Poems of Coleridge by Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
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Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons >> Poems of Coleridge
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Most of his best criticism circles around Shakespeare; and he took
Shakespeare almost frankly in the place of Nature, or of poetry. He
affirms, "Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate
workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of
place." This granted (and to Coleridge it is essential that it should be
granted, for in less than the infinite he cannot find space in which to use
his wings freely) he has only to choose and define, to discover and to
illuminate. In the "myriad-minded man," in his "oceanic mind," he finds all
the material that he needs for the making of a complete aesthetics. Nothing
with Coleridge ever came to completion; but we have only to turn over the
pages about Shakespeare, to come upon fragments worth more than anyone
else's finished work. I find the whole secret of Shakespeare's way of
writing in these sentences: "Shakespeare's intellectual action is wholly
unlike that of Ben Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher. The latter see the
totality of a sentence or passage, and then project it entire. Shakespeare
goes on creating, and evolving B out of A, and C out of B, and so on, just
as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems
forever twisting and untwisting its own strength. "And here are a few
axioms: 'The grandest efforts of poetry are where the imagination is called
forth, not to produce a distinct form, but a strong working of the mind';
or, in other words, "The power of poetry is, by a single word perhaps, to
instill that energy into the mind which compels the imagination to produce
the picture." "Poetry is the identity of all other knowledges," "the
blossom and fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human
passions, emotions, language." "Verse is in itself a music, and the natural
symbol of that union of passion with thought and pleasure, which
constitutes the essence of all poetry "; "a more than usual state of
emotion, with more than usual order," as he has elsewhere defined it. And,
in one of his spoken counsels, he says: "I wish our clever young poets
would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose--
words in their best order; poetry--the best words in the best order."
Unlike most creative critics, or most critics who were creative artists in
another medium, Coleridge, when he was writing criticism, wrote it wholly
for its own sake, almost as if it were a science. His prose is rarely of
the finest quality as prose writing. Here and there he can strike out a
phrase at red-heat, as when he christens Shakespeare "the one Proteus of
the fire and flood"; or he can elaborate subtly, as when he notes the
judgment of Shakespeare, observable in every scene of the "Tempest," "still
preparing, still inviting, and still gratifying, like a finished piece of
music"; or he can strike us with the wit of the pure intellect, as when he
condemns certain work for being "as trivial in thought and yet enigmatic in
expression, as if Echo and the Sphinx had laid their heads together to
construct it." But for the most part it is a kind of thinking aloud, and
the form is wholly lost in the pursuit of ideas. With his love for the
absolute, why is it that he does not seek after an absolute in words
considered as style, as well as in words considered as the expression of
thought? In his finest verse Coleridge has the finest style perhaps in
English; but his prose is never quite reduced to order from its tumultuous
amplitude or its snake-like involution. Is it that he values it only as a
medium, not as an art? His art is verse, and this he dreads, because of its
too mortal closeness to his heart; the prose is a means to an end, not an
end in itself.
The poetry of Coleridge, though it is closely interwoven with the
circumstances of his life, is rarely made directly out of those
circumstances. To some extent this is no doubt explained by a fact to which
he often refers in his letters, and which, in his own opinion, hindered him
not only from writing about himself in verse, but from writing verse at
all. "As to myself," he writes in 1802, "all my poetic genius ... is gone,"
and he attributes it "to my long and exceedingly severe metaphysical
investigations, and these partly to ill-health, and partly to private
afflictions which rendered any subjects, immediately connected with
feeling, a source of pain and disquiet to me." In 1818 he writes: "Poetry
is out of the question. The attempt would only hurry me into that sphere of
acute feelings from which abstruse research, the mother of self-oblivion,
presents an asylum." But theory worked with a natural tendency in keeping
him for the most part away from any attempt to put his personal emotions
into verse. "A sound promise of genius," he considered, "is the choice of
subjects very remote from the private interests and circumstances of the
writer himself." With only a few exceptions, the wholly personal poems,
those actually written under a shock of emotion, are vague, generalized,
turned into a kind of literature. The success of such a poem as the almost
distressingly personal "Ode on Dejection" comes from the fact that
Coleridge has been able to project his personal feeling into an outward
image, which becomes to him the type of dejection; he can look at it as at
one of his dreams which become things; he can sympathize with it as he
could never sympathize with his own undeserving self. And thus one stanza,
perhaps the finest as poetry, becomes the biography of his soul:
"There was a time when, though my path was rough,
This joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:
For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine
But now afflictions bow me down to earth:
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth;
But oh! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination.
