Coleridge's Conversation Poems

[Extracted from a critical essay.]

[Notes in both square brackets and italics are mine--Marj.]

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``Coleridge's Conversation Poems'', by George McLean Harper, from M. H. Abrams, ed., 1960: English Romantic Poets - Modern Essays in Criticism. A Galaxy Book, Oxford University Press, New York.

A young poet whom I love has just left my house and driven away in the soft darkness of a spring night, to the remote cottage in the Delaware valley where he meditates a not thankless Muse, Before he came I was in despair, sitting bewildered with my heaps of notes on Coleridge spread before me, having much to say, but not knowing how to begin. Now it should be easier, for one fire kindleth another, and our talk was of friendship and poetry. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to those who know him well, exists in three modes, as Philosopher, Poet, Friend. If the truth were told, we should all be obliged to admit that the Philosopher escapes us. We hear his voice and enter the room where he is speaking, only to see his retreating figure down some dim corridor. `Aids to Reflection,' `Table Talk,' and other echoes of his speach yield merely a confused murmur, baffling, and the more exasperating because the tones are in themselves melodious. ...

It is the opinion of many that Coleridge as Poet is almost equally an evanescent shadow; and though the many are in this quite mistaken, they have some excuse for thinking thus, because his fulfilment falls far short of his promise. But they fail to appreciate how very great, after all, the fulfilment is. The causes of this injustice to Coleridge the Poet are the splendor of the three poems of his which everybody knows and admires, and also the habit of regarding him as a mere satellite of Wordsworth, or at least as Wordsworth's weaker brother. Those who are so dazzled by `The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' `Kubla Khan,' and `Cristabel.' that all the rest of Coleridge's poetry seems to them colorless, are invited to reopen his book, but first to read J. Dykes Campbell's Life of him [or that by Richard Holmes] or the collection of his wonderful letters edited by the late Ernest Hartley Coleridge, his grandson; and I wish to direct the attention of those from whom he is obscured by the greater glory of Wordsworth to a group of poems which can be compared only to the `Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey.'

These are his Poems of Friendship. They cannot be even vaguely understood unless the reader knows what persons Coleridge has in mind. They are, for the most part, poems in which reference is made with fine particularity to certain places. They were composed as the expression of feelings which were occasioned by quite definite events. Between the lines, when we know their meaning, we catch glimpses of those delightful people who formed the golden inner circle of his friends in the days of his young manhood: Charles Lamb, his oldest and dearest, Mary Lamb, practical Tom Poole, William and Dorothy Wordsworth in their days of clearest vision and warmest enthusiasm, and in the later pieces Mrs. Wordsworth and Sarah Hutchinson her young sister. They may all be termed, as Coleridge himself names one or two of them, Conversation Poems, for even when they are soliloquies the sociable man who wrote them could not even think without supposing a listener. They require and reward considerable knowledge of his life and especially the life of his heart.

This is not so certainly the case with his three famous Mystery Poems, in which the spellbound reader sees visions and hears music which float in from a magic realm and float out again into unfathomable space. Their perfection is not of this world nor founded on history or circumstance. No knowledge of their origin or mechanism can increase their beauty or enrich their charm. To attempt to account for them, to write footnotes about them, if it were hoped thereby to make them more powerful in their effect upon the imagination, would be ridiculous and pedantic, however fruitful of knowledge and interest the exercise might be.

While the Philosopher has wandered away into a vague limbo of unfinished projects and the Poet of `Cristabel' and its companion stars can only gaze in mute wonder upon the constellation he fixed in the heavens, the Poet of the Friendly Pieces lingers among us and can be questioned. We owe it to him and to ourselves to appreciate them. It is unfair to his genius that he should be represented in most anthologies of English verse only by the Mystery Poems, and that those who read the Poems of Friendship should so generally be ignorant of their meaning. It is unfair to ourselves that we should refuse the companionship of the most open-hearted of men, a generous spirit, willing to reveal to us the riches of his mind, a man whom all can understand and no one can help loving. There is not so much kindness, humor, wisdom, and frankness offered to most of us in the ordinary intercourse of life that we can afford to decline the outstretched hand of Coleridge.

