A Flash of Lightning

Here's Coleridge's Notebook entry for 22 June 1806 [CN 2:2866], written in Pisa, where he was taking a break on his long journey back to England. He'd left for Malta in 1804 hoping, amongst other things, to recuperate his health and energies, and get over his hopeless, desperate and unreciprocated passion for Sara Hutchinson; but he was returning home in a worse physical and mental condition than he left. As a storm raged thunder and lightning outside his hotel, he wrote:

The concrete in nature nearest to the abstract of Death is Death by a Flash of Lightning. Repeatedly during this night’s storm have I desired that I might be taken off, not knowing when or where/but a few moments past a vivid flash passed across me, my nerves thrilled, and I earnestly wished, so help me God! like a Love-longing, that it would pass through me!—Death without pain, without degrees, without the possibility of cowardly wishes, or recreant changes of resolve/Death without deformity, or assassin-like self-disorganization/Death, in which the mind by its own wish might seem to have caused its own purpose to be performed, as instantaneously and by an instrument almost as spiritual as the Wish itself!/—

Come, come, thou bleak December Wind,
And blow the dry Leaves from the Tree!
Flash, like a Love-thought, thro’ me, Death
And take a Life, that wearies me.

It's a rather lovely quatrain, that. Ernst Hartley Coleridge included it in his edition of Coleridge's Poetical Works (1912), adding a footnote remarking its similarity to this stanza from an old ballad:

Martinmas wind, when wilt thou blow
And shake the green leaves off the tree?
O gentle Death, when will thou come?
For of my life I am wearie.

That verse was clearly somewhere in STC's memory when he jotted his four lines down, although Coleridge's poem is about the very opposite of gentleness where its death is concerned. Bleak December wind is, perhaps, more directly from Robert Burns's ‘To A Mouse’ (1785: in that famous poem, the mouse's nest has been blasted by ‘bleak December's winds ensuing/Both snell [bitter] and keen’).

But what's distinctive here is the idea that this deadly lightning strikes ‘like love’. Coleridge implores the lightning bolt to ‘flash, like a Love-thought, thro’ me.’ Is STC thinking, in part, of this bit from Ovid's Amores?

In manibus nimbos et cum Iove fulmen habebam,
Quod bene pro caelo mitteret ille suo—
Clausit amica fores! ego cum Iove fulmen omisi;
Excidit ingenio Iuppiter ipse meo.
Iuppiter, ignoscas! nil me tua tela iuvabant;
Clausa tuo maius ianua fulmen habet. [Amores, 2:1, 15-20]

‘I held in my hands the clouds and Jove's own lightning-bolt, the same one he shot down so expertly to defend his heavens—but then the woman I loved shut her door on me. Both Jupiter and his lightning fell from me; Jupiter went clean out of my mind. Forgive me: your weapons are useless to me now; that shut door is more of a lightning-strike than yours.’ Marlowe's version of those lines:

Jove and Joves thunderbolts I had in hand
Which for his heauen fell on the Gyants band.
My wench her dore shut, Joves affares I left,
Even Jove himselfe out off my wit was reft.
Pardon me Jove, thy weapons ayde me nought,
Her shut gates greater lightning then thyne brought.

If so, I wonder if this moves the (as it were) centre of gravity of this Notebook passage away from the sheerly existential, or abruptly suicidal, and towards a more characteristically Coleridgean agonising over love. He's on his way back to England after all, which is where Asra lives. A few pages earlier in this very notebook Coleridge tries to swear-off Sara Hutchinson [CN 2:2860]. A couple of years earlier, when he was travelling in Germany and his passion for Asra was new on him, Coleridge sent earnest letters back to Sara in Britain (‘my dearest love’ one began). He recalled crossing the North Sea, at the moment he lost sight of land, when ‘the heavens all around me rested upon the waters, my dear Babies came upon me like a flash of lightning—I saw their faces so distinctly!’ [Letter to Sara Hutchinson, 18th Sept 1798; Collected Letters 1:254]. A love-flash, not a death-flash, then. A few weeks before recording the thunder-and-lightning at Pisa, and his desire it would shock through him like love, Coleridge wrote the following German in his notebook: ‘Ein Blitz der Seligkeit von Gottes Throne durch mein Wesen, als ich sie wiedersah’ [Notebooks 2:2790]. This seems to be Coleridge's own (it's not quoted from anywhere, I think) and means ‘A lightning-flash from God’s throne through my being when I saw her again.’ No prizes for guessing whom he meant by her.

A few years later, in 1808, another notebook entry considers the extent to which ‘falling in love’ is ever able to satisfy one’s moral yearnings. The lightning-flash image reappears: ‘if,’ Coleridge says, ‘this innermost & holiest Instinct have discovered its Object, as by a flash of lightning, or the Strike of a Horse’s Shoe, on a Flint, in utter darkness—if on after knowledge & tender affection one look of the eyes, one vision of the countenance, seen only by the Being on whom it worked, & by him only to be seen—’ at which point the notebook entry shifts to verse:

All Look or Likeness caught from Earth,
All accident of Kin or Birth,
Had pass’d away: there was no trace
Of aught upon her brighten’d face,
Uprais’d beneath that rifted Stone
But of one image—all her own!
She, She alone, and only She
Shone thro’ her body visibly. [Notebooks, 3:3291]

John Beer [Coleridge’s Play of Mind (OUP 2010), 110] glosses: ‘under the impact of that recalled momentary vision, swift as a flash of lightning, he has not only fallen in love with Sara, but done so with an absoluteness that (to cite another of his favourite formulations) replaced the feeling of positiveness with the sense of certainty.’

‘An quia fulmen Amoris lingua amabiles facilè flammas proximü iaculatur ad cor’, wrote Giulio Gabrielli in 1622; how like a lightning-bolt comes the language of love flaming as it bursts through the heart. Gabrielli means the spiritual love of God, but then, in his way, so does Coleridge. It's all tangled up for him, and in him, and he yearns for some exterior force to cut the Gordian knot that he himself has become.