For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient all I can,
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man--
This was my sole resource, my only plan:
Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul."
Elsewhere, in personal poems like "Frost at Midnight," and "Fears in
Solitude," all the value of the poem comes from the delicate sensations of
natural things which mean so much more to us, whether or not they did to
him, than the strictly personal part of the matter. You feel that there he
is only using the quite awake part of himself, which is not the essential
one. He requires, first of all, to be disinterested, or at least not
overcome by emotion; to be without passion but that of abstract beauty, in
Nature, or in idea; and then to sink into a quiet lucid sleep, in which his
genius came to him like some attendant spirit.
In the life and art of Coleridge, the hours of sleep seem to have been
almost more important than the waking hours. "My dreams became the
substance of my life," he writes, just after the composition of that
terrible poem on "The Pains of Sleep," which is at once an outcry of agony,
and a yet more disturbing vision of the sufferer with his fingers on his
own pulse, his eyes fixed on his own hardly awakened eyes in the mirror. In
an earlier letter, written at a time when he is trying to solve the problem
of the five senses, he notes: "The sleep which I have is made up of ideas
so connected, and so little different from the operations of reason, that
it does not afford me the due refreshment." To Coleridge, with the help of
opium, hardly required, indeed, there was no conscious division between day
and night, between not only dreams and intuitions, but dreams and pure
reason. And we find him, in almost all his great poems, frankly taking not
only his substance but his manner from dreams, as he dramatizes them after
a logic and a passion of their own. His technique is the transposition into
his waking hours of the unconscious technique of dreams. It is a kind of
verified inspiration, something which came and went, and was as little to
be relied upon as the inspiration itself. On one side it was an exact
science, but on the other a heavenly visitation. Count and balance
syllables, work out an addition of the feet in the verse by the foot-rule,
and you will seem to have traced every miracle back to its root in a
natural product. Only, something, that is, everything, will have escaped
you. As well dissect a corpse to find out the principle of life. That
elusive something, that spirit, will be what distinguishes Coleridge's
finest verse from the verse of, well, perhaps of every conscious artist in
our language. For it is not, as in Blake, literally unconscious, and
wavering on every breath of that unseen wind on which it floats to us; it
is faultless; it is itself the wind which directs it, it steers its way on
the wind, like a seagull poised between sky and sea, and turning on its
wings as upon shifted sails.
This inspiration comes upon Coleridge suddenly, without warning, in the
first uncertain sketch of "Lewti," written at twenty-two; and then it
leaves him, without warning, until the great year 1797, three years later,
when "Christabel" and "The Ancient Mariner" are begun. Before and after,
Coleridge is seen trying to write like Bowles, like Wordsworth, like
Southey, perhaps, to attain "that impetuosity of transition and that
precipitancy of fancy and feeling, which are the _essential_ qualities
of the sublimer Ode," and which he fondly fancies that he has attained in
the "Ode on the Departing Year," with its one good line, taken out of his
note-book. But here, in "Lewti," he has his style, his lucid and liquid
melody, his imagery of moving light and the faintly veiled transparency of
air, his vague, wildly romantic subject matter, coming from no one knows
where, meaning one hardly knows what; but already a magic, an incantation.
"Lewti" is a sort of preliminary study for "Kubla Khan"; it, too, has all
the imagery of a dream, with a breathlessness and awed hush, as of one not
yet accustomed to be at home in dreams.
