PART I

The Scribner English Classics

EDITED BY

FREDERICK H. SYKES, PH.D.

TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

COLERIDGE'S ANCIENT MARINER AND SELECT POEMS

1908

PREFATORY NOTE

The text of the poems in this volume is that of J. Dykes Campbell in the

Globe edition of Coleridge's poems. For the introduction I have depended

also largely upon his Memoir of Coleridge, and upon the two volumes of

the "Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge," edited by the poet's grandson,

Mr. E.H. Coleridge. In the Notes, as will be seen, I am indebted

particularly to the general editor of this series, Dr. F.H. Sykes, to

Dr. Lane Cooper of Cornell University, and again to Mr. Coleridge,

through whose kindness I have been able to get a reproduction of the

Marshmills crayon, undoubtedly the most satisfactory portrait of the

poet in existence, for the frontispiece.

H.M.B.

CONTENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION:

I. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

II. COLERIDGE'S POEMS

TEXT:

THE ANCIENT MARINER

CHRISTABEL

KUBLA KHAN

LOVE

FRANCE: AN ODE

DEJECTION: AN ODE

YOUTH AND AGE

WORK WITHOUT HOPE

EPITAPH

NOTES

*SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY*

EDITIONS:

Globe Edition. Edited by J. Dykes Campbell. 1 vol. Muses' Library.

Edited by Richard Garnett.

LIFE AND CRITICISM:

Stephen, Leslie, Article "Coleridge" in "The Dictionary of National

Biography."

H.D. Traill, "Coleridge" ("English Men of Letters Series").

Caine, T.H., "Coleridge" ("Great Writers Series").

Coleridge, S.T., "Biographia Literaria" ("Everyman's Library").

De Quincey, T., "Lake Poets."

Hazlitt, W., "First Acquaintance with Poets."

Cottle, J., "Reminiscences of Coleridge and Southey."

Pater, W., "Appreciations."

Shairp, J.C., "Studies in Poetry and Philosophy."

Sarrazin, Gabriel, "La Renaissance de la Poésie Anglaise, 1798-1889."

Brandl, Alois, "S.T. Coleridge and the English Romantic School."

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Haney, J.L., "A Bibliography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge."

INTRODUCTION

I. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

I. THE BEGINNINGS

Coleridge lived in what may safely be called the most momentous period

of modern history. In the year following his birth Warren Hastings was

appointed first governor-general of India, where he maintained English

empire during years of war with rival nations, and where he committed

those acts of cruelty and tyranny which called forth the greatest

eloquence of the greatest of English orators, in the famous impeachment

trial at Westminster, when Coleridge was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy in

London. A few years before his birth the liberal philosophy of France

had found a popular voice in the writings of Rousseau, which became the

gospel of revolution throughout Europe in Coleridge's youth and early

manhood. "The New Héloise" in the field of sentiment and of the relation

of the sexes, "The Social Contract" In political theory, and "Émile" in

matters of education, were books whose influence upon Coleridge's

generation it would be hard to estimate. When Coleridge was four years

old the English colonies in America declared their independence and

founded a new nation upon the natural rights of man,--a nation that has

grown to be the mightiest and most beneficent on the globe. Coleridge

was seventeen when the French Revolution broke out; he was forty-three

when Napoleon was sent to St. Helena. He saw the whole career of the

greatest political upheaval and of the greatest military genius of the

modern world. Fox, Pitt, and Burke,--the greatest Liberal orator, the

greatest Parliamentary leader, and the greatest philosophic statesman

that England has produced--were at the height of their glory when

Coleridge went up to Cambridge in 1791.

In literature--naturally, since literature is but an interpretation of

life--the age was not less remarkable. Dr. Johnson was still alive when

Coleridge came up to school at Christ's Hospital, Goldsmith had died

eight years before. But a new spirit was abroad in the younger

generation. Macpherson's "Fingal," alleged to be a translation from the

ancient Gaelic poet Ossian, had appeared in 1760; Thomas Percy's

"Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," a collection of folk-ballads and

rude verse-romances such as the common people cherished but critics had

long refused to consider as poetry, was published in 1765. These two

books were of prime importance in fostering a new taste in

literature,--a love of natural beauty, of simplicity, and of rude

strength. The new taste hailed with delight the appearance of a native

lyric genius in Burns, whose first volume of poems was printed in 1786.

It welcomed also the homely, simple sweetness, what Coleridge and Lamb

called the "divine chit-chat," of Cowper, whose "Task" appeared in the

preceding year. But it was in Coleridge himself and his close

contemporaries and followers that the splendor of the new poetry showed

itself. He was two years younger than Wordsworth, a year younger than

Scott; he was sixteen at the birth of Byron, twenty at that of Shelley,

twenty-four at that of Keats; and he outlived all of them except

Wordsworth. His genius blossomed early. "The Ancient Mariner," his

greatest poem, was published some years before Wordsworth's "Ode on the

Intimations of Immortality" was written, or Scott's "Lay of the Last

Minstrel." He was in the prime of life, or what should have been the

prime of life--forty years old--when Byron burst into sudden fame with

the first two cantos of "Childe Harold" in 1812; he was forty-six when

Keats published "Endymion"; he was fifty-one when Shelley was drowned.

And of all this gifted company Coleridge, though not the strongest

character or the most prolific poet, was the profoundest intellect and

the _most originative poetic spirit_.

There was little hint, however, of future greatness or of fellowship

with great names in his birth and early circumstances. His father was a

country clergyman and schoolmaster in the village of Ottery St. Mary, in

Devonshire, a simple-hearted unworldly man, full of curious learning and

not very attentive to practical affairs. His mother managed the

household and brought up the children. Both his parents were of simple

West-country stock; but his father, having a natural turn for study and

having done well in his early manhood as a schoolmaster, went at the age

of thirty-one as a sizar, or poor student, to Sidney-Sussex College,

Cambridge, took orders, and was afterwards given the living of Ottery

St. Mary. Here he continued his beloved work of teaching, in addition to

his pastoral duties, and by means of this combination won the humble

livelihood which, through his wife's careful economy, sufficed for

rearing his large family. Coleridge tells us that his father "had so

little of parental ambition in him that he had destined his children to

be blacksmiths, etc." (though he had "resolved that I should be a

parson"), "and had accomplished his intention but for my mother's pride

and spirit of aggrandizing her family." Several of the children rewarded

their mother's care by distinguishing themselves in a modest way in the

army or in the church, but the only one about whom the world is curious

now was the youngest of the ten, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was born

at Ottery St. Mary, October 21, 1772.

The essential traits of his later character appeared in his early

childhood. Almost from infancy he lived in his imagination rather than

in the world of reality. "The schoolboys drove me from play, and were

always tormenting me, and hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but

read incessantly.... I became a _dreamer_, and acquired an indisposition

to all bodily activity; and I was fretful, and inordinately

passionate." "Sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth," were "prominent

and manifest" in his character before he was eight years old. Such is

his own account of his childhood, written to his friend Poole in 1797;

and it is an accurate description, as far as it goes, of the grown man.

But of the religious temper, too, the love of freedom and of virtue, the

hatred of injustice, cruelty, and falsehood that guided his uneven steps

through all the pitiful struggle of his middle life, of the conscience

that made his weakness hell to him--of these, too, we may be sure that

the beginnings were to be seen in the boy at Ottery St. Mary, as indeed

they were before his eyes in the person of his father, who, if not a

first-rate genius, was, says his son, "a first-rate Christian."

The good vicar died in 1781; and the next year, a "presentation" to

Christ's Hospital having been secured for him, little Samuel, not yet

eleven years old, went up to London to enter the famous old city school.

Here,

"In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,"

where he

"Saw nought lovely but the sky and stars,"

one of some seven hundred Blue-Coat boys, Coleridge lived for nine

years.

