"Siege of Jerusalem by Titus"

Four charméd Spirits of Vengeance here
   Impatient wait
By hour, by day, by month, by year—
   They watch yon gate
No measure of time so small as to relax
   Their Ward,
Nor long enough t'exhaust or weary out
   Their guard.

In 1802 Coleridge wrote to Tom Wedgwood:

Dear sir, indulge me with looking still further on in my literary life. I have, since my twentieth year, meditated an heroic poem on the ‘Siege of Jerusalem’ by Titus. This is the pride and the stronghold of my hope, but I never think of it except in my best moods. The work to which I dedicate the ensuing years of my life is one which highly pleased Leslie, in prospective. [20 Oct 1802; CL 2:876]

This epic never got itself written, of course, despite STCs earnest dedication here. ‘Leslie’ is the Edinburgh scientist and professor John Leslie (the first man to produce artificial ice by using an air pump to freeze water) who had been Tom Wedgwood's tutor at the family home, 1791-2, and with whom Coleridge had, evidently, been in communication, although no letters between the two men—if any were written—survive.

This idea kept returning to Coleridge through his writing life, although in increasingly ubi sunt mode. In 1820 he wrote to Thomas Allsop: ‘alas! for the proud times when I planned, when I had present to my mind the materials as well as the Scheme of ... the Epic Poem on what still appears to me the one only fit subject remaining for an Epic Poem, Jerusalem beseiged & destroyed by Titus’ [20 Mar 1820; CL 4:28]. And here he is near the end of his life:

The destruction of Jerusalem is the only subject now remaining for an Epic Poem—a subject which should interest all Christendom, as the Fall of Man, or as the War of Troy did all Greece. There would be difficulties—as there are in all subjects—and they must be mitigated, palliated and thrown into the shade, as Milton has done with the numerous ones in the Paradise Lost; but there would be a greater assemblage of grandeur and splendor than can now be found in any other theme. As for the old Mythology—incredulus odi; and yet there must be a mythology for an epic poem; here there would be the completion of the prophecies—the termination of the first revealed national religion under the violence of Paganism as the immediate forerunner and condition of the spread of a revealed mundane religion; the character of the Roman and the Jew, the awfulness, the completeness, the justice. No materials would be wanted beyond the Bible, Josephus, Philo-Judaeus and the Zelotae. I schemed it at twenty-five—but alas! it was a scheme only for me! Venturum expectat. [Table Talk 24 April 1832; CC 14:289]

I suppose ‘it was a scheme only for me’ means ‘a scheme is all it ever was, for me’: it never got beyond the stage of my scheme to become an actual poem. Venturum expectat means ‘it awaits one who is yet to come’. The following year he was less sanguine:

I have already told you that in my opinion the Destruction of Jerusalem is the only subject for an Epic poem now left—yet with all its great capabilities, it has this one insurmountable defect—that whereas a poem, to be epic, must have a personal interest, in this subject no skill or genius could possibly preserve the interest for a hero from being merged in the interest for the Event. The fact is, the Event is too sublime and overwhelming. [Table Talk 2 Sept 1833; CC 14:441]

What interests me is this: what might this poem have looked like, if it had ever been written?

There are hints as to how Coleridge might have developed this idea. One we can glean from his reading of, and marginalia upon, a commentary upon the Revelation of St John by the German theologian Johann Gottfried Eichhorn: Commentarius in apocalypsin Joannis (1791). Eichhorn's is a work which reads Revelation as (in George Whalley's words) ‘a poetic and obscurely symbolic representation of the triumph of Christianity over Judaism: ACT 1, the Fall of Jerusalem; ACT II, the fall of Rome or the victory of the Christians over the Gentiles; ACT III the Heavenly Jerusalem.’ Coleridge's annotations date from some time between 1817 and 1822. So, Eichhorn glosses the following passage (as a for-instance) as being a poetical version of Titus's sacking of Rome:

13 And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God,
14 Saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates.
15 And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men.
16 And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them.
17 And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone.
18 By these three was the third part of men killed, by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths.
19 For their power is in their mouth, and in their tails: for their tails were like unto serpents, and had heads, and with them they do hurt. [Revelation 9:13-19]

Coleridge follows him down this peculiar rabbit hole. Why do these horses have mouths in their heads and their tails?