"Kubla Khan," which was literally composed in sleep, comes nearer than any
other existing poem to that ideal of lyric poetry which has only lately
been systematized by theorists like Mallarme. It has just enough meaning to
give it bodily existence; otherwise it would be disembodied music. It seems
to hover in the air, like one of the island enchantments of Prospero. It is
music not made with hands, and the words seem, as they literally were,
remembered. "All the images," said Coleridge, "rose up before me as
_things_, with a parallel production of the correspondent
expressions." Lamb, who tells us how Coleridge repeated it "so enchantingly
that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into my parlour
when he says or sings it to me," doubted whether it would "bear daylight."
It seemed to him that such witchcraft could hardly outlast the night. It
has outlasted the century, and may still be used as a touchstone; it will
determine the poetic value of any lyric poem which you place beside it.
Take as many poems as you please, and let them have all the merits you
please, their ultimate merit as poetry will lie in the degree of their
approach to the exact, unconscious, inevitable balance of qualities in the
poetic art of "Kubla Khan."
In "The Ancient Mariner," which it seems probable was composed before, and
not after "Kubla Khan," as Coleridge's date would have us suppose, a new
supernaturalism comes into poetry, which, for the first time, accepted the
whole responsibility of dreams. The impossible, frankly accepted, with its
own strict, inverted logic; the creation of a new atmosphere, outside the
known world, which becomes as real as the air about us, and yet never loses
its strangeness; the shiver that comes to us, as it came to the wedding-
guest, from the simple good faith of the teller; here is a whole new
creation, in subject, mood, and technique. Here, as in "Kubla Khan,"
Coleridge saw the images "as _things_"; only a mind so overshadowed by
dreams, and so easily able to carry on his sleep awake, could have done so;
and, with such a mind, "that willing suspension of disbelief for a moment,
which constitutes poetic faith," was literally forced upon him. "The
excellence aimed at," says Coleridge, "was to consist in the interesting of
the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally
accompany such situations," those produced by supernatural agency,
"supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human
being who, from whatever sense of delusion, has at any time believed
himself under supernatural agency." To Coleridge, whatever appealed vitally
to his imagination was real; and he defended his belief philosophically,
disbelieving from conviction in that sharp marking off of real from
imaginary which is part of the ordinary attitude of man in the presence of
mystery.
It must not be forgotten that Coleridge is never fantastic. The fantastic
is a playing with the imagination, and Coleridge respects it. His intellect
goes always easily as far as his imagination will carry it, and does not
stop by the way to play tricks upon its bearer. Hence the conviction which
he brings with him when he tells us the impossible. And then his style, in
its ardent and luminous simplicity, flexible to every bend of the spirit
which it clothes with flesh, helps him in the idiomatic translation of
dreams. The visions of Swedenborg are literal translations of the
imagination, and need to be retranslated. Coleridge is equally faithful to
the thing seen and to the laws of that new world into which he has
transposed it.
"The Ancient Mariner" is the most sustained piece of imagination in the
whole of English poetry; and it has almost every definable merit of
imaginative narrative. It is the only poem I know which is all point and
yet all poetry; because, I suppose, the point is really a point of mystery.
It is full of simple, daily emotion, transported, by an awful power of
sight, to which the limits of reality are no barrier, into an unknown sea
and air; it is realized throughout the whole of its ghastly and marvellous
happenings; and there is in the narrative an ease, a buoyancy almost, which
I can only compare with the music of Mozart, extracting its sweetness from
the stuff of tragedy; it presents to us the utmost physical and spiritual
horror, not only without disgust, but with an alluring beauty. But in
"Christabel," in the first part especially, we find a quality which goes
almost beyond these definable merits. There is in it a literal spell, not
acting along any logical lines, not attacking the nerves, not terrifying,
not intoxicating, but like a slow, enveloping mist, which blots out the
real world, and leaves us unchilled by any "airs from heaven or blasts from
hell," but in the native air of some middle region. In these two or three
brief hours of his power out of a lifetime, Coleridge is literally a
wizard. People have wanted to know what "Christabel" means, and how it was
to have ended, and whether Geraldine was a vampire (as I am inclined to
think) or had eyes in her breasts (as Shelley thought). They have wondered
that a poem so transparent in every line should be, as a whole, the most
enigmatical in English. But does it matter very much whether "Christabel"
means this or that, and whether Coleridge himself knew, as he said, how it
was to end, or whether, as Wordsworth declared, he had never decided? It
seems to me that Coleridge was fundamentally right when he said of the
"Ancient Mariner," "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." The "Ancient Mariner,"
if we take its moral meaning too seriously, comes near to being an
allegory. "Christabel," as it stands, is a piece of pure witchcraft,
needing no further explanation than the fact of its existence.
