Kablakhan

A rather likeable typo this, I think.

It's from Friedrich Johann Jacobsen's Briefe an eine deutsche Edelfrau ueber die neuesten englischen Dichter (‘letters to a German noblewoman about the latest English poets’; 1820). Pages 220-223 of that book are an account of Coleridge’s Christabel:

Sie erinnern sich, das Lord Byron als Motto zu seinem unsterblichen “Fare thee well” folgende Stelle aus einem ungedruckten Gedichte von Coleridge anführt:

Alas they had been friends in youth,
But whispering tongues can poison truth.

Das Gedicht ist als wild, seltsam und schön vor der Herausgabe empfohlen. Es ist erschienen unter dem Titel:

Christabel Kablakhan, a Vision. – The pains of Sleep by S. T. Coleridge. London, Murray 1816.

The Edinburgh Review von 1816 behauptet, das aus der Lake School so viel Tadelhaftes gekommen sey, das man hätte glauben sollen, es könne nicht weiter getrieben werden; aber in eben dem Augenblick komme Coleridge wie ein Riese, der durch Schlaf gestärkt sey (er hatte von 1808 bis 1816 kein Gedicht herausgegeben) und breche auf das Publicum mit diesen Worten herein:

'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock
And the owls have auaken'd the crowing cock;
Tu – with! – Tu – whoo!
And hark – again! the crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.

Sir Leoline, the Baron rich, - - - - - - - -
Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
From her kennet beneath the rock
She makes answer to the clock,
Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour;
E'er and aye, moonshine or shou'er;
Sixteen short howls, not over loud;
Some say she sees my lady's shrouds.
Is the night chilly and dark?
The night is chilly, but not dark.

Die Fabel der wilden, abentheuerlichen Gedichte ist diese. Der Lady Christabel träumt von ihrem Geliebten. Sie geht in der Nacht auf's Feld, findet die Lady Geraldine unter einem Baum, woselbst sie von 5 unbekannten Entführern in Krämpfen gelassen ist. Sie wird von der Lady Christabel nach dem Schlosse gebracht. Hier erscheint ihr die verstorbene Mutter der Christabel, – es gehen wunderliche Dinge vor, der Vater der Christabel sendet die Geraldine im höchsten Zorn darüber zu ihrem Vater zurück.

Das zweite und dritte Gedicht sind noch unbedeutender als das erste.

Es heisst in Dr. Adrian's Uebersetzung der Gedichte von Lord Byron, Letzterer habe den Anfang des Gedichtes Christabel, welches damals noch nicht gedruckt gewesen sey, in der Schweiz recitirt. Einer aus der Gesellschaft sey von dem Grausenvollen dieser Geschichte so ergriffen geworden, das er mit Entsetzen aus dem Zimmer geeilt sey. Der Lord und ein Arzt wären ihm gefolgt, hätten ihn fast ohnmähtig und mit Angstschweiss bedeckt gefunden, und er habe behauptet, eine Erscheinung gehabt zu haben. Wie die Gesellschaft zuzückgekehrt, sey der Vorschlag gemacht worden, jeder der Anwesenden solle ein Gedicht niederschreiben, welches auf irgend eine übernatürliche Einwirkung gegründet wäre. Lord Byron habe bei dieser Gelegenheit seine Erzählung, the Vampyr, geschrieben, die auf dem arabischen, griechischen und ungarischen Aberglauben beruht, das es Blutsauger giebt, die das Blut von geliebten Personen so lange aussaugen, bis sie davon sterben. Ich sandte Ihnen den Vampyr, und da Sie die Erzählung der Talente des grossen Dichters unwürdig hielten, so will ich sie nicht weiter commentiren. Viele urtheilen aber günstiger über Coleridge als der Edinburger, und selbst dieser nennt einige der früheren Gedichte von Coleridge als sehr vorzüglich. Coleridge hat eine wahre Wasserscheu vor den Critikern. Er klagt, während Lord Byron und Walter Scott seine Christabel gut gefunden, verfolgten ihn die Critiker so unbarmherzig, das er ihre Gestalten sehe, wo er gehe und stehe. Coleridge's Bemerkungen über Shakspeare werden von Vielen gerühmt.

This means:

You'll remember that Lord Byron's motto for his immortal “Fare thee well” was the following passage from one of the unpublished poems of Coleridge:

Alas they had been friends in youth,
But whispering tongues can poison truth.

The poem thuswise recommended is wild, strange and beautiful. It has now been published under the title:

Christabel Kablakhan, a Vision. – The Pains of Sleep by S. T. Coleridge. London, Murray 1816.

The Edinburgh Review of 1816 claimed that the Lake School was having such a damaging effect on poetry that it ought not to be permitted to continue. But at that very moment Coleridge came like a giant strengthened by sleep (for he had published no poetry between 1808 to 1816) to astonish the public with these words:

'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock
And the owls have auaken'd the crowing cock;
Tu – with! – Tu – whoo!
And hark – again! the crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.

Sir Leoline, the Baron rich, - - - - - - - -
Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
From her kennet beneath the rock
She makes answer to the clock,
Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour;
E'er and aye, moonshine or shou'er;
Sixteen short howls, not over loud;
Some say she sees my lady's shrouds.
Is the night chilly and dark?
The night is chilly, but not dark.

Here is the story of this wild, adventurous poem: Lady Christabel dreams of her lover. She goes out into the countryside at night, finds Lady Geraldine under a tree, where she has been detained by five unknown kidnappers. Lady Christabel brings her into the castle. Here the deceased mother of Christabel appears to her—for there are indeed strange things going on in this poem. Christabel's father angrily orders Geraldine sent back to her own father. (The second and third sections of the poem are rather less effective than the first.)