It appears, I own, somewhat fanciful; but I cannot frown away the suggestion that the power being in the Mouths, and even the Tails having Mouths, is meant to express the fact that the great superiority of the Roman Armies over the Zelotae and other Fanatics of Judaea & Jersualem (the Scorpion-Locusts) consisted not in Courage or Warlike Skill; but in admirable Officering even of the lowest portions of the Forces brought by Vespasian & Titus—
It was the Discipline—the Voice—the Word of Command—

Hmm. A little earlier, Coleridge scribbles a gloss upon Eichhorn's gloss of  the Johannine ‘four angels were loosed which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year’.

Most poetic & vivid they are—. See Ode on the Departing Year, and the Personification of Destruction, with lidless dragon eyes Dreaming on the marge of a Volcano of the predestined prey—the Fiend-hag on her perilous Couch doth leap Muttering distempered Triumph in her charmed Sleep. So here—the four Spirits of Vengeance
     Impatient waiting with unsleeping
to By hour, by day, by month, by year—

No measure of time so small as to relax their Ward, None long enough to exhaust & weary out/  [Marginalia, CC 12.2 515]

This looks to me like STC starting to block out poetry for Titus's Siege of Jerusalem: as it might be

Four charméd Spirits of Vengeance here
   Impatient wait
By hour, by day, by month, by year—
   They watch yon gate
No measure of time so small as to relax
   Their Ward,
Nor long enough t'exhaust or weary out
   Their guard.

and so on. The bit of his own ‘Ode on the Departing Year’ (1791) to which he is here referring is this one (lines 140-48):

The nations curse thee. They with eager wondering
Shall hear Destruction, like a vulture, scream!
Strange-eyed Destruction! who with many a dream
Of central fires through neither seas upthundering
Soothes her fierce solitude; yet as she lies
By livid fount, or red volcanic stream,
If ever to her lidless dragon-eyes,
O Albion! thy predestined ruins rise,
The fiend-hag on her perilous couch doth leap,
Muttering distempered triumph in her charmed sleep. 

What about the detail that the the four angels, or Spirits of Vengeance are ‘bound in the great river Euphrates’ [Rev 9:14]? Eichhorn comments:

Qui carceris locus soli debetur poetae ingenio, nullamque patitur ex historia excidii Hierosolymitani interpretationem. Poesis enim prophetica postulat, ut singula in carmine declaranda ad loca certa personasque certas. revocentur. Quid? quod nee Romanus exercitus, ad Judaos coercendos ab Euphrate progressos dici poterat; is enim ex Achaia profectus Alexandriam petiit et legionibus Ptolemaidis et Caesreae auctus in Judeam irrupit, vid. Josephus de bello Judaico lib 3. C. 1. 3.

This location for imprisonment is merely the fancy of the poet; it permits no interpretation that relates to the actual destruction of Jerusalem. For indeed, poetic prophesy is premised on the idea that each thing mentioned in the poem must relate to specific places and specific people. What follows? The Roman army might be said to have advanced on and surrounded the Jews from the Euphrates; after all, it had set off from Achaia, travelled to Alexandria, and reinforced by the legions of Ptolemais and of Caesara, had invaded Judea (See Josephus Jewish War, 3:1.3.) [Eichhorn
Commentarius in apocalypsin Joannis (1791), 2:35]

Coleridge is unimpressed by this Eichhornian literalism.

P.35. I wonder at this assertion from so acute and ingenious a Man as Eichhorn. First, as I have noted—if Rome was to be symbolized as Babylon, the River must be the Euphrates. But that the four mighty Destroyers were bound up [in] the great River—‘up a great River, great as any Sea’ [Osorio IV:232] is according to the code of popular Beliefs—the bad Spirits are sent bound to the bottom of the Red SEA—. But a Sea would not have been appropriate or designative of the Roman Power—while the Tyber was a perfect Synonime of Rome, and the trite poetic Exponent of the Roman Power—Now the Tyber could not but be changed into the Euphrates ... Four giant Daemons could not be imagined bound or chained up in a vast City—this would have been too indefinite—But neither in any Dungeon or Tower in the Babylon—this would have been as much too narrow, & besides too gross an outrage to probability, & above all too little ghostliness/—With great Judgement therefore the sublime Seer transfers their prison to the River but amplifies the River into all the magnificence of a Sea for the Imagination of the Readers. Only read the Greek words aloud [‘τοὺς τέσσαρας ἀγγέλους τοὺς δεδεμένους ἐπὶ τῷ ποταμῷ τῷ μεγάλῳ Εὐφράτῃ’] ore rotundo and you will feel the effect—Add to all this the Hebrew Associations with the Euphrates—Captivity after bloody Wars, and the Seige, Sack and utter Destruction of their Chief City & Temple! Is it not, I say again, striking that Eichhorn should overlook all these so striking and exquisite properties in a “soli debetur poetae ingenio”!!—
[Marginalia, CC 12.2 512]

In his ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature (Cambridge 1975), E. S. Shaffer quotes this passage ‘as characteristic of the symbolism of Kubla’.

