Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems
by
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Part 1 out of 3

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EDITED BY

FREDERICK H. SYKES, PH.D.
TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

COLERIDGE'S ANCIENT MARINER AND SELECT POEMS

1908

PREFATORY NOTE

The text of the poems in this volume is that of J. Dykes Campbell in the
Globe edition of Coleridge's poems. For the introduction I have depended
also largely upon his Memoir of Coleridge, and upon the two volumes of
the "Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge," edited by the poet's grandson,
Mr. E.H. Coleridge. In the Notes, as will be seen, I am indebted
particularly to the general editor of this series, Dr. F.H. Sykes, to
Dr. Lane Cooper of Cornell University, and again to Mr. Coleridge,
through whose kindness I have been able to get a reproduction of the
Marshmills crayon, undoubtedly the most satisfactory portrait of the
poet in existence, for the frontispiece.

H.M.B.

CONTENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION:

I. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
II. COLERIDGE'S POEMS

TEXT:

THE ANCIENT MARINER
CHRISTABEL
KUBLA KHAN
LOVE
FRANCE: AN ODE
DEJECTION: AN ODE
YOUTH AND AGE
WORK WITHOUT HOPE
EPITAPH

NOTES

*SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY*

EDITIONS:

Globe Edition. Edited by J. Dykes Campbell. 1 vol. Muses' Library.
Edited by Richard Garnett.

LIFE AND CRITICISM:

Stephen, Leslie, Article "Coleridge" in "The Dictionary of National
Biography."

H.D. Traill, "Coleridge" ("English Men of Letters Series").

Caine, T.H., "Coleridge" ("Great Writers Series").

Coleridge, S.T., "Biographia Literaria" ("Everyman's Library").

De Quincey, T., "Lake Poets."

Hazlitt, W., "First Acquaintance with Poets."

Cottle, J., "Reminiscences of Coleridge and Southey."

Pater, W., "Appreciations."

Shairp, J.C., "Studies in Poetry and Philosophy."

Sarrazin, Gabriel, "La Renaissance de la Poesie Anglaise, 1798-1889."

Brandl, Alois, "S.T. Coleridge and the English Romantic School."

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Haney, J.L., "A Bibliography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge."

INTRODUCTION

I. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

I. THE BEGINNINGS

Coleridge lived in what may safely be called the most momentous period
of modern history. In the year following his birth Warren Hastings was
appointed first governor-general of India, where he maintained English
empire during years of war with rival nations, and where he committed
those acts of cruelty and tyranny which called forth the greatest
eloquence of the greatest of English orators, in the famous impeachment
trial at Westminster, when Coleridge was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy in
London. A few years before his birth the liberal philosophy of France
had found a popular voice in the writings of Rousseau, which became the
gospel of revolution throughout Europe in Coleridge's youth and early
manhood. "The New Heloise" in the field of sentiment and of the relation
of the sexes, "The Social Contract" In political theory, and "Emile" in
matters of education, were books whose influence upon Coleridge's
generation it would be hard to estimate. When Coleridge was four years
old the English colonies in America declared their independence and
founded a new nation upon the natural rights of man,--a nation that has
grown to be the mightiest and most beneficent on the globe. Coleridge
was seventeen when the French Revolution broke out; he was forty-three
when Napoleon was sent to St. Helena. He saw the whole career of the
greatest political upheaval and of the greatest military genius of the
modern world. Fox, Pitt, and Burke,--the greatest Liberal orator, the
greatest Parliamentary leader, and the greatest philosophic statesman
that England has produced--were at the height of their glory when
Coleridge went up to Cambridge in 1791.

In literature--naturally, since literature is but an interpretation of
life--the age was not less remarkable. Dr. Johnson was still alive when
Coleridge came up to school at Christ's Hospital, Goldsmith had died
eight years before. But a new spirit was abroad in the younger
generation. Macpherson's "Fingal," alleged to be a translation from the
ancient Gaelic poet Ossian, had appeared in 1760; Thomas Percy's
"Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," a collection of folk-ballads and
rude verse-romances such as the common people cherished but critics had
long refused to consider as poetry, was published in 1765. These two
books were of prime importance in fostering a new taste in
literature,--a love of natural beauty, of simplicity, and of rude
strength. The new taste hailed with delight the appearance of a native
lyric genius in Burns, whose first volume of poems was printed in 1786.
It welcomed also the homely, simple sweetness, what Coleridge and Lamb
called the "divine chit-chat," of Cowper, whose "Task" appeared in the
preceding year. But it was in Coleridge himself and his close
contemporaries and followers that the splendor of the new poetry showed
itself. He was two years younger than Wordsworth, a year younger than
Scott; he was sixteen at the birth of Byron, twenty at that of Shelley,
twenty-four at that of Keats; and he outlived all of them except
Wordsworth. His genius blossomed early. "The Ancient Mariner," his
greatest poem, was published some years before Wordsworth's "Ode on the
Intimations of Immortality" was written, or Scott's "Lay of the Last
Minstrel." He was in the prime of life, or what should have been the
prime of life--forty years old--when Byron burst into sudden fame with
the first two cantos of "Childe Harold" in 1812; he was forty-six when
Keats published "Endymion"; he was fifty-one when Shelley was drowned.
And of all this gifted company Coleridge, though not the strongest
character or the most prolific poet, was the profoundest intellect and
the _most originative poetic spirit_.

There was little hint, however, of future greatness or of fellowship
with great names in his birth and early circumstances. His father was a
country clergyman and schoolmaster in the village of Ottery St. Mary, in
Devonshire, a simple-hearted unworldly man, full of curious learning and
not very attentive to practical affairs. His mother managed the
household and brought up the children. Both his parents were of simple
West-country stock; but his father, having a natural turn for study and
having done well in his early manhood as a schoolmaster, went at the age
of thirty-one as a sizar, or poor student, to Sidney-Sussex College,
Cambridge, took orders, and was afterwards given the living of Ottery
St. Mary. Here he continued his beloved work of teaching, in addition to
his pastoral duties, and by means of this combination won the humble
livelihood which, through his wife's careful economy, sufficed for
rearing his large family. Coleridge tells us that his father "had so
little of parental ambition in him that he had destined his children to
be blacksmiths, etc." (though he had "resolved that I should be a
parson"), "and had accomplished his intention but for my mother's pride
and spirit of aggrandizing her family." Several of the children rewarded
their mother's care by distinguishing themselves in a modest way in the
army or in the church, but the only one about whom the world is curious
now was the youngest of the ten, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was born
at Ottery St. Mary, October 21, 1772.

The essential traits of his later character appeared in his early
childhood. Almost from infancy he lived in his imagination rather than
in the world of reality. "The schoolboys drove me from play, and were
always tormenting me, and hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but
read incessantly.... I became a _dreamer_, and acquired an indisposition
to all bodily activity; and I was fretful, and inordinately
passionate." "Sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth," were "prominent
and manifest" in his character before he was eight years old. Such is
his own account of his childhood, written to his friend Poole in 1797;
and it is an accurate description, as far as it goes, of the grown man.
But of the religious temper, too, the love of freedom and of virtue, the
hatred of injustice, cruelty, and falsehood that guided his uneven steps
through all the pitiful struggle of his middle life, of the conscience
that made his weakness hell to him--of these, too, we may be sure that
the beginnings were to be seen in the boy at Ottery St. Mary, as indeed
they were before his eyes in the person of his father, who, if not a
first-rate genius, was, says his son, "a first-rate Christian."

The good vicar died in 1781; and the next year, a "presentation" to
Christ's Hospital having been secured for him, little Samuel, not yet
eleven years old, went up to London to enter the famous old city school.
Here,

"In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,"

where he

"Saw nought lovely but the sky and stars,"

one of some seven hundred Blue-Coat boys, Coleridge lived for nine
years.

Most of the boys at Christ's Hospital, then as now, were given a
"commercial" education (which none the less included a very thorough
training in Latin); but a few of the most promising students were each
year selected by the masters for a classical training in preparation for
the universities, whence they were known as Grecians. Coleridge was
elected a Grecian in 1788. The famous Boyer--famous for his enthusiasm
alike in teaching the classics and in wielding the birch--laid the
foundation of Coleridge's later scholarship. Here, too, Coleridge did a
great amount of reading not laid down in the curriculum,--Latin and
Greek poetry and philosophy, mediaeval science and metaphysics--and won
the approval of his teachers by the excellence of his verses in Greek
and Latin, such as boys at school and students at the universities were
expected to write in those days. In the great city school, as in the
Devonshire vicarage, he lived in the imagination, inert of body and
rapacious of intellect; but he was solitary no longer, having found his
tongue and among his more intellectual schoolfellows an interested
audience. While yet a boy, he would hold an audience spellbound by his
eloquent declamation or the fervor of his argument till, as Lamb, who
was one of his hearers, tells us, "the walls of the old Grey Friars
re-echoed to the accents of the _inspired charity boy_!" That is the way
his conversation,--or monologue, as it often was,--affected not boys
only, but men, and especially young men, to his dying day. He cast a
spell upon men by his speech; upon his schoolfellows, upon young men at
the universities in the Pantisocracy days, upon Lloyd and Poole at
Nether Stowey, upon earnest young thinkers in his last days at Highgate;
so that even if he had never written "The Ancient Mariner" and the
_Biographia, Literaria_ he would still be remembered for the inspiration
of his talk.

