Sunday 6 June 2021

Buried Together

This is a notebook entry written some time between 1808 and 1810, when Coleridge was experiencing his most acute despairing-yearning for Sara Hutchinson, his ‘Asra’. The passage here folds in lots of STCs and plays on ΣΑΡΑ/AΣΡΑ in Greek, together with the Greek verb συνθάπτω, which means ‘to bury together’, ‘to bury more than one person in a grave’. Kathleen Coburn translates the lines:      


If that looks a little blurry, click on it and it will embiggen and clarify.

Coburn is broadly right, here (and the Σ'ΑΡΑ/ΣΑΡΑ pun at the end is important) except in one particular: this rather morbid conceit, of Coleridge and the woman he loved, but who didn't love him back, being buried in the same grave, does not proceed from a ‘Coleridgean compound for “persons buried in the same grave”.’ Which is to say, the compound is not Coleridgean. It's Biblical.

The verb συνθάπτω is used several times in the New Testament. It's used in Romans 6:4: ‘therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.’ It's also in Colossians 2:12: ‘Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead.’ I'd submit that this puts a distinctly less morbid gloss on Coleridge's heart-broken yearning for Asra, here. It's not a kind of Blue Öyster Cult ‘Don't Fear The Reaper’ style suicide-pact; it's a yearning, more pathetic than creepy and not for the first time in STC's life cathecting his erotic and personal desire for Sara Hutchinson through religion, for a rebirth.

"Craving the Flesh of the Starling"

 In 1808 (maybe a little later, in 1809 or 1810) Coleridge copied this passage into his notebook.

This means ‘one who is accustomed always to eat partridge sometimes craves the flesh of the starling. It is surely impossible for the owl to imitate the nightingale.’

Where is it from? ‘Untraced’ is all Kathleen Coburn can give us. In fact it's from the dedication to Il malmantile racquistato colle note di Puccio Lamoni, di Lorenzo Lippi (1688). The deal here is that Lorenzo Lippi, very famous in his day as a painter of portraits and heroic subjects, came after his death to be better known for his Malmantile Racquistato, a racy mock-heroic poem written in Florentine dialect. Here's wikipedia:

[In 1660] he wrote his humorous poem named Malmantile Racquistato, which was published under the anagrammatic pseudonym of Perlone Zipoli. The Malmantile Racquistato is a mock-heroic romance, mostly compounded out of a variety of popular tales; its principal subject matter is an expedition for the recovery of a fortress and territory whose queen had been expelled by a female usurper. It is full of graceful or racy Florentine idioms, and is counted by Italians as a testo di lingua. Lippi is remembered more for this poem than by his paintings. It was published posthumously in 1688.
Presumably Coleridge had come across a copy of this 1688 edition. Lippi's point is that, after a career of paintings characterised by their serious artistic merit and gravity, he felt he could excuse himself where a more trivial and lighthearted production was concerned.