'Constancy to an Ideal Object' (1828)

I say '1828', in the blogpost title there, because that's when Coleridge first published ''Constancy to an Ideal Object'. He wrote the poem earlier, though; perhaps much earlier. There's a reference to it in a letter of 1825 as 'those lines which a long time ago I sent to Mrs Green', and depending upon how long you think 'a long time' covers it could have been written any time in the preceding two decades. Since it is patently a poem about coming to terms, however painfully, with the impossibility of his love for Sara Hutchinson, I suppose it's likely to have been written in 1808-10. 'And art thou nothing?' is a pretty heartbreaking thing for a man to say to the woman he has loved for a decade as intensely as Coleridge loved 'Asra'.

Since all that beat about in Nature's range,
Or veer or vanish; why should'st thou remain
The only constant in a world of change,
O yearning Thought! that liv'st but in the brain?
Call to the Hours, that in the distance play,         [5]
The faery people of the future day—
Fond Thought! not one of all that shining swarm
Will breathe on thee with life-enkindling breath,
Till when, like strangers shelt'ring from a storm,
Hope and Despair meet in the porch of Death!   [10]
Yet still thou haunt'st me; and though well I see,
She is not thou, and only thou are she,
Still, still as though some dear embodied Good,
Some living Love before my eyes there stood
With answering look a ready ear to lend,            [15]
I mourn to thee and say—'Ah! loveliest friend!
That this the meed of all my toils might be,
To have a home, an English home, and thee!'
Vain repetition! Home and Thou are one.
The peacefull'st cot, the moon shall shine upon, [20]
Lulled by the thrush and wakened by the lark,
Without thee were but a becalméd bark,
Whose Helmsman on an ocean waste and wide
Sits mute and pale his mouldering helm beside.

And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when     [25]
The woodman winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, where o'er the sheep-track's maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist'ning haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image with a glory round its head;                 [30]
The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues,
Nor knows he makes the shadow, he pursues!

The phenomenon referred to in those last eight lines is now called the 'Brocken Spectre'. It even has its own Wikipedia page, which describes it as 'the apparently enormous and magnified shadow of an observer, cast upon the upper surfaces of clouds opposite the sun. The phenomenon can appear on any misty mountainside or cloud bank, even when seen from an aeroplane, but the frequent fogs and low-altitude accessibility of the Brocken, a peak in the Harz Mountains in Germany, have created a local legend from which the phenomenon draws its name.' It often, as in the images illustrating this blogpost, involves a spectral 'glory' rainbowing around the shadowform head.

'Constancy to an Ideal Object' is a trickier-than-it-appears, coolly wrongfooting sort of poem, I think: expressive not of anger or even anguish, but a kind of scintillant despair. It is 'about' constancy, in one sense; but it construes that constancy as a pointless and meritless obsession, not because the object to which the speaker of the poem has been constant has proved herself unworthy, but because the object is revealed not to exist, or at any rate to exist only as a figment of the speaker's ideation. It is, in other words, a poem that plays constancy against change, parsing the good (constancy is good and change bad, since a true lover ought not to be flighty, ought to be true to his love and the declaration of that love) against the bad (constancy is bad and change good, since the former is a kind of obstinately persevered-with misunderstanding of the nature of things, and the latter is the idiom of growth, maturity and wisdom). It's handled with real nuance and subtlety. Look, for instance, at the rhyme scheme: the poem starts as a stanzaic piece, a repeating six-line pattern rhyming ababcc; but after only two such stanzas, at line 12

She is not thou, and only thou are she

the form changes to heroic couplets, as if the final two lines of the stanza pattern have jammed in the machinery of the poem, and can only repeat, can only repeat, as the lover's obstinate constancy can't stop repeating his hopeless love. She is not thou, and only thou are she is a beautifully modulated line, whose intimation of a paradoxical 'she is not thou and she is thou' resolves itself, when you look a little closer, into no paradox at all. 'Only thou are she' figures as a simple statement that Sara (let's say) is herself, an ordinary woman uninterested in the poet, unlike the phantasmic Asra Coleridge has projected from his own love and yearning and loneliness. The 'Only thou' captures that separateness whilst also intimating the poet's aloneness as a function of that separateness. Otherwise that rhyme-pattern circles through the first twelve lines and then is jarred by this realisation that Asra is not Sara and only Sara is Sara into a string of repeating couplets couplets couplets; which in turn match the way verbal repetition becomes the dominant feature of the second half of the first verse paragraph: 'Still, still'; 'some dear ... some Love'; the look 'answering' the look; 'a home, a home', all dismissed as 'Vain repetition!' The reduplicated pairs become unequal pairs: evening's thrush and dawn's lark; the house and the boat; companionship and isolation.

Another formal aspect of this poem is the way so many of its lines are built out of strings of monosyllabic words, or else are made out of one di- or (more rarely) trisyllabic word set in a line otherwise wholly monosyllabic: 'O yearning Thought! that liv'st but in the brain'; 'Call to the Hours, that in the distance play'; 'Fond Thought! not one of all that shining swarm'; 'Will breathe on thee with life enkindling breath'; 'Hope and Despair meet in the porch of Death!' immediately followed by the three lines:

Yet still thou haunt'st me; and though well I see,
She is not thou, and only thou are she,
Still, still as though some dear embodied Good,

and two steps later the four lines

I mourn to thee and say—'Ah! loveliest friend!
That this the meed of all my toils might be,
To have a home, an English home, and thee!'
Vain repetition! Home and Thou are one.