Further details of the life at Christ's Hospital must be sought in
Lamb's two essays, especially that on "Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty
Years Ago." In 1791, having secured a Christ's Hospital "exhibition," he
entered Jesus College, Cambridge.

His university life extended over three years, from October, 1791, to
December, 1794. It was an unhappy time for him and an uneasy time for
his respectable relatives, for reasons that were partly in his own
nature and partly in the temper of the times.

Even Boyer's severe training, while it had made him a hard student and
an unusual scholar for his years, had failed to give him what he most
needed as a balance to his intellect and imagination, stability of
character. There is evidence that after the first few months, during
which the habits of his hard school life had not yet broken, the new
liberty of university life led him into extravagance, if not
dissipation. Work he doubtless did (he won the Browne medal for a Greek
ode on the slave-trade in 1792), but fitfully, giving less and less
attention to his regular studies and more to conviviality and, above
all, to dreams of literary fame. He wrote verses after various models,
sentimental, fanciful, or gallant; he was enthusiastic in praise of a
contemporary sonneteer, the Rev. William Bowles, whose "divine
sensibility" seemed to him the height of poetic feeling; and in
connection with Wordsworth's younger brother Christopher, who entered
Cambridge in 1793, he formed a literary society that discussed, among
other things, Wordsworth's volume of early poetry, "Descriptive
Sketches," published in that year. Wordsworth himself was a Cambridge
man, but had taken his degree in 1791 and gone abroad, so that the two
men whose personal friendship was to mean so much in English poetry did
not meet until 1796. Already in 1793, however, Coleridge had developed
political theories, or rather sympathies, which were preparing him for
fellowship with Wordsworth.

The French Revolution, which, after years of preparation, took concrete
shape in 1789, did not look to young Englishmen in 1791-4 as it looks to
us now, nor even as it was to look to those same Englishmen in 1800. In
those first years warm-hearted young enthusiasts at the universities saw
in the violence of their fellow-men across the Channel only the
struggles of the beautiful Spirit of Liberty bursting the chains of
age-long tyranny and corruption and calling men up to the heights to
breathe diviner air.

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven!"

wrote Wordsworth afterwards; and in the glow of his young idealism he
had gone over to France in the autumn of 1791 and was on the point of
throwing in his lot with the revolutionists, when his parents compelled
his return by cutting off his supplies. And many who, like Coleridge,
merely watched from afar shared his faith that a new order of things was
to be established, wherein Love should be Law and man's inhumanity to
man become but a memory of things outworn.

Less generous men, with a selfish interest in established privileges;
timid men, who looked with terror upon any prospect of change; older and
wiser men, who better understood the foundations of social order and the
nature of man--all these looked with distrust upon the revolutionary
idealism that was spreading from France through the younger generation
of Englishmen. The new notions of liberty, it was felt, threatened not
only the vested rights of property and the prescriptions of rank, but
the Church, too, and religion. Some of the would-be reformers were
avowed atheists; some (Coleridge and his friends, for instance, in the
Pantisocracy period) were communists. In general, they ascribed all the
evils of society to "institutions," and wanted them abolished.

Just how far Coleridge had gone in this direction by the autumn of 1793
we do not know; far enough at least to disturb his view of the future,
to worry his elder brother George, a clergyman and school-teacher, who
had in some measure filled a father's place to the young genius, and,
most important of all, to alarm and distress a gentle girl in London.
For before he left Christ's Hospital for Cambridge he had become
intimate at the house of a Mrs. Evans, and most of the letters preserved
from his first two years at the University were addressed to her or to
one of her two daughters, Anne and Mary. With the latter Coleridge was
in love; and that she had some regard for him is apparent from a letter
she sent him in 1794. Before that, however, Coleridge had taken a step
that seemed likely to close at once his college career and his prospects
of literary fame. The reasons have not been recorded: probably pecuniary
embarrassment, the yeasty state of his religious and political ideas,
and impatience or despondency over his love-affair with Mary Evans,
combined to precipitate his flight; what we know is that he ran away
from Cambridge and in December, 1793, enlisted as a dragoon in the
army.

Coleridge had hardly taken the step before he repented of it. His
letters to his brother George, who with other friends bestirred himself
for Coleridge's release as soon as his whereabouts was discovered, are
rather distressing in their self-abasement. The efforts of his friends
were successful and in April he returned to the University, where a
public admonition was the extent of his punishment, and he continued in
receipt of his Christ's Hospital exhibition.

But Coleridge's college days were practically over. He was now nearly
twenty-two years old, and the revolutionary unrest which had doubtless
contributed to his first escapade soon resulted in the formation of
schemes that took him away from Cambridge for good and all. In June,
1794, he made a visit to an old schoolfellow at Oxford. Here he met
Robert Southey of Balliol College. A friendship sprang up between them
out of which, before the end of the summer, grew the Utopian scheme of
Pantisocracy. A company of gentlemen and ladies were to emigrate to
America, take up lands in the Susquehanna valley, and there establish an
ideal community in which all should bear rule equally and find happiness
in a life of justice, labor, and love. The education of the young in the
principles of ideal humanity was an important part of the scheme. We are
reminded of the Brook Farm experiment in New England a generation later,
which bears a daughter's likeness to Pantisocracy, the chief difference
being that the New England enthusiasts were mature men and women and
really put the idea into practice, whereas the Pantisocrats were for the
most part collegians and never got beyond the stage of talking and
writing about their plans. The scheme was further elaborated at Bristol,
where Coleridge, returning from a vacation tour in Wales, again met
Southey, and at Bath, the home of Southey and of Southey's betrothed and
her sister, Edith and Sarah Fricker--"two sisters, milliners of Bath,"
as Byron contemptuously called them.

To the other sister, Sarah, Coleridge rather precipitately engaged
himself. His love for Mary Evans was not dead, but he seems to have
despaired of winning her and to have determined, by uniting himself
domestically with Southey and his friends, to make retreat from their
communistic scheme impossible. A few weeks later he is back at
Cambridge, tortured apparently between his old love and his new
engagement. Mary Evans has written to him deploring his wild notions and
the mad plan of Pantisocracy, yet confident that he has "too much
sensibility to be an infidel." Southey has reproved him rather sharply
for failing to write to his betrothed at Bath. Our next glimpse of him
is at London, discussing poetry and philosophy with Lamb at the
"Salutation and Cat" tavern and perhaps trying to get a sight of Mary
Evans. In December he is again at Bristol, in lively correspondence with
Southey about democracy, Pantisocracy, and poetry, but at the same time
he addresses a last appeal to Miss Evans. Her answer is kind, but final;
that chapter is closed, and Coleridge writes to Southey that he will "do
his duty," by which he means apparently that he will be faithful to
Pantisocracy and marry Sarah Fricker.

The Pantisocracy scheme could not in the nature of things be long-lived.
As a matter of fact it lasted little more than a year, ending in a
rupture between the two leading spirits just when they became
brothers-in-law. Coleridge spent the summer of 1795 in Bristol in
company with Southey, writing and lecturing. In October he was married
to Sarah Fricker in "St. Mary's Redcliff, poor Chatterton's church." In
November Southey married Edith Fricker and set sail for Lisbon, where
his uncle was the English chaplain; and Pantisocracy was dead.

The break with Southey was the natural result of attempting to force
through a scheme impracticable in itself and doubly impracticable for
the men who conceived it. Its collapse did not altogether sever their
literary relations. The collaboration begun in "The Fall of Robespierre"
(Cambridge, 1794) was continued in Southey's "Joan of Arc" (1796), to
which Coleridge contributed the part afterwards printed (with some
additions) as "The Destiny of Nations," and in Coleridge's first volume
of "Poems" (Bristol, 1796). A more important contributor to this volume,
however, was Charles Lamb, whose initials were appended to four of the
pieces. A second edition appeared in June, 1797, with eleven additions
from Coleridge besides verses by Lamb and Charles Lloyd, all under the
title: "Poems by S.T. Coleridge. Second Edition. To which are added
Poems by Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd." The publisher of both
editions was Joseph Cottle, a bookseller of Bristol, who played the part
of provincial Murray to the young poets in these years.

Meanwhile Coleridge, after a period of lecturing and projecting, had as
we have seen married Sarah Fricker, with whom he was now very much in
love, and had begun housekeeping in a cottage at Clevedon near the
Bristol Channel. The beauty of the place and his happiness there are
celebrated in "The Aeolian Harp" and "Reflections on Leaving a Place of
Retirement" (better known by its opening words, "Low was our pretty
cot"). His next residence was in Bristol--rather a base of operations
than a home, for Coleridge was on the road much of the time, lecturing,
preaching, soliciting subscriptions for his political and philosophical
paper "The Watchman" (which ran from March to May, 1796), and trying in
various other ways to provide for his family, which was increased by the
birth of a son in September, 1796. At last in December he secured the
little cottage at Nether Stowey in the Quantock Hills (south of the
Bristol Channel, in Somerset), close to the house of his beloved friend,
Thomas Poole, where he lived until his departure for Germany in
September, 1798.

II. AT NETHER STOWEY

The Stowey period was the blossoming time of Coleridge's genius. All the
poems in this volume except the last four, and besides these "This
Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," "Frost at Midnight," and "Fears in
Solitude"--the bulk of his achievement in poetry--were either written or
begun in 1797 and 1798. It will be proper, then, to dwell a little on
his circumstances, his friends, and his ideas during these two years.

