The Columbia History of British Poetry (83 page)

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Page 345
Another great poem of the marvelous written in the
Lyrical Ballads
period, but one never intended for the joint publication, is "Kubla Khan." Not published until 1816, it was then accompanied by a long prose preface, the purpose of which was to set it off from most other poetry and to make it more of a psychological curiosity or, in the words of its subtitle, "A Vision in a Dream." According to Coleridge's account, the poem was a "fragment" of a longer one he had composed in drug-induced sleep after reading about Kubla Khan's garden and palace in Samuel Purchas's seventeenth-century
Pilgrimage
. While writing down the words, ''he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock," and the rest of the "two to three hundred lines" was lost. Today there is little doubt that the interruption came from the same person who persuaded Coleridge not to write his crucial chapter on the Imagination for the
Biographia Literaria
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The prefatory matter works to disarm criticism, at the same time claiming for "Kubla Khan" the privileged Romantic genre of the fragment and the equally privileged status of the dream. The doubts cast upon Coleridge's account of the poem's production have by no means diminished the interest of readersindeed, we are now free to experience "Kubla Khan" as poetry rather than as a substitute for it.
The opening lines locate Kubla Khan's pleasure dome in a landscape of the mind. The river Alph, suggesting the first letters of the Greek and Hebrew alphabets, is an image of what Coleridge in the
Biographia
would call "the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception"the primary Imagination. Nature and art, ancient forests and pleasure dome, are held in a tension mediated by walled gardens partaking of both. The pleasure dome itself, its reflection floating "midway on the waves," is stationed between the closely related though seemingly opposite realities of the conscious and unconscious mind"a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!" The poet's role is to re-create its architectonics in a poem, forestalling the threat of "Ancestral voices prophesying war," a message all too appropriate in the wartime 1790s. A new muse is the source of his visionnot the Greek Euterpe or Milton's Urania, but "an Abyssian maid" nearer the ancient earthly Paradise. As the poet longs to "revive within me / Her symphony and song," his poem becomes the first of a long line, culminating in Valéry's
Le cimetière marin
, to have as a theme its own coming into existence. In its closing lines the poet is transformed into a mantic being whom the community fears. Yet what we are left with is not the attempt to con-
 
Page 346
tain him by primitive ritual but the Edenic origin that is a guarantee of his poetic truth: "For he on honey-dew hath fed / And drank the milk of Paradise."
If "Kubla Khan" is a whole poem masquerading as a fragment, "Christabel," Coleridge's third major poem of the marvelous, is strongly directed toward a completion it never attained. Part I was written in Somerset in 1797, Part II, which reflects the topography of the Lake District, at Keswick in 1800. The two parts were to be published in the second edition of
Lyrical Ballads
, and Wordsworth's decision to exclude them may have contributed to a blockage that became insurmountable. By the time Coleridge published "Christabel" in 1816, he had to appeal in a preface to the reader's faith in his originality, for by then Scott's
Bridal of Triermain
and Byron's "Siege of Corinth," both influenced by Coleridge's poem, had appeared. Blaming his inability to finish on the "state of suspended imagination in which his poetic powers had been,'' Coleridge now thought he could go on with the work. Although this was not to be, he did confide in his friend James Gillman about his plan for the poem, while a shorter and different précis was given to his son, Derwent, and these summaries suggest that the completion of the poem had been plotted in detail.
"Christabel" is a poem of surprising revelations, transmutations, and changes of situation having to do with the intimate connection between the Christlike heroine and her mysterious visitor, Geraldine. Geraldine, the poem suggests, is both lover and motheron the night that they couch together she "Seems to slumber still and mild, / As a mother with her child." That night only Christabel sees the deformity of Geraldine's bosom, and on the next day she alone perceives Geraldine's serpentine transformationbut in the "dizzying trance" she falls into, it is Christabel herself who appears reptile as she "shuddered aloud with a hissing sound." Consequently, she must watch in dreamlike passivity as her father leads Geraldine forth in her place. If Gillman's scenario is correct, the themes of sexual propinquity and exchanged natures would have continued with Geraldine's transformation into a semblance of Christabel's faraway lover. At the crucial moment of the marriage ceremony, the real lover would have entered, bearing the ring of their betrothal; and Geraldine, like her immediate descendant, Keats's Lamia, would have disappeared. It is sometimes said, on the basis of a statement by Coleridge himself linking "Christabel" to Crashaw's hymn to Saint Teresa, that Christabel experiences vicarious suffering to
 
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redeem her absent lover. Only in the context of a fully worked-out poem, however, could such a meaning be fully established. An association with Saint Teresa would also have an intensely erotic element, as Bernini and George Eliot understood.
Almost as important as these poems of the marvelous in Coleridge's oeuvre are those in a subgenre of his own making: the conversation poems, following Coleridge's own term for "The Nightingale," which first appeared in
Lyrical Ballads
. An emblem of these monologues in blank verse could be "that film, which fluttered on the grate," the "
stranger
" of ''Frost at Midnight" (1798):
                                  a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own mood interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself . . .
The mode is associative, or rather an artfully shaped fiction of association, one image leading to another, seeming to follow the processes of thought itself. The discourse is not imagined as meditation, but rather as an address to an intimate of the speaker's. This listener may be identified immediately (Sara Coleridge in first line of "The Eolian Harp," Charles Lamb in the original subtitle of "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison") or may be the subject of a dramatic turn in the poem, as in the "Dear Babe" Hartley in "Frost at Midnight" and "my friends!" William and Dorothy Wordsworth in "The Nightingale." Typically, these poems explore their worlds by the use of significant images like "the nigh thatch / Smokes in the sun-thaw," embodying a transformative natural process in "Frost at Midnight." The rook crossing the sun in "This Lime-Tree Bower" and the baby's eyes "that swam with undropped tears" in "The Nightingale" are also images delicately poised on the threshold of symbolism. One doesn't know how far to take them, and that is of course part of Coleridge's artistry.
Two other works of major importance have affinities with the conversation poems: "Dejection: An Ode" and "To William Wordsworth." The former began as a long verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth's sister-in-law, with whom Coleridge had fallen hopelessly in love. A confessional poem of personal misery, it makes contact at several points with the first four stanzas, then in manuscript, of Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." There Wordsworth raised the question of how the intensity of percep-
 
