And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he/Was tyrannous and strong

 

Who coined the phrase ‘tyrannous and strong’ to describe the wind? Was it Coleridge? Or Wordsworth?

The phrase's most famous appearance is in the Ancient Mariner, but only in the 1834 version of the poem (which is to say, it's not in the 1798 version).

And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.

With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled. [Ancient Mariner, lines 41-50]

The phrase also appears in Wordsworth's ‘The Waterfall and the Eglantine’ (in Lyrical Ballads, 1800). In that poem a thunderous waterfall mocks a tiny briar-rose, vowing to wash it away despite the plant's pitiable pleas for mercy. The key stanza is:

“Dost thou presume my course to block?
Off, off! or, puny Thing!
I'll hurl thee headlong with the rock
To which thy fibres cling.”
The Flood was tyrannous and strong;
The patient Briar suffered long,
Nor did he utter groan or sigh,
Hoping the danger would be past.

But here's Coleridge's ‘A Thought Suggested by a View of Saddleback in Cumberland’, a poem jotted into his notebook some time around 1800, though not published (in The Amulet) until 1833.

On stern Blencartha's perilous height
The winds are tyrannous and strong;
And flashing forth unsteady light
From stern Blencartha's skiey height,
As loud the torrents throng!
Beneath the moon in gentle weather,
They bind earth and sky together.
But oh! the sky and all its forms, how quiet!
The things that seek the earth, how full of noise and riot!

Coleridge first mentions Blencartha (also known as Saddleback; one of the most northerly hills in the English Lake District) in November 1799, and first climbed it in August 1800, so it's likely he wrote this short verse sometime around those dates. 

So did Coleridge coin ‘tyrannous and strong’ and Wordsworth appropriated it for his poem? Or was it the other way around? Paul Magnuson notes: ‘it is difficult to determine whether Coleridge or Wordsworth was the first to use the phrase.’

Let's come at it another way. Though he's unknown nowadays. James Hurdis was once a famous poet, praised by his contemporaries as the heir of Cowper, and appointed Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1793. He married in 1799, and died suddenly in 1801. His reputation faded quickly thereafter. Writing a quarter century after his death, Southey insisted that Hurdis did not deserve to be forgotten, ‘for his poems, though ill conceived and carelessly composed, abound with images from nature, which show the eye of a poet, and with strains of natural feeling, which could only have proceeded from the heart of one. He was, indeed, a most amiable man, of the best and kindliest feelings’ [Southey, Quarterly Review 35 (1827) 201]. The 1790s were the high-point of Hurdis's reputation, and in 1795 he published a poem looking forward to the marriage of the Prince of Wales to his cousin Princess Caroline of Brunswick (they were married on 8 April 1795, after which, of course, things went spectacularly wrong betweem them, though Hurdis wasn't to know that).  

It's not a bad poem, actually, though it is obseqiously royalist. And it's an interesting gesture (more the kind of thing the Poet Laureate would do than the Oxford Professor of Poetry). It was certainly noticed: reviewed positively, with long passages quoted, in the Analytic Review, the Critical Review and elsewhere. STC and/or Wordsworth might have read those reviews, or might even have read the actual poem. It opens with a description of an Oxfordshire winter:

Season of darkness and contracted day,
Inclement Winter, whose approaching foot
Treads on the heel of Autumn, pause; nor strew
With thy rude gust the ill-surviving leaf
Which hangs discoloured upon hill and vale. [Hurdis, Prospect of the Marriage, line 1-5]

This, though, is the bit that struck me: the poet orders the ‘Impending Season’, to ‘Bid thy strong gale’ traverse the landscape.

Elsewhere be tyrannous, but gentle here:
Here smile serene; and let incautious Spring,
Decoyed or e’er her season, on thy brow
An odorous chaplet place of early buds,
And deck with blossoms thy snow-sprinkled crown. [21-25]

Is that too tenuous a connection? Hurdis's gale is strong and tyrannous; Coleridge's tyrannous and strong.

Maybe this is too close to home. We could suggest that either Wordsworth or Coleridge, or even Hurdis, took the idea of a tyrannous wind from John Donne's linked poems ‘The Storme’/‘The Calme’ (probably written in the early 1600s), addressed ‘to Christopher Brook, from the Island Voyage with the Earl of Essex’ (Donne's second poem opens with the line: ‘our storm is past, and that storm's tyrannous rage’). Or we could go further, to Erasmus's famous colloquy Naufragium (‘The Shipwreck’, 1518), upon which Donne drew.

Or we could go further back still, all the way to Hesiod, and his vivid account of Zeus overthrowing the Titan Typhoeus (sometimes called Typhon): ‘when Zeus had conquered him and lashed him with strokes, Typhoeus was hurled down, a maimed wreck, so that the huge earth groaned. And flame shot forth from the thunderstricken lord in the dim rugged glens of the mount, when he was smitten. A great part of huge earth was scorched by the terrible vapor and melted as tin melts when heated by men's art in channelled crucibles; or as iron, which is hardest of all things, is shortened by glowing fire ... even so, then, the earth melted in the glow of the blazing fire. And in the bitterness of his anger Zeus cast him into wide Tartarus’. From this downfall, says Hesiod, were born the great winds that have ever since blown over the world:

ἐκ δὲ Τυφωέος ἔστ᾽ ἀνέμων μένος ὑγρὸν ἀέντων,
νόσφι Νότου Βορέω τε καὶ ἀργέστεω Ζεφύροιο:
οἵ γε μὲν ἐκ θεόφιν γενεή, θνητοῖς μέγ᾽ ὄνειαρ:
οἱ δ᾽ ἄλλοι μαψαῦραι ἐπιπνείουσι θάλασσαν:
αἳ δή τοι πίπτουσαι ἐς ἠεροειδέα πόντον,
πῆμα μέγα θνητοῖσι, κακῇ θυίουσιν ἀέλλῃ:
ἄλλοτε δ᾽ ἄλλαι ἄεισι διασκιδνᾶσί τε νῆας
ναύτας τε φθείρουσι: κακοῦ δ᾽ οὐ γίγνεται ἀλκὴ
ἀνδράσιν, οἳ κείνῃσι συνάντωνται κατὰ πόντον: [Theogony, 869-77]

‘And from Typhoeus come boisterous winds which blow damply, except Notus and Boreas and clear Zephyr. These are a god-sent kind, and a great blessing to men; but the others blow fitfully upon the sea. Some rush upon the misty sea and work great havoc among men with their evil, raging blasts; for varying with the season they blow, scattering ships and destroying sailors. And men who meet these upon the sea have no help against the mischief’ [this is Hugh G. Evelyn-White's Loeb translation]

Boisterous winds here is ᾰ̓́νεμοι μένοι, and maybe Coleridge was thinking of this—thinking, that is, of linking tyranny with another Greek word: τό μένος, ‘might, force’, ‘strength, fierceness’, used in the Iliad of ‘soul, spirit, passion, the battlerage of men’ [Iliad 2.387] and, interestingly, used in Plotinus to mean ‘filled with spiritual exaltation’. Hesiod's personified wind comes as forcefully down upon his put-upon mariners as terribly as does Coleridge's personified storm-blast upon his. 

Typhon is the root, etymologically, of the English word typhoon; or more specifically, the English usage of this word bent its Chinese original (Mandarin dàfēng, Cantonese daai6 fung1, ‘Big Wind’) around the Greek name to produce the English word. The OED records the first English use in 1588, and it appears in Purchas's Pilgrimage (‘Tempests, Huricanos, Tufons, Water-spouts’ [I. i. vi. 20]) a book we know Coleridge read. 

That's enough about tyrannous-strong winds for now, I think.

 

At the head of the post: William Strang's fine etching, ‘And Now The Storm-Blast Came’ (1896), currently in the National Gallery of Scotland. Click to embiggen: it's worth it.