The means of livelihood for himself and his family when he went to
Stowey were a subscription of about L40 that Poole and some friends got
together for him, L20 that Cottle paid for the second edition of the
"Poems," the promise of L80 from the father of Charles Lloyd, who was to
live with him and study under his direction, and such money as he could
earn by reviews and magazine articles, which he estimated at L40 a year;
not a munificent provision for a household of three adults and a child.
But the theories of the simple life that had made Pantisocracy seem a
feasible project still inspired him with confidence. "Sixteen
shillings," he wrote to Poole, "would cover all the weekly expenses of
my wife, infant, and myself. This I say from my wife's own
calculations." Further, he will support himself by the labor of his
hands. "If you can instruct me to manage an acre and a half of land, and
to raise in it, with my own hands, all kinds of vegetables and grain,
enough for myself and my wife and sufficient to feed a pig or two with
the refuse, I hope that you will have served me _most_ effectually by
placing me out of the necessity of being served." This was in December,
just before he moved to Stowey. In February he wrote from his new home
to another friend: "From seven till half past eight I work in my garden;
from breakfast till twelve I read and compose, then read again, feed the
pigs, poultry, etc., till two o'clock; after dinner work again till tea;
from tea till supper, _review_. So jogs the day, and I am happy.... I
raise potatoes and all manner of vegetables, have an orchard, and shall
raise corn with the spade, enough for my family. We have two pigs, and
ducks and geese. A cow would not answer the keep: we have whatever milk
we want from T. Poole."

There is a suspicious regularity about this schedule. Lamb wrote from
London in January: "Is it a farm that you have got? And what does your
worship know about farming?" His agricultural activity, in the month of
February, must have been chiefly prospective; and we may safely assume
that Poole supplied other things besides milk, and that the poet spent
more time reading, dreaming, and talking than he did raising potatoes. A
good deal of time must have been spent in the actual composition of his
poetry, including his play "Osorio," which was written in 1797, and in
studying the landscape beauties of the Quantocks. After the coming of
the Wordsworths to Alfoxden he spent much of the time walking between
Alfoxden and Stowey, or further afield with Wordsworth and his sister.
"My walks," he wrote afterwards, "were almost daily on the top of
Quantock, and among its sloping coombs. With my pencil and
memorandum-book in my hand, I was making studies, as the artists call
them, and often moulding them into verse with the objects and imagery
immediately before my eyes." This does not sound much like "raising corn
with the spade."

On Sundays he would sometimes preach before such Unitarian
congregations, within walking distance, as cared to hear him. But as he
would take no pay for his services his preaching contributed nothing
toward the support of his family. Lloyd, who was epileptic and subject
to moody variation in his attachments, was but an irregular housemate
after the first few months, and his contribution to the household
expenses was correspondingly uncertain. The future looked so dark in
October, 1797, that in spite of misgivings and former scruples he had
concluded that he "must become a Unitarian minister, as a less evil than
starvation." Accordingly he was in Shrewsbury in January, 1798,
preaching in the Unitarian church and on the point of accepting the
pastorate at a salary of L150 a year, when the sky brightened in another
quarter. Thomas and Josiah Wedgwood, sons of the famous potter and
friends of Thomas Poole, offered him an equal sum annually as a free
gift. They were wealthy men, well able to afford it; they attached no
condition to the gift except that he should devote himself entirely to
the study of poetry and philosophy, which was precisely what he wanted
to do; and he was not long in determining to accept the offer. "I
accepted it," he wrote to Wordsworth while still at Shrewsbury, "on the
presumption that I had talents, honesty, and propensities to perseverant
effort." The propensities, alas, remained propensities, never acquiring
the force of habit. The pension, however, continued to be paid in full
until 1812, when Josiah Wedgwood withdrew his half of it. The other
half, upon the death of Thomas Wedgwood in 1805, had been secured to
Coleridge for life; and this annuity must have constituted the chief
reliance of Mrs. Coleridge for many years.

If Coleridge did not prosper financially, he was at least fortunate in
his friends; and a man's friends are after all the best testimony to the
character of his mind and heart. When he went to Stowey in December,
1796, he was again on good terms with Southey, though the enthusiasm of
their first fellowship was gone. The friendship with Lamb, begun in
their school-days and renewed at the "Salutation and Cat" in 1794, was
maintained by an eager correspondence and by Lamb's visit to Stowey in
July, 1797; and although Lloyd's vagaries led to a coolness between the
old friends in the following year, the breach was soon healed, and the
friendship continued till death. Another with whom Coleridge maintained
a voluminous correspondence in 1796-7 was John Thelwall, theoretical
democrat, atheist, and admirer of Godwin, whose visit to Coleridge and
Wordsworth in the summer of 1797 so shocked the good conservatives of
the neighborhood that Wordsworth had to leave Alfoxden in consequence of
it. But without doubt the dearest and most influential friend Coleridge
had before the Wordsworths came into his life was Thomas Poole. It was
in order to be in daily intercourse with Poole that he moved to Stowey;
and Poole's hesitation about securing the cottage for him, arising,
Coleridge seemed to fear, from imperfect confidence and friendship, was
a source of agonized apprehension to the sensitive poet. When we
consider that Poole was a self-educated man, a Somersetshire tanner with
no claim to literary genius or philosophical acquirements, Coleridge's
devotion to him and dependence on him bring out in a strong light the
substantial, elemental character of the man. "O Poole!" Coleridge wrote
to him from Germany afterwards, "you are a noble heart as ever God
made!" Poole had indeed in a marked degree the genius for friendship.
Strength of character, sympathy, and self-effacing devotion, combined
with prudence and sincerity, made this man a tower of refuge for the
unstable spirit of the poet.

No other single relation, however, can compare in importance, for
Coleridge's poetic development, with that which sprang up in the summer
of 1797 between him and William Wordsworth. Just when they first met is
not recorded. We have seen that Coleridge was acquainted with
Wordsworth's younger brother in his college days, and discussed with him
Wordsworth's first published poems. In January, 1797, he told Cottle
that he wished to submit his "Visions of the Maid of Arc" to Wordsworth
for criticism. The earliest definite record of their personal
acquaintance is a letter Coleridge wrote to Cottle while on a visit to
Wordsworth at Racedown (just over the Somerset border in Dorsetshire)
early in June. About the beginning of July he is again at Racedown; and
when he returns he brings Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy with him for
a visit. On the 7th Lamb arrived for his long-planned reunion with
Coleridge. The second week of July, 1797, was thus a rich and
long-remembered time for all of them, despite the fact that Mrs.
Coleridge "accidentally emptied a skillet of boiling milk" on her
husband's foot, which confined him "during the whole time of Charles
Lamb's stay." The others took long walks in the neighborhood, amid such
scenery as is described in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," a poem
that admirably voices the happiness, of those days of spiritual
fellowship. The Wordsworths did not return to Racedown. "By a
combination of curious circumstances a gentleman's seat, with a park and
woods, elegantly and completely furnished,... in the most beautiful and
romantic situation by the seaside, four miles from Stowey--this we have
got for Wordsworth at the _rent of twenty-three pounds a year, taxes
included_!" Coleridge triumphantly announced to Southey; and in this
house, the Manor of Alfoxden, the Wordsworths remained for a year, in
daily companionship with Coleridge and surrounded by scenes of natural
beauty that have left a lasting mark on the work of both poets.

What the friendship with Coleridge meant to Wordsworth may best be seen
in "The Prelude: or, Growth of a Poet's Mind," Wordsworth's greatest
long poem, written some years afterwards and addressed throughout to
Coleridge.

"There is no grief, no sorrow, no despair,
No languor, no dejection, no dismay,
No absence scarcely can there be, for those
Who love as we do."

What Wordsworth was to Coleridge is more important for us here. The
admiration which the brilliant child of genius felt for the great
preacher-poet is chiefly, one feels, an admiration for his character. As
a matter of fact, Wordsworth had written nothing, up to his coming to
Alfoxden, that would have preserved his name as a poet, nothing so
noteworthy or promising as what Coleridge had already written. But
Coleridge felt in this lean and thoughtful young man a strength of mind,
a depth and sureness of heart that compelled his allegiance and even
imparted, for the time, some of that resolution in which he was by
nature so sadly deficient. The character of their friendship is to be
seen not only in the published work of the two poets from this time on
(notably in "Dejection"), but perhaps even more clearly in Dorothy
Wordsworth's Journal and in Coleridge's letters. "I speak with
heart-felt sincerity," he wrote to Cottle in June, 1797, "and (I think)
unblinded judgment, when I tell you that I feel myself _a little man by
his side_, and yet do not think myself the less man than I formerly
thought myself.... T. Poole's opinion of Wordsworth is that he is the
greatest man he ever knew; I coincide." Wordsworth's influence is
evident in a letter from Coleridge to his brother George in April, 1798:
"I love fields and woods and mountains with almost a visionary fondness.
And because I have found benevolence and quietness growing within me as
that fondness has increased, therefore I should wish to be the means of
implanting it in others, and to destroy the bad passions not by
combating them but by keeping them in inaction." Under the calming and
clarifying influence of the stronger Northern spirit the fever of his
revolutionary dreams abated, he found happiness in the conscious
exercise of his poetic powers, and for one year in his troubled
existence his genius showed itself in all its splendor.

