Tuesday 14 June 2016

'Lewti, or the Circassian Love-Chant' (1798)


The image, there, is an 1850 print by George Baxter, based on an original painting by Wingael: 'Circassian Lady at the Bath'.

Nobody knows why Coleridge called this poem 'Lewti'. We do know that it started life as an unfinished poem by William Wordsworth called 'Beauty and Midnight: an Ode', and that Coleridge took it, revised and expanded it, and then published it in the Morning Post, April 1798. 'Lewti', the name, is entirely Coleridge's invention, and doesn't seem to have any antecedents. He later (in the words of J C C Mays) 'came to associate the poem with Sara Hutchinson and to think of it as his own', reprinting it in Sybilline Leaves (1817). Mays, incidentally, thinks 'Lewti' is Coleridge's Scots-ballad-esque version of the word loyalty 'which happens to rhyme with beauty' [Mays (ed) Poems 1:457]. I don't think that's right; but I'll come on to what I think 'Lewti' means in a bit. First, the poem:
At midnight by the stream I roved,
To forget the form I loved.
Image of Lewti! from my mind
Depart; for Lewti is not kind.

The Moon was high, the moonlight gleam  [5]
And the shadow of a star
Heaved upon Tamaha's stream;
But the rock shone brighter far,
The rock half sheltered from my view
By pendent boughs of tressy yew.—      [10]
So shines my Lewti's forehead fair,
Gleaming through her sable hair,
Image of Lewti! from my mind
Depart; for Lewti is not kind.

I saw a cloud of palest hue,                  [15]
Onward to the Moon it passed;
Still brighter and more bright it grew,
With floating colours not a few,
Till it reach'd the Moon at last:
Then the cloud was wholly bright,        [20]
With a rich and amber light!
And so with many a hope I seek
And with such joy I find my Lewti;
And even so my pale wan cheek
Drinks in as deep a flush of beauty!      [25]
Nay, treacherous image! leave my mind,
If Lewti never will be kind.

The little cloud—it floats away,
Away it goes; away so soon?
Alas! it has no power to stay:               [30]
Its hues are dim, its hues are grey—
Away it passes from the Moon!
How mournfully it seems to fly,
Ever fading more and more,
To joyless regions of the sky—               [35]

As white as my poor cheek will be,
When, Lewti! on my couch I lie,
A dying man for love of thee.
Nay, treacherous image! leave my mind— [40]
And yet, thou didst not look unkind.

I saw a vapour in the sky,
Thin, and white, and very high;
I ne'er beheld so thin a cloud:
Perhaps the breezes that can fly            [45]
Now below and now above,
Have snatched aloft the lawny shroud
Of Lady fair—that died for love.
For maids, as well as youths, have perish'd
From fruitless love too fondly cherish'd. [50]
Nay, treacherous image! leave my mind—
For Lewti never will be kind.

Hush! my heedless feet from under
Slip the crumbling banks for ever:
Like echoes to a distant thunder,          [55]
They plunge into the gentle river.
The river-swans have heard my tread,
And startle from their reedy bed.
O beauteous Birds! methinks ye measure
Your movements to some heavenly tune! [60]
O beauteous Birds! 'tis such a pleasure
To see you move beneath the Moon,
I would it were your true delight
To sleep by day and wake all night.
I know the place where Lewti lies        [65]
When silent night has closed her eyes—
It is a breezy jasmine-bower,
The Nightingale sings o'er her head:
VOICE of the Night! had I the power
That leafy labyrinth to thread,              [70]
And creep, like thee, with soundless tread,
I then might view her bosom white
Heaving lovely to my sight,
As these two swans together heave
On the gently-swelling wave.               [75]

Oh! that she saw me in a dream,
And dreamt that I had died for care!
All pale and wasted I would seem
Yet fair withal, as spirits are!
I'd die indeed, if I might see                 [80]
Her bosom heave, and heave for me!
Soothe, gentle image! soothe my mind!
To-morrow Lewti may be kind.
So: a love poem, or rather a poem of hopeless love. Circassia is a region south of Russia on the eastern littoral of the Black Sea; and its people (who call themselves the Adyghe) were renowned throughout the Classical and later Arab World for the beauty of their women. Said beauty was reputed to reside in particular in (a) the fairness of their skin, (b) the blackness of their hair and (c) the shapeliness of their figures. (When Lawrence of Arabia passed as an Arab, he explained his own fair skin to the Turks he met in terms of a supposed Circassian heritage). The contrast between pale white skin and very black hair was a particular feature of the Circassian 'look', and one nineteenth-century ladies were keen to copy:


So the salient, in this 'Circassian' love poem, is paleness of skin, of the sort Coleridge's epoch especially valorised as beautiful in a woman. And that's certainly what the poem zeroes-in on: the repeated references to the pallor of the moonlight gleam and 'the shadow of a star' [6]; Lewti's white forehead contrasted with her 'sable hair' [11-12]; the 'cloud of palest hue' [15]; the narrator's 'pale wan cheek' [24]; and 'white, poor cheek' [37]; the 'vapour in the sky,/Thin, and white' [42-3] the (white, of course) Jasmin flowers [67] and finally the white river-swans that 'move beneath the Moon', to which Lewti's breasts are, rather lubriciously, compared:
I then might view her bosom white
Heaving lovely to my sight,
As these two swans together heave
... All pale and wasted I would seem
Yet fair withal, as spirits are!
I'd die indeed, if I might see
Her bosom heave, and heave for me! [72-81]
All of which brings me to my theory as to what Coleridge is getting at with his invented name 'Lewti'. I think this is an anglicised version of the Greek, λευ τι, an abbreviated form of λευκός τι, 'how white', 'so very white!' If I had to press the case, I'd suggest that Coleridge preferred the spelling 'Lewti' to 'Leuti' in order, in part, to disguise the fact that one reason the name is introduced into the poem is precisely as a rhyme word for 'beauty'. All in all, a very white sort of poem.

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