Most of the boys at Christ's Hospital, then as now, were given a

"commercial" education (which none the less included a very thorough

training in Latin); but a few of the most promising students were each

year selected by the masters for a classical training in preparation for

the universities, whence they were known as Grecians. Coleridge was

elected a Grecian in 1788. The famous Boyer--famous for his enthusiasm

alike in teaching the classics and in wielding the birch--laid the

foundation of Coleridge's later scholarship. Here, too, Coleridge did a

great amount of reading not laid down in the curriculum,--Latin and

Greek poetry and philosophy, mediaeval science and metaphysics--and won

the approval of his teachers by the excellence of his verses in Greek

and Latin, such as boys at school and students at the universities were

expected to write in those days. In the great city school, as in the

Devonshire vicarage, he lived in the imagination, inert of body and

rapacious of intellect; but he was solitary no longer, having found his

tongue and among his more intellectual schoolfellows an interested

audience. While yet a boy, he would hold an audience spellbound by his

eloquent declamation or the fervor of his argument till, as Lamb, who

was one of his hearers, tells us, "the walls of the old Grey Friars

re-echoed to the accents of the _inspired charity boy_!" That is the way

his conversation,--or monologue, as it often was,--affected not boys

only, but men, and especially young men, to his dying day. He cast a

spell upon men by his speech; upon his schoolfellows, upon young men at

the universities in the Pantisocracy days, upon Lloyd and Poole at

Nether Stowey, upon earnest young thinkers in his last days at Highgate;

so that even if he had never written "The Ancient Mariner" and the

_Biographia, Literaria_ he would still be remembered for the inspiration

of his talk.

Further details of the life at Christ's Hospital must be sought in

Lamb's two essays, especially that on "Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty

Years Ago." In 1791, having secured a Christ's Hospital "exhibition," he

entered Jesus College, Cambridge.

His university life extended over three years, from October, 1791, to

December, 1794. It was an unhappy time for him and an uneasy time for

his respectable relatives, for reasons that were partly in his own

nature and partly in the temper of the times.

Even Boyer's severe training, while it had made him a hard student and

an unusual scholar for his years, had failed to give him what he most

needed as a balance to his intellect and imagination, stability of

character. There is evidence that after the first few months, during

which the habits of his hard school life had not yet broken, the new

liberty of university life led him into extravagance, if not

dissipation. Work he doubtless did (he won the Browne medal for a Greek

ode on the slave-trade in 1792), but fitfully, giving less and less

attention to his regular studies and more to conviviality and, above

all, to dreams of literary fame. He wrote verses after various models,

sentimental, fanciful, or gallant; he was enthusiastic in praise of a

contemporary sonneteer, the Rev. William Bowles, whose "divine

sensibility" seemed to him the height of poetic feeling; and in

connection with Wordsworth's younger brother Christopher, who entered

Cambridge in 1793, he formed a literary society that discussed, among

other things, Wordsworth's volume of early poetry, "Descriptive

Sketches," published in that year. Wordsworth himself was a Cambridge

man, but had taken his degree in 1791 and gone abroad, so that the two

men whose personal friendship was to mean so much in English poetry did

not meet until 1796. Already in 1793, however, Coleridge had developed

political theories, or rather sympathies, which were preparing him for

fellowship with Wordsworth.

The French Revolution, which, after years of preparation, took concrete

shape in 1789, did not look to young Englishmen in 1791-4 as it looks to

us now, nor even as it was to look to those same Englishmen in 1800. In

those first years warm-hearted young enthusiasts at the universities saw

in the violence of their fellow-men across the Channel only the

struggles of the beautiful Spirit of Liberty bursting the chains of

age-long tyranny and corruption and calling men up to the heights to

breathe diviner air.

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very Heaven!"

wrote Wordsworth afterwards; and in the glow of his young idealism he

had gone over to France in the autumn of 1791 and was on the point of

throwing in his lot with the revolutionists, when his parents compelled

his return by cutting off his supplies. And many who, like Coleridge,

merely watched from afar shared his faith that a new order of things was

to be established, wherein Love should be Law and man's inhumanity to

man become but a memory of things outworn.

Less generous men, with a selfish interest in established privileges;

timid men, who looked with terror upon any prospect of change; older and

wiser men, who better understood the foundations of social order and the

nature of man--all these looked with distrust upon the revolutionary

idealism that was spreading from France through the younger generation

of Englishmen. The new notions of liberty, it was felt, threatened not

only the vested rights of property and the prescriptions of rank, but

the Church, too, and religion. Some of the would-be reformers were

avowed atheists; some (Coleridge and his friends, for instance, in the

Pantisocracy period) were communists. In general, they ascribed all the

evils of society to "institutions," and wanted them abolished.

Just how far Coleridge had gone in this direction by the autumn of 1793

we do not know; far enough at least to disturb his view of the future,

to worry his elder brother George, a clergyman and school-teacher, who

had in some measure filled a father's place to the young genius, and,

most important of all, to alarm and distress a gentle girl in London.

For before he left Christ's Hospital for Cambridge he had become

intimate at the house of a Mrs. Evans, and most of the letters preserved

from his first two years at the University were addressed to her or to

one of her two daughters, Anne and Mary. With the latter Coleridge was

in love; and that she had some regard for him is apparent from a letter

she sent him in 1794. Before that, however, Coleridge had taken a step

that seemed likely to close at once his college career and his prospects

of literary fame. The reasons have not been recorded: probably pecuniary

embarrassment, the yeasty state of his religious and political ideas,

and impatience or despondency over his love-affair with Mary Evans,

combined to precipitate his flight; what we know is that he ran away

from Cambridge and in December, 1793, enlisted as a dragoon in the

army.

Coleridge had hardly taken the step before he repented of it. His

letters to his brother George, who with other friends bestirred himself

for Coleridge's release as soon as his whereabouts was discovered, are

rather distressing in their self-abasement. The efforts of his friends

were successful and in April he returned to the University, where a

public admonition was the extent of his punishment, and he continued in

receipt of his Christ's Hospital exhibition.

But Coleridge's college days were practically over. He was now nearly

twenty-two years old, and the revolutionary unrest which had doubtless

contributed to his first escapade soon resulted in the formation of

schemes that took him away from Cambridge for good and all. In June,

1794, he made a visit to an old schoolfellow at Oxford. Here he met

Robert Southey of Balliol College. A friendship sprang up between them

out of which, before the end of the summer, grew the Utopian scheme of

Pantisocracy. A company of gentlemen and ladies were to emigrate to

America, take up lands in the Susquehanna valley, and there establish an

ideal community in which all should bear rule equally and find happiness

in a life of justice, labor, and love. The education of the young in the

principles of ideal humanity was an important part of the scheme. We are

reminded of the Brook Farm experiment in New England a generation later,

which bears a daughter's likeness to Pantisocracy, the chief difference

being that the New England enthusiasts were mature men and women and

really put the idea into practice, whereas the Pantisocrats were for the

most part collegians and never got beyond the stage of talking and

writing about their plans. The scheme was further elaborated at Bristol,

where Coleridge, returning from a vacation tour in Wales, again met

Southey, and at Bath, the home of Southey and of Southey's betrothed and

her sister, Edith and Sarah Fricker--"two sisters, milliners of Bath,"

as Byron contemptuously called them.

To the other sister, Sarah, Coleridge rather precipitately engaged

himself. His love for Mary Evans was not dead, but he seems to have

despaired of winning her and to have determined, by uniting himself

domestically with Southey and his friends, to make retreat from their

communistic scheme impossible. A few weeks later he is back at

Cambridge, tortured apparently between his old love and his new

engagement. Mary Evans has written to him deploring his wild notions and

the mad plan of Pantisocracy, yet confident that he has "too much

sensibility to be an infidel." Southey has reproved him rather sharply

for failing to write to his betrothed at Bath. Our next glimpse of him

is at London, discussing poetry and philosophy with Lamb at the

"Salutation and Cat" tavern and perhaps trying to get a sight of Mary

Evans. In December he is again at Bristol, in lively correspondence with

Southey about democracy, Pantisocracy, and poetry, but at the same time

he addresses a last appeal to Miss Evans. Her answer is kind, but final;

that chapter is closed, and Coleridge writes to Southey that he will "do

his duty," by which he means apparently that he will be faithful to

Pantisocracy and marry Sarah Fricker.

The Pantisocracy scheme could not in the nature of things be long-lived.

As a matter of fact it lasted little more than a year, ending in a

rupture between the two leading spirits just when they became

brothers-in-law. Coleridge spent the summer of 1795 in Bristol in

company with Southey, writing and lecturing. In October he was married

to Sarah Fricker in "St. Mary's Redcliff, poor Chatterton's church." In

November Southey married Edith Fricker and set sail for Lisbon, where

his uncle was the English chaplain; and Pantisocracy was dead.