The immediate poetic result of their friendship was the "Lyrical
Ballads," published by Cottle in September, 1798. The origin of the work
has been described both by Wordsworth (in a prefatory note to "We Are
Seven") and by Coleridge (in the _Biographia Literaria_, chap. xiv.). At
first, they were to collaborate in writing a poem the proceeds of which
should pay the expenses of a little tour they were making when the plan
was thought of, in November, 1797; and thus "The Ancient Mariner" was
begun. As this poem grew under Coleridge's "shaping-spirit of
imagination" Wordsworth saw that he "could only be a clog" upon its
progress, and it was resigned to Coleridge. The plan was then enlarged
to include a volume illustrating "two cardinal points of poetry, the
power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to
the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by
the modifying colours of imagination." Wordsworth was to illustrate the
former principle, Coleridge the latter, and the proceeds of the book
were to go toward the expenses of a trip to Germany, decided on in the
spring of 1798. The bulk of the volume was Wordsworth's, and was
typically Wordsworthian, ranging from such simple ballads of humble
incident as "Goody Blake" and "The Idiot Boy" to the magnificent blank
verse of "Tintern Abbey"; Coleridge's share consisted of a brief poem
called "The Nightingale," two short extracts from "Osorio," and "The
Rime of the Ancyent Marinere."

Apart from the "Lyrical Ballads" Coleridge conceived and finished
between June, 1797, and the departure for Germany in 1798, and published
in the latter year, "Fire, Famine, and Slaughter," "Frost at Midnight,"
"Fears in Solitude," and "France." He conceived and partly executed, but
did not then publish, "Christabel," "Kubla Khan," "Love," "The Ballad of
the Dark Ladie," and "The Three Graves." Thus, all Coleridge's best
poetry, with the exception of those three saddest of voices out of a
broken life, "Dejection" (1802), the lines to Wordsworth on hearing him
read "The Prelude" (1807), and "Youth and Age" (1823-32), belongs either
wholly or in its inception to the year of his fellowship with the
Wordsworths in the Quantock Hills.

Of his political, religious, and literary opinions at this time he has
left a fairly adequate account in his published writings and his
correspondence, especially in the _Biographia Literaria_ and in the
letter to the Rev. George Coleridge referred to above. The first year of
his married life saw him still, in spite of the failure of Pantisocracy,
an eager visionary reformer upborne by generous enthusiasm and ardent
religious feeling. "O! never can I remember those days," he wrote in the
_Biographia_, "with either shame or regret. For I was most sincere, most
disinterested! My opinions were indeed in many and most important points
erroneous; but my heart was single. Wealth, rank, life itself, then
seemed cheap to me, compared with the interest of (what I believed to
be) the truth, and the will of my Maker." However much he may have
consorted with unbelievers like Thelwall and distressed his good brother
George by his heterodoxy, he was by nature deeply religious. He tried in
his letters to recover Thelwall from his "atheism," though he heartily
approved a sentiment expressed by the latter: "He who thinks and _feels_
will be virtuous; and he who is absorbed in self will be vicious,
whatever may be his speculative opinions." Godwin's system of "Justice,"
with its soulless logic, he abhorred. He preached often in Unitarian
churches. To young Hazlitt, who heard him preach in January, 1798, from
the text "And He went up into the mountain to pray, _Himself, alone_,"
it seemed "as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human
heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence
through the universe." In politics he was, when he went to Stowey,
"almost equidistant from all the three prominent parties, the Pittites,
the Foxites, and the Democrats"; he was "a vehement anti-ministerialist,
but after the invasion of Switzerland, a more vehement anti-Gallican
[see the last two stanzas of "France"], and still more intensely an
anti-Jacobin." Under Wordsworth's influence his thoughts turned in great
measure from contemporary politics to more fundamental matters. Always
his poetry had been the utterance of his essential being. "I feel
strongly and I think strongly," he wrote to Thelwall in 1796, "but I
seldom feel without thinking or think without feeling. Hence, though my
poetry has in general a hue of tenderness or passion over it, yet it
seldom exhibits unmixed and simple tenderness and passion. My
philosophical opinions are blended with or deduced from my feelings."
Wordsworth gave his feelings a new object and his philosophy a higher
aim. In April of the second year at Stowey, in the letter to his brother
already quoted, Coleridge wrote: "I have for some time past withdrawn
myself totally from the consideration of _immediate causes_, which are
infinitely complex and uncertain, to muse on fundamental and general
causes, the 'causae causarum.' I devote myself to such works as encroach
not on the anti-social passions--in poetry, to elevate the imagination
and set the affections in right tune by the beauty of the inanimate
impregnated as with a living soul by the presence of life--in prose to
the seeking with patience and a slow, very slow mind, 'Quid sumus, et
quidnam victuri gignimus,'--what our faculties are and what they are
capable of becoming." This last sentence is a sort of half-prophetic
summary of his life's work; but the poetry soon gave way to the prose,
and he never again so nearly realized his poetical ideal as he had
already done in "The Ancient Mariner."

Of his person and the impression he made upon people at this time there
are various contemporary accounts. To Thelwall, in November, 1796, he
sent the following description of himself: "... my face, unless when
animated by immediate eloquence, expresses great sloth, and great,
indeed almost idiotic good-nature. 'Tis a mere carcass of a face; fat,
flabby, and expressive chiefly of inexpression. Yet I am told that my
eyes, eyebrows, and forehead are physiognomically good; but of this the
deponent knoweth not. As to my shape, 'tis a good shape enough if
measured, but my gait is awkward, and the walk of the whole man
indicates _indolence capable of energies_.... I cannot breathe through
my nose, so my mouth, with sensual thick lips, is almost always open. In
conversation I am impassioned, and oppose what I deem error with an
eagerness which is often mistaken for personal asperity; but I am ever
so swallowed up in the _thing_ said that I forget my _opponent_. Such am
I." The Rev. Leapidge Smith, in his "Reminiscences of an Octogenarian,"
remembered him as "a tall, dark, handsome young man, with long, black,
flowing hair; eyes not merely dark, but black, and keenly penetrating; a
fine forehead, a deep-toned, harmonious voice; a manner never to be
forgotten, full of life, vivacity, and kindness; dignified in person
and, added to all these, exhibiting the elements of his future
greatness."[1] Hazlitt, in "My First Acquaintance with Poets" (a paper
that every student of Coleridge's life and poetry should read),
describing him as he appeared on his visit to Hazlitt's father at Wem in
1798, says: "His complexion was at that time clear, and even bright. His
forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with large
projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a sea with
darkened lustre.... His mouth was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his
chin good-humored and round, but his nose, the rudder of the face, the
index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing--like what he has done."
And Dorothy Wordsworth (to close with a contemporary and sympathetic
impression) set him down in her journal after their first meeting at
Racedown thus: "He is a wonderful man. His conversation teems with soul,
mind, and spirit.... At first I thought him very plain, that is for
about three minutes: he is pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and
not very good teeth, longish, loose-growing, half-curling, rough black
hair. But if you hear him speak for five minutes you think no more of
them. His eye is large and full, and not very dark, but grey[2]--such an
eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it
speaks every emotion of his animated mind; it has more of 'the poet's
eye in a fine frenzy rolling' than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark
eyebrows, and an overhanging forehead." The friendly and keen-sighted
woman gives a more sympathetic picture than the others; but there must
have been truth, too, in the view of the equally keen-sighted and less
friendly Hazlitt, whose description accords well with Coleridge's
self-portraiture, and in the last sarcastic item, too well, with the
remainder of the poet's career.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: "Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge," ed. by E.H.
Coleridge, Vol. I., p. 180, note.]

[Footnote 2: The uncertainty as to the color of his eyes is a tribute to
their expressiveness. Carlyle described him in 1824 as having "a pair of
strange brown, timid, yet earnest-looking eyes." Emerson visited him in
1833 and found him "with bright blue eyes and fine clear complexion."]

III. THE REST OF THE STORY

Coleridge lived for thirty-six years after he left Stowey for Germany in
1798. His fame as a poet grew as the world became acquainted with and
learned to feel the peculiar charm of his poetry, and he was even more
famous, for a while, as a literary critic and a moral philosopher. But
they were years of weak-willed wandering, of vast hazy plans and feeble
performance, lighted only here and there by glimpses of fragmentary
accomplishment, and that seldom in poetry. Keats died at twenty-six,
leaving behind him a body of poetry hardly less wonderful than Coleridge
had fashioned at the same age; and another poet sang of him:

"The bloom, whose petals, nipt before they blew,
Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste."

In Coleridge the poet died at nearly the same age, almost as completely
as if the man himself had passed "within the twilight chamber ... of
white Death"; and "Dejection" is that poet's dirge. The remaining years
need therefore but few words.