Poetry draws mankind together, breaks down barriers, relieves loneliness, shows us ourselves in others and others in ourselves. It is the friendly art. It ignores time and space. National, racial, and secular differences fall at its touch, which is the touch of kinship, and when we feel this we laugh shamefacedly at our pretensions, timidities, and reserves. Everything in antiquity is antiquated except its art and especially its poetry. That is scarcely less fresh than when it fell first from living lips. The religion of the ancients is to us superstition, their science childishness, but their poetry is as valid and vital as our own. We appropriate it, and it unites us with our fathers.

`One precious, tender-hearted scroll
Of pure Simonides'

shines through the mist more brightly than the Nicomachean Ethics or the Constitution of Athens. What is most enduring in the Old Testament is the humanity revealed here and there in veins of poetry, not only as psalms and prophecies but gleaming out from the historical books. It is the nature of all great poetry to open and bring together the hearts of men. And few poets have so generously given themselves out to us as Coleridge. The gift is rare and wonderful because he was a very good man, even more than because of his marvellous mind. When I say he was good, I mean that he was loving. However many other kinds of goodness there may be, this is the indispensable element. ...

The Poems of Friendship make yet another claim on our attention: they are among the supreme examples of a peculiar kind of poetry. Others not unlike them, though not surpassing them, are Ovid's `Cum subit illius tristissima noctis imago,' and several of the Canti of Leopardi. Some passages in Cowper's `Task' resemble them in tone. Poignancy of feeling, intimacy of address, and ease of expression are even more perfectly blended in Coleridge's poems than in any of these.

The compositions which I denominate Poems of Friendship or Conversation Poems are `The Eolian Harp,' `Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement,' `This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison,' `Frost at Midnight,' `Fears in Solitude,' `The Nightingale,' `Dejection,' and `To William Wordsworth' (sometimes printed `To a Gentleman'). The list is not complete; there are shorter pieces which might be added; but these are the most substantial and, I think, the best. The qualities common to all the eight are qualities of style no less than of subject. Wordsworth is clearly more entitled than Coleridge to be considered the leader in creating and also in expounding a new kind of poetry... . Until he met Wordsworth, which was probably in 1795, Coleridge wrote in the manner which had been fashionable since the death of Milton, employing without hesitation all those poetic licences which constituted what he later termed `Gaudyverse,' in contempt. ... If one reads Coleridge's early poems in chronological order, one will perceive that Gaudyverse persists till about the middle of 1795, and then quickly yields to the natural style which Wordsworth was practising.

`The Eolian Harp,' composed on Aug. 20, 1795, in the short period when Coleridge was happy in his approaching marriage, sounds many a note of the dolce stil nuovo, and is moreover in substance his first important and at the same time characteristic poem. The influence of Wordsworth, whose early works he had read, is to be seen in small details, such as a bold and faithful reference to the scents `snatched from yon beanfield.' The natural happiness of Coleridge, which was to break forth from him in spite of sorrow through all his darkened later years, flows like a sunlit river in this poem. In two magnificent passages he anticipates by nearly three years the grand climax of the `Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey,' singing:

`O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where--
...
And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all.'

Here is the Philosopher at his best, but he steps down from the intellectual throne at the bidding of love; and out of consideration for Sarah's religious scruples, and in obedience to his own deep humility, apologizes for

`These shapings of the unregenerate mind.'

It is to be noted also that the blank verse is more fluent and easy than Milton's, or any that had been written since Milton, moving with a gentle yet sufficiently strong rhythm, and almost free from the suggeston of the heroic couplet, a suggestion which is felt in nearly all 18th-century unrhymed verse, as of something recently lost and not quite forgotten. The cadences are long and beautiful, binding line to line and sentence to sentence in a way that the constant use of couplets and stanzas had made rare since Milton's time.

A few weeks later Coleridge wrote `Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement.' The poem begins with a quiet description of the surrounding scene and, after a superb flight of imagination, brings the mind back to the starting-point, a pleasing device which we may call the `return.' The imagination, in the second poem, seeks not, as in the first, a metaphysical, but an ethical height. The poet is tormented in the midst of his happiness by the thought of those who live in wretchedness or who die in the war, and asks himself:

`Was it right

While my unnumbered brethren toiled and bled,
That I should dream away the entrusted hours
On rose-leaf beds, pampering the coward heart
With feelings all to delicate for use?'

