Poems Of Coleridge Part 31

The lonesome Spirit from the south-pole carries on the s.h.i.+p as far as the Line, in obedience to the angelic troop, but still requireth vengeance.

The Polar Spirit's fellow-daemons, the invisible inhabitants of the element, take part in his wrong; and two of them relate, one to the other, that penance long and heavy for the ancient Mariner hath been accorded to the Polar Spirit, who returneth southward.

PART VI

The Mariner hath been cast into a trance; for the angelic power causeth the vessel to drive northward faster than human life could endure.

The supernatural motion is r.e.t.a.r.ded; the Mariner awakes, and his penance begins anew.

The curse is finally expiated.

And the ancient Mariner beholdeth his native country.

The angelic spirits leave the dead bodies,

And appear in their own forms of light.

PART VII

The Hermit of the Wood,

Approacheth the s.h.i.+p with wonder.

The s.h.i.+p suddenly sinketh.

The ancient Mariner is saved in the Pilot's boat.

The ancient Mariner earnestly entreateth the Hermit to shrieve him; and the penance of life falls on him.

And ever and anon throughout his future life an agony constraineth him to travel from land to land,

And to teach, by his own example, love and reverence to all things that G.o.d made and loveth.

p. 27. _Christabel_. Coleridge at his best represents the imaginative temper in its essence, pure gold, with only just enough alloy to give it firm bodily substance. "Christabel" is not, like "Kubla Khan," a disembodied ecstasy, but a coherent effort of the imagination. Yet, when we come to the second part, the magic is already half gone out of it. Rossetti says, in a printed letter, with admirable truth: "The conception, and partly the execution, of the pa.s.sage in which Christabel repeats by fascination the serpent-glance of Geraldine, is magnificent; but that is the only good narrative pa.s.sage in part two. The rest seems to have reached a fatal facility of jingling, at the heels whereof followed Scott." A few of the lines seem to sink almost lower than Scott, and suggest a Gilbert parody:

"He bids thee come without delay With all thy numerous array.

And he will meet thee on the way With all his numerous array."

But in the conclusion, which has nothing whatever to do with the poem, Coleridge is his finest self again: a magical psychologist. It is interesting to know that Crashaw was the main influence upon Coleridge while writing "Christabel," and that the "Hymn to the Name and Honour of the admirable S. Teresa" was "ever present to his mind while writing the second part."

p. 61. _Love_. This poem was originally published, in the _Morning Post_ of December 21, 1799, as part of an "Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie." This introduction begins:

"O leave the lily on its stem; O leave the rose upon the spray; O leave the elder-bloom, fair maids!

And listen to my lay.

A cypress and a myrtle bough This morn around my harp you twined, Because it fas.h.i.+on'd mournfully Its murmurs in the wind.

And now a tale of love and woe, A woeful tale of love I sing; Hark, gentle maidens! hark, it sighs And trembles on the string."

p. 65. _The Three Graves_. Coleridge only published what he calls "the following humble fragment" of what was to have been a poem in six parts; but he wrote an imperfect sketch of the first two parts, which was published from the original MS. by d.y.k.es Campbell in his edition. The poem as Coleridge left it is sufficiently complete, and I have ventured to divide it into Part I. and Part II., instead of the usual Part III. and Part IV. It is Coleridge's one attempt to compete with Wordsworth on what Wordsworth considered his own ground, and it was first published by Coleridge in _The Friend_ of September 21, 1809, on the advice of Wordsworth and Southey. "The language," we are told in an introductory note, "was intended to be dramatic; that is, suited to the narrator; and the metre corresponds to the homeliness of the diction. It is therefore presented as the fragment, not of a poem, but of a common Ballad-tale.

Whether this is sufficient to justify the adoption of such a style, in any metrical composition not professedly ludicrous, the Author is himself in some doubt. At all events, it is not presented as poetry, and it is in no way connected with the Author's judgment concerning poetic diction. Its merits, if any, are exclusively psychological." Exclusively, it would be unjust to say; but to a degree beyond those of any similar poem of Wordsworth, certainly.

p. 78. _Dejection_. This ode was originally addressed to Wordsworth, but before it was published in its first form, the "William" of the still existing MS. was changed to "Edmund"; in later editions "Edmund" was changed to "Lady," except in the seventh stanza, where "Otway" is subst.i.tuted. The reference in this stanza is to Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray,"

and the germ of the pa.s.sage occurs in a letter of Coleridge to Poole, printed by d.y.k.es Campbell in the notes to his edition: "Greta Hall, Feb. 1, 1801.--O my dear, dear Friend! that you were with me by the fireside of my study here, that I might talk it over with you to the tune of this night- wind that pipes its thin, doleful, climbing, sinking notes, like a child that has lost its way, and is crying aloud, half in grief, and half in the hope to be heard by its mother."

p. 9O. _Fears in Solitude_. Coleridge, who was so often his own best critic, especially when the criticism was to remain inactive, wrote on an autograph copy of this poem now belonging to Professor Dowden: "N.B.--The above is perhaps not Poetry,--but rather a sort of middle thing between Poetry and Oratory--_sermoni propriora_.--Some parts are, I am conscious, too tame even for animated prose." It is difficult to say whether, in such poems as this, Coleridge is overtaken by his besetting indolence, or whether he is deliberately writing down to the theories of Wordsworth. Another criticism of his own on his early blank verse, where he speaks of "the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead _plumb down_ of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle and sinew in the single lines," applies only too well to the larger part of his work in this difficult metre, so apt to go to sleep by the way.

p. 1O7. _Hymn before Sun-rise_. Coleridge was never at Chamouni, and the suggestion of his poem is to be found in a poem of twenty lines by a German poetess, Frederike Brun. Some of the rhetoric of his poem Coleridge got from the German poetess; the imagination is all his own. It is perhaps a consequence of its origin that the imagination and the rhetoric never get quite clear of one another, and that, in spite of some magical lines (wholly Coleridge's) like:

"O struggling with the darkness all the night, And visited all night by troops of stars:"

the poem remains somewhat external, a somewhat deliberate heaping up of hosannas.

p. 114. _The Nightingale_. The persons supposed to take part in this "conversation poem" are of course William and Dorothy Wordsworth.

p. 134. _A Day-Dream_. "There cannot be any doubt, I think, that the 'Asra' of this poem is Miss Sarah Hutchinson; 'Mary,' her sister (Mrs.

Wordsworth); 'our sister and our friend,' Dorothy and William Wordsworth."

(d.y.k.eS CAMPBELL.)

p. 142. _Work without Hope_. "What could be left to hope for when the man could already do such work?" asks Mr. Swinburne. With this exquisite poem, in which Coleridge's style is seen in its most faultless union of his finest qualities, compare this pa.s.sage from a letter to Lady Beaumont, about a year earlier: "Though I am at present sadly below even _my_ par of health, or rather unhealth, and am the more depressed thereby from the consciousness that in this yearly resurrection of Nature from her winter sleep, amid young leaves and blooms and twittering nest-building birds, the sun so gladsome, the breezes with such healing on their wings, all good and lovely things are beneath me, above me, and everywhere around me, and all from G.o.d, while my incapability of enjoying, or, at best, languor in receiving them, is directly or indirectly from myself, from past procrastination, and cowardly impatience of pain." It was always upon some not less solid foundation that Coleridge built these delicate structures.

p. 147. _Phantom_. This, almost Coleridge's loveliest fragment of verse, was composed in sleep, like "Kubla Khan," "Constancy to an Ideal Object," and "Phantom or Fact?" There is a quality, in this and some other poems of Coleridge, which he himself has exquisitely rendered in the pa.s.sage on Ariel in the lectures on Shakespeare: "In air he lives, from air he derives his being, in air he acts; and all his colours and properties seem to have been obtained from the rainbow and the skies. There is nothing about Ariel that cannot be conceived to exist either at sunrise or sunset: hence all that belongs to Ariel belongs to the delight the mind is capable of receiving from the most lovely external appearances. "Coleridge is the Ariel of English Poetry: glittering in the song from "Zapolya," translucent in the "Phantom," infantine, with a note of happy infancy almost like that of Blake, in "Something Childish, but very Natural." In these poems, and in the "Ode to the Rain," and the "Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath,"

there is a unique way of feeling, which he can render to us on those rare occasions when his sensations are uninterrupted; by thought, which clouds them, or by emotion, which disturbs them. He reveals mysterious intimacies with natural things, the "flapping" flame or a child's scarcely more articulate moods. And in some of them, which are experiments in form, he seems to compete gaily with the Elizabethan lyrists, doing wonderful things in jest, like one who is for once happy and disengaged, and able to play with his tormentor, verse.

p. 153. _Forbearance_. "Gently I took that which urgently came" is from Spenser's "Shepherds' Calendar": "But gently tooke that ungently came."

p. 154. _Sancti Dominici Pallium_. The "friend," as d.y.k.es Campbell points out, was Southey, whose "Book of the Church" had been attacked by Charles Butler. This is one of Coleridge's most masterly experiments in dealing with material hardly possible to turn into poetry. What exquisite verse, and what variety of handling! The eighteenth-century smooth force and pungency of the main part of it ends in an antic.i.p.ation of the burlesque energy of some of Mr. George Meredith's most characteristic verse. Anyone coming upon the lines:

"More than the Protestant milk all newly lapt, Impearling a tame wild-cat's whiskered jaws,"

would have a.s.signed them without hesitation to the writer of "A Certain People" and other sonnets in the "Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth."