Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I

Introduction

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English poet, critic, and philosopher, who was a leader of the Romantic movement.

II

Development

Coleridge was born in Ottery St Mary, Devon, on October 21, 1772, the son of a vicar. From 1791 until 1794 he studied classics at Jesus College, Cambridge University, and became interested in French revolutionary politics. His heavy drinking and debauchery incurred massive debts which he attempted to clear by entering the army for a brief period. Eventually, his brother paid for him to be discharged on a plea of insanity. At university he absorbed political and theological ideas then considered radical, especially those of Unitarianism. He left Cambridge without a degree and joined his university friend, the poet Robert Southey in a plan, soon abandoned, to found a Utopian society in Pennsylvania. Based on the ideas of William Godwin, this new society was dubbed “Pantisocracy”. In 1795 the two friends married sisters, Sara and Edith Fricker. Not only did Coleridge’s marriage to Sara proved extremely unhappy, but he also became estranged from Southey, who departed for Portugal that same year. Coleridge remained in England to write and lecture, editing a radical Christian journal, The Watchman, from his new home in Clevedon. In 1796 he published Poems on Various Subjects, which included “The Eolian Harp” and his “Monody on the Death of Chatterton”.

In June 1797 Coleridge met and began what was to be a lifelong friendship with the poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. The years 1797 and 1798, during which the friends lived near Nether Stowey, in Somerset, were among the most fruitful of Coleridge’s life. The two men anonymously published a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads (1798), that became a landmark in English poetry; it contained the first great works of the Romantic school (see Romanticism (literature)). The 1800 edition of the book contained a preface by Wordsworth, written at Coleridge’s request. This piece offered an explanation of the thinking behind the collection, arguing that “the real language of men” should be part of poetic diction. The relationship between the imagination of the poet and the beauty of the natural world was also a central concern.

III

Conversational Poems

Critical interest in Coleridge has focused on the poems he wrote in the 1790s. One of the major achievements of this period was his development of the Conversational or Conversation poem. Deeply personal, these works are emotional meditations upon experiences from everyday life. “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” (1797) relates the poet’s frustration when injury prevents him from taking a walk with friends. Through the faculty of his imagination, he participates in their pleasure, and realizes that the tree bower under which he is convalescing also possesses a profound beauty, arguing that:

“The Nightingale” (1798) moves from the poet’s admission that the bird’s conventional associations with melancholy are a human construct, but then goes on to relate the intense experience of observing his son’s delight in birdsong and moonlight. “Frost at Midnight” (1798), perhaps Coleridge’s most powerful work in this style, is quietly meditative in tone. This gentle quality is provided by the poem’s lack of artificial, self-conscious devices. There are few end-stopped lines, and even fewer full rhymes, so the rhythm of the poem is subtle and unforced, successfully suggesting the rhythms of real speech. The poem’s speaker reflects on the silence of the night as he watches over his sleeping child. As in the other Conversational works, the mind of the poet and his environment are brought into intimate contact. Here, the evocative but ambiguous phrase, “the secret ministry of frost” is the mystic agency of the poet’s imaginative journey. In “dim sympathy” with the wintry night’s silence, he muses on an unhappy urban childhood, spent in “the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim”, and resolves that this will not be the case for his son. Coleridge returns from his thoughts with a touching and unpretentious expression of joy in the sight of his sleeping child: “My babe so beautiful it thrills my heart”.

IV

Supernatural Poems

The opening poem of the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, is, in a precise historical sense, the only true ballad in the book. Conforming to the genre’s traditional rules of metre, it is a kind of pastiche: an attempt to construct a historical artefact in the way that aristocrats of the period were enhancing their parks and gardens with picturesque ruins. The diction of the poem is scattered with archaisms such as “unhand me, grey-beard loon! “ The 1798 edition had used the mock-medieval spelling “Ancyent Marinere”. Later, Coleridge added prose glosses in the style of a 17th-century scholar.

The poem is essentially a narrative one, and describes a meeting between the title character and a guest at a wedding. The Wedding Guest expects to hear an amusing anecdote from the Mariner, but finds himself listening to the story of a horrific supernatural ordeal. The Mariner tells how his rash act of killing an albatross brings ghostly retribution upon the crew of his ship. The dead bird is hung around his neck to indicate his cursed status. The ship is adrift in a stagnant sea alive with “slimy things”. Dying of thirst, the men are visited by a spectre, the “Night-mare Life-in-Death”. Adrift on a ship of dead men, the Mariner is released when, looking at the slimy “water-snakes”, he blesses them for their strange beauty. The albatross falls from his neck, but for his crime he is condemned to wander the Earth, preaching reverence for all creatures.

The poem achieves the stated aims of Lyrical Ballads with its strong, simple rhythms and repetitions, creating the impression that it is a product of oral rather than written culture:

As well as emphasizing its balladic features, the insistent rhymes allude to the irresistible supernatural powers that take control of the ship, and give urgency to the Mariner’s narration. This urgency is a cursed one: “I pass, like night, from land to land”, he declares, compelled to relate his story with his “strange power of speech”. There is much strangeness in the poem that is hard to interpret consistently. Centrally, the momentous killing of the albatross seems a totally motiveless act.

The similarly supernatural poem “Christabel” (1798, revised 1800) is presented as a fragment: Coleridge drafted but never completed a second part. It is a fantasy with a medieval setting influenced by the conventions of Gothic fiction. Like the “Ancient Mariner”, it is narrative-based rather than reflective, and tells the story of a baronet’s daughter who discovers a mysterious woman in the forest that surrounds her castle home. This woman, Geraldine, appears to be the victim of an abduction, but in fact is a predatory, vampire-like entity. Coleridge gives her malignity a strongly erotic edge, placing much emphasis on Geraldine’s desire to look at Christabel’s naked body—”a sight to dream of, not to tell! “ Exclamations such as this are urgently addressed to the reader, a convention also borrowed from Gothic fiction.