"The Poet's Eye In His Tipsy Hour" (1800)

Notebook entry 791 (August 1800) records a ‘tipsy’ (that is, likely opium-dosed) Coleridge admiring the view from his Keswick home. He writes retrospectively about the shifting beauties of the lake during the day, jotting down his entry at 11pm that night with one eye on the ‘conical Volcano of coal, half an inch high, ejaculating its inverted cone of smoke’ in his fireplace. It's windy outside. He makes a start on the first draft of a poem:

The poet's eye in his tipsy hour
Hath a magnifying power
Or rather he diverts his eyes/his soul emancipates his eyes
Of the accidents of size/
In unctuous cones of kindling Coal
Or smoke from his Pipe's bole
His eyes can see
Phantoms of sublimity.

An hour later, having gone to investigate some tapping at his window, STC returns and writes a little more in his notebook:

Nick! Nick! This is very nice writing. Magnifying in line 2 might make us think of microscopes and such, but I'd suggest Coleridge has in mind the Latin root of our word: not just ‘make bigger’, but also make more magnificus (‘great, noble, distinguished, eminent, august’). Sublimifying, in a word. The lovely chocky k-alliteration in line 5's ‘unctuous cones of kindling Coal’ (unctuous is a really nicely-chosen word), overlapping with the mouth-circling oh-assonances of lines 5 and 6 (‘cones’, ‘coal’, smoke’, ‘bole’) work together to imply a finely sensuous evocation of the scene. These two sound-patterns, the ck and the oh (the clinking of hot coals, the expanding oh-shapes of the smoke) get picked up in the midnight PS, which moves from nick! nick! to poa(cher). Sublime indeed.

Decades later, Coleridge published an article in Blackwood's Magazine (January 1822) under the title ‘The Historic and Gests of Maxilian’. This is a curious piece of prose, not really like anything else Coleridge wrote: a lumbering exercise in rather donnish comedy. STC had written to the Blackwood's editor, William Blackwood, sending him the text of ‘Maxilian’ and promising more: ‘Within ten days you will receive a second packet consisting of 1. The ideal of a Magazine—2. the first article on the history and theory of Witchcraft &c. 3. The world without and the world within—a tale of Truth from Faery Land-Book I.—4. The Life of Hölty, with specimens of his poems, translated into English Verse.—’

‘Some traces of these projects remain among Coleridge's papers,’ H L Jackson notes ‘but they were evidently not submitted to Blackwood's ... “Maxilian” appeared in January and was hailed by the editor, under the familiar pseudonym of Christopher North, as “a fragment indeed, but such a fragment as we are sure nobody but Mr. Coleridge could have written!” Coleridge's friends were pleased with the piece, and Coleridge was encouraged: “Mr Gillman & Mr Green both liked the Maxilian much—& it will improve. But small interruptions in my state of Health are not small—”.’ [H. J. Jackson, ‘Coleridge's “Maxilian”’ Comparative Literature 33:1 (1981), 38-39]

The essay itself is most odd; its first half a drawn-out, facetious, heavy-handed satire of the modern age; its second a verbose adaptation of E. T. A. Hoffmann's short story Der goldne Topf. But as part of the piece Coleridge retrieved and reworked his nascent 1800 poem, above. This is how the poem finally appears in print, in Blackwoods, 1822:

The poet in his lone yet genial hour
Gives to his eyes a magnifying power:
Or rather he emancipates his eyes
From the black shapeless accidents of size—
In unctuous cones of kindling coal,
Or smoke upwreathing from the pipe's trim bole,
His gifted ken can see
Phantoms of sublimity.

Unreprinted in Coleridge's life, this version was eventually published by his grandson Ernest Hartley Coleridge, in his 1912 Coleridge's Poetical Works, under the title ‘Apologia pro vita sua’.

In the earlier version we need, obviously, to continue back the strike-through to eliminate ‘Or rather’ from line 3 and so preserve the tetrameter. It's how J C C Mays prints the poem in his standard Princeton Coleridge: Poetical Works:

The poet's eye in his tipsy hour
Hath a magnifying power
His soul emancipates his eyes
From the accidents of size.
In unctuous cones of kindling Coal
Or smoke from his Pipe's bole
His eyes can see
Phantoms of sublimity.