The break with Southey was the natural result of attempting to force

through a scheme impracticable in itself and doubly impracticable for

the men who conceived it. Its collapse did not altogether sever their

literary relations. The collaboration begun in "The Fall of Robespierre"

(Cambridge, 1794) was continued in Southey's "Joan of Arc" (1796), to

which Coleridge contributed the part afterwards printed (with some

additions) as "The Destiny of Nations," and in Coleridge's first volume

of "Poems" (Bristol, 1796). A more important contributor to this volume,

however, was Charles Lamb, whose initials were appended to four of the

pieces. A second edition appeared in June, 1797, with eleven additions

from Coleridge besides verses by Lamb and Charles Lloyd, all under the

title: "Poems by S.T. Coleridge. Second Edition. To which are added

Poems by Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd." The publisher of both

editions was Joseph Cottle, a bookseller of Bristol, who played the part

of provincial Murray to the young poets in these years.

Meanwhile Coleridge, after a period of lecturing and projecting, had as

we have seen married Sarah Fricker, with whom he was now very much in

love, and had begun housekeeping in a cottage at Clevedon near the

Bristol Channel. The beauty of the place and his happiness there are

celebrated in "The Aeolian Harp" and "Reflections on Leaving a Place of

Retirement" (better known by its opening words, "Low was our pretty

cot"). His next residence was in Bristol--rather a base of operations

than a home, for Coleridge was on the road much of the time, lecturing,

preaching, soliciting subscriptions for his political and philosophical

paper "The Watchman" (which ran from March to May, 1796), and trying in

various other ways to provide for his family, which was increased by the

birth of a son in September, 1796. At last in December he secured the

little cottage at Nether Stowey in the Quantock Hills (south of the

Bristol Channel, in Somerset), close to the house of his beloved friend,

Thomas Poole, where he lived until his departure for Germany in

September, 1798.

II. AT NETHER STOWEY

The Stowey period was the blossoming time of Coleridge's genius. All the

poems in this volume except the last four, and besides these "This

Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," "Frost at Midnight," and "Fears in

Solitude"--the bulk of his achievement in poetry--were either written or

begun in 1797 and 1798. It will be proper, then, to dwell a little on

his circumstances, his friends, and his ideas during these two years.

The means of livelihood for himself and his family when he went to

Stowey were a subscription of about £40 that Poole and some friends got

together for him, £20 that Cottle paid for the second edition of the

"Poems," the promise of £80 from the father of Charles Lloyd, who was to

live with him and study under his direction, and such money as he could

earn by reviews and magazine articles, which he estimated at £40 a year;

not a munificent provision for a household of three adults and a child.

But the theories of the simple life that had made Pantisocracy seem a

feasible project still inspired him with confidence. "Sixteen

shillings," he wrote to Poole, "would cover all the weekly expenses of

my wife, infant, and myself. This I say from my wife's own

calculations." Further, he will support himself by the labor of his

hands. "If you can instruct me to manage an acre and a half of land, and

to raise in it, with my own hands, all kinds of vegetables and grain,

enough for myself and my wife and sufficient to feed a pig or two with

the refuse, I hope that you will have served me _most_ effectually by

placing me out of the necessity of being served." This was in December,

just before he moved to Stowey. In February he wrote from his new home

to another friend: "From seven till half past eight I work in my garden;

from breakfast till twelve I read and compose, then read again, feed the

pigs, poultry, etc., till two o'clock; after dinner work again till tea;

from tea till supper, _review_. So jogs the day, and I am happy.... I

raise potatoes and all manner of vegetables, have an orchard, and shall

raise corn with the spade, enough for my family. We have two pigs, and

ducks and geese. A cow would not answer the keep: we have whatever milk

we want from T. Poole."

There is a suspicious regularity about this schedule. Lamb wrote from

London in January: "Is it a farm that you have got? And what does your

worship know about farming?" His agricultural activity, in the month of

February, must have been chiefly prospective; and we may safely assume

that Poole supplied other things besides milk, and that the poet spent

more time reading, dreaming, and talking than he did raising potatoes. A

good deal of time must have been spent in the actual composition of his

poetry, including his play "Osorio," which was written in 1797, and in

studying the landscape beauties of the Quantocks. After the coming of

the Wordsworths to Alfoxden he spent much of the time walking between

Alfoxden and Stowey, or further afield with Wordsworth and his sister.

"My walks," he wrote afterwards, "were almost daily on the top of

Quantock, and among its sloping coombs. With my pencil and

memorandum-book in my hand, I was making studies, as the artists call

them, and often moulding them into verse with the objects and imagery

immediately before my eyes." This does not sound much like "raising corn

with the spade."

On Sundays he would sometimes preach before such Unitarian

congregations, within walking distance, as cared to hear him. But as he

would take no pay for his services his preaching contributed nothing

toward the support of his family. Lloyd, who was epileptic and subject

to moody variation in his attachments, was but an irregular housemate

after the first few months, and his contribution to the household

expenses was correspondingly uncertain. The future looked so dark in

October, 1797, that in spite of misgivings and former scruples he had

concluded that he "must become a Unitarian minister, as a less evil than

starvation." Accordingly he was in Shrewsbury in January, 1798,

preaching in the Unitarian church and on the point of accepting the

pastorate at a salary of £150 a year, when the sky brightened in another

quarter. Thomas and Josiah Wedgwood, sons of the famous potter and

friends of Thomas Poole, offered him an equal sum annually as a free

gift. They were wealthy men, well able to afford it; they attached no

condition to the gift except that he should devote himself entirely to

the study of poetry and philosophy, which was precisely what he wanted

to do; and he was not long in determining to accept the offer. "I

accepted it," he wrote to Wordsworth while still at Shrewsbury, "on the

presumption that I had talents, honesty, and propensities to perseverant

effort." The propensities, alas, remained propensities, never acquiring

the force of habit. The pension, however, continued to be paid in full

until 1812, when Josiah Wedgwood withdrew his half of it. The other

half, upon the death of Thomas Wedgwood in 1805, had been secured to

Coleridge for life; and this annuity must have constituted the chief

reliance of Mrs. Coleridge for many years.

If Coleridge did not prosper financially, he was at least fortunate in

his friends; and a man's friends are after all the best testimony to the

character of his mind and heart. When he went to Stowey in December,

1796, he was again on good terms with Southey, though the enthusiasm of

their first fellowship was gone. The friendship with Lamb, begun in

their school-days and renewed at the "Salutation and Cat" in 1794, was

maintained by an eager correspondence and by Lamb's visit to Stowey in

July, 1797; and although Lloyd's vagaries led to a coolness between the

old friends in the following year, the breach was soon healed, and the

friendship continued till death. Another with whom Coleridge maintained

a voluminous correspondence in 1796-7 was John Thelwall, theoretical

democrat, atheist, and admirer of Godwin, whose visit to Coleridge and

Wordsworth in the summer of 1797 so shocked the good conservatives of

the neighborhood that Wordsworth had to leave Alfoxden in consequence of

it. But without doubt the dearest and most influential friend Coleridge

had before the Wordsworths came into his life was Thomas Poole. It was

in order to be in daily intercourse with Poole that he moved to Stowey;

and Poole's hesitation about securing the cottage for him, arising,

Coleridge seemed to fear, from imperfect confidence and friendship, was

a source of agonized apprehension to the sensitive poet. When we

consider that Poole was a self-educated man, a Somersetshire tanner with

no claim to literary genius or philosophical acquirements, Coleridge's

devotion to him and dependence on him bring out in a strong light the

substantial, elemental character of the man. "O Poole!" Coleridge wrote

to him from Germany afterwards, "you are a noble heart as ever God

made!" Poole had indeed in a marked degree the genius for friendship.

Strength of character, sympathy, and self-effacing devotion, combined

with prudence and sincerity, made this man a tower of refuge for the

unstable spirit of the poet.

No other single relation, however, can compare in importance, for

Coleridge's poetic development, with that which sprang up in the summer

of 1797 between him and William Wordsworth. Just when they first met is

not recorded. We have seen that Coleridge was acquainted with

Wordsworth's younger brother in his college days, and discussed with him

Wordsworth's first published poems. In January, 1797, he told Cottle

that he wished to submit his "Visions of the Maid of Arc" to Wordsworth

for criticism. The earliest definite record of their personal

acquaintance is a letter Coleridge wrote to Cottle while on a visit to

Wordsworth at Racedown (just over the Somerset border in Dorsetshire)

early in June. About the beginning of July he is again at Racedown; and

when he returns he brings Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy with him for

a visit. On the 7th Lamb arrived for his long-planned reunion with

Coleridge. The second week of July, 1797, was thus a rich and

long-remembered time for all of them, despite the fact that Mrs.

