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:      

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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.