First, the three great sacred cities—Jerusalem, Babylon and Rome—are blended; the symbolism is not sequential, as in Eichhorn’s scheme, but simultaneous. Because Rome too must fall, and the city of wickedness is Babylon, the captive demons in Jerusalem may be imprisoned in ‘the Euphrates’ … the references are interchangeable, they flow in and out of each other. Geographical mobility is uncannily combined with exact location, timelessness with precise and known history. The superimposition and blending of meaning is perfect. Especially characteristic of Kubla is the way the river expands at a touch into a sea—size as immaterial as place and time—while retaining all the connotations of that particular named river and acquiring all those of the sea.’ [Shaffer, 101]

This would be more convincing if it weren't so anachronistic, shifting comments STC wrote 1817-22 back in time so they can inform the writing of ‘Kubla Khan’. Although having said that, and as I argued in this earlier post, I can well believe (though Shaffer doesn't say anything about this) that STC was reading Josephus with enough attention for this passage describing the old Temple at Jerusalem as both a sunlit golden eminence and a mountain of snow to have stuck in his poetic inspiration, and to have informed his automatic-writing account of Kubla's Xanadian pleasure dome (‘that sunny dome! those caves of ice!’):

Τὸ δ' ἔξωθεν αὐτοῦ πρόσωπον οὐδὲν οὔτ' εἰς ψυχῆς οὔτ' εἰς ὀμμάτων ἔκπληξιν ἀπέλειπεν: πλαξὶ γὰρ χρυσοῦ στιβαραῖς κεκαλυμμένος πάντοθεν ὑπὸ τὰς πρώτας ἀνατολὰς πυρωδεστάτην ἀπέπαλλεν αὐγὴν καὶ τῶν βιαζομένων ἰδεῖν τὰς ὄψεις ὥσπερ ἡλιακαῖς ἀκτῖσιν ἀπέστρεφεν. τοῖς γε μὴν ἀφικνουμένοις ξένοις πόῤῥωθεν ὅμοιος ὄρει χιόνος πλήρει κατεφαίνετο: καὶ γὰρ καθὰ μὴ κεχρύσωτο λευκότατος ἦν.

Now the outward face of the temple in its front wanted nothing that was likely to surprise either men's minds or their eyes; for it was covered all over with plates of gold of great weight, and, at the first rising of the sun, reflected back a very fiery splendour, and made those who forced themselves to look upon it to turn their eyes away, just as they would have done at the sun's own rays. But this temple appeared to strangers, when they were coming to it at a distance, like a mountain covered with snow; for as to those parts of it that were not gilt, they were exceeding white. [Josephus, Jewish War, 5.5.6]

So we might want to argue that, amongst the many other things we can say of ‘Kubla Khan’, it's a kind of dry-run for Coleridge's Siege of Jerusalem by Titus.

Josephus and "Kubla Khan"

When, on a day in September 1797, Coleridge put down his copy of Purchas His Pilgrimes to drift off into another one of his opium sleeps, the passage he had been reading was this one:

In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be moved from place to place.

On waking from his sleep, he started writing:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
⁠A stately pleasure-dome decree:
⁠Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
⁠Through caverns measureless to man
⁠Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

...and so on, until the visitor from Porlock interrupted him and the rest of the epic was lost. So far, so famous.

What do we know about this ‘dome’? It sits above a hidden river called Alph (for Alphabet, according to Ted Hughes) that flows underground and then bursts out in sublime magnificence (‘from this chasm/A mighty fountain momently was forced/Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst/It flung up momently the sacred river’). The dome itself sits inside a walled area; and marks a remarkable kind of material oxymoron in which warm, golden sunlight and freezing white ice combine:

It was a miracle of rare device,
⁠A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

That couplet is the hinge point in the poem. After those lines we move on to the Abyssinian damsel with her dulcimer singing of a magical mountain called Abora (A + B for the alphabet; ora, calling us to prayer, according to Ted Hughes), which brings us back to the poem's core oxymoron: ‘that sunny dome! those caves of ice!’

