – & always speak and listen with the door shut.”

  He was a clever boy – Coleridge was immensely proud of this – but alas his cleverness led to lies and fantasies and false excuses. “Excuses may show your ingenuity, but they make your honesty suspected. We may admire a man for his cleverness; but we love and esteem him only for his goodness – and a strict attachment to Truth…” Hartley must do what he was told at once – “No procrastination – no self-delusion”. If he took a little trouble, “everyone will be delighted with you”. Coleridge added, “I have not spoken about your mad passions, and frantic Looks & poutmouthing; because I trust, that is all over.”

  What worried Coleridge most about Hartley was a quality he knew now that he himself had bequeathed to his eldest son. “This power, which you possess, of shoving aside all disagreeable reflections, or losing them in a labyrinth of day-dreams, which saves you from present pain, has on the other hand interwoven into your nature a habit of procrastination, which unless you correct them in time (and it will require all your best exertions to do it effectually) – must lead you into lasting Unhappiness.”

  Not even Southey could have put this more acutely. It was the perfect device, that neither father nor son would ever quite accept. Coleridge had found a mirror in Hartley, and the reflections would haunt him, sometimes with laughter but more often with tears. He signed himself, “my dear, my very dear Hartley, most anxiously, Your fond Father, S.T. Coleridge”.71

  11

  The trip to London was planned for a week, but lasted a month. They stayed with the Montagus, met up with Walter Scott, and took Hartley to visit the great sights of the capital. He was deliriously happy and excited. They saw the animals in the Tower of London, Humphry Davy’s laboratories at the Royal Institution, and a pantomime at Covent Garden. In one of his earliest memories, Hartley recalled “the tiered boxes, the almost stupendous galleries, and the novelty of the sliding-scenes” which caught his young poet’s imagination. He also remembered an oddly deflating remark of Sara Hutchinson’s, who laughed at his astonishment at the wonderful stage-moon descending on a wire and compared it dismissively “to a copper warming-pan”.72

  Coleridge enjoyed showing off his son, but was much concerned with finances for the year ahead. He borrowed £50 from Wordsworth to pay his life assurance, and a further £50 from his old friend Sotheby to pay for the West Country expedition. He talked again with Davy about lecturing, and wrote to Godwin i
n search of the manuscript of his play Osorio which he suddenly thought of reviving for the new generation of actor-managers who seemed much taken with elaborate staging and exotic tales. Amazingly – but typically – he had kept no copy.

  He wondered if Godwin “would take the trouble of rescuing it from any chance rubbish-corner, in which it may have been preserved. It is not merely a work which employed 8 months of my life from 23 to 24, it is interesting to me in the history of my own mind.” Godwin did indeed find the manuscript in his meticulous filing system, and much later it would bring Coleridge the greatest financial success he had ever known.

  He invited Godwin to the unlikely event of a Coleridgean breakfast at half past nine in the morning, but added that he was ill and much abed. “I am so unwell & so languid from – no matter what – other’s follies and my own – from hopelessness without rest, & restlessness without hope – that I dare scarcely promise to go any where.”73 He also saw Stuart at the Courier office, discussed articles, and promised to repay his debts “by regular instalments” from the fees he happily assumed he would earn at Ottery. As a last quixotic throw (and no doubt encouraged by Wordsworth’s example) he contracted with Longman for 100 guineas on a two-volume collection of poems – “these are all ready, but two” – to be delivered in two months provided “death & sickness” did not intervene.

  The continuing dream of finishing “Christabel”, and filling out the new volume with his Asra poems (dating right back to the “Dejection” ode) obviously inspired this idea. But it would involve a degree of literary self-exposure from which he shrank more than ever. Against this was the provoking fact that Walter Scott had achieved a resounding success with his “Lay of the Last Minstrel” (1805), which had now sold 15,000 copies, cleverly imitating the free syllabic metre of “Christabel”, copying its gothic themes, and openly plagiarizing some of its most memorable phrasing. Coleridge was aware of this though he would not refer to it in print for many years.74 In the event, the collection was not assembled for another decade, and Longman’s guineas never materialized at any time. How far Coleridge’s reputation would have altered, had he seriously tried to match Wordsworth’s two volumes in 1807, is a subject he himself bitterly thought about in later years.