Rossetti called Coleridge the Turner of poets, and indeed there is in
Coleridge an aerial glitter which we find in no other poet, and in Turner
only among painters. With him colour is always melted in atmosphere, which
it shines through like fire within a crystal. It is liquid colour, the dew
on flowers, or a mist of rain in bright sunshine. His images are for the
most part derived from water, sky, the changes of weather, shadows of
things rather than things themselves, and usually mental reflections of
them. "A poet ought not to pick Nature's pocket," he said, and it is for
colour and sound, in their most delicate forms, that he goes to natural
things. He hears
"the merry nightingale
That crowds and hurries and precipitates
With fast thick warble his delicious notes;"
and an ecstasy comes to him out of that natural music which is almost like
that of his own imagination. Only music or strange effects of light can
carry him swiftly enough out of himself, in the presence of visible or
audible things, for that really poetic ecstasy. Then all his languor drops
off from him, like a clogging garment.
The first personal merit which appears in his almost wholly valueless early
work is a sense of colour. In a poem written at twenty-one he sees Fancy
"Bathed in rich amber-glowing floods of light,"
and next year the same colour reappears, more expressively, in a cloud,
"wholly bright,
With a rich and amber light."
The two women in "The Two Graves," during a momentous pause, are found
discussing whether the rays of the sun are green or amber; a valley is
"Tinged yellow with the rich departing light;"
seen through corn at evening,
"The level sunshine glimmers with green light;"
and there is the carefully observed
"western sky
And its peculiar tint of yellow green."
"The Ancient Mariner" is full of images of light and luminous colour in sky
and sea; Glycine's song in "Zapolya" is the most glittering poem in our
language, with a soft glitter like that of light seen through water. And he
is continually endeavouring, as later poets have done on a more deliberate
theory, to suffuse sound with colour or make colours literally a form of
music; as in an early poem
"Where melodies round honey-dropping flowers,
Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,
Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untamed wing."
With him, as with some of them, there is something pathological in this
sensitiveness, and in a letter written in 180O he says: "For the last month
I have been trembling on through sands and swamps of evil and bodily
grievance. My eyes have been inflamed to a degree that rendered reading
scarcely possible; and, strange as it seems, the act of mere composition,
as I lay in bed, perceptibly affected them, and my voluntary ideas were
every minute passing, more or less transformed into vivid spectra."
Side by side with this sensitiveness to colour, or interfused with it, we
find a similar, or perhaps a greater, sensitiveness to sound, Coleridge
shows a greater sensitiveness to music than any English poet except Milton.
The sonnet to Linley records his ecstatic responsiveness to music;
Purcell's music, too, which he names with Palestrina's ("some madrigals
which he heard at Rome") in the "Table-Talk." "I have the intensest delight
in music," he says there, "and can detect good from bad"; a rare thing
among poets. In one of his letters he notes: "I hear in my brain ...
sensations ... of various degrees of pain, even to a strange sort of uneasy
pleasure.... I hear in my brain, and still more in my stomach." There we
get the morbid physical basis of a sensitiveness to music which came to
mean much to him. In a note referring to "Christabel," and to the reasons
why it had never been finished, he says: "I could write as good verse now
as ever I did, if I were perfectly free from vexations, and were in the
_ad libitum_ hearing of fine music, which has a sensible effect in
harmonizing my thoughts, and in animating and, as it were, lubricating my
inventive faculty." "Christabel," more than anything of Coleridge, is
composed like music; you might set at the side of each section, especially
of the opening, _largo, vivacissimo_, and, as the general expression
signature, _tempo rubato_. I know no other verse in which the effects
of music are so precisely copied in metre. Shelley, you feel, sings like a
bird; Blake, like a child or an angel; but Coleridge certainly writes
music.