Coleridge "accidentally emptied a skillet of boiling milk" on her

husband's foot, which confined him "during the whole time of Charles

Lamb's stay." The others took long walks in the neighborhood, amid such

scenery as is described in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," a poem

that admirably voices the happiness, of those days of spiritual

fellowship. The Wordsworths did not return to Racedown. "By a

combination of curious circumstances a gentleman's seat, with a park and

woods, elegantly and completely furnished,... in the most beautiful and

romantic situation by the seaside, four miles from Stowey--this we have

got for Wordsworth at the _rent of twenty-three pounds a year, taxes

included_!" Coleridge triumphantly announced to Southey; and in this

house, the Manor of Alfoxden, the Wordsworths remained for a year, in

daily companionship with Coleridge and surrounded by scenes of natural

beauty that have left a lasting mark on the work of both poets.

What the friendship with Coleridge meant to Wordsworth may best be seen

in "The Prelude: or, Growth of a Poet's Mind," Wordsworth's greatest

long poem, written some years afterwards and addressed throughout to

Coleridge.

"There is no grief, no sorrow, no despair,

No languor, no dejection, no dismay,

No absence scarcely can there be, for those

Who love as we do."

What Wordsworth was to Coleridge is more important for us here. The

admiration which the brilliant child of genius felt for the great

preacher-poet is chiefly, one feels, an admiration for his character. As

a matter of fact, Wordsworth had written nothing, up to his coming to

Alfoxden, that would have preserved his name as a poet, nothing so

noteworthy or promising as what Coleridge had already written. But

Coleridge felt in this lean and thoughtful young man a strength of mind,

a depth and sureness of heart that compelled his allegiance and even

imparted, for the time, some of that resolution in which he was by

nature so sadly deficient. The character of their friendship is to be

seen not only in the published work of the two poets from this time on

(notably in "Dejection"), but perhaps even more clearly in Dorothy

Wordsworth's Journal and in Coleridge's letters. "I speak with

heart-felt sincerity," he wrote to Cottle in June, 1797, "and (I think)

unblinded judgment, when I tell you that I feel myself _a little man by

his side_, and yet do not think myself the less man than I formerly

thought myself.... T. Poole's opinion of Wordsworth is that he is the

greatest man he ever knew; I coincide." Wordsworth's influence is

evident in a letter from Coleridge to his brother George in April, 1798:

"I love fields and woods and mountains with almost a visionary fondness.

And because I have found benevolence and quietness growing within me as

that fondness has increased, therefore I should wish to be the means of

implanting it in others, and to destroy the bad passions not by

combating them but by keeping them in inaction." Under the calming and

clarifying influence of the stronger Northern spirit the fever of his

revolutionary dreams abated, he found happiness in the conscious

exercise of his poetic powers, and for one year in his troubled

existence his genius showed itself in all its splendor.

The immediate poetic result of their friendship was the "Lyrical

Ballads," published by Cottle in September, 1798. The origin of the work

has been described both by Wordsworth (in a prefatory note to "We Are

Seven") and by Coleridge (in the _Biographia Literaria_, chap. xiv.). At

first, they were to collaborate in writing a poem the proceeds of which

should pay the expenses of a little tour they were making when the plan

was thought of, in November, 1797; and thus "The Ancient Mariner" was

begun. As this poem grew under Coleridge's "shaping-spirit of

imagination" Wordsworth saw that he "could only be a clog" upon its

progress, and it was resigned to Coleridge. The plan was then enlarged

to include a volume illustrating "two cardinal points of poetry, the

power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to

the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by

the modifying colours of imagination." Wordsworth was to illustrate the

former principle, Coleridge the latter, and the proceeds of the book

were to go toward the expenses of a trip to Germany, decided on in the

spring of 1798. The bulk of the volume was Wordsworth's, and was

typically Wordsworthian, ranging from such simple ballads of humble

incident as "Goody Blake" and "The Idiot Boy" to the magnificent blank

verse of "Tintern Abbey"; Coleridge's share consisted of a brief poem

called "The Nightingale," two short extracts from "Osorio," and "The

Rime of the Ancyent Marinere."

Apart from the "Lyrical Ballads" Coleridge conceived and finished

between June, 1797, and the departure for Germany in 1798, and published

in the latter year, "Fire, Famine, and Slaughter," "Frost at Midnight,"

"Fears in Solitude," and "France." He conceived and partly executed, but

did not then publish, "Christabel," "Kubla Khan," "Love," "The Ballad of

the Dark Ladie," and "The Three Graves." Thus, all Coleridge's best

poetry, with the exception of those three saddest of voices out of a

broken life, "Dejection" (1802), the lines to Wordsworth on hearing him

read "The Prelude" (1807), and "Youth and Age" (1823-32), belongs either

wholly or in its inception to the year of his fellowship with the

Wordsworths in the Quantock Hills.

Of his political, religious, and literary opinions at this time he has

left a fairly adequate account in his published writings and his

correspondence, especially in the _Biographia Literaria_ and in the

letter to the Rev. George Coleridge referred to above. The first year of

his married life saw him still, in spite of the failure of Pantisocracy,

an eager visionary reformer upborne by generous enthusiasm and ardent

religious feeling. "O! never can I remember those days," he wrote in the

_Biographia_, "with either shame or regret. For I was most sincere, most

disinterested! My opinions were indeed in many and most important points

erroneous; but my heart was single. Wealth, rank, life itself, then

seemed cheap to me, compared with the interest of (what I believed to

be) the truth, and the will of my Maker." However much he may have

consorted with unbelievers like Thelwall and distressed his good brother

George by his heterodoxy, he was by nature deeply religious. He tried in

his letters to recover Thelwall from his "atheism," though he heartily

approved a sentiment expressed by the latter: "He who thinks and _feels_

will be virtuous; and he who is absorbed in self will be vicious,

whatever may be his speculative opinions." Godwin's system of "Justice,"

with its soulless logic, he abhorred. He preached often in Unitarian

churches. To young Hazlitt, who heard him preach in January, 1798, from

the text "And He went up into the mountain to pray, _Himself, alone_,"

it seemed "as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human

heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence

through the universe." In politics he was, when he went to Stowey,

"almost equidistant from all the three prominent parties, the Pittites,

the Foxites, and the Democrats"; he was "a vehement anti-ministerialist,

but after the invasion of Switzerland, a more vehement anti-Gallican

[see the last two stanzas of "France"], and still more intensely an

anti-Jacobin." Under Wordsworth's influence his thoughts turned in great

measure from contemporary politics to more fundamental matters. Always

his poetry had been the utterance of his essential being. "I feel

strongly and I think strongly," he wrote to Thelwall in 1796, "but I

seldom feel without thinking or think without feeling. Hence, though my

poetry has in general a hue of tenderness or passion over it, yet it

seldom exhibits unmixed and simple tenderness and passion. My

philosophical opinions are blended with or deduced from my feelings."

Wordsworth gave his feelings a new object and his philosophy a higher

aim. In April of the second year at Stowey, in the letter to his brother

already quoted, Coleridge wrote: "I have for some time past withdrawn

myself totally from the consideration of _immediate causes_, which are

infinitely complex and uncertain, to muse on fundamental and general

causes, the 'causae causarum.' I devote myself to such works as encroach

not on the anti-social passions--in poetry, to elevate the imagination

and set the affections in right tune by the beauty of the inanimate

impregnated as with a living soul by the presence of life--in prose to

the seeking with patience and a slow, very slow mind, 'Quid sumus, et

quidnam victuri gignimus,'--what our faculties are and what they are

capable of becoming." This last sentence is a sort of half-prophetic

summary of his life's work; but the poetry soon gave way to the prose,

and he never again so nearly realized his poetical ideal as he had

already done in "The Ancient Mariner."