The problem is not stated in abstract, but in concrete terms. In fact, the only abstract passages in the Conversation Poems are the two quoted above, from `The Eolian Harp'; and in general it is noticeable that Coleridge, whose talk was misty and whose prose writings are often like a cloud, luminous but impossible to see through, is one of the simplest and most familiar of poets. He, the subtlest metaphysician in England, was, as a poet, content to express elementary and universal feelings in the plainest terms.

On July 2, 1797, Coleridge, with Dorothy Wordsworth sitting beside him, drove from Racedown in Dorset to Nether Stowey in Somerset, and for about two weeks the small cottage behind Tom Poole's hospitable mansion sheltered William and Dorothy and perhaps Basil Montague's little boy, whom they were educating, besides Coleridge and Mrs. Coleridge and Hartley the baby and Nanny their maid. To fill up the measure, Charles Lamb joined them on the 7th and stayed a week. Coleridge, writing to Southey, says:

`The second day after Wordsworth came to me, dear Sara accidentally emptied a skillet of boiling milk on my foot, which confined me during the whole time of C. Lamb's stay, and still prevents me from all walks longer than a furlong. While Wordsworth, his sister, and Charles Lamb were out one evening, sitting in the arbour of T. Poole's garden, which communicates with mine, I composed these lines, with which I am pleased.'

He encloses the poem `This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison,' in which he refers tenderly to his guests as `my Sister and my Friends.' It begins:

`Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost
Beauties and feelings such as would have been
Most sweet to my remembrance even when age
Had dimmed mine eyes to blindness!'

In imagination he follows them as they `wander in gladness along the hill-top edge,' and thinks with special satisfaction of the pleasure granted to his gentle-hearted Charles, who had been long `in the great City pent,' an expression which he uses again in `Frost at Midnight' and which Wordsworth later adopted, both of them echoing a line of Milton. The idea of storing up happy memories for some wintry season of the heart, an idea expanded by Wordsworth in `Tintern Abbey,' and again in `I wandered lonely as a Cloud,' occurs in the lines quoted above; and Wordsworth's famous brave remark,

`Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her,'

is also anticipated in this poem when Coleridge declares,

`Henceforth I shall know

That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure,'

the wise and pure, we may be certain, being in their eyes those who love Nature. In this third Conversation Poem Coleridge has risen above the level attained in the former two; Gaudyverse is gone entirely, and unaffected simplicity, the perfection of tranquil ease, reigns without a rival. No better example, even in Wordsworth's own verse, could be found to illustrate the theory set forth three years later in the Preface to `Lyrical Ballads.' The beauty and truth of the poem and the picture it gives of Coleridge's yearning heart of love do not depend upon the fact that it was an illustrious trio whom he followed in imagination as they roved `upon smooth Quantock's airy ridge'; it is a clear boon to us that they happened to be no less than Charles Lamb and Dorothy and William Wordsworth. The significant thing is Coleridge's unselfish delight in the joys of others. Happiness of this kind is an inexhaustible treasure to which all have access.

`Frost at Midnight,' composed in February, 1798, also dates from that most blessed time, when he was living in concord with his wife, under the wide-branching protection of strong Thomas Poole, with William and Dorothy near and poetry pouring unto him from the heaven's height. It is the musing of a father beside the cradle of his child, and the passage is well known in which he foretells that Hartley shall

`wander like a breeze

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain.'

The chief beauty of the poem, however, is in its `return,' which is the best example of the peculiar kind of blank verse Coleridge had evolved, as natural-seeming as prose, but as exquisitely artistic as the most complicated sonnet:

`Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.'

`Fears in Solitude,' written in April 1798, `during the alarm of an invasion,' is the longest of the Conversation Poems. It begins characteristically in a low key, with a quiet description of the poet's surroundings. He is reposing, happy and tranquil, in a green dell, above which sings a skylark in the clouds. Then quite suddenly his conscience cries out, when he thinks, as in `Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement,' of the dangers and sufferings of others. From self-tormenting he passes into an indictment of his countrymen for going lightly to war and for having `borne to distant tribes' slavery, suffering, and vice. In words of terrible sincerity he charges society and his age with hardness and frivolity. `We have loved,' he cries, `to swell the war-whoop, passionate for war.' To read of war has become `the best amusement for our morning meal.' We have turned the forms of holy religion into blasphemy, until

`the owlet Atheism,

Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon,
Drops his blue-fringèd lids, and holds them close,
And hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven,
Cries out ``Where is it?'' '