I'm talking, here, about sources for this poem. But even John Livingstone Lowes' eloquent and wide-ranging source-study The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (1927; rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955) can't do much more with ‘Kubla Khan’ than this, since STC lays it all out for us so thoroughly. On the other hand, Lowes is interested in the fact that Josephus crops up in another masterpiece from this era, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Josephus? The same. Bear with me.

In Mariner the oxymoron of hot sun and frozen ice is unpicked by being narrativized, with the mariner passing from the latter zone to the former. At exactly the moment of transition (‘And some in dreams assurèd were/Of the Spirit that plagued us so;/Nine fathom deep he had followed us/From the land of mist and snow’) Coleridge adds this gloss:

A Spirit had followed them; one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels; concerning whom the learned Jew Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element without one or more.

Here's Dorothy Bilik:

In discussing the gloss to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Livingstone Lowes asks, ‘but what is the learned Jew, Josephus, doing in that galley?’ Josephus (c. C.E. 37-100), unlike the Neoplatonist Michael Psellus with whom he is coupled, is not an authority on demonology. However, Lowes points out that Josephus and others wrote about Cain; and Cain, together with the Wandering Jew, combined with Wordsworth's suggestions and other influences, culminated, because of Coleridgean magic, in the haunting figure of the ancient Mariner. Coleridge's notebook entries for 1796 include excerpts, in Greek, from Josephus' Antiquities; in an 1802 entry Coleridge refers to Josephus' The Jewish Wars. [Bilik, ‘Josephus, Mosollamus, and the Ancient Mariner’, Studies in Philology, 86:1 (1989), 87]

I don't think the reference to Josephus has anything to do with Cain, as it happens. But I do think it's significant, and not just for the Mariner.

We know Coleridge was reading Josephus at this time, because Josephus's Jewish War is the main source for our knowledge of Titus's seige and sack of Jerusalem in AD 70. For a long time, Coleridge planned an ambitious epic on that subject. In 1802 he wrote to Tom Wedgwood:

I have, since my twentieth year, meditated an heroic poem on the ‘Siege of Jerusalem’ by Titus. This is the pride and the stronghold of my hope, but I never think of it except in my best moods. The work to which I dedicate the ensuing years of my life. [20 Oct 1802; CL 2:876]

When Titus finally captured Jerusalem he destroyed the city and its temple, and the Jewish people went from being a nation centred on a temple, run by a High Priest, to a diasporic congeries of peoples, carrying their synagogues with them wherever they went, and guided not by priests but rabbis.

There's Jerusalem, at the head of this post: a territory of twice five cubits walled around, and most notable now for the golden dome of its mosque. This most holy of Judaeo-Christian cities is now the site of (what Coleridge would have regarded as) a pagan, oriental dome, a structure which, however magnificent, is built on a hidden tumult which vocalises as ancestral voices prophesying war (which ancestors? The Jews, as the precursors of Christianity. Which war? The recapture of Jerusalem).

Coleridge had been reading Josephus's account of Titus's capture of Jerusalem closely, planning and revolving the great epic he hoped to write, ostentatiously dedicating the remainder of his life as a poet to the project. It came to nothing, of course. Instead Coleridge wrote, in a kind of trance, a strange epic opening, the suggestive ruin of an epic, like a single wall of an uncomplete temple. A poem about a dome bathed in golden sunlight that is also, impossibly, a kind of concavity of ice, the dialectic of antithetical shapes and temperatures subliming into beauty (the most beautiful poem Coleridge ever composed, certainly). And here is Josephus's description the Great Temple of Jerusalem, before its destruction:

Τὸ δ' ἔξωθεν αὐτοῦ πρόσωπον οὐδὲν οὔτ' εἰς ψυχῆς οὔτ' εἰς ὀμμάτων ἔκπληξιν ἀπέλειπεν: πλαξὶ γὰρ χρυσοῦ στιβαραῖς κεκαλυμμένος πάντοθεν ὑπὸ τὰς πρώτας ἀνατολὰς πυρωδεστάτην ἀπέπαλλεν αὐγὴν καὶ τῶν βιαζομένων ἰδεῖν τὰς ὄψεις ὥσπερ ἡλιακαῖς ἀκτῖσιν ἀπέστρεφεν. τοῖς γε μὴν ἀφικνουμένοις ξένοις πόῤῥωθεν ὅμοιος ὄρει χιόνος πλήρει κατεφαίνετο: καὶ γὰρ καθὰ μὴ κεχρύσωτο λευκότατος ἦν.