Of his person and the impression he made upon people at this time there

are various contemporary accounts. To Thelwall, in November, 1796, he

sent the following description of himself: "... my face, unless when

animated by immediate eloquence, expresses great sloth, and great,

indeed almost idiotic good-nature. 'Tis a mere carcass of a face; fat,

flabby, and expressive chiefly of inexpression. Yet I am told that my

eyes, eyebrows, and forehead are physiognomically good; but of this the

deponent knoweth not. As to my shape, 'tis a good shape enough if

measured, but my gait is awkward, and the walk of the whole man

indicates _indolence capable of energies_.... I cannot breathe through

my nose, so my mouth, with sensual thick lips, is almost always open. In

conversation I am impassioned, and oppose what I deem error with an

eagerness which is often mistaken for personal asperity; but I am ever

so swallowed up in the _thing_ said that I forget my _opponent_. Such am

I." The Rev. Leapidge Smith, in his "Reminiscences of an Octogenarian,"

remembered him as "a tall, dark, handsome young man, with long, black,

flowing hair; eyes not merely dark, but black, and keenly penetrating; a

fine forehead, a deep-toned, harmonious voice; a manner never to be

forgotten, full of life, vivacity, and kindness; dignified in person

and, added to all these, exhibiting the elements of his future

greatness."[1] Hazlitt, in "My First Acquaintance with Poets" (a paper

that every student of Coleridge's life and poetry should read),

describing him as he appeared on his visit to Hazlitt's father at Wem in

1798, says: "His complexion was at that time clear, and even bright. His

forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with large

projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a sea with

darkened lustre.... His mouth was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his

chin good-humored and round, but his nose, the rudder of the face, the

index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing--like what he has done."

And Dorothy Wordsworth (to close with a contemporary and sympathetic

impression) set him down in her journal after their first meeting at

Racedown thus: "He is a wonderful man. His conversation teems with soul,

mind, and spirit.... At first I thought him very plain, that is for

about three minutes: he is pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and

not very good teeth, longish, loose-growing, half-curling, rough black

hair. But if you hear him speak for five minutes you think no more of

them. His eye is large and full, and not very dark, but grey[2]--such an

eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it

speaks every emotion of his animated mind; it has more of 'the poet's

eye in a fine frenzy rolling' than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark

eyebrows, and an overhanging forehead." The friendly and keen-sighted

woman gives a more sympathetic picture than the others; but there must

have been truth, too, in the view of the equally keen-sighted and less

friendly Hazlitt, whose description accords well with Coleridge's

self-portraiture, and in the last sarcastic item, too well, with the

remainder of the poet's career.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: "Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge," ed. by E.H.

Coleridge, Vol. I., p. 180, note.]

[Footnote 2: The uncertainty as to the color of his eyes is a tribute to

their expressiveness. Carlyle described him in 1824 as having "a pair of

strange brown, timid, yet earnest-looking eyes." Emerson visited him in

1833 and found him "with bright blue eyes and fine clear complexion."]

III. THE REST OF THE STORY

Coleridge lived for thirty-six years after he left Stowey for Germany in

1798. His fame as a poet grew as the world became acquainted with and

learned to feel the peculiar charm of his poetry, and he was even more

famous, for a while, as a literary critic and a moral philosopher. But

they were years of weak-willed wandering, of vast hazy plans and feeble

performance, lighted only here and there by glimpses of fragmentary

accomplishment, and that seldom in poetry. Keats died at twenty-six,

leaving behind him a body of poetry hardly less wonderful than Coleridge

had fashioned at the same age; and another poet sang of him:

"The bloom, whose petals, nipt before they blew,

Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste."

In Coleridge the poet died at nearly the same age, almost as completely

as if the man himself had passed "within the twilight chamber ... of

white Death"; and "Dejection" is that poet's dirge. The remaining years

need therefore but few words.

Coleridge had taken opium, perhaps as early as his school-days, for

relief from neuralgia. He had recourse to it in March, 1796, for

sleeplessness; in the following November, for relief from violent

nervous pains; and near the close of the Stowey period, in May, 1798,

when the vagaries of Lloyd, the estrangement from Lamb, domestic

anxiety, and physical suffering had reduced him to a state of extreme

nervous wretchedness, he again took refuge in opiates, of which "Kubla

Khan" is partly the result. He returned from Germany in 1799, worked for

a while on a newspaper in London and on a translation of Schiller's

"Wallenstein," and in the summer of 1800 removed to Keswick in

Cumberland, in the Lake Country, where the Wordsworths had already

established themselves. Here, in the autumn of 1800, he strove to

finish "Christabel," and did finish the second part. In the winter and

spring he suffered from a complicated illness, in which he again had

recourse to laudanum; and from the spring of 1801 he was confirmed in

the opium habit, sinking often to pitiful depths of moral and physical

misery. He was in the Mediterranean, chiefly at Malta, from 1804 to

1806. His wife and children remained at Keswick, where Southey and his

family had become co-tenants with them of Greta Hall. Southey, it might

almost be said, took care of Coleridge's family henceforth; for

Coleridge had begun to find his own fireside an intolerable place as

early as 1802, lived little at home, and made a formal separation from

his wife in 1808,--though they saw each other occasionally after that

and the Wedgwood annuity continued to be paid to Mrs. Coleridge. In 1809

he was living with the Wordsworths at Grasmere, where he wrote several

numbers of a politico-philosophical paper called "The Friend." About the

close of 1810 he was taken in hand by a Mr. and Mrs. Morgan of

Hammersmith, near London, under whose care he kept the opium in check

sufficiently to give his famous lectures on the "Principles of Poetry"

in the winter of 1811-12, and another series in the early summer on

Shakespeare. In the winter following, his play of "Remorse," a recast of

the "Osorio" of 1797, was acted in London with some success. In the

winter of 1813-14 he lectured, in a "conversational" fashion, at

Bristol. He also wrote irregularly for the London papers during these

years. But his studies, since his return from Germany, had been directed

to metaphysics, and especially to the philosophical bases of poetry and

theology; and the last twenty years of his life, at least, were occupied

with plans for a great philosophical work covering these two fields of

thought. One of the fragments of the great work that actually came to

light, the _Biographia Literaria_, seems to have been sent to the

printers in 1815. A collected edition of his poetry was also begun while

he was under the Morgans' care.

From 1816 till his death in 1834 he lived in comparative peace, if not

in happiness, with a Mr. Gilman of Highgate near London, an apothecary.

Gilman and his wife were able so far to wean him from the drug, or to

regulate his use of it, that he brought to the birth something of his

vast plans in criticism and philosophy, notably the _Biographia

Literaria_ (1817) and the "Aids to Reflection" (1825). The beginning of

his stay with Gilman was also marked by the publication of "Christabel"

and "Kubla Khan" (1816), and of a collected edition of his other poems

(including "The Ancient Mariner," considerably revised) under the title

"Sibylline Leaves" (1817). But the poems that were not finished in the

first great period at Stowey remained unfinished. He talked divinely

("an archangel a little damaged," Lamb said), and both by his talk and

his metaphysical writings profoundly influenced the literature and

philosophy of the century, both in England and America; but the poet in

him was dead.

"Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain,

And genius given, and knowledge won in vain;

And all which I had culled in woodwalks wild,

And all which patient toil had reared, and all

Commune with _thee_ had opened out--but flowers

Strewed on my corse, and borne upon my bier,

In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!"[1]

It would be a mistake to ascribe the paralysis of Coleridge's powers of

constructive imagination exclusively to laudanum. Rather the resort to

narcotics and the inability to control his creative faculty are alike

symptoms of a temperamental malady which had its roots in his nature

close to the seat of that special faculty. Under a favorable conjunction

of outward circumstance and inward state, imagination came; it possessed

him, and he labored in it, happily. Afterwards he could revise what he

had shaped, analyze it philosophically, perfect some details of it, but

he could not proceed in the creative act after the inspiration had left

him. His own description of his nature--"_indolence capable of

energies_"--is accurate as far as it goes. The opium, resorted to often,

no doubt, to quicken the dreams in his brain as well as to relieve his

bodily suffering, helped to enfeeble his will; but the "indolence" was

in him before he became addicted to opium, and he was never "capable of

energies" at the call of duty, but only at the call of his "shaping

spirit," over whose coming and going he had no control.

Poetically it is perhaps as well. Had he been like his friend Wordsworth

in strength and steadiness of purpose--which is to suppose him another

nature than he was--his life would have been happier and more edifying,

but he would hardly have given us anything better than "Christabel" and

"The Ancient Mariner." Romantic poetry of the higher type is essentially

the creature of mood. Even Wordsworth's long and conscientious labors

produced but a small bulk of poetry of this character, amid dreary

reaches of uninspired preaching. Coleridge waited--in despondency often,

in self-upbraidings, in the temporary deception of opium dreams with

their consequent misery--for the return of the spirit; and it did not

come.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: From the lines addressed to Wordsworth after hearing him

read "The Prelude," in 1807.]