Coleridge had taken opium, perhaps as early as his school-days, for
relief from neuralgia. He had recourse to it in March, 1796, for
sleeplessness; in the following November, for relief from violent
nervous pains; and near the close of the Stowey period, in May, 1798,
when the vagaries of Lloyd, the estrangement from Lamb, domestic
anxiety, and physical suffering had reduced him to a state of extreme
nervous wretchedness, he again took refuge in opiates, of which "Kubla
Khan" is partly the result. He returned from Germany in 1799, worked for
a while on a newspaper in London and on a translation of Schiller's
"Wallenstein," and in the summer of 1800 removed to Keswick in
Cumberland, in the Lake Country, where the Wordsworths had already
established themselves. Here, in the autumn of 1800, he strove to
finish "Christabel," and did finish the second part. In the winter and
spring he suffered from a complicated illness, in which he again had
recourse to laudanum; and from the spring of 1801 he was confirmed in
the opium habit, sinking often to pitiful depths of moral and physical
misery. He was in the Mediterranean, chiefly at Malta, from 1804 to
1806. His wife and children remained at Keswick, where Southey and his
family had become co-tenants with them of Greta Hall. Southey, it might
almost be said, took care of Coleridge's family henceforth; for
Coleridge had begun to find his own fireside an intolerable place as
early as 1802, lived little at home, and made a formal separation from
his wife in 1808,--though they saw each other occasionally after that
and the Wedgwood annuity continued to be paid to Mrs. Coleridge. In 1809
he was living with the Wordsworths at Grasmere, where he wrote several
numbers of a politico-philosophical paper called "The Friend." About the
close of 1810 he was taken in hand by a Mr. and Mrs. Morgan of
Hammersmith, near London, under whose care he kept the opium in check
sufficiently to give his famous lectures on the "Principles of Poetry"
in the winter of 1811-12, and another series in the early summer on
Shakespeare. In the winter following, his play of "Remorse," a recast of
the "Osorio" of 1797, was acted in London with some success. In the
winter of 1813-14 he lectured, in a "conversational" fashion, at
Bristol. He also wrote irregularly for the London papers during these
years. But his studies, since his return from Germany, had been directed
to metaphysics, and especially to the philosophical bases of poetry and
theology; and the last twenty years of his life, at least, were occupied
with plans for a great philosophical work covering these two fields of
thought. One of the fragments of the great work that actually came to
light, the _Biographia Literaria_, seems to have been sent to the
printers in 1815. A collected edition of his poetry was also begun while
he was under the Morgans' care.

From 1816 till his death in 1834 he lived in comparative peace, if not
in happiness, with a Mr. Gilman of Highgate near London, an apothecary.
Gilman and his wife were able so far to wean him from the drug, or to
regulate his use of it, that he brought to the birth something of his
vast plans in criticism and philosophy, notably the _Biographia
Literaria_ (1817) and the "Aids to Reflection" (1825). The beginning of
his stay with Gilman was also marked by the publication of "Christabel"
and "Kubla Khan" (1816), and of a collected edition of his other poems
(including "The Ancient Mariner," considerably revised) under the title
"Sibylline Leaves" (1817). But the poems that were not finished in the
first great period at Stowey remained unfinished. He talked divinely
("an archangel a little damaged," Lamb said), and both by his talk and
his metaphysical writings profoundly influenced the literature and
philosophy of the century, both in England and America; but the poet in
him was dead.

"Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain,
And genius given, and knowledge won in vain;
And all which I had culled in woodwalks wild,
And all which patient toil had reared, and all
Commune with _thee_ had opened out--but flowers
Strewed on my corse, and borne upon my bier,
In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!"[1]

It would be a mistake to ascribe the paralysis of Coleridge's powers of
constructive imagination exclusively to laudanum. Rather the resort to
narcotics and the inability to control his creative faculty are alike
symptoms of a temperamental malady which had its roots in his nature
close to the seat of that special faculty. Under a favorable conjunction
of outward circumstance and inward state, imagination came; it possessed
him, and he labored in it, happily. Afterwards he could revise what he
had shaped, analyze it philosophically, perfect some details of it, but
he could not proceed in the creative act after the inspiration had left
him. His own description of his nature--"_indolence capable of
energies_"--is accurate as far as it goes. The opium, resorted to often,
no doubt, to quicken the dreams in his brain as well as to relieve his
bodily suffering, helped to enfeeble his will; but the "indolence" was
in him before he became addicted to opium, and he was never "capable of
energies" at the call of duty, but only at the call of his "shaping
spirit," over whose coming and going he had no control.

Poetically it is perhaps as well. Had he been like his friend Wordsworth
in strength and steadiness of purpose--which is to suppose him another
nature than he was--his life would have been happier and more edifying,
but he would hardly have given us anything better than "Christabel" and
"The Ancient Mariner." Romantic poetry of the higher type is essentially
the creature of mood. Even Wordsworth's long and conscientious labors
produced but a small bulk of poetry of this character, amid dreary
reaches of uninspired preaching. Coleridge waited--in despondency often,
in self-upbraidings, in the temporary deception of opium dreams with
their consequent misery--for the return of the spirit; and it did not
come.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: From the lines addressed to Wordsworth after hearing him
read "The Prelude," in 1807.]

II. COLERIDGE'S POEMS.

"THE ANCIENT MARINER"

"The Ancient Mariner" was first printed in the first edition of "Lyrical
Ballads," 1798, again with considerable changes in the second edition,
1800, and without further significant change in the editions of 1802 and
1805. Its fifth appearance was in "Sibylline Leaves," 1817, again with
some important changes, and the addition of the Latin motto and the
marginal gloss. In the "Poetical Works," 1828, and again in the
"Poetical Works," 1829, the poem appeared in its final form as we now
have it,--differing very little from the form it had in "Sibylline
Leaves." One or two significant minor changes will be mentioned in the
notes.

Coleridge's own account of the genesis of the poem, given in the
_Biographia Literaria_ nearly twenty years later, is interesting.
"During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our
conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry,
the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence
to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty
by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which
accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset, diffused over a
known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability
of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested
itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might
be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to
be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to
consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of
such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing
them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being
who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself
under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be
chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such
as will be found in every village and its vicinity where there is a
meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when
they present themselves.

"In this idea originated the 'Lyrical Ballads'; in which it was agreed
that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters
supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our
inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to
procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of
disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr.
Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object,
to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a
feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention
from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the wonders and
loveliness of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for
which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude,
we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither
feel nor understand.

"With this view I wrote 'The Ancient Mariner,' and was preparing, among
other poems, 'The Dark Ladie,' and the 'Christabel,' in which I should
have more nearly realized my ideal than I had done in my first attempt.
But Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and
the number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead
of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous
matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own
character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction which is
characteristic of his genius [among them the "Lines composed a few miles
above Tintern Abbey"]. In this form the 'Lyrical Ballads' were
published."

Lyrical they hardly were, in any current meaning of that word; they were
narrative. But they were ballads as the word was then understood. The
two cardinal points of poetry that Coleridge says they had in view in
this partnership production were both believed to be special marks of
the ballad; the charm of homeliness and simplicity, and the spell of the
supernatural and romantic. Bishop Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English
Poetry," 1765, had created a taste for the traditional poetry of humble
folk. Spreading to Germany and uniting there with the sentimental
sensationalism of the eighteenth century, this taste found expression in
Burger's "Lenore," which in turn had a powerful influence in England,
five distinct translations of it appearing in 1796. Of the distinction
so much insisted on by later analysts of the true popular ballad--its
communal origin, its impersonality, its freedom from adornment, its lack
of conscious art--the Englishman of Coleridge's time took no account.
"The Ancient Mariner" is not a ballad in the sense in which "Sir Patrick
Spens" or "Young Waters" is a ballad. It is in the highest degree a work
of conscious and individual art. It is rather to be classed, like
"Christabel," as a romance. But it was conceived and written under the
influence of the "ballad revival," and bears many marks of that
influence both in its general structure and in its details of
workmanship.

Much of the archaic diction and antique spelling, as well as the ruder
grotesquerie, that in the first edition proclaimed its relation to the
pseudo-balladry of the time disappeared in the later editions. But the
archaisms, the "unpoetical" diction, and especially the disregard of
tense coherence in the poem as we now have it, contribute greatly to the
atmosphere of romance--as of a story removed alike from the commonplace
experience of every day and from familiar literary conventions--which it
was Coleridge's intention to produce. By a few devotional
ejaculations--"Heaven's Mother send us grace!" "To Mary Queen the praise
be given!"--we are made to feel that the Ancient Mariner lived before
the Reformation, in the ages of wonder and faith. Repetition, as in many
stanzas of Part IV., is a device caught from the folk-ballad and
modified to produce the effect of a spell, which is so strong a mark of
the poem. The abrupt opening, the unannounced transitions in dialogue,
the omission of all but the vital incidents of the story, all belong to
the ballad style. The verse form is what is known as the ballad stanza
(stanza of four lines--a line of four accents followed by one of three,
the second and fourth lines riming) variously extended and modified to
suit the mood of the passage. The prose summary in the form of a
marginal gloss, first added in the edition of 1817, is a practice taken
from early printed books, but not from balladry, which is normally oral.