The metre of the "Ancient Mariner" is a re-reading of the familiar ballad-
metre, in which nothing of the original force, swiftness or directness is
lost, while a new subtlety, a wholly new music, has come into it. The metre
of "Christabel" is even more of an invention, and it had more immediate
consequences. The poem was begun in 1797, and not published till 1816; but
in 1801 Scott heard it recited, and in 1805 reproduced what he could of it
in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" and the other metrical romances which, in
their turn, led the way to Byron, who himself heard "Christabel" recited in
1811. But the secret of Coleridge's instinct of melody and science of
harmony was not discovered. Such ecstasy and such collectedness, a way of
writing which seems to aim at nothing but the most precisely expressive
simplicity, and yet sets the whole brain dancing to its tune, can hardly be
indicated more exactly than in Coleridge's own words in reference to the
Italian lyrists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They, attained
their aim, he says, "by the avoidance of every word which a gentleman would
not use in dignified conversation, and of every word and phrase which none
but a learned man would use; by the studied position of words and phrases,
so that not only each part should be melodious in itself, but contribute to
the harmony of the whole, each note referring and conducing to the melody
of all the foregoing and following words of the same period or stanza; and,
lastly, with equal labour, the greater because unbetrayed, by the variation
and various harmonies of their metrical movement." These qualities we may
indeed find in many of Coleridge's songs, part Elizabethan, part eighteenth
century, in some of his infantile jingles, his exuberant comic verse (in
which, however, there are many words "which a gentleman would not use"),
and in a poem like "Love," which has suffered as much indiscriminate praise
as Raphael's Madonnas, which it resembles in technique and sentiment, and
in its exquisite perfection of commonplace, its _tour de force _of an
almost flawless girlishness. But in "Christabel" the technique has an
incomparable substance to work upon; substance at once simple and abnormal,
which Coleridge required, in order to be at his best.
It has been pointed out by the profoundest poetical critic of our time that
the perfection of Coleridge's style in poetry comes from an equal balance
of the clear, somewhat matter-of-fact qualities of the eighteenth century
with the remote, imaginative qualities of the nineteenth century. "To
please me," said Coleridge in "Table-Talk," "a poem must be either music or
sense." The eighteenth-century manner, with its sense only just coupled
with a kind of tame and wingless music, may be seen quite by itself in the
early song from "Robespierre":
"Tell me, on what holy ground
May domestic peace be found?"
Here there is both matter and manner, of a kind; in "The Kiss" of the same
year, with its one exquisite line,
"The gentle violence of joy,"
there is only the liquid glitter of manner. We get the ultimate union of
eighteenth and nineteenth century qualities in "Work without Hope," and in
"Youth and Age," which took nine years to bring into its faultless ultimate
form. There is always a tendency in Coleridge to fall back on the
eighteenth-century manner, with its scrupulous exterior neatness, and its
comfortable sense of something definite said definitely, whenever the
double inspiration flags, and matter and manner do not come together. "I
cannot write without a _body of thought_," he said at a time before he
had found himself or his style; and he added: "Hence my poetry is crowded
and sweats beneath a heavy burden of ideas and imagery! It has seldom
ease." It was an unparalleled ease in the conveying of a "body of thought"
that he was finally to attain. In "Youth and Age," think how much is
actually said, and with a brevity impossible in prose; things, too, far
from easy for poetry to say gracefully, such as the image of the steamer,
or the frank reference to "this altered size"; and then see with what an
art, as of the very breathing of syllables, it passes into the most flowing
of lyric forms. Besides these few miracles of his later years, there are
many poems, such as the Flaxman group of "Love, Hope, and Patience
supporting Education," in which we get all that can be poetic in the
epigram softened by imagination, all that can be given by an ecstatic plain
thinking. The rarest magic has gone, and he knows it; philosophy remains,
and out of that resisting material he is able, now and again, to weave, in
his deftest manner, a few garlands.
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