It says in Dr. Adrian's translation of Lord Byron's poems that he recited the beginning of Christabel (unpublished at that time) in Switzerland. One of the company was so moved by the horror of the story that he rushed out of the room in fright. The lord, and his doctor, followed this indivdual and found him almost helpless, literally sweating with fear, claiming to have seen an apparition. As the group reassembled, the suggestion was made that everyone present should write a poem based on some supernatural influence. On this occasion, Lord Byron wrote his story, The Vampyre, based on the Arabic, Greek and Hungarian superstition that there exist bloodsuckers who drain the blood of loved ones, until they perish. I sent you a copy of The Vampyre, and since you considered the story unworthy of the talents of so great a poet I will not comment on it any further. Many, however, judge Coleridge more favorably than does the Edinburgh Review, and even that journal praises some of Coleridge's earlier poems. Coleridge complains that although Lord Byron and Walter Scott both rated his Christabel highly, the critics have pursued him so relentlessly that he sees their figures wherever he goes. Coleridge's remarks about Shakspeare are praised by many.

This is interesting on several fronts. Evidently, in 1820 in Germany Coleridge was so little known that it was possible to mangle the title of what is now one of his most famous poems (I assume the mistake in the quoted passage, Tu – with! – Tu – whoo!, is a simpler kind of typo). Also Jacobsen believes that The Vampyre was written not by its actual author, John Polidori, but by Byron himself. That book was, of course, result of the same celebrated competition that produced Shelley's Frankenstein: ‘Polidori developed the idea, and seems to have written it down for the Countess of Breuss, who lived nearby, and from whom the publisher acquired the manuscript. It was first published in April 1819 in Henry Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine, under the title The Vampyre: A Tale by Lord Byron, later appearing as a book with Byron’s name on the title page of the first edition. His name was removed for the second edition. Byron disclaimed authorship, but the work’s immediate success rested largely on being attributed to him.’

According to the diary Polidori kept during 1816, Christabel was indeed among the books read during the famous ‘year without a summer’:

This point is the ‘ghost story contest’ proposed by Lord Byron in June 1816 at the Villa Diodati he rented by Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where he hosted, among others, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin (Mary Shelley by December) and Byron’s personal physician and occasional homosexual partner, Dr John Polidori, the keeper of a diary during that whole time. That challenge began, Polidori tells us, with an immersion in earlier Gothic: a group reading of Fantasmagoriana (1812), a French translation by Jean Baptiste Eyriés of German Gothic tales imitative of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), and Byron’s recitation of Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’, just published in 1816, though mostly as its author had left it in 1800. From this confluence emerged a great deal of important writing: Byron’s own extensions of the Gothic in The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems (December 1816) and his verse-drama Manfred (1817) – leading later to the ‘Norman Abbey’ cantos in Don Juan (left incomplete when he died at Missolonghi in 1824) – then Mary’s novel Frankenstein (1818) and Polidori’s novella The Vampyre (1819), perhaps the two most influential of all Gothic fictions to this day. [Jerrold E. Hogle ‘Gothic and Second-Generation Romanticism: Lord Byron, P. B. Shelley, John Polidori and Mary Shelley’, in Angela Wright and Dale Townshend (eds) Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press 2016), 112]

Polidori also says that it was Shelley who was so terrified by this recitation. Indeed, Polidori tells us more: ‘according to Doctor Polidori’s anecdote, the “sight to dream of, not to tell” caused Shelley to hallucinate women with eyes for nipples and run screaming from the room where Byron was reading the poem aloud’ [Anne C. McCarthy, ‘Dumbstruck: Christabel, the Sublime, and the Willing Suspension of Disbelief’, Romantic Circles].

Jacobens' reference to the Edinburgh Review is to that journal's negative review of Coleridge's poem.

When Christabel was attacked in the Edinburgh in September, 1816—by Hazlitt, it has been commonly thought—Byron's name was linked with Coleridge's, and he was abused for his professed admiration of Christabel. “Et tu Jeffrey?” was Byron's comment upon this latest attack, for he believed Jeffrey to be the reviewer; and he wrote to Moore explaining his position in the matter. “I praised it,” he said, “firstly, because I thought well of it; secondly, because Coleridge was in great distress, and after doing what little I could do for him in essentials, I thought that the public avowal of my good opinion might help him further, at least with the booksellers. I am very sorry that Jeffrey has attacked him because, poor fellow, it will hurt him in mind and pocket. As for me, he's welcome.” To Murray he wrote, “I won't have anyone sneer at Christabel: it is a fine wild poem.” [Edwin M. Everett, ‘Lord Byron's Lakist Interlude’, Studies in Philology 55:1 (1958), 63-4]

Byron, of course, was vastly more famous in Germany (and elsewhere) than Coleridge, which is why Jacobsen tags his account of Christabel to the other poet. An interesting snapshot, though, of the effect a Gothic tale was reputed to be able to have on its audience.

I'm trying to track down where in the German edition of Byron's poems ‘Dr Adrian’ actually says this, but so far without success. It must be in the preface to Adrian's Byron: Erzählungen, in Versen und Prosa, mit einem Versuche über des Dichters Leben und Schriften (Frankfurt, Sauerländer 1819), but I can't locate a copy online. (The best I could do was an 1830 edition, Lord Byron's Sämmtliche Werke, Herausgegeben von Dr. Adrian, ordentlichem öffentlichem Professor der neueren Literatur an der Universität zu Gießen, but neither preface nor notes here make any reference to Coleridge.)