Of the literary qualities of the poem much might be said, but I call
attention here to but two: the organic structure of the story and the
character of the imagery, two important aspects of creative imagination.
The seven parts are seven stages of the narrative, each, except the
last, closing with a reference to the Mariner's sin. The story proceeds
like the successive acts of a play. In Part I. the deed is committed; in
Part II. the punishment begins; in Part III. the punishment reaches its
climax. Part IV. brings the "turn"; in the crisis of his sufferings
comes the consciousness of fellowship with other creatures and
repentance for his cruelty. Parts V. and VI. relate his penance begun,
and his return by supernatural agencies to the world of human
fellowship; and Part VII. brings us back to the opening scene, closing
the whole with a moral. The moral is so plainly set forth that one
wonders how Mrs. Barbauld could ever have complained, as Coleridge tells
us she did, that the poem "had no moral." His reply is worth recording:
"I told her that in my opinion the poem had too much; and that the only,
or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral
sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a
work of such pure imagination. It ought to have had no more moral than
the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by
the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie
starts up, and says he _must_ kill the aforesaid merchant, because one
of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son."
But the poet of 1798 knew better than the metaphysician of 1830. The
moral is as essential a part of the whole poem as moral consciousness is
of man; without it the poem would be without the coherence of human
interest which alone can secure for "these shadows of imagination"
"poetic faith." The moral, really, is suffused throughout the work, is
the blood of its being; that it should be formulated at the close is
quite in accord with the simplicity which marked the whole conception of
the "Lyrical Ballads," and is moreover perfectly harmonious with the
spirit of the poem itself. There have been poets who seemed to be
without the moral sense, and who have written poetry quite free from any
moral, like Poe and his landscape visions, but wonderful as they are,
they are abnormal, and are less great as they are less completely human.
It may be that Wordsworth, as one infers from recollections of the
composition of the poem, suggested the moral plot; but if so it entered
at once and completely into Coleridge's imagination and governed the
shaping of the poem from the start. In all the very considerable changes
and omissions that the poem underwent after it was first printed, there
was none that either retrenched from or added to the moral
interpretation of the tale.

Of its imagery the most evident characteristic is what may be called the
anthropomorphic treatment of nature. This, although in accord with
modern conceptions of primitive culture, is not at all a mark of the
popular ballad. Sun, and moon, and storm-wind, and ocean are in
folk-song sun and moon and wind and water and nothing more; but in "The
Ancient Mariner" they are living beings.

"And now the Storm-blast came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased us south along."

"And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,
(Heaven's Mother send us grace!)
As if through a dungeon-grate he peered
With broad and burning face."

"Still as a slave before his lord,
The ocean hath no blast;
His great bright eye most silently
Up to the Moon is cast--

"If he may know which way to go;
For she guides him smooth or grim.
See, brother, see! how graciously
She looketh down on him."

This is the most noticeable of the "modifying colours of imagination"
in "The Ancient Mariner." The practice might be classed as a sort of
personification; but how utterly different in its effect from the
conventional "literary" personifications of the eighteenth century--of
Gray in the "Elegy," for instance! Grandeur, and Envy, and Honour, in
that admirable poem, are not real persons to the imagination; the
abstraction remains an abstraction. But in Coleridge's poem all nature
is alive with the life of men. Other elements of "that synthetic and
magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of
imagination," and which blends "the idea with the image" and "the sense
of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects" will be felt as
the poem is studied.

Wordsworth related in after years that the suggestion for the poem came
from a dream of a phantom ship told to Coleridge by a friend, and that
he (Wordsworth) proposed the shooting of the albatross, the revenge of
the "tutelary spirits," and the "navigation of the ship by the dead
men," and contributed the fourth stanza of the poem and the last two
lines of the first stanza of Part IV. He had been reading Shelvocke's
"Voyages," a book in which he had found a description of albatrosses as
they are seen in far southern waters. Other reading that may have
suggested some of the scenery is described in the "Notes" to the Globe
edition of Coleridge's poems. There are also passages and situations in
the last two acts of Wordsworth's play, "The Borderers," which Coleridge
read with great admiration in the summer of 1797, that have evident
kinship with "The Ancient Mariner," and Wordsworth's "Peter Bell"
(composed at Alfoxden, but printed many years later) suggests what the
story might have become if Coleridge instead of Wordsworth had withdrawn
from collaboration.

"CHRISTABEL" AND "KUBLA KHAN"

"Christabel" and "Kubla Khan" were first printed in 1816, in a pamphlet
along with "The Pains of Sleep," a sort of contrast to "Kubla Khan"
composed in 1803. In the Preface to this pamphlet Coleridge informs us
that the first part of "Christabel" was written at Stowey in 1797 and
the second part at Keswick, Cumberland, in 1800. The poem was intended
originally for the "Lyrical Ballads," and it was with the hope of
finishing it for the second edition that Coleridge took it up again in
the fall of 1800. There is a good deal of uncertainty as to just how
much of the work was done at that time. In two letters of that period he
speaks of it as "running up to 1300 lines," and "swelled into a poem of
1400 lines," so that it is no longer suitable for the "Lyrical Ballads";
but hardly half of this amount was printed in the 1816 pamphlet or has
ever been found since. One suspects that already in 1800 dreams and
projects had begun to be confounded with performance. In the latter of
the two letters mentioned above he relates how his "verse-making
faculties returned" to him, after long and unsuccessful struggles with
"barrenness" and deep "dejection," as the result of drinking, "at the
house of a neighbouring clergyman, ... so much wine, that I found some
effort and dexterity requisite to balance myself on the hither edge of
sobriety." On the whole, it seems probable that "Christabel" owes little
to the forced efforts of his first year in the Lake country. Like most
of the other poems in this volume, it is a product of the great year at
Stowey. He himself told a friend in later years: "I had the whole of the
two cantos in my mind before I began it," adding very truly, "certainly
the first canto is more perfect, has more of the true wild weird spirit
than the last."

Down to the close of his life he dreamed of finishing this work. He
amused his listeners at Highgate with a continuation of the plot; and
in 1833 he declared that if he "were perfectly free from vexation and
were in the _ad libitum_ hearing of fine music" he could yet finish
"Christabel," "for I have, as I always had, the whole plan entire from
beginning to end in my mind; but I fear I could not carry on with equal
success the execution of the idea." Wordsworth had a different
recollection. He told Coleridge's nephew in 1836 that he did not think
Coleridge "had ever conceived, in his own mind, any definite plan for
it; that the poem had been composed while they were in habits of daily
intercourse, and almost in his presence, and when there was the most
unreserved intercourse between them as to all their literary projects
and productions, and he had never heard from him any plan for finishing
it"; and added, what is fully borne out by a study of Coleridge's life:
"schemes of this sort passed rapidly and vividly through his mind, and
so impressed him, that he often fancied he had arranged things, which
really, and upon trial, proved to be mere embryos."

"The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower
Unfinished must remain,"

wrote Longfellow, alluding to "The Dolliver Romance" that Hawthorne left
incomplete at his death. There is strong kinship, moral and artistic,
between Coleridge and Hawthorne; both believed that the heart is more
than the head, and neither could force his imagination to work under
unfavorable conditions. But Hawthorne's failure of imagination came at
the end of a fruitful and consistent career, and his life failed with
it; in Coleridge the poet died half a lifetime before the man, and left
the man--the preacher and philosopher--to lament his loss.

Whether or not Coleridge had the story complete in his mind, what we
have is a fragment, and does not enable us to divine, as some broken
statues do, the plan of the whole. What it gives us is the romantic
mood, the sense of "witchery by daylight," and this it does more
hauntingly than anything else in the English language. It is a series
of magical and unforgetable pictures. It owes a good deal to the old
verse romances and ballads that so impressed the imagination in those
days of the mediaeval revival, but it was itself a far stronger
influence. It operated as an original force, both by its form and by its
spirit, upon the poetic imagination of the first half of the nineteenth
century more widely and deeply than the work of any other man, Burns and
Keats not excepted. Scott heard it read from manuscript, and the "Lay of
the Last Minstrel," with the series of verse romances that followed, may
almost be called a result of that reading; the verse form of Scott's
romances certainly is. Poe's poetry is as far as the poles removed from
Scott's; yet a close study of Poe's work shows the influence of
"Christabel" to be even deeper here than in the "Lay of the Last
Minstrel."

Coleridge was fully aware of a special power, both of imagination and of
verse-music, in the poem. His attempts to complete it in 1800 brought
persistently to his mind the project of a philosophy of poetry, and
especially of this poem, as we may infer from a letter to Poole in
March, 1801: "I shall ... immediately publish my 'Christabel,' with two
essays annexed to it, on the 'Preternatural' and on 'Metre.'" When the
two cantos were at last printed in 1816, Coleridge wrote in the Preface:
"The metre of the 'Christabel' is not, properly speaking, irregular,
though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle: namely,
that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the
latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will
be found to be only four. Nevertheless this occasional variation in
number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of
convenience, but in correspondence with some transition, in the nature
of the imagery or passion." This is not to be taken quite literally. The
accentual principle was assuredly nothing new in English verse, and
syllable-counting, though introduced by Chaucer, had to be reintroduced
by the Renaissance poets and did not become an unquestioned convention
till the latter part of the seventeenth century. But the return to free
accentual verse in the "Christabel" was an innovation at the beginning
of the nineteenth century. It is to be noted, too, that there are lines
of three and even of two accents in Part I.

In chap. XV. of the _Biographia Literaria_, in a list of the "specific
symptoms of poetic power" in Shakespeare's early work, Coleridge places
first "the perfect sweetness of the versification; its adaptation to the
subject; and the power displayed in varying the march of the words....
The sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift
of imagination; and this, together with the power of reducing multitude
into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some one
predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but can
never be learnt. It is in these that _Poeta nascitur non fit_."