This earlier metre seems to me preferable to the padded-out pentameter of the Blackwood's version: ‘lone yet’; ‘Give to his eyes’ in place of ‘hath a’; ‘black shapeless’; ‘upwreathing’; ‘trim’ ... these are all make-weights and add little. But the final line, in both versions, has excited Coleridge scholars. Michael Johnduff, in his review of Coleridge, Language, and the Sublime: From Transcendence to Finitude (Palgrave, 2011), calls this little poem ‘the most sublime of Coleridge’s fragments’ and adds: ‘Phantoms of sublimity? What is that? Indeed, something so sublime that even phantoms, wispy traces of it are sublime; and yet how sublime could a mere phantom of sublimity be? If we try to see what the poet’s gifted ken can see, this experience that is supposed to be transcendent here comes not to carry us off into the beyond, but to make us fall back upon ourselves, doubt whether what we just felt was real, and begin asking whether what we have grasped was indeed an experience of the sublime.’

That's as may be, but it's worth pointing out that ‘phantoms of sublimity’ is actually Coleridge quoting, or if we wish to be less charitable, plagiarising, Mark Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination (1744). The poet in that work is surveying a sublime landscape, just as Coleridge has been:

                                          Mark the sable woods
That shade sublime yon mountain's nodding brow;
With what religious awe the solemn scene
Commands your steps! ...
                                       Behold th' expanse
Of yon gay landscape, where the silver clouds
Flit o'er the heav'ns before the sprightly breeze:
Now their grey cincture skirts the doubtful sun;
Now streams of splendor, thro' their opening veil
Effulgent. [Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination, 3:286-97]

This leads him into a meditation on sublimity as such:

If human thought could reach, or words unfold,
By what mysterious fabric of the mind,
The deep-felt joys and harmony of sound
Result from airy motion; and from shape
The lovely phantoms of sublime and fair. [3:457-61]

This is, I think, another example of what Harriet Devine Jump has called ‘Coleridge's Unacknowledged Debt to Akenside’ [the title of her article in Studies in Romanticism, 28:2 (1989), pp. 207-224]. Because Akenside is forgotten now we tend to overlook how much Coleridge drew from him: Coleridge wrote to John Thelwall in December 1796 ‘I have room enough in my brain to admire, aye & almost equally, the head and fancy of Akenside, and the heart and fancy of Bowles, the solemn Lordliness of Milton, & the divine Chit chat of Cowper’.

The opening of this short 1800 notebook poem, ‘the poet's eye’, is a Shakespearean tag; but it is one already associated with Akenside, whose fascinations both with vision and the imaginative augmentation of what the eye sees was the ground of his celebrity as a poet, back when his poetry was celebrated. Here, for instance, is a passage from Anna Letitia Barbauld's prefatory essay on The Pleasures of the Imagination, which Coleridge certainly knew:

Why, he asks, does the deep shade of a thick wood strike us with religious awe? Why does the lightsomeness and variety of a more airy landscape suggest to us the idea of gaiety and social mirth? Is there really any resemblance, or is it owing to early and frequent associations? He decides for the latter, and beautifully illustrates that great law on which the power of memory entirely depends. This leads him to consider the powers of Imagination as residing in the human mind, when, after being stored by means of memory, with ideas of all that is great and beautiful in nature, the child of fancy combines and varies them in a new creation of its own, from whence the origin of Music, Painting, Poetry, and all those arts which give rise to the secondary or reflex pleasures, referred to in the latter part of his definition. This is accompanied by a glowing and animated description of the process of composition, written evidently with the pleasure a person of genius must have felt, when reflecting with conscious triumph that he is exercising the powers he so well describes. He had probably likewise in his eye the well-known lines of Shakespear,

The Poet's eye in a fine phrenzy rolling.

[The Pleasures of the Imagination. By Mark Akenside, M.D. To Which is Prefixed a Critical Essay on the Poem, by Mrs. Barbauld (London: Printed for T. Cadell, Junior and W. Davies, in the Strand, by R. Noble, in the Old Bailey, 1794), 26-27]

(That last is quoted from Midsummer Night's Dream.) I'd hazard that Coleridge, warm by his fireside in 1800, might even have been reading Pleasures of the Imagination, and had his own poetic imagination jogged by Akenside's Phantoms of Sublime.