II. COLERIDGE'S POEMS.

"THE ANCIENT MARINER"

"The Ancient Mariner" was first printed in the first edition of "Lyrical

Ballads," 1798, again with considerable changes in the second edition,

1800, and without further significant change in the editions of 1802 and

1805. Its fifth appearance was in "Sibylline Leaves," 1817, again with

some important changes, and the addition of the Latin motto and the

marginal gloss. In the "Poetical Works," 1828, and again in the

"Poetical Works," 1829, the poem appeared in its final form as we now

have it,--differing very little from the form it had in "Sibylline

Leaves." One or two significant minor changes will be mentioned in the

notes.

Coleridge's own account of the genesis of the poem, given in the

_Biographia Literaria_ nearly twenty years later, is interesting.

"During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our

conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry,

the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence

to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty

by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which

accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset, diffused over a

known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability

of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested

itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might

be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to

be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to

consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of

such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing

them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being

who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself

under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be

chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such

as will be found in every village and its vicinity where there is a

meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when

they present themselves.

"In this idea originated the 'Lyrical Ballads'; in which it was agreed

that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters

supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our

inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to

procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of

disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr.

Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object,

to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a

feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention

from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the wonders and

loveliness of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for

which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude,

we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither

feel nor understand.

"With this view I wrote 'The Ancient Mariner,' and was preparing, among

other poems, 'The Dark Ladie,' and the 'Christabel,' in which I should

have more nearly realized my ideal than I had done in my first attempt.

But Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and

the number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead

of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous

matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own

character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction which is

characteristic of his genius [among them the "Lines composed a few miles

above Tintern Abbey"]. In this form the 'Lyrical Ballads' were

published."

Lyrical they hardly were, in any current meaning of that word; they were

narrative. But they were ballads as the word was then understood. The

two cardinal points of poetry that Coleridge says they had in view in

this partnership production were both believed to be special marks of

the ballad; the charm of homeliness and simplicity, and the spell of the

supernatural and romantic. Bishop Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English

Poetry," 1765, had created a taste for the traditional poetry of humble

folk. Spreading to Germany and uniting there with the sentimental

sensationalism of the eighteenth century, this taste found expression in

Burger's "Lenore," which in turn had a powerful influence in England,

five distinct translations of it appearing in 1796. Of the distinction

so much insisted on by later analysts of the true popular ballad--its

communal origin, its impersonality, its freedom from adornment, its lack

of conscious art--the Englishman of Coleridge's time took no account.

"The Ancient Mariner" is not a ballad in the sense in which "Sir Patrick

Spens" or "Young Waters" is a ballad. It is in the highest degree a work

of conscious and individual art. It is rather to be classed, like

"Christabel," as a romance. But it was conceived and written under the

influence of the "ballad revival," and bears many marks of that

influence both in its general structure and in its details of

workmanship.

Much of the archaic diction and antique spelling, as well as the ruder

grotesquerie, that in the first edition proclaimed its relation to the

pseudo-balladry of the time disappeared in the later editions. But the

archaisms, the "unpoetical" diction, and especially the disregard of

tense coherence in the poem as we now have it, contribute greatly to the

atmosphere of romance--as of a story removed alike from the commonplace

experience of every day and from familiar literary conventions--which it

was Coleridge's intention to produce. By a few devotional

ejaculations--"Heaven's Mother send us grace!" "To Mary Queen the praise

be given!"--we are made to feel that the Ancient Mariner lived before

the Reformation, in the ages of wonder and faith. Repetition, as in many

stanzas of Part IV., is a device caught from the folk-ballad and

modified to produce the effect of a spell, which is so strong a mark of

the poem. The abrupt opening, the unannounced transitions in dialogue,

the omission of all but the vital incidents of the story, all belong to

the ballad style. The verse form is what is known as the ballad stanza

(stanza of four lines--a line of four accents followed by one of three,

the second and fourth lines riming) variously extended and modified to

suit the mood of the passage. The prose summary in the form of a

marginal gloss, first added in the edition of 1817, is a practice taken

from early printed books, but not from balladry, which is normally oral.

Of the literary qualities of the poem much might be said, but I call

attention here to but two: the organic structure of the story and the

character of the imagery, two important aspects of creative imagination.

The seven parts are seven stages of the narrative, each, except the

last, closing with a reference to the Mariner's sin. The story proceeds

like the successive acts of a play. In Part I. the deed is committed; in

Part II. the punishment begins; in Part III. the punishment reaches its

climax. Part IV. brings the "turn"; in the crisis of his sufferings

comes the consciousness of fellowship with other creatures and

repentance for his cruelty. Parts V. and VI. relate his penance begun,

and his return by supernatural agencies to the world of human

fellowship; and Part VII. brings us back to the opening scene, closing

the whole with a moral. The moral is so plainly set forth that one

wonders how Mrs. Barbauld could ever have complained, as Coleridge tells

us she did, that the poem "had no moral." His reply is worth recording:

"I told her that in my opinion the poem had too much; and that the only,

or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral

sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a

work of such pure imagination. It ought to have had no more moral than

the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by

the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie

starts up, and says he _must_ kill the aforesaid merchant, because one

of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son."

But the poet of 1798 knew better than the metaphysician of 1830. The

moral is as essential a part of the whole poem as moral consciousness is

of man; without it the poem would be without the coherence of human

interest which alone can secure for "these shadows of imagination"

"poetic faith." The moral, really, is suffused throughout the work, is

the blood of its being; that it should be formulated at the close is

quite in accord with the simplicity which marked the whole conception of

the "Lyrical Ballads," and is moreover perfectly harmonious with the

spirit of the poem itself. There have been poets who seemed to be

without the moral sense, and who have written poetry quite free from any

moral, like Poe and his landscape visions, but wonderful as they are,

they are abnormal, and are less great as they are less completely human.

It may be that Wordsworth, as one infers from recollections of the

composition of the poem, suggested the moral plot; but if so it entered

at once and completely into Coleridge's imagination and governed the

shaping of the poem from the start. In all the very considerable changes

and omissions that the poem underwent after it was first printed, there

was none that either retrenched from or added to the moral

interpretation of the tale.

Of its imagery the most evident characteristic is what may be called the

anthropomorphic treatment of nature. This, although in accord with

modern conceptions of primitive culture, is not at all a mark of the

popular ballad. Sun, and moon, and storm-wind, and ocean are in

folk-song sun and moon and wind and water and nothing more; but in "The

Ancient Mariner" they are living beings.

"And now the Storm-blast came, and he

Was tyrannous and strong:

He struck with his o'ertaking wings,

And chased us south along."

"And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,

(Heaven's Mother send us grace!)

As if through a dungeon-grate he peered

With broad and burning face."

"Still as a slave before his lord,

The ocean hath no blast;

His great bright eye most silently

Up to the Moon is cast--

"If he may know which way to go;

For she guides him smooth or grim.

See, brother, see! how graciously

She looketh down on him."

This is the most noticeable of the "modifying colours of imagination"

in "The Ancient Mariner." The practice might be classed as a sort of

personification; but how utterly different in its effect from the

conventional "literary" personifications of the eighteenth century--of

Gray in the "Elegy," for instance! Grandeur, and Envy, and Honour, in

that admirable poem, are not real persons to the imagination; the

abstraction remains an abstraction. But in Coleridge's poem all nature

is alive with the life of men. Other elements of "that synthetic and

magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of

imagination," and which blends "the idea with the image" and "the sense

of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects" will be felt as

the poem is studied.

Wordsworth related in after years that the suggestion for the poem came

from a dream of a phantom ship told to Coleridge by a friend, and that

he (Wordsworth) proposed the shooting of the albatross, the revenge of

the "tutelary spirits," and the "navigation of the ship by the dead

men," and contributed the fourth stanza of the poem and the last two

lines of the first stanza of Part IV. He had been reading Shelvocke's

"Voyages," a book in which he had found a description of albatrosses as

they are seen in far southern waters. Other reading that may have

suggested some of the scenery is described in the "Notes" to the Globe

edition of Coleridge's poems. There are also passages and situations in

the last two acts of Wordsworth's play, "The Borderers," which Coleridge

read with great admiration in the summer of 1797, that have evident

kinship with "The Ancient Mariner," and Wordsworth's "Peter Bell"

(composed at Alfoxden, but printed many years later) suggests what the

story might have become if Coleridge instead of Wordsworth had withdrawn

from collaboration.