"Kubla Khan" is the remembered fragment of a dream. All that we know
about it is contained in the note Coleridge prefixed to it in the
pamphlet of 1816. In the summer of 1798 (Coleridge says 1797, but this
seems to have been a slip of his memory[1]) "the author, then in ill
health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton,
on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a
slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects
of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading
the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in 'Purchas's
Pilgrimage': 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a
stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were
inclosed with a wall.' The author continued for about three hours in a
profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he
has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than
from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called
composition in which all the images rose up before him as _things_,
with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any
sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself
to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink,
and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here
preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on
business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his
return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification,
that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the
general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or
ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the
images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but,
alas! without the after restoration of the latter!"

Opinion will ever vary as to its poetic worth. Coleridge himself
professed to consider it "rather as a psychological curiosity" than as a
thing "of any supposed _poetic_ merits"; to Lamb he repeated it "so
enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers
into any parlour when he sings or says it," and it has been a sort of
touchstone of romantic taste ever since. It supremely illustrates that
"sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it," which the
poet declared to be a gift of the imagination that can never be learnt.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: See notes to this poem in the Globe edition, and E.H.
Coleridge's "Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge," Vol. I, p. 245, note.]

"FRANCE: AN ODE"

This ode was written in February, 1798, and first printed in the
"Morning Post" for April 16 of that year, under the significant title of
"Recantation." In the autumn it was printed with its present title in a
pamphlet together with "Fears in Solitude," another political poem, and
"Frost at Midnight," a poem on his infant child. In October, 1802, it
was reprinted in the "Post" with a prose "Argument" (see notes), less
necessary for the readers of that time than it may be now. Coleridge,
like Wordsworth, had welcomed the French Revolution as ushering in an
era of light and love in human society; both, though Wordsworth more
profoundly, had been depressed by the excesses of 1793-4, and by the
lust of conquest which became more and more evident under the Directory;
and when at last in February, 1798, the French armies invaded
Switzerland, the ancient sacred home of liberty in Europe, Coleridge
"recanted" in this ode.

Political poetry is likely to lose its power with the passing of the
events and passions that give it birth; it retains its power just in
proportion as it is built on lasting and universal interests of the
heart of man. That "France" has retained its position as one of the
great odes of the English language is due not only to the loftiness of
its thought and the splendor of its imagery, but even more to the fact
that it turns from the political excitement of the hour to the grandeur
and beauty of nature and to those aspirations and ideals whose home is
"in the heart of man."

"LOVE"

From the second edition of "Lyrical Ballads," 1800. It was planned by
Coleridge as an introduction to the ballad of "The Dark Ladie," which
was never completed, but of which some fifteen stanzas were printed in
the 1834 edition of his "Poetical Works." Its composition cannot be
accurately dated. It is conceived in the general spirit of the ballads
but is simpler, more purely a poem of sentiment, than either
"Christabel" or "The Ancient Mariner," and makes no use of the
supernatural. Its simplicity and absolute purity of tone are, however,
something more than a negative virtue. Coleridge himself declared of it
and "The Ancient Mariner" that they might be excelled, but could not be
imitated.

"DEJECTION: AN ODE"

This ode was written in April, 1802, at a time when, after sickness,
opium, domestic unhappiness and the consequent paralysis of his poetic
faculty had driven him to seek distraction in the study of metaphysics,
he made a visit to Wordsworth at Dove Cottage and in that vitalizing
presence experienced a brief return of his powers--enough to give
wonderful expression to perhaps the saddest thoughts that ever visited
ungoverned genius. The earliest known form of the poem, preserved in a
letter to W. Sotheby of July 19, 1802, shows (what is apparent enough to
one familiar with the relations existing between the two poets) that it
was conceived as a letter to Wordsworth, who is addressed in this
earliest version as "Dearest Poet," "Wordsworth," and "William." It was
first printed in the "Morning Post" for October 4, 1802, with "Edmund"
for Wordsworth's name and with some omissions, but with the strong
personal feeling undiminished; and in its present form (that is, with
the parts omitted in the 1802 print restored, but with the substitution
of "Lady" for "Edmund" and with numerous other omissions and changes,
notably in the last stanza, all tending to depersonalize the poem) in
"Sibylline Leaves," 1816. In 1810 a hint given by Wordsworth, with the
best intentions, to a third person concerning the real nature of
Coleridge's troubles, was reported, or rather misreported, to Coleridge,
and an estrangement fraught with deep grief to both ensued. The breach
was healed, as much as such wounds may be, by the mediation of a common
friend in 1812; but the old glad and fruitful fellowship could never be
restored. Coleridge wrote to Poole, February 13, 1813: "A reconciliation
has taken place, but the _feeling_, which I had previous to that moment,
... that, I fear, never can return. All outward actions, all inward
wishes, all thoughts and admirations will be the same--_are_ the same,
but--aye, there remains an immedicable _But_."

"Dejection" is distinguished from the other poems in this volume by
containing, along with its wonderful interpretation of outward nature
into harmony with his own else unutterable sadness, Coleridge's--and
perhaps all poets'--essential philosophy of poetry. It was natural that
the metaphysics in which he had been immersed should color his thought;
but literature affords few if any instances of metaphysics so
transformed into poetry in the crucible of feeling as is afforded by
stanza V. of this ode.

"YOUTH AND AGE" AND "WORK WITHOUT HOPE"

In these two poems Coleridge has left a record of the sadness of a life
lived

"In darkness, with the light of youth gone out,"

or returning only in glimpses that showed what he had lost. In these
latter years he was busy enough in an incoherent, visionary fashion, and
did even write and publish (though in characteristically fragmentary
form) a work that made a great impression on young men in the second
quarter of the century, his "Aids to Reflection"; but his activity was
philosophical and theological, not poetic, and even in that field the
product fell far short of his plans and promises. The inner and real
life of the man is revealed, now as always, in his poetry; and amidst
what profound dejection it glimmers on, these two brief poems show.

"Youth and Age" was written in 1823--"an _air_ that whizzed ... right
across the diameter of my brain ... over the summit of Quantock at
earliest dawn just between the nightingale that I stopt to hear in the
copse at the foot of Quantock, and the first sky-lark that was a
song-fountain, dashing up and sparkling to the ear's eye, ... out of
sight, over the cornfields on the descent of the mountain on the other
side--out of sight, tho' twice I beheld its mute shoot downward in the
sunshine like a falling star of silver"--so he described the conception
of the poem in the original MS., printed by Mr. Campbell in the Notes to
the Globe edition. It was a flash of poignant memory of the old days at
Stowey. The first thirty-eight lines were printed in 1828, and the whole
poem (including the last six lines, which were not in the original
draft) in 1834.

"Work Without Hope" was written, Coleridge says, "on the 21st February,
1827," and was first printed in 1828.

THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

IN SEVEN PARTS

Facile credo, plures esse Naturas invisibiles quam visibiles in rerum
universitate. Sed horum omnium familiam quis nobis enarrabit? et gradus
et cognationes et discrimina et singulorum munera? Quid agunt? quae loca
habitant? Harum rerum notitiam semper ambivit ingenium humanum, nunquam
attigit. Juvat, interea, non diffiteor, quandoque in animo, tanquam in
tabula, majoris et melioris mundi imaginem contemplari: ne mens
assuefacta hodiernae vitae minutiis se contrahat nimis, et tota subsidat
in pusillas cogitationes. Sed veritati interea invigilandum est,
modusque servandus, ut certa ab incertis, diem a nocte, distinguamus--T.
BURNET, _Archaeol. Phil_, p. 68.

PART I

[Sidenote: An ancient Mariner meeteth three Gallants bidden to a
wedding-feast, and detaineth one.]

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
"By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

The bridegroom's doors are opened wide, 5
And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May'st hear the merry din."

He holds him with his skinny hand,
"There was a ship," quoth he. 10
"Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!"
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

[Sidenote: The Wedding-Guest is spellbound by the eye of the old
seafaring man, and constrained to hear his tale.]

He holds him with his glittering eye--
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years' child: 15
The Mariner hath his will.

The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner. 20

"The ship was cheered, the harbor cleared,
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the lighthouse top.

[Sidenote: The Mariner tells how the ship sailed southward with a good
wind and fair weather, till it reached the Line.]

The sun came up upon the left, 25
Out of the sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.

Higher and higher every day,
Till over the mast at noon--" 30
The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,
For he heard the loud bassoon.

[Sidenote: The Wedding-Guest heareth the bridal music; but the Mariner
continueth his tale.]

The bride hath paced into the hall,
Red as a rose is she;
Nodding their heads before her goes 35
The merry minstrelsy.

The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,
Yet he cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner. 40

[Sidenote: The ship driven by a storm toward the south pole.]

"And now the Storm-blast came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.

With sloping masts and dipping prow, 45
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled. 50

And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.

[Sidenote: The land of ice, and of fearful sounds where no living thing
was to be seen.]

And through the drifts the snowy clifts 55
Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken--
The ice was all between.

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around: 60
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!

[Sidenote: Till a great sea-bird, called the Albatross, came through the
snow-fog, and was received with great joy and hospitality.]

At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul, 65
We hailed it in God's name.

It ate the food it ne'er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit;
The helmsman steered us through! 70

[Sidenote: And lo! the Albatross proveth a bird of good omen, and
followeth the ship as it returned northward through fog and floating
ice.]

And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariners' hollo!

In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud, 75
It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white moon-shine."

[Sidenote: The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of
good omen.]