Down to the 129th line the strain of passionate pacificism continues. It is the confession of a tender-hearted, conscience-stricken man, to whom has been revealed a region above partisan and national views. We feel that if the passage had been declaimed to an army before battle, the men would have broken ranks in horror of their own designs. Quite unexpectedly, however, the tone changes at this point, and he bursts into a tirade against the French, calling upon Englishmen to stand forth and `repel an impious foe.' The violence of the transition is disconcerting. But anon, with a thrust in each direction, at the over-sanguine English friends of the Revolution and at its unreasonable foes, he sings a glorious pæan to `dear Britain,' his `native Isle.' Then comes a sweet `return': he bids farewell to the soft and silent spot where he has been reclining; he thinks with joy of his beloved Stowey and his friend Poole and the lowly cottage where his babe and his babe's mother dwell in peace. It was like Coleridge to see both sides of the problem raised by the war, by all war, and to express both with equal poignancy. Extreme as are the limits to which his imagination carries him, his eloquence is vitiated by no sentimentalism or self-delusion. The dilemma is fairly stated; the distress is genuine. Were it not for the exquisite frame in which the fears and questionings are set, were it not for the sweet opening and the refreshing `return,' the pain excited by this poem would outweigh our pleasure in the aptness of its figures and the melody of its verse. But the frame saves the picture, as the profound psychological truth of the picture justifies the beauty of the frame. Coleridge was unaware how successful he had been, for in a note in one of his manuscript copies of this superb work of art he says: `The above is perhaps not Poetry, but rather a sort of middle thing between Poetry and Oratory, sermioni propriora. Some parts are, I am conscious, too tame even for animated prose.' These words must have been dictated by humility rather than critical judgment. ...

In the same productive month, April 1789, he wrote `The Nightingale,' which he himself terms a Conversation Poem, though it is neither more nor less conversational than the others of this kind. It was printed five months later in `Lyrical Ballads.' Hazlitt, in his account of a visit he made that spring to Nether Stowey, tells of a walk he took with William and Dorothy and Coleridge: `Returning that same evening, I got into a metaphysical argument with Wordsworth, while Coleridge was explaining the different notes of the nightingale to his sister, in which we neither of us succeeded in making ourselves perfectly clear and intelligible.' In Dorothy's Alfoxden journal are brief mentions of many a walk by moon or star light with `dear Col.' The friendship had ripened fast. `My Friend, and thou, our Sister' are addressed in the poem ... .

Thus far we have seen Coleridge in his day of strength. If he has written of sorrow, it has been sorrow for suffering mankind; if he has written of sin, it has been the sin of his country. He has been too manly to invent reasons for self-pity. But he is wretched without the companionship of loving friends. In Germany, when separated from the Wordsworths, he sends a wistful call across the frozen wastes of the Lüneburg Heath:

`William, my head and my heart, dear William and dear Dorothea!
You have all in each other; but I am lonely and want you!'

And when he ran away from them in Scotland, perhaps to escape their anxious care of his health, he was soon in distress and crying out:

`To be beloved is all I need,
And whom I love I love indeed.'

Prior to his return from Germany, in the summer of 1799, he had not become a slave to opium, though the habit of taking it had been formed. In the next three years the vice [sic] grew fixed, his will decayed, he produced less, and fell into depths of remorse. ... he was unhappy with his wife; and ... the woman for whom Coleridge felt most affection was Sarah Hutchinson. There was something innocent and childlike in all his sympathies and likings and lovings. He never permanently alienated a friend; he never quite broke the tie between himself and his wife; he could, it seems, love without selfishness and be loved without jealousy. ...