"CHRISTABEL" AND "KUBLA KHAN"

"Christabel" and "Kubla Khan" were first printed in 1816, in a pamphlet

along with "The Pains of Sleep," a sort of contrast to "Kubla Khan"

composed in 1803. In the Preface to this pamphlet Coleridge informs us

that the first part of "Christabel" was written at Stowey in 1797 and

the second part at Keswick, Cumberland, in 1800. The poem was intended

originally for the "Lyrical Ballads," and it was with the hope of

finishing it for the second edition that Coleridge took it up again in

the fall of 1800. There is a good deal of uncertainty as to just how

much of the work was done at that time. In two letters of that period he

speaks of it as "running up to 1300 lines," and "swelled into a poem of

1400 lines," so that it is no longer suitable for the "Lyrical Ballads";

but hardly half of this amount was printed in the 1816 pamphlet or has

ever been found since. One suspects that already in 1800 dreams and

projects had begun to be confounded with performance. In the latter of

the two letters mentioned above he relates how his "verse-making

faculties returned" to him, after long and unsuccessful struggles with

"barrenness" and deep "dejection," as the result of drinking, "at the

house of a neighbouring clergyman, ... so much wine, that I found some

effort and dexterity requisite to balance myself on the hither edge of

sobriety." On the whole, it seems probable that "Christabel" owes little

to the forced efforts of his first year in the Lake country. Like most

of the other poems in this volume, it is a product of the great year at

Stowey. He himself told a friend in later years: "I had the whole of the

two cantos in my mind before I began it," adding very truly, "certainly

the first canto is more perfect, has more of the true wild weird spirit

than the last."

Down to the close of his life he dreamed of finishing this work. He

amused his listeners at Highgate with a continuation of the plot; and

in 1833 he declared that if he "were perfectly free from vexation and

were in the _ad libitum_ hearing of fine music" he could yet finish

"Christabel," "for I have, as I always had, the whole plan entire from

beginning to end in my mind; but I fear I could not carry on with equal

success the execution of the idea." Wordsworth had a different

recollection. He told Coleridge's nephew in 1836 that he did not think

Coleridge "had ever conceived, in his own mind, any definite plan for

it; that the poem had been composed while they were in habits of daily

intercourse, and almost in his presence, and when there was the most

unreserved intercourse between them as to all their literary projects

and productions, and he had never heard from him any plan for finishing

it"; and added, what is fully borne out by a study of Coleridge's life:

"schemes of this sort passed rapidly and vividly through his mind, and

so impressed him, that he often fancied he had arranged things, which

really, and upon trial, proved to be mere embryos."

"The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower

Unfinished must remain,"

wrote Longfellow, alluding to "The Dolliver Romance" that Hawthorne left

incomplete at his death. There is strong kinship, moral and artistic,

between Coleridge and Hawthorne; both believed that the heart is more

than the head, and neither could force his imagination to work under

unfavorable conditions. But Hawthorne's failure of imagination came at

the end of a fruitful and consistent career, and his life failed with

it; in Coleridge the poet died half a lifetime before the man, and left

the man--the preacher and philosopher--to lament his loss.

Whether or not Coleridge had the story complete in his mind, what we

have is a fragment, and does not enable us to divine, as some broken

statues do, the plan of the whole. What it gives us is the romantic

mood, the sense of "witchery by daylight," and this it does more

hauntingly than anything else in the English language. It is a series

of magical and unforgetable pictures. It owes a good deal to the old

verse romances and ballads that so impressed the imagination in those

days of the mediaeval revival, but it was itself a far stronger

influence. It operated as an original force, both by its form and by its

spirit, upon the poetic imagination of the first half of the nineteenth

century more widely and deeply than the work of any other man, Burns and

Keats not excepted. Scott heard it read from manuscript, and the "Lay of

the Last Minstrel," with the series of verse romances that followed, may

almost be called a result of that reading; the verse form of Scott's

romances certainly is. Poe's poetry is as far as the poles removed from

Scott's; yet a close study of Poe's work shows the influence of

"Christabel" to be even deeper here than in the "Lay of the Last

Minstrel."

Coleridge was fully aware of a special power, both of imagination and of

verse-music, in the poem. His attempts to complete it in 1800 brought

persistently to his mind the project of a philosophy of poetry, and

especially of this poem, as we may infer from a letter to Poole in

March, 1801: "I shall ... immediately publish my 'Christabel,' with two

essays annexed to it, on the 'Preternatural' and on 'Metre.'" When the

two cantos were at last printed in 1816, Coleridge wrote in the Preface:

"The metre of the 'Christabel' is not, properly speaking, irregular,

though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle: namely,

that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the

latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will

be found to be only four. Nevertheless this occasional variation in

number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of

convenience, but in correspondence with some transition, in the nature

of the imagery or passion." This is not to be taken quite literally. The

accentual principle was assuredly nothing new in English verse, and

syllable-counting, though introduced by Chaucer, had to be reintroduced

by the Renaissance poets and did not become an unquestioned convention

till the latter part of the seventeenth century. But the return to free

accentual verse in the "Christabel" was an innovation at the beginning

of the nineteenth century. It is to be noted, too, that there are lines

of three and even of two accents in Part I.

In chap. XV. of the _Biographia Literaria_, in a list of the "specific

symptoms of poetic power" in Shakespeare's early work, Coleridge places

first "the perfect sweetness of the versification; its adaptation to the

subject; and the power displayed in varying the march of the words....

The sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift

of imagination; and this, together with the power of reducing multitude

into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some one

predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but can

never be learnt. It is in these that _Poeta nascitur non fit_."

"Kubla Khan" is the remembered fragment of a dream. All that we know

about it is contained in the note Coleridge prefixed to it in the

pamphlet of 1816. In the summer of 1798 (Coleridge says 1797, but this

seems to have been a slip of his memory[1]) "the author, then in ill

health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton,

on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a

slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects

of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading

the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in 'Purchas's

Pilgrimage': 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a

stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were

inclosed with a wall.' The author continued for about three hours in a

profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he

has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than

from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called

composition in which all the images rose up before him as _things_,

with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any

sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself

to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink,

and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here

preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on

business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his

return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification,

that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the

general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or

ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the

images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but,

alas! without the after restoration of the latter!"

Opinion will ever vary as to its poetic worth. Coleridge himself

professed to consider it "rather as a psychological curiosity" than as a

thing "of any supposed _poetic_ merits"; to Lamb he repeated it "so

enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers

into any parlour when he sings or says it," and it has been a sort of

touchstone of romantic taste ever since. It supremely illustrates that

"sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it," which the

poet declared to be a gift of the imagination that can never be learnt.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: See notes to this poem in the Globe edition, and E.H.

Coleridge's "Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge," Vol. I, p. 245, note.]

"FRANCE: AN ODE"

This ode was written in February, 1798, and first printed in the

"Morning Post" for April 16 of that year, under the significant title of

"Recantation." In the autumn it was printed with its present title in a

pamphlet together with "Fears in Solitude," another political poem, and

"Frost at Midnight," a poem on his infant child. In October, 1802, it

was reprinted in the "Post" with a prose "Argument" (see notes), less

necessary for the readers of that time than it may be now. Coleridge,

like Wordsworth, had welcomed the French Revolution as ushering in an

era of light and love in human society; both, though Wordsworth more

profoundly, had been depressed by the excesses of 1793-4, and by the

lust of conquest which became more and more evident under the Directory;

and when at last in February, 1798, the French armies invaded

Switzerland, the ancient sacred home of liberty in Europe, Coleridge

"recanted" in this ode.

Political poetry is likely to lose its power with the passing of the

events and passions that give it birth; it retains its power just in

proportion as it is built on lasting and universal interests of the

heart of man. That "France" has retained its position as one of the

great odes of the English language is due not only to the loftiness of

its thought and the splendor of its imagery, but even more to the fact

that it turns from the political excitement of the hour to the grandeur

and beauty of nature and to those aspirations and ideals whose home is

"in the heart of man."

