Chapter IX: Letter 135: To Cottle

(1807.)

My dear Cottle,

* * * The common end of all narrative, nay, of all poems is, to convert a series into a whole, to make those events, which, in real or imagined history, move on in a straight line, assume to our understandings a circular motion--the snake with its tail in its mouth. Hence, indeed, the almost flattering and yet appropriate term, Poesy, _i.e._ Poieses--_making_. Doubtless, to His eye, which alone comprehends all past and all future, in one eternal, what to our short sight appears straight, is but a part of the great cycle, just as the calm sea to us appears level, though it be indeed only a part of the globe. Now what the globe is in geography, miniaturing in order to manifest the truth, such is a poem to that image of God, which we were created into, and which still seeking that unity, or revelation of the one, in and by the many, which reminds it, that though in order to be an individual being, it must go further from God; yet as the receding from him, is to proceed toward nothingness and privation, it must still at every step turn back toward him, in order to be at all. A straight line continually retracted, forms of necessity a circular orbit. Now God's will and word CANNOT be frustrated. His fiat was, with ineffable awfulness, applied to man, when all things, and all living things, and man himself, (as a mere animal) included, were called forth by the Universal, "Let there be," and then the breath of the Eternal superadded, to make an immortal spirit--immortality being, as the author of the _Wisdom of Solomon_ profoundly expresses it, "the only possible reflex, or image of eternity." The immortal finite is the contracted shadow of the eternal Infinite. Therefore nothingness, or death, to which we move, as we recede from God and from the Word, cannot be nothing; but that tremendous medium between nothing and true being, which Scripture and inmost reason present as most, most horrible!

Affectionately,
S. T. C.]

FOOTNOTES:

[5] [Stoddart had retained his MSS. in Malta (for some
unaccountable reason), which had disconcerted Coleridge.]

[6] [Staying at the farmhouse near the mansion of Coleorton.]

[7] _T. Poole and his Friends_, ii, 174-184.

[8] _Religious Musings_ was at first called _The Nativity_, and sent
to Charles Lamb in December 1794 as an unfinished poem.
Coleridge wrote to Cottle in one of his short notes, while his
first volume of _Poems_ was being put through the press: "_The
Nativity_ is not quite three hundred lines. It has cost me much
labour in polishing; more than any poem I ever wrote, and I
believe it deserves it:" Cottle's _Reminiscences_, p. 66. The
first 158 lines, down to "This is the Messiah's destined
victory!" were probably written in the spring of 1796. Their
spirit is diametrically opposed to the remainder of the poem,
in which the Messiah's victory is to be a political one.

[9] ["Even they will be necessitated to admit, completely exonerated
the Jews."--_Early Recollections._]

[10] ["Voluntary actions."--_Early Recollections._]

[11] ["Over all our."--_Early Recollections._]