"God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!-- 80
Why look'st thou so?"--"With my cross-bow
I shot the Albatross.

PART II

The Sun now rose upon the right:
Out of the sea came he,
Still hid in mist, and on the left 85
Went down into the sea.

And the good south wind still blew behind,
But no sweet bird did follow,
Nor any day for food or play
Came to the mariners' hollo! 90

[Sidenote: His shipmates cry out against the ancient Mariner, for
killing the bird of good luck.]

And I had done a hellish thing,
And it would work 'em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay, 95
That made the breeze to blow!

[Sidenote: But when the fog cleared off, they justify the same, and thus
make themselves accomplices in the crime.]

Nor dim nor red, like God's own head,
The glorious Sun uprist:
Then all averred, I had killed the bird
That brought the fog and mist. 100
'T was right, said they, such birds to slay,
That bring the fog and mist.

[Sidenote: The fair breeze continues; the ship enters the Pacific Ocean,
and sails northward, even till it reaches the Line.]

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst 105
Into that silent sea.

[Sidenote: The ship hath been suddenly becalmed.]

Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
'T was sad as sad could be;
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea! 110

All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.

Day after day, day after day, 115
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

[Sidenote: And the Albatross begins to be avenged.]

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink; 120
Water, water, every where
Nor any drop to drink.

The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs 125
Upon the slimy sea.

About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white. 130

[Sidenote: A Spirit had followed them: one of the invisible inhabitants
of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels, concerning whom the
learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael
Psellus, may be consulted. They are very numerous, and there is no
climate or element without one or more.]

And some in dreams assured were
Of the Spirit that plagued us so;
Nine fathom deep he had followed us
From the land of mist and snow.

And every tongue, through utter drought, 135
Was withered at the root;
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.

[Sidenote: The shipmates, in their sore distress, would fain throw the
whole guilt on the ancient Mariner: in sign whereof they hang the dead
sea-bird round his neck.]

Ah! well-a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young! 140
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

PART III

[Sidenote: The ancient Mariner beholdeth a sign in the element afar
off.]

There passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye.
A weary time! a weary time! 145
How glazed each weary eye,
When looking westward, I beheld
A something in the sky.

At first it seemed a little speck,
And then it seemed a mist; 150
It moved and moved, and took at last
A certain shape, I wist.

A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist!
And still it neared and neared:
As if it dodged a water-sprite, 155
It plunged and tacked and veered.

[Sidenote: At its nearer approach, it seemeth him to be a ship; and at a
dear ransom he freeth his speech from the bonds of thirst.]

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
We could nor laugh nor wail;
Through utter drought all dumb we stood!
I bit my arm, I sucked the blood, 160
And cried, A sail! a sail!

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
Agape they heard me call:

[Sidenote: A flash of joy;]

[Sidenote: And horror follows. For can it be a ship that comes onward
without wind or tide?]

Gramercy! they for joy did grin,
And all at once their breath drew in, 165
As they were drinking all.

See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more!
Hither to work us weal;
Without a breeze, without a tide,
She steadies with upright keel! 170

The western wave was all a-flame.
The day was well nigh done!
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright Sun;
When that strange shape drove suddenly 175
Betwixt us and the Sun;

[Sidenote: It seemeth him but the skeleton of a ship.]

And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,
(Heaven's Mother send us grace!)
As if through a dungeon-grate he peered
With broad and burning face. 180

Alas (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nears and nears!
Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,
Like restless gossameres?

[Sidenote: And its ribs are seen as bars on the face of the setting Sun.
The Spectre-Woman and her Deathmate, and no other on board the
skeleton-ship.]

Are those her ribs through which the Sun 185
Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a Death? and are there two?
Is Death that woman's mate?

[Sidenote: Like vessel, like crew!]

Her lips were red, her looks were free, 190
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-mare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.

[Sidenote: Death and Life-in-Death have diced for the ship's crew, and
she (the latter) winneth the ancient Mariner.]

The naked hulk alongside came, 195
And the twain were casting dice;
'The game is done! I've won! I've won!'
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.

[Sidenote: No twilight within the courts of the Sun.]

The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out;
At one stride comes the dark; 200
With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea,
Off shot the spectre-bark.

[Sidenote: At the rising of the moon.]

We listened and looked sideways up!
Fear at my heart, as at a cup,
My life-blood seemed to sip! 205
The stars were dim, and thick the night,
The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white;
From the sails the dew did drip--
Till clomb above the eastern bar
The horned Moon, with one bright star 210
Within the nether tip.

[Sidenote: One after another,]

One after one, by the star-dogged Moon,
Too quick for groan or sigh,
Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,
And cursed me with his eye. 215

[Sidenote: His shipmates drop down dead.]

Four times fifty living men,
(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)
With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,
They dropped down one by one.

[Sidenote: But Life-in-Death begins her work on the ancient Mariner.]

The souls did from their bodies fly,-- 220
They fled to bliss or woe!
And every soul, it passed me by,
Like the whizz of my cross-bow!"

PART IV

[Sidenote: The Wedding-Guest feareth that a Spirit is talking to him;]

"I Fear thee, ancient Mariner!
I fear thy skinny hand! 225
And thou art long, and lank, and brown,
As is the ribbed sea-sand.

I fear thee and thy glittering eye,
And thy skinny hand, so brown."--
"Fear me not, fear not, thou wedding-guest! 230
This body dropt not down.

[Sidenote: But the ancient Mariner assureth him of his bodily life, and
proceedeth to relate his horrible penance.]

Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on the wide, wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony. 235

[Sidenote: He despiseth the creatures of the calm.]

The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.

[Sidenote: And envieth that they should live, and so many lie dead.]

I looked upon the rotting sea, 240
And drew my eyes away;
I looked upon the rotting deck,
And there the dead men lay.

I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gusht, 245
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.

I closed my lids, and kept them close,
And the balls like pulses beat;
For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky 250
Lay like a load on my weary eye,
And the dead were at my feet.

[Sidenote: But the curse liveth for him in the eye of the dead men.]

The cold sweat melted from their limbs,
Nor rot nor reek did they:
The look with which they looked on me
Had never passed away.

An orphan's curse would drag to hell
A spirit from on high;
But oh! more horrible than that
Is a curse in a dead man's eye!
Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,
And yet I could not die.

[Sidenote: In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the
journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move
onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their
appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes,
which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and
yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.]

The moving Moon went up the sky,
And nowhere did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside--

Her beams bemocked the sultry main,
Like April hoar-frost spread;
But where the ship's huge shadow lay,
The charmed water burnt alway
A still and awful red.

[Sidenote: By the light of the Moon he beholdeth God's creatures of the
great calm.]

Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water-snakes:
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.

Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track 280
Was a flash of golden fire.

[Sidenote: Their beauty and their happiness.]

[Sidenote: He blesseth them in his heart.]

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware: 285
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.

[Sidenote: The spell begins to break.]

The selfsame moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank 290
Like lead into the sea.

PART V

Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole!
To Mary Queen the praise be given!
She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven, 295
That slid into my soul.

[Sidenote: By grace of the holy Mother, the ancient Mariner is refreshed
with rain.]

The silly buckets on the deck,
That had so long remained,
I dreamt that they were filled with dew;
And when I awoke, it rained. 300

My lips were wet, my throat was cold,
My garments all were dank;
Sure I had drunken in my dreams,
And still my body drank.

I moved, and could not feel my limbs: 305
I was so light--almost
I thought that I had died in sleep,
And was a blessed ghost.

[Sidenote: He heareth sounds and seeth strange sights and commotions in
the sky and the element.]

And soon I heard a roaring wind:
It did not come anear; 310
But with its sound it shook the sails,
That were so thin and sere.

The upper air burst into life!
And a hundred fire-flags sheen,
To and fro they were hurried about! 315
And to and fro, and in and out,
The wan stars danced between.

And the coming wind did roar more loud,
And the sails did sigh like sedge;
And the rain poured down from one black cloud; 320
The Moon was at its edge.

The thick black cloud was cleft, and still
The Moon was at its side.
Like waters shot from some high crag,
The lightning fell with never a jag, 325
A river steep and wide.

[Sidenote: The bodies of the ship's crew are inspired, and the ship
moves on;]

The loud wind never reached the ship,
Yet now the ship moved on!
Beneath the lightning and the Moon
The dead men gave a groan. 330

They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,
Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;
It had been strange, even in a dream,
To have seen those dead men rise.

The helmsman steered, the ship moved on; 335
Yet never a breeze up blew;
The mariners all 'gan work the ropes,
Where they were wont to do;
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools--
We were a ghastly crew. 340

The body of my brother's son
Stood by me, knee to knee:
The body and I pulled at one rope,
But he said nought to me."

[Sidenote: But not by the souls of the men, nor by daemons of earth or
middle air, but by a blessed troop of angelic spirits, sent down by the
invocation of the guardian saint.]

"I fear thee, ancient Mariner!" 345
"Be calm, thou Wedding-Guest!
'T was not those souls that fled in pain,
Which to their corses came again,
But a troop of spirits blest:

For when it dawned--they dropped their arms,
And clustered round the mast; 350
Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths,
And from their bodies passed.

Around, around, flew each sweet sound,
Then darted to the Sun; 355
Slowly the sounds came back again,

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Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select PoemsbySamuel Taylor Coleridge

Part 1 out of 3

Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems
by
Samuel Taylor Coleridge