"LOVE"

From the second edition of "Lyrical Ballads," 1800. It was planned by

Coleridge as an introduction to the ballad of "The Dark Ladie," which

was never completed, but of which some fifteen stanzas were printed in

the 1834 edition of his "Poetical Works." Its composition cannot be

accurately dated. It is conceived in the general spirit of the ballads

but is simpler, more purely a poem of sentiment, than either

"Christabel" or "The Ancient Mariner," and makes no use of the

supernatural. Its simplicity and absolute purity of tone are, however,

something more than a negative virtue. Coleridge himself declared of it

and "The Ancient Mariner" that they might be excelled, but could not be

imitated.

"DEJECTION: AN ODE"

This ode was written in April, 1802, at a time when, after sickness,

opium, domestic unhappiness and the consequent paralysis of his poetic

faculty had driven him to seek distraction in the study of metaphysics,

he made a visit to Wordsworth at Dove Cottage and in that vitalizing

presence experienced a brief return of his powers--enough to give

wonderful expression to perhaps the saddest thoughts that ever visited

ungoverned genius. The earliest known form of the poem, preserved in a

letter to W. Sotheby of July 19, 1802, shows (what is apparent enough to

one familiar with the relations existing between the two poets) that it

was conceived as a letter to Wordsworth, who is addressed in this

earliest version as "Dearest Poet," "Wordsworth," and "William." It was

first printed in the "Morning Post" for October 4, 1802, with "Edmund"

for Wordsworth's name and with some omissions, but with the strong

personal feeling undiminished; and in its present form (that is, with

the parts omitted in the 1802 print restored, but with the substitution

of "Lady" for "Edmund" and with numerous other omissions and changes,

notably in the last stanza, all tending to depersonalize the poem) in

"Sibylline Leaves," 1816. In 1810 a hint given by Wordsworth, with the

best intentions, to a third person concerning the real nature of

Coleridge's troubles, was reported, or rather misreported, to Coleridge,

and an estrangement fraught with deep grief to both ensued. The breach

was healed, as much as such wounds may be, by the mediation of a common

friend in 1812; but the old glad and fruitful fellowship could never be

restored. Coleridge wrote to Poole, February 13, 1813: "A reconciliation

has taken place, but the _feeling_, which I had previous to that moment,

... that, I fear, never can return. All outward actions, all inward

wishes, all thoughts and admirations will be the same--_are_ the same,

but--aye, there remains an immedicable _But_."

"Dejection" is distinguished from the other poems in this volume by

containing, along with its wonderful interpretation of outward nature

into harmony with his own else unutterable sadness, Coleridge's--and

perhaps all poets'--essential philosophy of poetry. It was natural that

the metaphysics in which he had been immersed should color his thought;

but literature affords few if any instances of metaphysics so

transformed into poetry in the crucible of feeling as is afforded by

stanza V. of this ode.

"YOUTH AND AGE" AND "WORK WITHOUT HOPE"

In these two poems Coleridge has left a record of the sadness of a life

lived

"In darkness, with the light of youth gone out,"

or returning only in glimpses that showed what he had lost. In these

latter years he was busy enough in an incoherent, visionary fashion, and

did even write and publish (though in characteristically fragmentary

form) a work that made a great impression on young men in the second

quarter of the century, his "Aids to Reflection"; but his activity was

philosophical and theological, not poetic, and even in that field the

product fell far short of his plans and promises. The inner and real

life of the man is revealed, now as always, in his poetry; and amidst

what profound dejection it glimmers on, these two brief poems show.

"Youth and Age" was written in 1823--"an _air_ that whizzed ... right

across the diameter of my brain ... over the summit of Quantock at

earliest dawn just between the nightingale that I stopt to hear in the

copse at the foot of Quantock, and the first sky-lark that was a

song-fountain, dashing up and sparkling to the ear's eye, ... out of

sight, over the cornfields on the descent of the mountain on the other

side--out of sight, tho' twice I beheld its mute shoot downward in the

sunshine like a falling star of silver"--so he described the conception

of the poem in the original MS., printed by Mr. Campbell in the Notes to

the Globe edition. It was a flash of poignant memory of the old days at

Stowey. The first thirty-eight lines were printed in 1828, and the whole

poem (including the last six lines, which were not in the original

draft) in 1834.

"Work Without Hope" was written, Coleridge says, "on the 21st February,

1827," and was first printed in 1828.

THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

IN SEVEN PARTS

Facile credo, plures esse Naturas invisibiles quam visibiles in rerum

universitate. Sed horum omnium familiam quis nobis enarrabit? et gradus

et cognationes et discrimina et singulorum munera? Quid agunt? quae loca

habitant? Harum rerum notitiam semper ambivit ingenium humanum, nunquam

attigit. Juvat, interea, non diffiteor, quandoque in animo, tanquam in

tabulâ, majoris et melioris mundi imaginem contemplari: ne mens

assuefacta hodiernae vitae minutiis se contrahat nimis, et tota subsidat

in pusillas cogitationes. Sed veritati interea invigilandum est,

modusque servandus, ut certa ab incertis, diem a nocte, distinguamus--T.

BURNET, _Archaeol. Phil_, p. 68.

PART I

[Sidenote: An ancient Mariner meeteth three Gallants bidden to a

wedding-feast, and detaineth one.]

It is an ancient Mariner,

And he stoppeth one of three.

"By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,

Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

The bridegroom's doors are opened wide, 5

And I am next of kin;

The guests are met, the feast is set:

May'st hear the merry din."

He holds him with his skinny hand,

"There was a ship," quoth he. 10

"Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!"

Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

[Sidenote: The Wedding-Guest is spellbound by the eye of the old

seafaring man, and constrained to hear his tale.]

He holds him with his glittering eye--

The Wedding-Guest stood still,

And listens like a three years' child: 15

The Mariner hath his will.

The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:

He cannot choose but hear;

And thus spake on that ancient man,

The bright-eyed Mariner. 20

"The ship was cheered, the harbor cleared,

Merrily did we drop

Below the kirk, below the hill,

Below the lighthouse top.

[Sidenote: The Mariner tells how the ship sailed southward with a good

wind and fair weather, till it reached the Line.]

The sun came up upon the left, 25

Out of the sea came he!

And he shone bright, and on the right

Went down into the sea.

Higher and higher every day,

Till over the mast at noon--" 30

The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,

For he heard the loud bassoon.

[Sidenote: The Wedding-Guest heareth the bridal music; but the Mariner

continueth his tale.]

The bride hath paced into the hall,

Red as a rose is she;

Nodding their heads before her goes 35

The merry minstrelsy.

The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,

Yet he cannot choose but hear;

And thus spake on that ancient man,

The bright-eyed Mariner. 40

[Sidenote: The ship driven by a storm toward the south pole.]

"And now the Storm-blast came, and he

Was tyrannous and strong:

He struck with his o'ertaking wings,

And chased us south along.

With sloping masts and dipping prow, 45

As who pursued with yell and blow

Still treads the shadow of his foe,

And forward bends his head,

The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,

And southward aye we fled. 50

And now there came both mist and snow,

And it grew wondrous cold:

And ice, mast-high, came floating by,

As green as emerald.

[Sidenote: The land of ice, and of fearful sounds where no living thing

was to be seen.]

And through the drifts the snowy clifts 55

Did send a dismal sheen:

Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken--

The ice was all between.

The ice was here, the ice was there,

The ice was all around: 60

It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,

Like noises in a swound!

[Sidenote: Till a great sea-bird, called the Albatross, came through the

snow-fog, and was received with great joy and hospitality.]

At length did cross an Albatross,

Thorough the fog it came;

As if it had been a Christian soul, 65

We hailed it in God's name.

It ate the food it ne'er had eat,

And round and round it flew.

The ice did split with a thunder-fit;

The helmsman steered us through! 70

[Sidenote: And lo! the Albatross proveth a bird of good omen, and

followeth the ship as it returned northward through fog and floating

ice.]

And a good south wind sprung up behind;

The Albatross did follow,

And every day, for food or play,

Came to the mariners' hollo!

In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud, 75

It perched for vespers nine;

Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,

Glimmered the white moon-shine."

[Sidenote: The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of

good omen.]

"God save thee, ancient Mariner!

From the fiends, that plague thee thus!-- 80

Why look'st thou so?"--"With my cross-bow

I shot the Albatross.