‘Alph, Quicksilver River’: Coleridge and Fracastoro

Coleridge doesn’t mention Girolamo Fracastoro in his Notebooks, and he’s not in the Marginalia, but we know he read him—or we know now, because I tracked down the source of this poem which, it may be, Coleridge tried to pass off as his own in a September 1802 letter to William Sotheby.

But it was always likely Coleridge read Fracastoro: he was one of the most celebrated and widely published of the Renaissance neo-Latin poets, and his mini-epic Syphilis sive morbus gallicus (‘Syphilis or The French Disease’; 1530) was highly regarded. It’s a strange work, in many ways: three books of Vergilian dactylic hexameters speculating on the origins and treatment of what was, in the early 1500s, a ‘new’ disease. We call this sickness ‘syphilis’ today because of Fracastoro’s poem. Its third book contains an inset-story, in Latin pastoral mode, in which a handsome shepherd called Syphilus angers the god of the Sun by refusing him sacrifices, and is punished with a terrible disease that gives him sores all over his body. From him the disease spreads through the land.

But that’s only a part of the whole, and Syphilus only one of several shepherds who are afflicted with the disease in Fracastoro's telling. Book One of the epic blames the coming of the disease on the French: for in 1494 Charles VIII of France had invaded northern Italy, and his army ravaged the country, sacking cities, killing and raping (the war went on until 1559). That a new disease happened to arrive at the same time led to the belief that the French had brought it with them. But although Fracastoro’s poem endorses this theory (as per its subtitle) it also knows that the theory isn’t true; that syphilis was just as unknown previously in France as it was in Italy. Book Two of the poem advances a different theory: that syphilis was brought back from the New World, after the first Europeans arrived there in the late 1400s. Opinion today is divided between those who think this is indeed where syphilis originated, and those who think the disease existed already in Europe, diagnosed as other illnesses (leprosy, elephantiasis, ‘saddle-nose’ and others) and that it mutated or increased in intensity around this time. I’m no expert, but it seems the problem with the latter theory is that untreated syphilis leaves its mark in the bones of those it kills, and although some pre-1500 European skeletons show these signs only very few do, where you’d expect (following its later epidemic spread) many more would do so. So perhaps it did come from America, as Fracastoro says.

As a physician, Fracastoro proposes two treatments for the disease, neither of any actual therapeutic merit (until the invention of antibiotics, four centuries later, there was no effective treatment for syphilis). One was injecting the patient with mercury: ‘quicksilver’. The other was Oil of Guaiac, derived from the Palo Santo tree (Bulnesia sarmientoi) which grows in the New World. Fracastoro’s poem sees divine providence in this latter fact: just as this horrible illness came from this newly discovered place, so God has placed there the cure. I got the poison, I got the remedy, as another poet put it.

Anyway, I’ve been reading Fracastoro’s Syphilis, which is full of interesting things. And since we know Coleridge was reading Fracastoro in 1802, it’s not unlikely that he was reading him in the 1790s too. And here I come to the point of my post.

In Book Two, Lipara—one of the daughters of the Hesperides (the Gardens of the West: she is introduced into the poem because the far west is where the New World is)—takes Ilceus, a young shepherd, like Syphilus suffering from this new disease, into an antrum opacum, a ‘dark cave’:

Sic ait, et se antro gradiens praemittit opaco.
Ille subit, magnos terrae miratus hiatus,
squallentesque situ aeterno, et sine lumine vastas
speluncas, terramque meantia flumina subter.
Tum Lipare: “Hoc quodcunque patet, quam maxima terra est:
hunc totum sine luce globum, loca subdita nocti,
dii habitant: imas retinet Proserpina sedes,
flumina supremas, quae sacris concita ab antris
in mare per latas abeunt resonantia terras.”

She spoke, and stepped ahead of him into the dark cave.
He followed, marvelling at the great chasms inside the earth,
Eternal sites of waste, of vast and lightless
caverns, and the rivers meandering through the earth below.
Then Lipara said: “This huge expanse, as wide as the earth herself,
this huge lightless globe and these regions subject to night,
are where gods dwell: Proserpina holds the lowest realm,
while higher up are rivers, which flow through the sacred caves
into the sea, passing noisily through the broad lands.” [Syphilis 2:371-79]

They move on: to the left they see Vulcan’s smithy, roaring, hissing and clanging, and on the right a ‘sacred river’, a sacer fluvius [2:402] that flows into a subterranean sea of quicksilver. This sunless sea of mercury is the expedition’s destination— Lipara bathes Ilceus in it, washing him ‘three times with her virginal hands’ (Ilceus, we are told, ‘marvelled that his ugly sores were gone, his body now free of the malign disease’ 2:415-16) and then returns him to the sunlight.

But doesn’t this strike a familiar note, to the reader of ‘Kubla Khan’? Alph, the sacred river, which runs through the opening lines of that great poem, is not a detail mentioned in Purchas, His Pilgrimes (1619), which (of course) Coleridge was reading, immediately before ‘falling asleep’ (that is, sinking into an opium daze) and dreaming the poem:

In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be moved from place to place.

I wonder if Coleridge in 1797 was reading Fracastoro alongside Samuel Purchas. One of his projects (one of his many, unrealised projects) was an anthology of neo-Latin verse, and to that end he would definitely have read one of the most famous of all neo-Latin poets (‘As late as 1806 the Scottish poet and linguist John Black could say “Fracastoro and our Buchanan are generally supposed to dispute the sceptre of modern poetical latinity.”’ [James Gardner]. Coleridge knew Black, who edited the Morning Chronicle, a paper to which Coleridge contributed). Plus he was most definitely reading him in 1802, only five years later.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

Was Coleridge thinking of Fracastoro’s sacred river, that flows with argentum vivum [2:403] ‘living silver’/quicksilver, down to a sea that is dark (atra, 2:405], occupying one of the vast underworld's sunless sacred caverns (sacra antra sine lumine 2:378, 373)? I’m intrigued by the notion that ‘Alph the Sacred River’ might actually be a river of mercury.

One other detail: the cave into which the Hesperidean virgin leads Ilceus is located in the far east—in that place where ‘Dawn arises and ushers in the new day’ [2:344]. Somewhere near Xanadu, maybe?