"Ode to Tranquillity" (1801)

 

Coleridge most likely wrote this October or November 1801; Mays notes that it was first published in the Morning Post, 4th December 1801. It was widely reprinted in other newspapers. Coleridge then carved off the poem's first two stanzas (they make a series of specific political connections) and published the last four stanzas in the first installment of The Friend [1 June 1809]. He later collected this version in 1817's Sybilline Leaves. That's the version screenshotted at the head of this post. 

TRANQUILLITY! thou better name
Than all the family of Fame!
Thou ne’er will leave my riper age
To low intrigue, or factious rage;
For oh! dear child of thoughtful Truth,
To thee I gave my early youth,
And left the bark, and blest the steadfast shore,
Ere yet the tempest rose and scared me with its roar.

Who late and lingering seeks thy shrine,
On him but seldom, power divine,
Thy spirit rests. Satiety
And sloth, poor counterfeits of thee,
Mock the tired worldling. Idle Hope
And dire Remembrance interlope,
To vex the feverish slumbers of the mind:
The bubble floats before, the spectre stalks behind.

But me thy gentle hand will lead
At morning through the accustomed mead:
And in the sultry summer’s heat
Will build me up a mossy seat!
And when the gust of Autumn crowds,
And breaks the busy moonlight clouds,
Thou best the thought canst raise, the heart attune,
Light as the busy clouds, calm as the gliding Moon.

The feeling heart, the searching soul,
To thee I dedicate the whole!
And while within myself I trace
The greatness of some future race,
Aloof with hermit-eye I scan
The present works of present man—
A wild and dream-like trade of blood and guile,
Too foolish for a tear, too wicked for a smile!

In his copy of The Friend STC scribbled a sardonic little marginalium next to ‘interlope’ at the end of line 14: ‘O Rhyme! Rhyme! what hast thou not to answer for?’ He also annotated the poem's final couplet: ‘these two lines were composed during sleep. S.T.Coleridge.’ Interesting!

It seems to me this is a poem the proper understand of which depends upon a sense of Coleridge's Latin, and upon how important ‘desynonymising’ was to him: that process by which words commonly taken to be synonyms are prised apart to explore important distinctions in meaning. Perhaps the most famous example of this is his account of ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’ in the Biographia, but there are lots of other places where he does it.  

In Latin, pax and tranquillitas are sometimes used interchangeably; peace, tranquillity, quiet. But the Latin grammars of Coleridge's day stressed the difference between the two words.

This idea fed from Latin grammars into English ones, with the notion, widespread in the eighteenth-century though generally repudiated today, that the latter should take its cue from the former. So for example:

(it doesn't name him on the title page, but this was by John Trusler)

 

There's interesting work to be done, I think, excvataing the pre-history of Coleridge's ideas of desynonymization in suchlike grammars. 

 

At any rate, that's what's going on here. There are no shortages to odes ‘Ad Pacem’, after all.

Coleridge's decision to write an ode not to Pax but to Tranquillitas has particular bite at the end of 1801. Britain, having been at war for nearly a decade, was publicly suing for peace. Holy Roman Emperor Francis had signed the Treaty of Lunéville with France in February, and by November Cornwallis was in Paris negotiating what would (at the beginning of 1802) become the Treaty of Amiens. Nonetheless, Coleridge writes not of that, but of an inward state of tranquillity. The contrast is more explicit in the Morning Post version of the poem, which opens with this stanza (Addington and Cornwallis are the Statesmen, Napoleon the ‘CONSUL’):

What Statesmen scheme, and Soldiers work,
Whether the Pontiff, or the Turk,
Will e'er renew th'expiring lease
Of Empire; whether War or Peace
Will best play off the CONSUL's game
What fancy-figures, and what name
Half-thinking, sensual France, a natural Slave
On those ne'er broken Chains, her self-forg'd Chains, will grave;

Disturb not me! ....

Not that I'm suggesting Coleridge is being startlingly original here. On the contrary, much of this poem is perfectly conventional in its styling. For example, the notion, offered so to bolster one's staying-power, that tranquillity will follow life's tempest's (with which stanza 1 ends) is from Erasmus's colloquim Funus (‘The Funeral’ 1526): Sequuta est igitur eam tempestatem tranquillitas. But it does speak to Coleridge's public disengagement, or at least his profession of that.