Sunday 14 October 2018

‘Blest in the Happy Marriage of Sweet Words’



I know a lot of these source-hunting posts are pretty dry and indigestible, but this one's a fraction more interesting than usual (or else I'm finally going Stockholm Syndrome on all this dryasdust pedantry). Anyway. In the early 1800s Coleridge, estranged from his wife, fell deeply in love with Sara Hutchinson, the unmarried sister of Wordsworth's wife Mary, who lived with the Wordsworths at Grasmere. Sara H., though a good friend to Coleridge in many ways, rejected his advances, leading to a deal of anguished scribbling in his notebooks and a number of heartbroken poems addressed to Sara under the paper-thin pseudonym ‘Asra’. Then something traumatic happened—something he referred to in his Notebook as the ‘EPOCH’. We can't be sure exactly what this was, although it brought Coleridge close to breakdown. Probably what happened was that, in December 1806, Coleridge discovered Wordsworth in bed with Sara Hutchinson. He was devastated by this, although Wordsworth tried to convince him the whole thing was just a hallucination he had experienced. Indeed Coleridge seems to have come to believe this, or at least seems to have wanted to believe it (not the same thing, of course). At any rate he continued staying with the Wordsworths, and therefore with Sara Hutchinson, after the December 1806 events of the EPOCH, only finally leaving for London in April 1807.

He spent the rest of that year in London, Bristol and a few other places and then in February 1808 he wrote to Sara Hutchinson, making her a present of some books, including a copy of Chapman's Odyssey, together with a covering letter. Henry Nelson Coleridge, assembling the Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge for posthumous publication (it came out 1836), thought the sentiments in this letter interesting enough to include, although to evade even the whiff of indecency he pretended it had been sent to Wordsworth rather than to Sara H.
Chapman I have sent in order that you might read the Odyssey/ the Iliad is fine, but less equal in the Translation, as well as less interesting in itself. What is stupidly said of Shakspeare, is really true & appropriate of Chapman—“mighty faults counterpoised by mighty Beauties.” Excepting his quaint epithets which he affects to render literally from the Greek, a language above all others “blest in the happy marriage of sweet words”, and which in our language are mere Printer's compound Epithets—such as—quaff’d divine Joy-in-the-heart-of-man-infusing Wine/ the undermark’d is to be one word, because one sweet mellifluous Word expresses it in Homer—excepting this, it has no look, no air, of a translation. It is as truly an original poem as the Faery Queen—it will give you small idea of Homer, tho’ yet a far truer one than from Pope's Epigrams, or Cowper's cumbersome most anti-homeric Miltoniad—for Chapman writes & feels a Poet,—as Homer might have written had he lived in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth/ In short, it is an exquisite poem, spite of its frequent & perverse quaintnesses and harshnesses, which are however amply repaid by almost unexampled sweetness & beauty of language, all over spirit & feeling, in the main/ it is an English Heroic Poem, the tale of which is borrowed from the Greek—& I anticipate pleasure in your enjoyment of it. [Marginalia 2:1120]
The phrasing is interesting there, I think: I anticipate pleasure in your enjoyment of it presumably means ‘I anticipate that you will derive pleasure from it and enjoy it’; but what Coleridge has actually written is: ‘I look forward to me deriving pleasure from the fact that you will enjoy this’. A very different sentiment! And the choice of gift looks rather freighted, don't you think? A poem about a storm-tossed hero, forced to weary peregrinations, but always hoping to return to his true love, in her Ithaca. Like an 1808 version of giving a mix-tape to a girl you have a crush on.

The single Homeric word that gets translated, in STC's letter, by that English multiply-hyphenated monster is μελίφρονα [eg Odyssey 7:182; it actually occurs a dozen times in the poem], which means ‘sweet-to-the-mind’, via the Greek μέλι, ‘honey’: Chapman calls this ‘one sweet mellifluous word’ and actually translates it as ‘honey-sweet-to-the-mind’. The shift from that to Coleridge's misremembering ‘joy-in-the-heart-of-man-infusing’ is the distance between a broader somatic pleasure to the yearning of a man who still, in his emotionally bruised and hopeless way, yearns for one particular woman to fuse her heart with his. It was a hope destined to remain unfulfilled. Although Coleridge returned to the Wordsworths in Sept 1808, and enjoyed physical propinquity with Sara H as she acted as his amanuensis on The Friend through 1809, at the beginning of 1810 she left Grasmere to live with her brothers on a farm in Wales. Coleridge felt personally betrayed by this departure, unreasonably enough. Penelope, after all, is supposed to wait patiently at home for her Odysseus to work his way, eventually, back to her.

What of that quoted phrase, the one that says Greek is ‘blest in the happy marriage of sweet words’? George Whalley appends the following footnote:



Hard to blame Whalley for not tracking this down, since it's another creative misrememberquoting by Coleridge. In fact it is from the allegorical play Lingua, or the Combat of the Tongue and the Five Senses for Superiority (published anonymously in 1607, scholars now generally attribute it to Thomas Tomkis). In the play, the beautiful young woman Lingua, the personification of language, offers a prize for the worthiest of man's five senses: Auditus (hearing); Visus (sight); Olfactus, Gustus, and Tactus): ‘He of the five that proves himself the best,/Shall have his temples with this coronet blest’. The five bicker and fight over who should win—eventually Visus does—and Lingua's demands to be received as the sixth sense are rejected. The relevant passage, in which Lingua berates Audita, is here:
LINGUA: O, horrible ingratitude! that thou,
That thou of all the rest should'st threaten me:
Who by my meanes conceiv'st as many tongues,
As Neptune closeth lands betwixt his armes:
The ancient Hebrew, clad with mysteries,
The learned Greeke, rich in fit epithites,
Blest in the lovely marriage of pure words,
The Caldy [ie Chaldean] wise, the Arabian physicall,
The Romane eloquent, the Tuscane grave,
The braving Spanish, and the smooth-tong'd French,
These precious jewels that adorne thine eares,
All from my mouthe's rich cabinet are stolne:
How oft hast thou beene chain'd writo my tongue?
Hang'd at my lips, and ravisht with my words,
So that a speech, faire feather'd, could not flie,
But thy eares' pit-fall caught it instantly.
But now, O, heavens! [Lingua, 1.1.55-70]
The subtle subconscuous pressures that lead to Coleridge inadvertently correcting ‘pure’ to the μελίφρον-ic ‘sweet’ (for who would want a pure love-match when you can have the more intimate consummation of a sweet one?) is the same force that slides the original lovely to STC's wished-for happy.

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