Now the outward face of the temple in its front wanted nothing that was likely to surprise either men's minds or their eyes; for it was covered all over with plates of gold of great weight, and, at the first rising of the sun, reflected back a very fiery splendour, and made those who forced themselves to look upon it to turn their eyes away, just as they would have done at the sun's own rays. But this temple appeared to strangers, when they were coming to it at a distance, like a mountain covered with snow; for as to those parts of it that were not gilt, they were exceeding white. [Josephus, Jewish War, 5.5.6]

You may try and tell me that this passage wasn't in Coleridge's poetic subconscious when he wrote ‘Kubla Khan’. You may try it, but I won't believe you.

The thing is, if we see this as one of the shaping influences that went into the poem, it alters the way we read the whole work, I think. It means that, in an oblique way, Xanadu becomes a kind of convex upside-down iteration of the concavity of Titus's hollowing-out of Jerusalem; a strange symbolic reinscription of that historical drama. The river becomes the flow of Christian faith, underground during the era of the Jews, but bursting into the sunlight in sublime wonder and terror with Christ's crucifixion (at Jerusalem, of course). The subterranean cave of ice becomes the glorious snowy mountain of Abora, which is also, in Coleridge's potent concision of imagery, the golden mountain-dome of Xanadu itself.

Jerusalem; Heirusalem; Xarusalem. Enough! Or—too much?

"The Eo-nauts" (1813)

A curio, this: a pamphlet published in 1813 as by ‘Lemuel Gulliver’, supposedly a descendent of Swift's celebrated traveller, although in fact this was written by Elizabeth Susanna Graham (1764-1844, née Davenport, wife to and then widow of Thomas Graham, of Edmond Castle, Cumberland, and Lincoln's Inn [not to be confused with this Thomas Graham]). It's a poem written, so far as I can tell, in order to mock the East India Company Act of 1813, also known as the Charter Act 1813, which licensed the British East India Company's ongoing exploitation of India. Graham, fictionalising India as ‘Laputa’, appears to have regarded the whole enterprise as a reprise of the South Sea Bubble, from a century earlier. This is how the poem opens:

Impatient, on his oozy bed,
Where Fate so long had bound him
Rouz’d Speculation rears his head,
And wildly glares around him.

His bosom boils, his seething brains
With countless Visions teem;
His mind such wefted schemes contains
As wove the South Sea dream.

With Eastern treasures stor’d, he fills,
Or seems to fill his coffer,
And thinks to find the golden hills
And long lost mines of Ophir.

Of north-east passage without squalls,
He’s raving—sine fine-—
And veining Panama with CANALS,
For shorter cuts to China.

’Tis done! —the deed’s accomplish’d now—
The East’s wide trade is free;
And every bold adventurer’s prow
Darkens th’afrighted sea.

From Michael’s Mount to farthest North,
See bustle and confusion,
O’er whom, with wild shrieks, sallies forth
The Spirit of Delusion.

So why am I blogging about this obscure little tidbit on my Coleridge blog? Well, the whole poem is larded with sarcastic footnotes, containing many quotations, all made up by Graham but all attributed either to notable names or else to generic figures. As it might be:

There are loads of these, including pseudo-scholarly tables showing India to be so poor only a fool would think a fortune could be won there:

Anyway, late in the poem Graham includes a dig at Coleridge. This quatrain:

There Speculation’s sons may dash,
Where trade no bound restrains,
Which asks nor capital of cash,
Nor capital of brains.

—has the following note appended:

No such person as ‘Mr Wiske’ and no such play as China Hoy, although there certainly was a person called ‘Mr Coleridge’ of course. Still, 1813 seems to me late in the day to be twitting Coleridge for his Pantisocratic scheme, given that its failure was two decades in the past—if that is indeed what Graham is doing here. Perhaps Coleridge is invoked merely as the author of a well-known poem about a crazy sea-voyage. The archaic English is perhaps a dig at the olde-worlde Lyrical Ballads version of Ancient Mariner, and ‘Mr Wiske’ a jab at Wordsworth (although—why ‘whisk’? Why ‘China ahoy’? It can't be a ‘Kubla Khan’ thing since that poem, though written in 1797, wasn't published until 1816; and Graham didn't know or have any interactions with Coleridge. I remain puzzled.)