Page 348
tion and feeling falls off between childhood and maturity. Coleridge attempts to answer for himself, blaming his condition on the joylessness of his "coarse domestic Life" and on his escape into "abstruse research," resulting in the suspension of his "shaping Spirit of Imagination." In contrast to the harmony of self and nature in ''The Aeolian Harp," addressed in a happier time to another Sara, there appears and reappears the image of an Aeolian lute, driven by the strong wind to "A Scream / Of agony by torture lengthen'd out." As Coleridge believes the soul creates the metaphorical garment that is the reality according to which nature is perceived, his is a "shroud," Wordsworth's is a "Wedding Garment." After considerable shortening, revision, and rearrangement, "Dejection: An Ode, Written April 4, 1802" was published on Wordsworth's wedding dayat once a commemoration and a bitterly ironical self-comparison.
In its further revised, final form "Dejection" is not merely less immediately personal. The disappearance of much of the confessional content gives other parts of the "Ode" greater prominence, making its theme a secularized version of the failure of millennial hope. The image of the wedding-garment recalls the new Jerusalem of Revelation 21:2, "prepared as a bride adorned for her husband," and "a new Earth and new Heaven" adapts the language of Revelation 21:1 for a state now regarded as unattainable by the poet. The Joy of the Lady is as absolute and as inexplicable as the "grief without a pang" of the speaker. She exists as a
schöne Seele
in her separate sphere, while he in his desiccated apartness is like one of Blake's Spectres. Yet, paradoxically, from his state of accidie a memorable poem emerges.
Coleridge's true farewell to poetry of an ambitious order is not "Dejection" but the poem he addressed to Wordsworth after hearing the whole of
The Prelude
read by its author over several evenings during the Christmas season of 1806. Like "Dejection," this poem establishes a strong connection with Wordsworth while at the same time dismally contrasting Coleridge's situation, and like "Dejection," it moves along the interface of the secular and the sacred. Coleridge casts his past self in the role of a John the Baptist figure "Who came a welcomer in Herald's Guise, / Singing of Glory, and Futurity." As well as "guide," Wordsworth is "comforter," recalling the fourth Gospel's word for the Holy Ghost: "And I will pray to the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever" (John 14:16; see also 14:26 and 16:7).
 
Page 349
Panegyrized as the author of "that Lay / More than historic, that prophetic Lay," Wordsworth is one of "The truly Great / [Who] Have all one age, and from one visible space / Shed influence!" For himself, Coleridge amplifies the theme of relative inferiority he had sounded since their first meetings, but this time in a way that he knew would disturb the "beloved faces"Sara, Mary, Dorothy, and William, all of whom had been present at the reading. Coleridge himself is represented as dead, the products of both his own thought and of his joint labor with Wordsworth as ''but Flowers / Strewed on my corse, and borne upon my Bier, / In the same Coffin, for the self-same Grave!" With this funerary image, Coleridge removes his poetic self from any further comparisons with the subject of his panegyric.
In the decade or so following 1806 Coleridge wrote little poetry. In these years his separation from his wife was confirmed, his friendship with Wordsworth ruptured and only imperfectly reestablished, and his dependence upon opium increased. Occasionally his imagination flashed outas in a Notebook poem of 1811, part of which was was later published as "Limbo," where "that great ancestral flea" of John Donne's poem crosses the rivers of Hades and "frightens Ghosts as Ghosts here frighten men." Full of Joycean linguistic play and strange resonances, the poem conveys a terrible sense of vacuity that explains why Coleridge at this time had not much poetry in him. Nevertheless, during this period he managed to deliver several series of literary lectures in London and Bristol, to publish the twenty-seven numbers of
The Friend
(18091810), and to revise his play
Osorio
as
Remorse
for a successful production at Drury Lane Theatre.
There was productivity even in his indolence, and from 1815 his energies began to revive. He wrote another play,
Zapolya
, in 1815, began the dictation of the
Biographia Literaria
, and arranged his
Sibylline Leaves
for publication. In 1816, with Byron's encouragement and assistance, the
Christabel
volume appeared, also containing (at last) "Kubla Khan" and the anguished "Pains of Sleep."
Sibylline Leaves
and the
Biographia
were published in 1817, and Coleridge was stimulated to think of himself as a poet again. The poems he went on to produce in his later years were works in a minor key, but some of them are works of very great accomplishment, deserving far more attention than they have been given.
Coleridge's later poems are typically written in slack couplets sometimes intermingled with other verse forms. When he published them in

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