In the winter of 1801-1802, the two causes of Coleridge's unhappiness, opium and domestic discord, worked havoc with him and brought him to despair. The wings of poesy were broken, as he realized full well. Meanwhile Wordsworth was in high poetic activity, healthy, forward-looking, and happy. On April 4, 1802, when William and Dorothy were on a visit to Keswick, and could judge for themselves of his misery, he composed, in part at least, the poem `Dejection,' which is a confession of his own failure, and one of the saddest of all human utterances. But it is a glorious thing, too, for as the stricken runner sinks in the race he lifts up his head and cheers the friend ... and this generosity is itself a triumph. On Oct. 4, Wordsworth's wedding day and the seventh anniversary of Coleridge's marriage, the poem was printed in the `Morning Post.' It is an ode in form only; in contents it is a conversation. It is not an address to Dejection, but to [Sara Hutchinson]. As printed in the newspaper, it purports to be directed to some one named Edmund; in Coleridge's editions of his collected works this name is changed to Lady; ... In this sublime and heartrending poem Coleridge gives expression to an experience of double consciousness. His sense-perceptions are vivid and in part agreeable; his inner state is faint, blurred, and unhappy. He sees, but cannot feel. The power of feeling has been paralysed by chemically induced excitements of his brain. The seeing power, less dependent upon bodily health, stands aloof, individual, critical, and very mournful. By `seeing' he means perceiving and judging; by `feeling' he means that which impels to action. He suffers, but the pain is dull, and he wishes it were keen, for so he should awake from lethargy and recover unity at least. But nothing from outside can restore him. The sources of the soul's life are within. ...

Coleridge never faltered in his conviction that spirit was independent of matter. His unhappy experience deepened his faith in the existence of God, and of his own soul as something detachable from his `body that did him grievous wrong.' Yet he had once been a disciple of David Hartley and had, it seems, made a convert of Wordsworth, whose persistence in a semi-materialistic philosophy now alarmed him. In every other respect he venerates him and humbles himself before him. Wordsworth, pure in heart, that is to say, still a child of Nature, and free, has not lost his birthright of joy, which is the life-breath of poetry. But Oh! groans Coleridge, I have lost my gift of song, for each affliction

`Suspends what Nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination.'

His own race prematurely ended, he passes the torch to the survivor [some editions of the poem were addressed to `William']:

`Dear William, friend devoutest of my choice,
Thus mayst thou ever, evermore rejoice.'

Another awful day of remorse and humiliating comparison was approaching. In April, 1804, Coleridge left England for Sicily and Malta, where he sank very low in what had now become an incurable disease, though he subsequently at various times made heroic stands against it, through religious hope, the marvellous energy of an originally strong and joyous nature, and the devotion of one friend after another. While he was distant from his staunch supporters, Poole and Wordsworth, his creative powers, through the exercise of which he might have preserved some degree of self-respect, more nearly failed than at any period of his life. He came back to England in August, 1806, so ashamed that for months he avoided his family and his friends. ... in January, 1807, he visited them [Wordsworths] at a farmhouse, on Sir George Beaumont's estate, in which they had been living for several months. Here, one long winter night, Wordsworth began reading to him from the manuscript of `The Prelude,' that poem dedicated to him, in which the Growth of a Poet's Mind is narrated. What subject could have been more interesting or more painful to him? On the night when Wordsworth's deep voice ceased declaiming the firm pentameters, his brother poet, roused from lethargy, composed in response his lines `To William Wordsworth.' Lingering in his ear was the graceful tribute which recalled the glory of his youth, so few years past and yet so completely gone:

`Thou in bewitching words, with happy heart,
Didst chaunt the vision of that Ancient Man,
The bright-eyed Mariner, and rueful woes
Didst utter of the Lady Cristabel.'

Coleridge's reply, touching for the gratitude, reverence, and humbleness which it expresses, is remarkable too for the lightning flashes in which it shows us the course of Wordsworth's life and of his own, and summarizes `The Prelude.' ... The childlike candor of a beautiful spirit shines in the following lines, in which unconquered goodness and imperishable art unite:

`Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn
The pulses of my being beat anew:
And even as Life returns upon the drowned,
Life's joys rekindling roused a throng of pains--
Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe,
Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart:
And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of Hope;
And Hope that scarce would know itself from Fear;
Sense of past Youth, and Manhood come in vain,
And Genius given, and Knowledge won in vain.'

In the divine economy and equilibrium of the world all things have their uses and every disturbed balance is restored. Genius is not given in vain, goodness is never wasted, love comes at last into its own. The misfortunes, nay, even the faults of Coleridge, which were so grievous to him, can be seen now as a purifying discipline. I do not wish to preach a sermon in defence of weakness; but in all justice, not to say charity, let us ask ourselves whether the frailty of this great and essentially good man did not enhance his virtues and make him more lovable. ... He suffered burning remorse for wasted gifts and opportunities, but never whined about the futility of life. He trifled with his own sensations, but was no sentimentalist. He wandered, athirst and weak, in sandy places, but saw on the horizon a `shady city of palm trees,' and pointed the way thither.

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