The effect of building the centre of the poem out of so many lines like these is, I think, to slow the poem down, to break up what might otherwise be a prosodic fluency and motion (something Coleridge is very well capable of creating, as many other poems show) into something more hesitant, slow-stepping, solitary. All those solitary one-syllable-words, like the solitary unloved poet himself! It works with the grain of the poem's symbolism, too. The idyllic cottage that switches in an eyeblink to a decaying boat far out at sea. Hope and Despair meeting in the porch of Death's house—are they going indoors, Hope and Despair? Or are they stepping out? From life to death is but a step.

'Constancy to an Ideal Object' builds to its splendid, beautiful final image, preparing the ground with references to a variety of spectral or magical creatures: the personified Horae 'that in the distance play', an as-yet-unborn future 'faery people' and 'Fond Thought', even though all are invoked to be dismissed ('not one of all that shining swarm/Will breathe on thee with life-enkindling breath'). This is by way of stressing the immateriality of the Ideal Object, of course; but also the impossibility of future-consummation. These unborn people are the fairy spectres (we might say) of the children Coleridge and Asra will never have. 'Shining swarms' may glance back at Psalm 148, which is the one that begins 'Praise ye the LORD. Praise ye the LORD from the heavens: praise him in the heights' and that concludes, significantly for this poem, 'Let them praise the name of the LORD: for his name alone is excellent; his glory is above the earth and heaven.' Glory, see. For 'shining swarms' we turn to Isaac Watts, his The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament:

Ye creeping ants and worms,
His various wisdom show,
And flies in all your shining swarms,
Praise him that drest you so. [Psalm 148]

Flies is a little odd, here, I'd say (the KJV version makes reference only to ' Beasts, and all cattle; creeping things, and flying fowl'), not least because it, together with the lucifer-shine of the flyswarm, hints obliquely at the Lord of the Flies himself, Beelzebub. That, in other words, the shining one may not be what you think it is. But of course not! The Psalm is straightforwardly a hymn of praise to God, not to the devil. It would take perversity to flip it about and see the Devil in it. Wouldn't it?

Perversity is not the best word, here, though. What animates Coleridge's poem is its sense of how short a step it is between the idyllic cottage and the rotting bark, between Hope and Despair, between love and nothingness. How easily A flips about into null-A. So I suppose it is only fitting that the image in the final eight lines has been subject to so many diametrically opposed interpretations. Morton Paley summarises in his Coleridge's Later Poetry book (Clarendon 1996):

[The final eight lines] can be viewed very pessimistically, with the image of the glory regarded as 'the self-generated illusion of the rustic' [James T Boulger]. Or contrastingly the rustic's activity may be regarded positively: 'He pursues and by his own act of pursuit gives life to his ideal' [Stephen Prickett]. The pursuit may be seen as a correlative of the poetic enterprise: 'Through the "life-enkindling" power of the poet's imagination, his abstractions are reclaimed from pure thought and returned to the life that fostered them' [Edward Kessler]. Closer to my own view is that of Tilottama Rajan, for whom this poem recognizes both love's apparition and its evanishment, and achieves that difficult peace that eluded Coleridge in his poem of that name'; at the same time Rajan underscores 'the ironic element which continues to complicate the constitutive power of imagination even at the end.' [Paley, 103-04]

There's something in that; I mean, in Rajan's reading, but more importantly in the fact that the poem generates so many conflicting readings. It's the whole point. The poem exists not as a thing, out there in the world, but as a glory refracted off our own reading as the strong sunlight of Coleridge's imagination shines upon us.

[Coda: I have a theory that the title under which Coleridge published this poem (in 1828) was added shortly before it went to press, many years after the poem itself was written—that Coleridge was put in mind of it by something the critic Martin M'Dermot wrote in 1822 about the priority of 'sensible objects' over merely 'ideal objects'. Coleridge was almost certainly aware of M'Dermot: he was part of the Literary world of London in the 18-teens and 1820s; he published A Critical Dissertation on the Nature and Principles of Taste in 1822, and in the same year issued a series of 'Essays on the Genius of the British Poets' in the The European Magazine, and London Review. The third essay, on Milton's Paradise Lost, may well have caught Coleridge's eye; and if he read it he must surely have disagreed profoundly with what M'Dermot says:

The idea which a lover forms of his mistress, in her absence, is an idea of imagination; but this idea never conveys such rapturous emotions as he feels when she is present. The thoughts of her, it is true, make him happy, but how greatly is this happiness encreased the moment she appears in his presence. The presence of sensible objects affects us, therefore, more strongly than the images which imagination forms of them in their absence. ... A present object affects us so strongly, that we will not suffer ourselves to withdraw our attention from it; but an ideal object affects us so slightly, that we pass from it without difficulty, to contemplate another, and another. [The European Magazine, and London Review 81 (1822), 299]

We might take Coleridge's stress on his constancy to his ideal object to be a rebuttal to M'Dermot's airy an ideal object affects us so slightly, that we pass from it without difficulty. Coleridge's experience, mostly bitter, would have convinced him of the falsity of that position. Perhaps reading this essay in 1825 put him in mind of the poem he had earlier written, and he returned to it under a new MDermot-baiting title. I can't prove this theory, though.]