Chapter XXII: 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 substituted. The reference in this stanza is to Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray," and the germ of the passage occurs in a letter of Coleridge to Poole, printed by Dykes 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." (DYKES 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 passage 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 God, 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 passage 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 Dykes 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 anticipation 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 assigned them without hesitation to the writer of "A Certain People" and other sonnets in the "Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth."

p. 158. _Ne plus ultra_. This mysterious fragment is one of the most original experiments which Coleridge ever made, both in metre and in language (abstract terms becoming concrete through intellectual passion) and may seem to anticipate "The Unknown Eros."

p. 164. _The Pains of Sleep_. In a letter to Sir George and Lady Beaumont, dated September 22, 1803, Coleridge wrote, describing his journey to Scotland: "With the night my horrors commence. During the whole of my journey three nights out of four I have fallen asleep struggling and resolving to lie awake, and, awaking, have blest the scream which delivered me from the reluctant sleep.... These dreams, with all their mockery of guilt, rage, unworthy desires, remorse, shame, and terror, formed at the time the subject of some Verses, which I had forgotten till the return of my complaint, and which I will send you in my next as a curiosity."

p. 169. _Names_. Coleridge was as careless as the Elizabethans in acknowledging the originals of the poems which he translated, whether, as in this case, he was almost literal, or, as in the case of the Chamouni poem, he used his material freely. The lines "On a Cataract" are said to be "improved from Stolberg" in the edition of 1848, edited by Mrs. H. N. Coleridge; and the title may suit the whole of them.

p. 182. Answer to a Child's Question. I have omitted the four lines, printed in brackets in Campbell's edition, which were omitted, I think rightly, by Coleridge in reprinting the poem from the _Morning Post_ of October 16, 1802.

p. 183. _Lines on a Child_. This exquisite fragment is printed in Coleridge's works in a prefatory note to the prose "Wanderings of Cain." It was written, he tells us, "for the purpose of procuring a friend's judgment on the metre, as a specimen" of what was to have been a long poem, in imitation of "The Death of Abel," written in collaboration with Wordsworth. "The Ancient Mariner was written instead."

p. 188. _The two Round Spaces on the Tombstone_. This poem was printed in the _Morning Post_ of December 4, 180O, under the title: "The two Round Spaces: a Skeltoniad;" and it is this text which is here given, from Campbell's edition. The "fellow from Aberdeen" was Sir James Mackintosh. Coleridge apologised for reprinting the verses, "with the hope that they will be taken, as assuredly they were composed, in mere sport." No apology was needed; they are the most rich, ripe, and Rabelaisian comic verses he ever wrote, full-bodied and exultant in their exuberance of wayward and good-humoured satire.

p. 192. _Sonnets Attempted in the Manner of Contemporary Writers_. Dykes Campbell quotes a letter of Coleridge to Cottle, which he attributes to the year 1797, in which Coleridge says: "I sent to the _Monthly Magazine_ three mock sonnets in ridicule of my own Poems, and Charles Lloyd's, and Charles Lamb's, etc. etc., exposing that affectation of unaffectedness, of jumping and misplaced accent, in commonplace epithets, flat lines forced into poetry by italics (signifying how well and mouthishly the author would read them), puny pathos, etc. etc. The instances were all taken from myself and Lloyd and Lamb. I signed them 'Nehemiah Higginbottom.' I think they may do good to our young Bards."

Coleridge's humour, which begins as early as 1794, with the lines on "Parliamentary Oscillators," is one of the outlets of an oppressively ingenious mind, over-packed with ideas, which he cannot be content to express in prose. He delights, as in an intellectual exercise, in the grapple with difficult technique, the victorious wrestle with grotesque rhymes. All the comic poems are unusually rich and fine in rhythm, which seems to exult in its mastery over material so foreign to it.

Yet he has not always or wholly command of this humour. The famous "Lines to a Young Ass" were first written as a joke, and there is some burlesque strength in such lines as:

"Where Toil shall wed young Health, that charming Lass!
And use his sleek cows for a looking-glass."

But the mood went, the jest was so far forgotten as to be taken seriously by himself, and turned into the sober earnest which it remains; a kind of timidity of the original impression crept in, and we are left to laugh rather at than with the poet.

End of Project Gutenberg's Poems of Coleridge, by Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons