tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34538114762574648062024-02-19T02:02:47.261-08:00Samuel Taylor BloggeridgeAdam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comBlogger180125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-71215722033545706402024-01-03T10:26:00.000-08:002024-01-03T10:28:03.776-08:00Coleridge on Cholera<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUwpwn_wEO5tJrDwPcOBXCZURPSKTE27trAOgWBQ78ScTHlfDQ9PwjuKNoShdbPYoVXxVyBte5BvfXxRIiGDpZETUl5pcA3wYNyWlBlUKCvrcX-KmWgDLGI6QVbpowxejg5eUedrsJREjbJ3UeCpr2KBkt1IoedowyuBzqtcH3GNFv79aiNKSWRlEwCPQ/s660/coleridge%20plaque.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="451" data-original-width="660" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUwpwn_wEO5tJrDwPcOBXCZURPSKTE27trAOgWBQ78ScTHlfDQ9PwjuKNoShdbPYoVXxVyBte5BvfXxRIiGDpZETUl5pcA3wYNyWlBlUKCvrcX-KmWgDLGI6QVbpowxejg5eUedrsJREjbJ3UeCpr2KBkt1IoedowyuBzqtcH3GNFv79aiNKSWRlEwCPQ/s320/coleridge%20plaque.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /> I believe this to be a previously unnoticed record of Coleridge's speaking. It's from an article by ‘L.M.C.’ called <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Y_sEAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA142&dq=Coleridge+%22Another+star+is+quenched%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=qdPeUfK9J4Pw0gWj54C4Ag&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Coleridge%20%22Another%20star%20is%20quenched%22&f=false">‘Thoughts on the Poet Coleridge’ [<i>The Metropolitan Magazine</i> 11:42 (Oct 1834), 142-6]</a>. Much of the piece is general praise of Coleridge's talents (‘As a great poet, and a still greater philosopher, the world has hardly yet done justice to the genius of Coleridge’ and so on), but there are some personal reminiscences too:<br />
<blockquote>
The last time I ever saw him, was at the period when the cholera was beginning to shed its baneful influence over this country. Coleridge was walking in the grove at Highgate, his frequent promenade, and opposite to the church where his ashes now repose. We stopped to salute him, and he held us some time in discourse. He entered upon the then all-engrossing subject of that fearful scourge, not with the partiality or prejudice, or narrow views of the mere physician, anxious only to establish his own theory, and to subvert every other, but with the candour and the comprehensiveness of the great philosopher, anxious only to elicit truth. He mentioned several interesting circumstances connected with the plague, which had fallen under his own observation, while he was resident at Malta; and, amongst others, that while the pestilence was raging, the common flies were found lying dead about the houses, and the small fly, called the <i>blue fly of pestilence</i>, appeared in their stead. The important question, as to whether the cholera was <i>infectious</i>, or merely <i>contagious</i>, he discussed with luminous eloquence; and showed the great probability that it might in fact be <i>both</i>. He explained how one form of the disease might, under certain circumstances, tend to produce the other; and again, with fearful and destructive energy, reproduce and multiply itself. I merely state the substance of his remarks; for I cannot venture to put words into the mouth of that sublime colloquist: yet I have a vivid recollection of his tone and manner, when, comparing the pestilence to the ‘destroying angel,’ he lifted up his hands and eyes to the blue summer sky, that shed its full sunlight upon his inspired face. At that moment, who that saw him, but must have been struck with the wonderful mastery of mind over matter? for the bent figure, the tremulous motion of the head, and the silver tresses, that indicated a premature old age, seemed in a moment to vanish, and the divine spirit was alone present and perceptible to sense.
</blockquote>
Well, he was wrong about cholera: it's contagious, but not infectious. (In Frederick Burwick's <i>Oxford Companion to Coleridge</i> [(Oxford 2009), 299], Paul Cheshire reminds us of ‘a [Notebook] entry where Coleridge claimed that the cholera epidemic was the result of savage races neglecting to cultivate their higher functions.’ So I guess there are worse ways to be wrong about this particular disease). There's also this rather non-specific reminiscence of STC reading poetry, and opining on Shakespeare, which I'm afraid adds little the canon of Coleridgeana:<br />
<blockquote>
I remember Coleridge reading some passages from the old poets, with such a look and tone of enjoyment, that his whole soul seemed poured out in the flood of melody that fell from his lips. Nor was it surprising to find one of his most original turn giving the palm to those early writers, who, as he justly observed, were the parent streams of all those channels of thought, that diffuse themselves through modern poetry; which has chiefly the merit of dressing up old ideas in a new and more elegant costume, or, in other words, re-setting the jewels of antiquity in the filigree of the day. Talking of Shakspeare, he gave it as his opinion that both <i>Titus Andronicus</i>, and <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>, were the works of that mighty Archimage, and bore the impress of his genius too strongly, (despite their faults,) to give sanction to the idea entertained by some critics, that they were the compositions of an inferior hand.
</blockquote>
Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-3599538444054706162023-06-11T04:53:00.005-07:002023-06-11T09:35:17.821-07:00Coleridge, George Buchanan and the Tribade Riddle<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhya_1Mbm22eYmxlMSbVJhYEVVrrmUiS5RMW_Dtf2yPzIWXeprXcKyZjf-KmobvvQjv8wxncKx3Xq1v8kEM65wF5X_zf_fczKRSLQk80ujEk4OA-SQzqWPMZqrYvxhPMgsk5ze9BrkxoGsmF9YPpOnKZfopccyqTMOlzwOrP4GyRTVUd4kXcGPcZp9x/s415/George_Buchanan_by_Arnold_van_Brounckhorst.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="415" data-original-width="330" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhya_1Mbm22eYmxlMSbVJhYEVVrrmUiS5RMW_Dtf2yPzIWXeprXcKyZjf-KmobvvQjv8wxncKx3Xq1v8kEM65wF5X_zf_fczKRSLQk80ujEk4OA-SQzqWPMZqrYvxhPMgsk5ze9BrkxoGsmF9YPpOnKZfopccyqTMOlzwOrP4GyRTVUd4kXcGPcZp9x/s320/George_Buchanan_by_Arnold_van_Brounckhorst.jpg" width="254" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>A follow-up to <a href="https://samueltaylorbloggeridge.blogspot.com/2016/01/coleridges-tribade-riddle-1809.html?zx=b12c571c37ea7de3" target="_blank">this post, which Blogger in its wisdom has placed behind a content-warning</a>: on Coleridge's ‘Tribade Riddle’. I've been <a href="https://medium.com/adams-notebook/george-buchanan-rusticuss-hem-1545-3ac9c97e6225" target="_blank">reading a bit of George Buchanan lately</a>, and came across this quatrain of his. It's one of a series addressed to a woman called Leonora, roasting her for her indiscriminate promiscuity. She has sex, it seems, with all manner of monks, and cooks (the Latin, <i>coquus</i>, includes a double-entendre with ‘cock’ that is almost, but not quite, true of the English word), taking her pleasure with the ‘members of young men’ (<i>nervi juvenum</i>) as well as with the poet. This enrages and saddens him, though he can't break away from her. Here is ‘In Leonorum’:</p><blockquote>
<i>Vive male, monachique, tui lixaeque coquique<br />
Mater edax, illex filia, nigra tribas.<br />
Ne tamen interea, vestri immemor arguar esse,<br />
vos penes hoc nostri pignus amoris erit</i>.<br /><br />
Live wickedly, with your monks, your groupies and cooks<br />
you greedy mother, seductress girl, black frigger.<br />
Meantime, in case I’m accused of forgetting you,<br />you’ll soon possess this token of our love.
</blockquote>‘Groupies’ is, in the original, <i><a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lixa#Latin">lixae</a></i>. A <i>lixa</i> is a camp-follower, somebody who traipses after the army, either as a sutler or prostitute. I've assumed the latter meaning extends beyond just military usage, to mean any kind of person who follows others for sexual reasons, although obviously there's more than a touch of anachronism in my translation. I'm more interested in <i><a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tribas" target="_blank">tribas</a></i>: a word often turned into English as ‘lesbian’, but which more precisely refers to any practitioner of sexual frottage (the word comes from the Ancient Greek τρίβω <i>tríbō</i>, “to rub”). Martial's poem about an aggressive lesbian called Philaenis (Martial 7:67; I'm here quoting Gillian Spraggs's salty translation) opens: ‘Philaenis the tribade buggers boys/And randier than any married man/she eats-out eleven girls a day.’ Martial, here, is mocking Philaenis; he finds it cruelly hilarious that her butch lesbian aspirations, her filling her life with such masculine activities as lifting weights at the gym and wrestling, are all undermined by the fact that what she really likes doing is performing cunnilingus on women. Why Buchanan specifies a <i>black</i> tribade (‘nigra’) in his poem, is a puzzle. He might mean the word in the sense of wicked, evil, or, like Shakespeare's Dark Lady, it might be that Leonora is black-skinned. At any rate I wonder if Coleridge knew this poem. We know he read George Buchanan: he borrowed Buchanan's <i>Poemata quae extant</i> (Leyden, 1628) <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41154634" target="_blank">from Jesus College library</a>, and he working through the 1790s on an, in the event, unrealised project to publish a collection of the best Neo-Latin verse with his own translations.<p></p>Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-78556413327803563972023-02-12T03:11:00.028-08:002023-02-12T23:34:54.976-08:00‘Alph, Quicksilver River’: Coleridge and Fracastoro<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDgEMFuhzdLlJVNq8XDFyeO7wvUx2qt25nmjRfSOXzI2dT43ptCel9Q3HZukzUPdKgAe3lrUC96VDx1IW8AvD6vidFTccZ8_kPz4ab3Vr5MduEJS9REbtuq_szBIhRqSU4Y-CH-CX8cfepV0NY6HZrPRPfOUrNd1DWcNmk5I20umqs806dYMVYw66S/s1175/Hieronymi_Fracastorii_Poemata_Omnia.tif.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1175" data-original-width="800" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDgEMFuhzdLlJVNq8XDFyeO7wvUx2qt25nmjRfSOXzI2dT43ptCel9Q3HZukzUPdKgAe3lrUC96VDx1IW8AvD6vidFTccZ8_kPz4ab3Vr5MduEJS9REbtuq_szBIhRqSU4Y-CH-CX8cfepV0NY6HZrPRPfOUrNd1DWcNmk5I20umqs806dYMVYw66S/w273-h400/Hieronymi_Fracastorii_Poemata_Omnia.tif.jpg" width="273" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>Coleridge doesn’t mention <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girolamo_Fracastoro" target="_blank">Girolamo Fracastoro</a> in his <i>Notebooks</i>, and he’s not in the <em>Marginalia</em>, but we know he read him—or we know <i>now</i>, because I tracked down the source of <a href="https://samueltaylorbloggeridge.blogspot.com/2016/04/latin-lines-to-william-sotheby-sept-1802.html" target="_blank">this poem which, it may be, Coleridge tried to pass off as his own in a September 1802 letter to William Sotheby</a>.</p>
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 <em>Syphilis sive morbus gallicus</em> (‘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.<div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjsNqFwc73znYkjE2jE_Due97W3RIXOeqOU_rvqXcvZ1p40WZUCoNIMXLN_hhXLauKlUosbVN3EtpDsNz5sm-VVKR-rpDcNbcvalej3QvtS59fbwQaYwnpoymmjCKnUxWYvKItAQnRFjmk5W3DqdXHbtQbko2LD-CzjllWJwUc63GCbFXKYOm1zMU9/s767/Screenshot%20(725).png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="767" data-original-width="599" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjsNqFwc73znYkjE2jE_Due97W3RIXOeqOU_rvqXcvZ1p40WZUCoNIMXLN_hhXLauKlUosbVN3EtpDsNz5sm-VVKR-rpDcNbcvalej3QvtS59fbwQaYwnpoymmjCKnUxWYvKItAQnRFjmk5W3DqdXHbtQbko2LD-CzjllWJwUc63GCbFXKYOm1zMU9/w250-h320/Screenshot%20(725).png" width="250" /></a></div><br />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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Wars" target="_blank">Charles VIII of France had invaded northern Italy</a>, 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. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_syphilis" target="_blank">Opinion today is divided</a> 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.</div><div><br />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 <i>was</i> no effective treatment for syphilis). One was injecting the patient with mercury: ‘quicksilver’. The other was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_of_guaiac" target="_blank">Oil of Guaiac</a>, derived from the Palo Santo tree (<i>Bulnesia sarmientoi</i>) 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. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mej5wS7viw" target="_blank">I got the poison, I got the remedy</a>, as another poet put it.<br /><br />
Anyway, I’ve been reading Fracastoro’s <em>Syphilis</em>, 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.</div><div><br /></div><div>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 <em>antrum opacum</em>, a ‘dark cave’:
<blockquote>
<em>Sic ait, et se antro gradiens praemittit opaco. <br />
Ille subit, magnos terrae miratus hiatus, <br />squallentesque situ aeterno, et sine lumine vastas<br />speluncas, terramque meantia flumina subter. <br />
Tum Lipare: “Hoc quodcunque patet, quam maxima terra est: <br />hunc totum sine luce globum, loca subdita nocti, <br />dii habitant: imas retinet Proserpina sedes, <br />flumina supremas, quae sacris concita ab antris<br />in mare per latas abeunt resonantia terras.”</em><br /><br />
She spoke, and stepped ahead of him into the dark cave. <br />
He followed, marvelling at the great chasms inside the earth, <br />
Eternal sites of waste, of vast and lightless<br />
caverns, and the rivers meandering through the earth below. <br />
Then Lipara said: “This huge expanse, as wide as the earth herself, <br />
this huge lightless globe and these regions subject to night, <br />are where gods dwell: Proserpina holds the lowest realm, <br />
while higher up are rivers, which flow through the sacred caves<br />
into the sea, passing noisily through the broad lands.” [<em>Syphilis</em> 2:371-79]
</blockquote>
They move on: to the left they see Vulcan’s smithy, roaring, hissing and clanging, and on the right a ‘sacred river’, a <em>sacer fluvius</em> [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. <br /><br />
But doesn’t this strike a familiar note, to the reader of ‘Kubla Khan’? Alph, the sacred river, which runs through <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Christabel;_Kubla_Khan;_The_Pains_of_Sleep_(1816)/Kubla_Khan" target="_blank">the opening lines of that great poem</a>, is not a detail mentioned in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Purchas" target="_blank"><em>Purchas, His Pilgrimes </em>(1619)</a>, which (of course) Coleridge was reading, immediately before ‘falling asleep’ (that is, sinking into an opium daze) and dreaming the poem:<blockquote>
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.</blockquote>
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.”’ [<a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674072718" target="_blank">James Gardner</a>]. Coleridge knew Black, who edited the <i>Morning Chronicle</i>, a paper to which Coleridge contributed). Plus he was most definitely reading him in 1802, only five years later.
<blockquote>In Xanadu did Kubla Khan<br />
A stately pleasure-dome decree: <br />
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran<br />
Through caverns measureless to man<br />
Down to a sunless sea.</blockquote>
Was Coleridge thinking of Fracastoro’s sacred river, that flows with <em>argentum vivum</em> [2:403] ‘living silver’/quicksilver, down to a sea that is dark (<em>atra</em>, 2:405], occupying one of the vast underworld's sunless sacred caverns (<em>sacra antra sine lumine</em> 2:378, 373)? I’m intrigued by the notion that ‘Alph the Sacred River’ might actually be a river of mercury. <br /><br />
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?
</div>Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-73883113442082760832022-12-18T02:36:00.028-08:002023-01-04T00:51:52.199-08:00Samuel Taylor Kακά-rich: ‘Ode on the Departing Year’ (1796)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIOrLoMbVUwQdcB_jq6LOZU6e_mSThLenBxzr8mvhPiQIQu_lzBdt1cIVs6KpaWfm5AraH3Gx8GjTnEstglBlCZEc_xslRg3ivZ0TPCkJlBOKqyy0-2f5QnDYrstBGOE8Pu8bErfHBkqHJqN9idDT3QVKO0Kok9Fn8XPC-y0ywbjFAGYVmYl65Sgfb/s890/Screenshot%20(663).png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="625" data-original-width="890" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIOrLoMbVUwQdcB_jq6LOZU6e_mSThLenBxzr8mvhPiQIQu_lzBdt1cIVs6KpaWfm5AraH3Gx8GjTnEstglBlCZEc_xslRg3ivZ0TPCkJlBOKqyy0-2f5QnDYrstBGOE8Pu8bErfHBkqHJqN9idDT3QVKO0Kok9Fn8XPC-y0ywbjFAGYVmYl65Sgfb/s320/Screenshot%20(663).png" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><div style="text-align: center;">The poem's title was originally ‘on the Departing Year’; ‘to’ was a revision for 1817's <i>Sybilline Leaves</i>.</div></span><div><br /></div><div> <span style="font-size: large;">ODE on the Departing Year</span><p></p></div><br /><blockquote>Ἰοὺ ἰοὺ ὦ ὦ κακά.<br />Ὑπ' αν με δεινὸς ὀρθομαντείας πονός<br />Στροβει, ταράσσων φροιμίοις εφημίοις.<br />* * * * * *<br />Τὸ μέλλον ἥξει. Kαὶ σύ μην τάχει παρὼν<br />Αγαν γ' ἀληθόμαντιν μ' ἐρεις.<br /> ÆSCHYL. <i>Agam</i>. 1225.<br /></blockquote>ARGUMENT.<br />The Ode commences with an Address to the Divine Providence, that regulates into one vast Harmony all the events of time however calamitous some of them may appear to mortals. The Second Strophe calls on men to suspend their private joys and sorrows, and devote them for awhile to the cause of human nature in general. The first Epode speaks of the Empress of Russia, who died of an Apoplexy on the 17th of November, 1796; having just concluded a subsidiary treaty with the Kings combined against France. The first and second Antistrophe describe the Image of the departing year, &c. as in a vision. The second Epode prophecies in anguish of spirit, the downfall of this Country.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-size: x-small;">STROPHE I.</span><br /><br /><div>SPIRIT, who sweepest the wild Harp of Time,<br />It is most hard with an untroubled Ear<br />Thy dark inwoven Harmonies to hear!<br />Yet, mine eye fixt on Heaven's unchanging clime,<br />Long had I listened, free from mortal fear,<br />With inward stillness, and a bowed mind:<br />When lo! far onwards waving on the wind<br />I saw the skirts of the <span style="font-size: x-small;">DEPARTING YEAR</span>!<br />Starting from my silent sadness<br />Then with no unholy madness, [10]<br />Ere yet the entered cloud forbade my sight,<br />I rais’d th’ impetuous song, and solemnized his flight.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">STROPHE II.</span><br /><br /></div><div>Hither from the recent Tomb;<br />From the Prison's direr gloom;<br />From Poverty's heart-wasting languish;<br />From Distemper's midnight anguish:<br />Or where his two bright torches blending<br />Love illumines Manhood's maze;<br />Or where o'er cradled infants bending<br />Hope has fix'd her wishful gaze: [20]<br />Hither, in perplexed dance,<br />Ye <span style="font-size: x-small;">WOES</span>, and young-eyed <span style="font-size: x-small;">JOYS</span>, advance!<br />By Time's wild harp, and by the Hand<br />Whose indefatigable Sweep<br />Forbids its fateful strings to sleep,<br />I bid you haste, a mixt tumultuous band!<br />From every private bower,<br />And each domestic hearth,<br />Haste for one solemn hour;<br />And with a loud and yet a louder voice, [30]<br />O'er the sore travail of the common earth<br />Weep and rejoice!<br />Seiz’d in sore travail and portentous birth,<br />Let slip the storm and woke the brood of Hell:<br />(Her eye-balls flashing a pernicious glare)<br />Sick <span style="font-size: x-small;">NATURE</span> struggled! Hark—her pangs increase!<br />Her groans are horrible! But ô! most fair!<br />The promis’d Twins, she bears—<span style="font-size: x-small;">EQUALITY</span> and <span style="font-size: x-small;">PEACE</span>!<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">EPODE.</span></div><div> <br />I mark'd Ambition in his war-array;<br />I heard the mailed Monarch's troublous cry—<br />“Ah whither does the Northern Conqueress stay? [40]<br />“Groans not her Chariot o'er its onward way?<br />Fly, mailed Monarch, fly!<br />Stunn'd by Death's “twice mortal” mace,<br />No more on <span style="font-size: x-small;">MURDER</span>'s lurid face<br />Th’ insatiate Hag shall glote with drunken eye!<br />Manes of th’ unnumbered Slain!<br />Ye that gasp'd on <span style="font-size: x-small;">WARSAW</span>'s plain!<br />Ye that erst at <span style="font-size: x-small;">ISMAIL</span>'s tower,<br />When human Ruin chok'd the streams,<br />Fell in Conquest's glutted hour [50]<br />Mid Women's shrieks and Infants' screams;<br />Whose shrieks, whose screams were vain to stir<br />Loud-laughing, red-eyed Massacre!<br />Spirits of th’ uncoffin'd Slain,<br />Sudden blasts of Triumph swelling<br />Oft, at night, in misty train<br />Rush around her narrow Dwelling!<br />Th’ exterminating Fiend is fled—<br />(Foul her Life and dark her doom!)<br />Mighty Army of the Dead, [60]<br />Dance, like Death-fires, round her Tomb!<br />Then with prophetic song relate<br />Each some scepter'd Murderer's fate!<br />When shall scepter’d <span style="font-size: x-small;">SLAUGHTER</span> cease?<br />Awhile He crouch’d, O Victor France!<br />Beneath the light’ning of thy Lance,<br />With treacherous dalliance wooing <span style="font-size: x-small;">PEACE</span>.<br />But soon up-springing from his dastard trance<br />The boastful, bloody Son of Pride betray’d<br />His Hatred of the blest and blessing Maid. [70]<br />One cloud, O Freedom! cross’d thy orb of Light And sure he deem’d, that Orb was quench’d in night:<br />For still does <span style="font-size: x-small;">MADNESS</span> roam on <span style="font-size: x-small;">GUILT</span>’s bleak dizzy height!<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">ANTISTROPHE I.</span><br /><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;">DEPARTING YEAR</span>! ‘twas on no earthly shore<br />My Soul beheld thy Vision. Where, alone,<br />Voiceless and stern, before the Cloudy Throne<br />Aye <span style="font-size: x-small;">MEMORY</span> sits; there, garmented with gore,<br />With many an unimaginable groan<br />Thou storiedst thy sad Hours! Silence ensued:<br />Deep silence o'er th' ethereal Multitude, [80]<br />Whose purple Locks with snow-white Glories shone.<br />Then, his eye wild ardors glancing,<br />From the choired Gods advancing,<br />The <span style="font-size: x-small;">SPIRIT</span> of the <span style="font-size: x-small;">EARTH</span> made reverence meet,<br />And stood up beautiful before the Cloudy Seat!<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">ANTISTROPHE II.</span><br /><br /></div><div>On every Harp, on every Tongue,<br />While the mute Enchantment hung;<br />Like Midnight from a thundercloud,<br />Spake the sudden <span style="font-size: x-small;">SPIRIT </span>loud—<br />“Thou in stormy Blackness throning [90]<br />“Love and uncreated Light,<br />“By the Earth's unsolac'd groaning<br />“Seize thy terrors, Arm of Might!<br />“By Belgium's corse-impeded flood!<br />“By Vendee steaming Brother's blood!<br />“By <span style="font-size: x-small;">PEACE</span> with proffer'd insult scar'd,<br />“Masked hate and envying scorn!<br />“By Years of Havoc yet unborn;<br />“And Hunger's bosom to the frost-winds bar'd!<br />“But chief by Afric’s wrongs [100]<br />“Strange, horrible and foul!<br />“To the deaf Senate, ‘full of gifts and lies!’<br />“By Wealth's insensate Laugh! By Torture's Howl!<br />“Avenger, rise!<br />“For ever shall the bloody Island scowl?<br />“For aye, unbroken, shall her cruel Bow<br />“Shoot Famine's arrows o'er thy ravag’d World?<br />“Hark! how wide <span style="font-size: x-small;">NATURE</span> joins her groans below—<br />“Rise, God of Nature, rise! Why sleep those bolts unhurl'd? [110]<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">EPODE II.</span><br /><br /></div><div>The Voice had ceas'd, the Phantoms fled,<br />Yet still I gasp'd and reel'd with dread.<br />And ever when the dream of night<br />Renews the vision to my sight,<br />Cold sweat-damps gather on my limbs;<br />My Ears throb hot; my eye-balls start;<br />My Brain with horrid tumult swims;<br />Wild is the tempest of my Heart;<br />And my thick and struggling breath<br />Imitates the toil of Death! [120]<br />No uglier agony confounds<br />The Soldier on the war-field spread,<br />When all foredone with toil and wounds<br />Death-like he dozes among heaps of Dead!<br />(The strife is o'er, the day-light fled,<br />And the Night-wind clamours hoarse;<br />See! the startful Wretch's head<br />Lies pillow'd on a Brother's Corse!)<br />O doom'd to fall, enslav'd and vile,<br />O <span style="font-size: x-small;">ALBION</span>! O my mother Isle! [130]<br />Thy valleys, fair as Eden's bowers,<br />Glitter green with sunny showers;<br />Thy grassy Uplands’ gentle swells<br />Echo to the Bleat of Flocks;<br />(Those grassy Hills, those glitt'ring Dells<br />Proudly ramparted with rocks)<br />And Ocean mid his uproar wild<br />Speaks safety to his Island-child.<br />Hence for many a fearless age<br />Has social Quiet lov'd thy shore; [140]<br />Nor ever sworded Foeman's rage<br />Or sack’d thy towers, or stain’d thy fields with gore.<br />Disclaim’d of Heaven! mad Av’rice at thy side,<br />At coward distance, yet with kindling pride—<br />Safe 'mid thy herds and corn fields thou hast stood,<br />And join'd the yell of Famine and of Blood.<br />All nations curse thee: and with eager wond’ring<br />Shall hear <span style="font-size: x-small;">DESTRUCTION</span>, like a vulture, scream!<br />Strange-eyed <span style="font-size: x-small;">DESTRUCTION</span>, who with many a dream<br />Of central flames thro’ nether seas upthund'ring [150]<br />Soothes her fierce solitude, yet (as she lies<br />Stretch’d on the marge of some fire-flashing fount<br />In the black chamber of a sulphur’d mount,)<br />If ever to her lidless dragon eyes,<br />O <span style="font-size: x-small;">ALBION</span>! thy predestin’d ruins rise,<br />The Fiend-hag on her perilous couch doth leap,<br />Mutt'ring distemper'd triumph in her charmed sleep.<br /><br />Away, my soul, away!<br />In vain, in vain, the birds of warning sing—<br />And hark! I hear the famin’d brood of prey [160]<br />Flap their lank pennons on the groaning wind!<br />Away, my Soul, away!<br />I unpartaking of the evil thing<br />With daily prayer, and daily toil<br />Soliciting my scant and blameless soil,<br />Have wail’d my country with a loud lament.<br />Now I recenter my immortal mind<br />In the long sabbath of high self-content;<br />Cleans’d from the fleshly Passions that bedim<br />God’s Image, Sister of the Seraphim. [170]</div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>It’s surprising that ‘Ode on the Departing Year’ (1796) is not more widely discussed by critics and readers: it’s a very interesting poem, or so I think. I mean, I suppose I <i>can</i> see why it's so often overlooked. It's pretty long (170 lines) and much of it is written in that staid, formal ‘poeticised’ style that is conventional according to the conventions of 18th-century public versifying, dull and (often) inert (there's a lot of this in Coleridge's oeuvre frankly). Then again, sections of the poem break-through this into something more expressive, more sublime, more ‘Romantic’ stylistically—and 1796, the poem's topic, was a very interesting year. And overall the poem is doing something really quite striking, addressing a year of variegated public horrors and miseries, and trying to wrestle something more positive out of that. Very 2022, really. Plus he predicts that a gigantic dragon-vulture is about to devour England, so there's that. [<b>Note</b>: <i>the only online versions of the poem I can find are later, altered and dismembered texts, so I'm not linking to those here. I quote the whole of the first version of the poem above.</i>]<div><br /></div><div>Coleridge is here following the success of Gray’s ‘Pindaric’ ode <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bard_(poem)" target="_blank">‘The Bard’ (1757)</a>—itself a revolutionary intervention, styled (as these things often are) as a reversion to origins, positioning itself against the tradition of 17th and 18th century polished neoclassical Horatian odes by going back further <a href="https://medium.com/adams-notebook/pindar-pythian-5-6e8ca4e194d7" target="_blank">to Pindar</a>. The <a href="https://poetscollective.org/poetryforms/horation-ode/" target="_blank">Horatian ode</a> tends to be balanced, meditative, controlled, closed, personal; Pindar's odes were public performances, outward-looking celebrations of sporting success and national identity, written in a less polished, sometimes more obscure style. Gray’s resurrection of this enables a wilder proto-Romantic gnashing ruggedness and sublimity. He also captures something of Pindar’s grandiloquent obscurity, of style and allusion (concerning ‘The Bard’, Gray wrote to his friend William Mason: ‘nobody understands me, and I am perfectly satisfied.’)<div><br />
Coleridge wrote his poem reflecting on the tumultuous year of 1796. His thoughts were particularly catalysed by the death of Catherine II of Russia (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_the_Great#Final_months_and_death" target="_blank">17th November 1796</a>)— ‘I rejoice as at the disenshrining of a Demon!’ Coleridge wrote. ‘I rejoice as at the extinction of the evil principle impersonated!’ Catherine had, a few years earlier, partitioned Poland, put one of her many lovers, Stanislaus Poniatowski, on the throne of what remained of the country and then, when <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ko%C5%9Bciuszko_Uprising" target="_blank">the Poles had risen up in 1794</a> she had crushed the rebellion with overwhelming military force and extreme brutality. After the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Praga" target="_blank">Battle of Praga</a> (Nov 1794) Cossacks looted and burned Warsaw, killing 20,000 civilians. Coleridge mentions her, as ‘the Northern Conqueress’ in line 40 of his ode, deploring her sanguinary career. The other main political referent of the ode is, of course, the continuing war with Revolutionary (soon to be Napoleonic) France: Coleridge is more outraged by ‘scepter’d SLAUGHTER’ (that is, the killings perpetrated by the monarchies surrounding and attacking France) than by anything Bonaparte is up to. Coleridge reserves particular contumely for William Pitt, Prime Minister (‘the boastful, bloody Son of Pride’ he calls him, a man marked by ‘betrayal’ and ‘hatred of the blest’). There was also the situation in the Vendée, the coastal portion of west France that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Vend%C3%A9e" target="_blank">had risen in opposition to <i>la révolution française</i></a>, and had accordingly become a killing field. 1796 was the year The Revolutionary government finally declared the war in the Vendée officially over, after seven years of suppressing this counter-revolution during which something like 1700,000 men, women and children in the region had been killed (out of a total population of 800,000). <br /><br />
Critics don’t seem to have noticed it, but the poem also makes reference to a major earthquake that happened in Europe this year. ‘Sick NATURE struggled! Hark, her pangs increase!/Her groans are horrible!’ [lines 35-6]—a reference to the massive tremor that struck the Rhine Valley in 1796. This natural calamity was reported in the contemporary press; the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 had ignited interest in, and fear of, these phenomena, and this quake, in a place not known for earth tremors, at such a time, and of such magnitude, was taken as significant [<span style="font-size: x-small;">‘The 1796 earthquake inflicted heavy damage in the Rhine Valley region’;</span> <span style="font-size: x-small;">Monika Gisler, ‘Two Significant Earthquakes In the Rhine Valley at the End of the 18th Century: The Events of December 6, 1795 and April 20, 1796’ <em>Eclogae Geologicae Helvetiae</em> 96 (2003), 364</span>]. Later in the poem the Spirit of the Earth refers back to it: ‘“Hark! how wide NATURE joins her groans below—/Rise, God of Nature, rise!”’ [109-110].
<br /><br />
It’s worth noting that Coleridge does something quite odd with his odic structure. A classical ode goes <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CF%84%CF%81%CE%BF%CF%86%CE%AE#Ancient_Greek" target="_blank">strophe</a>-<a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/antistrophe" target="_blank">antistrophe</a>-<a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/epode#English" target="_blank">epode</a>, in that order, repeating this sequence as many times as the ode is long; I don’t know any examples that pile up two strophes, bung in an epode, add two antistrophes, and wrap up with another epode. Towards this end the poem shifts from the descriptive-vocative towards something more vatic: ‘you I am sure,’ Coleridge wrote to his friend Thomas Poole, Dec 26th 1796, ‘will not fail to recollect, that among the Ancients, the Bard and the Prophet were one and the same character.’ This poem certainly issues a pretty stark prophesy at its end: Albion, complacent behind its pelagic defences, will experience the same horrors of slaughter and violence currently blighting the Continent (‘although I prophesy curses,’ Coleridge told Poole, ‘I pray fervently for blessings’).
<br /><br />
The convention, as Carl Woodring notes, was to write odes <i>optimistically </i>addressed ‘To The New Year’.<blockquote>
The subject matter of the ‘Ode’ is the present state of Europe, and particularly the role of England. The poem is, as Woodring suggests in <em>Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge</em> deliberately antithetical to the New Year's odes delivered annually by the Poet Laureate, James Henry Pye (p. 175). This is true not only of the sentiments expressed but also of the language. For example, in Pye's ‘Ode to the New Year’ for 1793 (<em>London Chronicle</em> for January 1-3, 1793) the Laureate contrasts France, “Where Anarchy's insatiate brood/Their horrid footsteps mark with blood,” to “shores where temperate freedom reigns/ . . . Where Britain's grateful sons rejoice in GEORGE's sway.” In his ‘Ode for the New Year 1795’, Pye hoped for Concord or, alternatively, “dismay to Gallia's scatter'd host” (<em>London Chronicle</em>, December 30, 1794). Inflated rhetoric, luridness of diction, and frequent personification seem endemic to the subgenre, and in these respects Coleridge was all too ready to outdo it. [<span style="font-size: x-small;">Morton D. Paley, ‘<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24042754" target="_blank">Apocalypse and Millennium in the Poetry of Coleridge</a>’ <em>The Wordsworth Circle</em>, 23:1 (1992), 28</span>]
</blockquote>It’s not that Coleridge’s ‘Ode’ was an entirely radical departure; William Newton (the ‘<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Newton_(poet)" target="_blank">Peak Minstrel</a>’) published his ‘Sonnet to the Departing Year’ in <em>The Gentleman’s Magazine</em> [67 (1790), 79]:<blockquote>
Year! That hast seen my hopes and comforts fall<br />Huddled in dark’ning vest, like Night-hag old, <br />And breathing chill a baleful vapour cold, <br />On thee abhorr’d with banning voice I call.
</blockquote>(‘vest’ short for ‘vestments’, I suppose: rather than, you know: a string vest). Newton was not alone: ‘the clock proclaims in slow and solemn strains/A long farewell to the departing year:/One hours alone, one little hour remains’ wrote Amelia Pickering in 1788. So there was, we might say, a counter-tradition—although I don’t know of any specifically designated <em>odes</em> to the departing year before Coleridge’s.
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It's a poem that went through a number of revisions. It first appeared in the <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Intelligencer" target="_blank">Cambridge Intelligencer</a></em> (a Liberal weekly newspaper that ran from 1793 to 1803 edited by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Flower" target="_blank">Benjamin Flower</a>) 21st December 1796, under the title ‘Ode for the Last Day of the Year, 1796’. Ten days later it appeared on its own, a slim quarto pamphlet published by Cottle, as ‘Ode on the Departing Year’. In Feb 1797 Coleridge wrote a letter to Cottle in which he listed a large number of alterations he wished made before the poem could be included in his collection <i>Poems</i> (1797), adding:<blockquote>So much for an Ode: which some think superior to the Bard of Gray, & which others think a rant of turgid obscurity—& the latter are the more numerous class.—It is not obscure—my <a href="https://samueltaylorbloggeridge.blogspot.com/2016/01/religious-musings-1796.html" target="_blank">Religious Musings</a>, I know, are—but not this. [<span style="font-size: x-small;">Peter Mann, ‘<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/514017" target="_blank">Two Autograph Letters of S. T. Coleridge</a>’ <em>Review of English Studies</em> 25:99 (1974), 314</span>] </blockquote>
J C C Mays, in his edition of the <em><a href="https://archive.org/details/collectedworksof0016cole/mode/2up" target="_blank">Poetical Works</a></em>, notes that Coleridge was never entirely happy with the poem, and kept tinkering with it: ‘rewriting five lines at the end of the second strophe and omitting ten at the end of the epode for <em>Poems</em> (1797)’ where in <em>Sibylline Leaves</em> (1817) ‘he rewrote passages in the later half of the poem and further loosened the structure by replacing the headings (“STROPHE” etc) by numbers and dividing the second epode into numbered parts. The revision was never completely worked through, and C remained unhappy with it, as marginal notes testify’. [Mays, CC 16:1, 302] For this reason Mays prints the earliest version of the poem.
<br /><br /><div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">+++</span><br /><br />First-off, a couple of allusions, or references, that editors have not hitherto been able to track-down. Death’s “twice mortal” mace (line 43) was more than <a href="https://archive.org/details/collectedworksof0016cole/mode/2up" target="_blank">Mays</a> could identify (‘source untraced’) although <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393979046" target="_blank">Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson and Raimonda Modiano</a> usefully track it to Edward Young’s <em>Night Thoughts</em> (1745), which poem laments that once rationality has eroded sustaining religious faith, the prospect of dying becomes ‘tenfold’ more terrifying, ‘and dips in <em>Venom</em> his [that is, Death’s] twice-mortal Sting’ [4:765]. </div><div><br /></div><div>Coleridge’s lambasting the British Parliament (which was prosecuting the war, and had put-off abolishing slavery) as ‘the deaf Synod, “full of gifts and lies”’ in line 103 had remained unsourced. But Coleridge himself added a note to the <em>Cambridge Intelligence</em> version: ‘gifts used in Scripture for corruption’, so presumably the reference is to something like Ezekiel 20:31, when God rebukes the Israelites, ‘for when you offer your gifts you defile yourselves with all your idols, even to this day’—in verse 39 he instructs them: ‘profane My holy name no more with your gifts and your idols’ (there’s also Ecclesiasticus 34: ‘Lying omens are vanity … The most High approveth not the gifts of the wicked’).</div><div><br />Excellent though their edition is, Halmi, Magnuson and Modiano aren’t sure of the provenance of the poem’s final image:
<blockquote> Now I recenter my immortal mind<br />
In the long sabbath of high self-content; <br />
Cleans’d from the fleshly Passions that bedim<br />
God’s Image, Sister of the Seraphim.</blockquote>What does it mean? <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393979046" target="_blank">H., M. and M.</a> note that the seraphim are ‘the highest order of angels’ and ‘represent love’, and quote a line from Crashaw’s ‘The Flaming Heart’ (1646) which refers to Saint Teresa as ‘fair sister of the <span style="font-size: x-small;">SERAPHIM</span>.’ But that’s not it, and actually it’s quite important that it isn’t.</div><div><br /></div><div>In fact Coleridge is here quoting from one of Jeremy Taylor’s sermons (specifically, from Sermon IX Part 2 in <em>XXVII Sermons</em>): ‘if we consider what the soul is in its own capacity to happiness, we shall find it to be an excellency greater than the sun, of an angelical substance, sister to a cherubim, an image of the Divinity.’ We know this is where the image in the Ode comes from, because in his notebook Coleridge jotted it down: ‘God’s Image, Sister of the Cherubim’ [<em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleridge%27s_notebooks#Modern_editions" target="_blank">Notebooks</a></em> 1:272]. So the final reference is not to a saintly woman, but to Coleridge’s own soul, styled as a ‘sister’ because the Latin for soul, <i>anima</i>, is a feminine noun.
And that’s interesting, because the poem begins with a reference to the soul, too:<blockquote>
SPIRIT, who sweepest the wild Harp of Time, <br />
It is most hard with an untroubled Ear<br />
Thy dark inwoven Harmonies to hear!
</blockquote>The prose ‘argument’ Coleridge appended tells us this opening stanza constitutes ‘an Address to the Divine Providence, that regulates into one vast Harmony all the events of time however calamitous some of them may appear to mortals’; but we can take it that ‘Providence’ is the Departing Year itself, specifically addressed, and subsequently embodied in various providential forms: woes, young-eyed joys and so on. The ‘Spirit’, which animates the bard’s harp, is surely Coleridge’s own. He it is who is ‘sweeping’ the strings of poetry and generating the poem, after all; and the opening lines express the difficulty he has in understanding his own mind. He is the poet, and the <em>vates</em>, and this Ode is animated by his outrage—at Catherine II, at Pitt, at the fate of the Vendeans, at the African slave trade—as well as by his despair. The poem reflects both the outward horrors of 1796 as a year of Continental war and rapine, and the somatic horrors of Coleridge’s own 1796: illness, depression, persistent toothache so bad he started an opium habit that lasted, and rode, his entire life. The poem’s many ‘I’s evoke the ‘Departing Year’ (‘My Soul beheld thy Vision’; line 75) as a personalised experience. In Antistrophe II, we hear the Year’s harrowing words, but the next section of the poem reverts upon the poet’s own bodily circumstances:<blockquote>
The Voice had ceas'd, the Phantoms fled, <br />
Yet still I gasp'd and reel'd with dread. <br />
And ever when the dream of night <br />
Renews the vision to my sight, <br />
Cold sweat-damps gather on my limbs; <br />
My Ears throb hot; my eye-balls start; <br />
My Brain with horrid tumult swims; <br />
Wild is the tempest of my Heart; <br />
And my thick and struggling breath<br />
Imitates the toil of Death! <br />
No uglier agony confounds<br />
The Soldier on the war-field spread, <br />
When all foredone with toil and wounds<br />
Death-like he dozes among heaps of Dead! <br />
(The strife is o'er, the day-light fled, <br />
And the Night-wind clamours hoarse; <br />
See! the startful Wretch's head <br />
Lies pillow'd on a Brother's Corse!) [113-28]
</blockquote>This description of (what sound like) withdrawal symptoms from heroin addiction leads Coleridge straight into the wider condition of England: ‘O doom'd to fall, enslav'd and vile,/O ALBION! O my mother Isle!’ It’s an almost Blakean superposition of land and individual: Coleridge himself suffers as the land suffers (or will suffer, says Cassandra); the land suffers (or will) as Coleridge suffers. The soldier ‘pillowed on his brother’s corpse’ is a reference to Shakespeare’s <em>Cymbeline</em>, Act 4, scene 2, where Caius Lucius discovers ‘Fidelius’ (actually Imogen in disguise) asleep, with a dead body as her pillow. Lucius is horrified:
<blockquote>
For nature doth abhor to make his bed<br />
With the defunct, or sleep upon the dead.</blockquote>
(I don’t know if Coleridge had read, or was aware of, Charles Brockden Brown’s novel <em>Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker</em> (1799), whose hero kills an attacking Native American, and then collapses, sleeping through the night until, with the dawn, he understands where he had been reclining: ‘my head had reposed upon the breast of him whom I had shot in this part of his body. The blood had ceased to ooze from the wound, but my dishevelled locks were matted and steeped in that gore which had overflowed and choked up the orifice. I started from this detestable pillow, and regained my feet’ [ch. 19]). <br /><br />
This shift to collective from individual physical agony heralds the appearance of the ‘Vulture of DESTRUCTION’ that flaps on ‘lank pennons in the groaning wind’. Addressing his own country, Coleridge writes:<blockquote>
All nations curse thee: and with eager wond’ring <br />
Shall hear <span style="font-size: x-small;">DESTRUCTION</span>, like a vulture, scream! <br />
Strange-eyed <span style="font-size: x-small;">DESTRUCTION</span> … (as she lies<br />
Stretch’d on the marge of some fire-flashing fount<br />
In the black chamber of a sulphur’d mount,) <br />
If ever to her lidless dragon eyes, <br />
O <span style="font-size: x-small;">ALBION</span>! thy predestin’d ruins rise. [147-55]
</blockquote>
Is there a relationship between this bird, and Vergil’s <i>caucaseae volucres</i> [<i>Eclogues</i> 6:42], the ‘Caucasus Vulture’, that tore out the liver of Prometheus? Two decades later Shelley would also utilize the Promethean myth to talk about the departing era of tyrannical oppression, and the coming epoch of revolutionary freedom. There is some ambiguity in the myth as to whether it was an eagle (<em>aquila</em>) or a vulture (<em>vultur</em>, <em>voltur</em>, <em>volucer</em>) that was sent by Zeus to torture Prometheus: <em>vultur</em> is derived from <em>vellere</em>, from <em>vello</em> ‘I tear, pluck, rend, pull out’, since this is how those birds eat. It’s eagles in Aeschylus, but vultures in Vergil, Seneca, Propertius, Valerius Flaccus and others. <br /><br />
We could say that an ode on the departing year is by definition an Epimethean, and an ode on the coming one a Promethean, exercise. This poem looks back over the upheavals of the 1790s, political and personal, but looks forward to ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’ (1825)—the last public lecture that Coleridge gave and an expressive, summative essay on the working of Greek myth, and the Prometheus myth in particular (STC had been elected Royal Associate of the Royal Society of Literature in London, and delivered this talk on that occasion: his final public appearance). ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’ styles Prometheus as Reason (Nous) and Zeus as Law (Nomos), positing the complex nature of their relationship to one another—it’s nothing so Hegelian as an actual dialectic, but it approaches it, with both terms presupposed rather than sublated by God: ‘God is the condition under which the Law of the Universe exists; or God is presupposed, not involved, in the Law (i.e. the existential Act) of the Universe.’ The final stanza of ‘Ode on the Departing Year’, invoking Coleridge’s own soul (not once but twice: ‘away, my Soul, away!’) and staging a retreat from the horrors of the external world into ‘the immortal mind, the long sabbath of high self-content’ is not Quietism, so much as an attempt to reframe the whole of the larger question. It is the poem starting to go beyond the despairing materialism of its opening vision, and opening a process of poesis by which the materialist miseries of 1796 and the spiritual, religious implications of ‘redemption’—of justice and redress, of release from suffering and the coming of something better. <br /><br />
Of course, the actual opening of the poem is not the address to the ‘anima’ of line 1; it is the Aeschylean epigraph—from the <em>Agamemnon</em>, not the <em>Prometheus Bound</em>. Coleridge was oddly picky about this, and wrote quickly when this epigraph was accidentally omitted in the poem’s proofs (‘The Motto—! where is the Motto? I would not have lost the MOTTO for a kingdom twas the best part of the ode’). On 30th December 1796 he wrote to his friend John Prior Estlin: ‘you know, I am at heart a <em>mottophilist</em>, and almost a motto-<em>manist</em>—I love an apt motto to my heart.’ This is performative over-reaction, we might say: funny, but serious at the same time. And ‘motto’ is an interesting word: etymologically deriving from the Latin <em>muttum</em> which means a mutter or grunt. Like Prometheus grunting in pain, perhaps, or Cassandra muttering words others (not us: but her contemporaries) find incomprehensible in their proleptic negativity.<blockquote>
Ἰοὺ ἰοὺ ὦ ὦ κακά. <br />
Ὑπ' αν με δεινὸς ὀρθομαντείας πονός <br />
Στροβει, ταράσσων φροιμίοις εφημίοις. <br />
* * * * * * <br />
Τὸ μέλλον ἥξει. Kαὶ σύ μην τάχει παρὼν<br />
Αγαν γ' ἀληθόμαντιν μ' ἐρεις. <br /><br />
Uh! Uh! Oh! Oh! It’s all shit. <br />
Those fucking prophetic agonies are on me again: <br />
Dizzying, messing me up with their bloody presages. <br />
…<br />
The future's set: coming fast for all of you<br />
Then you’ll know I was a fighting true-prophet.
</blockquote>In terms of translation you may prefer a more respectable, elevated idiom, such as the Loeb provides (‘Ha ha! Oh oh, the agony! Once more the dreadful throes of true prophecy whirl and distract me with their ill-boding onset … what is to come, will come. Soon though present here thyself shalt of thy pity pronounce me all to true a prophetess’). But κακά does mean shit (in Ancient, as in Modern, Greek) as well as evil (κακός, here plural); and ‘bloody presages’ was the translation Coleridge himself offered for φροιμίοις εφημίοις (in the letter to Estlin, quoted above). The ‘fucking’ is my interpolation; that’s not actually in the Greek. Although Cassandra is in distress, moaning and muttering, and there is a politeness idiom through which searing and disrespectful language is simply ‘not heard’. Cassandra has fore-sight (pro-metheus) and sees that it's all going to shit. Coleridge's ode articulates hind-sight (epi-metheus) and sees the same thing. But perhaps, in the final address to his own soul, echoing the poem's opening, Coleridge is looking to trace a path out of the kaka. </div></div></div></div>Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-36649291381566008482022-11-14T01:16:00.007-08:002023-12-18T06:43:58.831-08:00Xenoglossy<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVRmcr62UqK3HlGIok9n-vwatEIKLOCKzStRgEy9IlBaLpvptmB_h7SxYEJf1_oy9w9hYKr5T76kI8ubQ4rX809SnPyNxgAfL5uFnEB583mHgo-pbjlysCSVrImadPdIXeCSkv6jOD1FjjmXF4-V7v5LsmG0hK7b4mXNFNZb9mb11AtfFRmGdgApI2/s786/0_JUwzDByscsF-_FTU.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="786" data-original-width="736" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVRmcr62UqK3HlGIok9n-vwatEIKLOCKzStRgEy9IlBaLpvptmB_h7SxYEJf1_oy9w9hYKr5T76kI8ubQ4rX809SnPyNxgAfL5uFnEB583mHgo-pbjlysCSVrImadPdIXeCSkv6jOD1FjjmXF4-V7v5LsmG0hK7b4mXNFNZb9mb11AtfFRmGdgApI2/s400/0_JUwzDByscsF-_FTU.jpg" /></a></div><p> </p><p>In the <i>Biographia Literaria</i> (1818), Coleridge talks, <i>inter alia</i> (<i>inter multa alia</i>) about — though he doesn’t call it this — ‘<a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/xenoglossy" target="_blank">xenoglossy</a>’: that is, the ability manifested by some people to speak in a language other than their own, despite never having learned that other language. The story goes like this: a few years before Coleridge arrived in Germany (in 1798) there was, ‘in a Roman Catholic town’ in the north of the country, a minor cause célèbre.</p><blockquote>
A young woman of four or five and twenty, who could neither read, nor write, was seized with a nervous fever; during which, according to the asseverations of all the priests and monks of the neighbourhood, she became possessed, and, as it appeared, by a very learned devil. She continued incessantly talking Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, in very pompous tones and with most distinct enunciation. This possession was rendered more probable by the known fact that she was or had been a heretic. … The case had attracted the particular attention of a young physician, and by his statement many eminent physiologists and psychologists visited the town, and cross-examined the case on the spot. Sheets full of her ravings were taken down from her own mouth, and were found to consist of sentences, coherent and intelligible each for itself, but with little or no connection with each other. Of the Hebrew, a small portion only could be traced to the Bible; the remainder seemed to be in the Rabbinical dialect. All trick or conspiracy was out of the question. Not only had the young woman ever been a harmless, simple creature; but she was evidently labouring under a nervous fever. In the town, in which she had been resident for many years as a servant in different families, no solution presented itself. [<i>Biographia</i>, ch 6]</blockquote>
I tried to track down further information about this case when I <a href="https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-biographia-literaria-by-samuel-taylor-coleridge.html" target="_blank">edited the <i>Biographia</i> for EUP</a>, but without success. I presume it was a small-town matter, without any ensuing national or international fame; it didn't, I think, make it into any contemporary newspapers or books, and had Coleridge not heard about it first-hand it would probably have been forgotten.<br /><br />
It was, however, far from an isolated example. Indeed, ‘Xenoglossy’ is now an area of study in its own right, something I realised having come across Ian Stevenston’s <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=QLpvQgAACAAJ&dq=inauthor:%22Ian+Stevenson%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&redir_esc=y" target="_blank"><i>Unlearned language: New Studies in Xenoglossy</i></a> (University Press of Virginia, 1984). Stevenson was Carlson Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia Medical School, so a respectable academic (this book is the sequel to an earlier volume of his called, just, <i>Xenoglossy</i> [1976], which I haven’t seen).<br /><br />
Now Xenoglossy — empirically, a real thing, which is to say, something that happens and is reported in the world — presents us with a problem of explanation that itself entails a different kind of problem: for one mode of explanation of the phenomenon leads us into the Land of Woo: of parascience, reincarnation, telepathy, angelic or demonic possession, and by extension, astrology, crystals, UFOs, belief in the England football team’s world-cup-winning prospects etc. These latter are not respectable academic discourses, although the otherwise-respectable Prof Stevenson found himself drawn magnetically into them, or at least into theorising reincarnation. This is a danger that, I suppose, keeps otherwise interested parties from investigating the phenomenon.<br /><br />
Stevenson’s <i>Unlearned Language</i> gives us two carefully evidenced and accredited case-studies, both from the later 20th-century. First is Dolores Jay, a middle-aged American woman married to a Methodist minister. One day her husband, who had studied hypnosis as part of his ‘ministry of healing’, hypnotised Dolores so as to relieve some backache from which she was suffering. Under hypnosis she began speaking German, a language she otherwise did not know, had never studied or spoken before. Intrigued, her husband hypnotised her repeatedly, and discovered not just that Dolores was speaking German, but [a] when speaking German she did not think she was called Dolores (‘Ich bin Gretchen’ she announced) and [b] that the <i>kind</i> of German she was speaking was not contemporary, but bore the traces of an older-fashioned and parochial style and idiom. Stevenson suggests she was speaking the German of about 1860, and of a sort that might be spoken ‘in an isolated rural community in Northern Germany’.<br /><br />
The second case study concerns Uttara Huddar, an Indian woman from Maharati, who taught at the University of Nagpur. Whilst hospitalised for a minor illness Huddar began practising meditation, and was surprised to discover that, in that state, she could speak Bengali, ‘a language that was previously unknown to her’ (her mother-tongue was Marathi). This Bengali-speaking version of Huddar claimed to be called Sharada, a early 19th-century Bengali woman. Huddar did not need to be hypnotised to unlock this language, and unlike Jay did not only speak in reaction to specific questions, but talked for long periods ‘apparently spontaneously’. There was no clear trigger for her Xenoglossy once it had been brought out by her initial meditation, though Stevenson speculates that her Bengali-speaking episodes were related to certain phases of the moon.<br /><br />
Stevenson goes into each case-study in much detail, and provides transcripts of the German and Bengali speechifying of the two women (their xenoglossy was recorded on tape machines) in the book’s appendices. Both women were of good character, without general predilection towards or specific motivation to lie. Both could converse fluently — that is, they did not rely on a few stock phrases, or make utterance merely as parrots do. Stevenson goes to some length to identify what he insists are lexical features that identify the speech as from the 1860s and 1820s respectively (he also quoted other analyses carried out by language experts that he claims support what he says).<br /><br />
How to explain it? One, materialist explanation would occam’s razor these cases by calling them mendacious: these two women were either lying to those around them — that is, they were fakes, who spoke perfectly good German and Bengali but were pretending not to — or else they were lying, as it were, to themselves. It’s possible they both genuinely believed themselves ignorant of these tongues when actually they did have some knowledge. We could speculate that their actions were resolved subconscious urges to which they did not have conscious access.<br /><br />
Stevenson isn’t having any of that. He proposes two explanations, one of which he dismisses. The dismissed one is telepathy: that some other parties, who could speak German and Bengali, were beaming that knowledge <i>into</i> the minds of Jay and Huddar. Stevenson doesn’t believe that’s possible. Which leaves him, he thinks, only one explanation: reincarnation. For Stevenson, the reason American Jay can speak German is that she is the reincarnation of German-speaking Gretchen from the 19th century. In his last chapter he speculates that violent, premature death may make such reincarnation more likely in itself, and more likely to result in a consciousness in which those earlier life-memories are merely dormant, rather than fully subsumed.<br /><br />
I don’t believe this for a moment, I must say. More, I’m not sure this book, though written in a scholarly manner, with citations for all claims and evidence laid out fairly, makes its case convincingly. I’m no Germanist, but even I can see that the Dolores Jay transcripts are mostly Dolores answering ‘ja’ or ‘nein’ to a set of questions, several of which are rather leading. As for Uttara Huddar, here’s William Frawley’s opinion, from his review of Stevenson’s book [in <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/414443" target="_blank"><i>Language</i>, 61:3 (1985)</a>, 739]:<blockquote>
With Dolores Jay, the data, given in an appendix [suggests] that the subject cannot carry on anything like German discourse: she is excellent at answering yes/no questions, but that is about all; the lexicon is extremely limited. The Bengali data, also in the appendix, are given in translation, so it is impossible to judge this subject’s ability in Bengali adequately. In each case, one must rely on testimony, with signed affidavits, by speakers of German and Bengali that the subjects can, indeed, speak the xenoglossically manifest languages … Stevenson underplays the fact that, in Case 2, the woman speaks Marathi (related to Bengali), has studied Sanskrit (from which both Marathi and Bengali derive), lives in a town where there are ten thousand Bengalis, and has very poor Bengali pronunciation (as testified by the experts). Could the subject be speaking some form of pidgin Bengali? Science has not been given its due here.</blockquote>
This doesn’t sound so nearly dazzling, I think.<br /><br />
The data still require explanation, of course, but we can perhaps provide one without resorting to theories of reincarnation. It is surely relevant that each woman is from a specific culture that, in the case of Jay, is glossolalian (the Pentecost is attested in the Bible after all, and ‘speaking in tongues’ has a high profile and status in many North American churches), and, in the case of Huddar, believes in reincarnation. In both cases we can imagine a motivation, perhaps occluded to the individual concerned, to do with asserting identity, or being heard and noticed, or being connected with the past (and therefore to do with continuity, and belonging), that gets filtered through the respective individual’s cultural priors. This need not be a conscious act of fakery.<br /><br />
Not that fakery can be ruled out, of course, in every case. Here’s one example — I would say— from Ernest Bozzano’s <i>Polyglot Mediumship</i> (1932). A séance was held in London on February 27th, 1924, attended by amongst others the Welsh writer and playwright <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caradoc_Evans" target="_blank">Caradoc Evans</a>. The medium, an American woman, calling herself ‘Valiantine’, insisted she spoke no Welsh. She addressed Caradoc Evans, in English, claiming to be the spirit of his dead father. Evans replied: ‘speak to me in your own language’, which the medium then did, answering questions about where Evans senior had died and giving a detailed description of the house in Carmarthen where he had lived. The conversation was, we are told, ‘cut short’, although it seems Evans was perfectly convinced he had been speaking to his father. The balance of probabilities here, especially given the widespread evidence of fraudulent practice by so many so-called mediums, is that ‘Valiantine’ actually spoke Welsh and was lying when she said she couldn’t — perhaps she <i>was</i> Welsh and was affecting an American identity for her commercial work — and that, moreover, she had done some research on her celebrated guest, knowing that he would be coming to her séance, being ready to ‘cut off’ all conversation, blaming some spiritualist loss-of-signal, once the questions moved her out of her comfort zone. As Derren Brown has shown over and over, people will do very much more than meet you halfway, and will fill-in a great many blanks with their own preconceptions, hopes and desires, if you are unscrupulous enough to pretend what you are not, and give them a wire-frame with which to work.<br /><br />
What about Coleridge? He was not a believer in reincarnation, and he’s not persuaded that this this case evinces demonic possession; but he does, in the <i>Biographia</i>, offer an explanation for the German housemaid’s surprising abilities in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. STC reports that a young doctor, called to examine the case, proved ‘determined to trace her past life step by step; for the patient herself was incapable of returning a rational answer’:<blockquote>
He at length succeeded in discovering the place, where her parents had lived: travelled thither, found them dead, but an uncle surviving; and from him learned, that the patient had been charitably taken by an old Protestant pastor at nine years old, and had remained with him some years, even till the old man’s death. Of this pastor the uncle knew nothing, but that he was a very good man. With great difficulty, and after much search, our young medical philosopher discovered a niece of the pastor’s, who had lived with him as his house-keeper, and had inherited his effects. She remembered the girl; related, that her venerable uncle had been too indulgent, and could not bear to hear the girl scolded; that she was willing to have kept her, but that, after her patron’s death, the girl herself refused to stay. Anxious inquiries were then, of course, made concerning the pastor’s habits; and the solution of the phenomenon was soon obtained. For it appeared, that it had been the old man’s custom, for years, to walk up and down a passage of his house into which the kitchen door opened, and to read to himself with a loud voice, out of his favourite books. A considerable number of these were still in the niece’s possession. She added, that he was a very learned man and a great Hebraist. Among the books were found a collection of Rabbinical writings, together with several of the Greek and Latin Fathers; and the physician succeeded in identifying so many passages with those taken down at the young woman’s bedside, that no doubt could remain in any rational mind concerning the true origin of the impressions made on her nervous system.</blockquote>
Just as Stevenson finds in his case studies evidence to support his prior belief in reincarnation, so Coleridge finds in this tale support for his prior belief — which was that the human memory is infinitely capacious, that we forget nothing and only suppress it to avoid being overwhelmed by the Niagara-gush of sensation and memory. Coleridge believed that when we die, and rejoin the infinite, absolutely <i>all</i> our life’s memories of absolutely everything, down to the most trivial, will be accessible to us again.<br /><br />
I don’t think our memories are infinite, as Coleridge did, but I’d have to assume that xenoglossy relates in some way to memory. I wonder if, given the well known linguistic plasticity and capaciousness of young brains (something we lose as we grow up), various languages other than the main one(s) spoken at home don’t get, to some extent, taken aboard, stored in some cached way, and are liable to reemerge to surprise even us. But I don’t know.<br /><br />
As for Stevenson, his belief in life-after-death and reincarnation led to some other psychiatrists and academics dismissing him as a crank, although he still has his followers in the parascientific world. Before he died he set-up a combination lock with a secret word or phrase and deposited it in a filing cabinet in his department. He told his colleagues that he would pass the code to them after his death, thereby proving his theories. He died in 2007. According to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Stevenson#Death_and_experiment" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a>, his colleague Emily Williams Kelly told The New York Times: “Presumably, if someone had a vivid dream about him, in which there seemed to be a word or a phrase that kept being repeated — I don’t quite know how it would work — if it seemed promising enough, we would try to open it using the combination suggested.” So far the lock remains unopened.</blockquote>Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-53266988119660266642022-11-02T08:53:00.024-07:002022-11-08T02:15:43.606-08:00Coleridge's Hummel-Bee (1823)<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO3PGBrA57amT-XiTJ-duogWZpiilUbCGGJhoOZ2k9lmd1B4C5AeJLLPreEdZG6_Y3SuEWxqG8sQlzuVz97SOCFBGhrg0vOdguHyQNxK-vdCBG39KPStEWNx84wUyf1uCwkM5blBGVRMyXzpBDQq8J19Gjc-k7jhIXaoGIDWV7c2hiIC-PkWEYz_NI/s667/Screenshot%20(592).png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="621" data-original-width="667" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO3PGBrA57amT-XiTJ-duogWZpiilUbCGGJhoOZ2k9lmd1B4C5AeJLLPreEdZG6_Y3SuEWxqG8sQlzuVz97SOCFBGhrg0vOdguHyQNxK-vdCBG39KPStEWNx84wUyf1uCwkM5blBGVRMyXzpBDQq8J19Gjc-k7jhIXaoGIDWV7c2hiIC-PkWEYz_NI/s320/Screenshot%20(592).png" width="320" /></a></div></div>
<p>Coleridge, on holiday in Ramsgate in 1823, saw (or heard) a bumblebee fly past his head, and wrote this in his notebook:</p><blockquote>An Air, that whizzed δία ἐγκεϕάλου (right across the diameter of my Brain) exactly like a Hummel Bee, alias, Dombeldore, the gentleman with Rappee Spenser, with bands Red, and Orange Plush Breeches, close by my ear, at once sharp and <em>burry</em>, right over the Summit of Quantock, <strike>item of Skiddaw </strike> at earliest Dawn, just between the Nightingale that I had stopt to hear in the Copse at the Foot of Quantock, and the first Sky-Lark, that was a Song-Fountain, dashing up and sparkling to the Ear’s Eye, in full Column, or ornamented Shaft of Sound in the Order of Gothic Extravaganza, out of Sight, over the Corn-fields on the Descent of the Mountain, on the other side out of sight, tho’ twice I beheld its <em>mute</em> shoot downward in the sunshine like a falling Star of melted Silver— [<i>CN</i> 4:4994; <i>PW</i> 592; 1823]</blockquote>
The entry then shifts to verse:<div><blockquote>
Flowers are lovely; Love <strike>of</strike> is flower-like; <br />
Friendship is a shelt’ring Tree; <br />
O the joys, that came down shower-like, <br />
Of Beauty, Truth, and Liberty— <br />
When I was young, ere I was old— <br />
O Youth that wert so glad, so bold, <br />
What quaint Disguise hast thou put on. <br />
Wouldn’t make believe, that thou art gone, <br />
O Youth! Thy Vesper Bell has not toll’d <br />
O Youth, so true, so fair, so free, <br />
Thy Vesper Bell has not yet toll’d— <br />
Thou always &c <br />
Thou always were a Masker bold!— <br />
To make believe, that thou art gone! <br />
Ah! was it not enough that Thou <br />
In they eternal Glory should’st outgo me? <br />
Wouldst thou not Grief’s sad Victory allow? <br />
Hope’s a Breeze that robs the Blossoms <br />
Fancy feeds on murmurs the Bee <br />
………………………embosoms <br />
…………………………Poesy—</blockquote>
Coleridge later augmented and published this as ‘Youth and Age’ (it appeared in several annuals in the later 1820s, and was collected <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ew0UAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA82&dq=coleridge+poetical+works+%22Youth+and+Age%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjYupn47I_7AhXSTcAKHciiBWUQ6AF6BAgJEAI#v=onepage&q=coleridge%20poetical%20works%20%22Youth%20and%20Age%22&f=false" target="_blank">in STC’s <i>Poetical Works</i> in 1828</a>). <div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEK2-GW-O5JssUauiHYxl6S2d5ZsGbxpej8UzNMjUXk8ErAOzJRRGGIcZfw3ljpyJwz6S7wyk2gf_JKBL11gLs2crE_ADF5DHpJaQYdGY2XcW3JMf2tewVT4DIFJ2oOiS906fNxuZzf7_99flCgb3DHT6N94YXGG4swu235NT_pSg1LjRHa5uproUK/s682/Screenshot%20(593).png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="682" data-original-width="597" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEK2-GW-O5JssUauiHYxl6S2d5ZsGbxpej8UzNMjUXk8ErAOzJRRGGIcZfw3ljpyJwz6S7wyk2gf_JKBL11gLs2crE_ADF5DHpJaQYdGY2XcW3JMf2tewVT4DIFJ2oOiS906fNxuZzf7_99flCgb3DHT6N94YXGG4swu235NT_pSg1LjRHa5uproUK/w350-h400/Screenshot%20(593).png" width="350" /></a>:<blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">Verse, a breeze mid blossoms straying,</div><div style="text-align: left;">Where Hope clung feeding, like a bee—</div><div style="text-align: left;">Both were mine! Life went a maying</div><div style="text-align: left;">With Nature, Hope, and Poesy,</div><div style="text-align: left;">When I was young!</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">When I was young?—Ah, woful When!</div><div style="text-align: left;">Ah! for the change 'twixt Now and Then!</div><div style="text-align: left;">This breathing house not built with hands,</div><div style="text-align: left;">This body that does me grievous wrong,</div><div style="text-align: left;">O'er aery cliffs and glittering sands,</div><div style="text-align: left;">How lightly then it flashed along;—</div><div style="text-align: left;">Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore,</div><div style="text-align: left;">On winding lakes and rivers wide,</div><div style="text-align: left;">That ask no aid of sail or oar,</div><div style="text-align: left;">That fear no spite of wind or tide!</div><div style="text-align: left;">Nought cared this body for wind or weather</div><div style="text-align: left;">When Youth and I lived in 't together.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like;</div><div style="text-align: left;">Friendship is a sheltering tree;</div><div style="text-align: left;">O! the joys, that came down shower-like,</div><div style="text-align: left;">Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty,</div><div style="text-align: left;">Ere I was old!</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Ere I was old ? Ah woful Ere,</div><div style="text-align: left;">Which tells me, Youth's no longer here!</div><div style="text-align: left;">O Youth! for years so many and sweet,</div><div style="text-align: left;">'Tis known, that Thou and I were one,</div><div style="text-align: left;">I'll think it but a fond conceit—</div><div style="text-align: left;">It cannot be that Thou art gone!</div><div style="text-align: left;">Thy vesper-bell hath not yet toll'd: —</div><div style="text-align: left;">And thou wert aye a masker bold!</div><div style="text-align: left;">What strange disguise hast now put on,</div><div style="text-align: left;">To make believe, that thou art gone?</div><div style="text-align: left;">I see these locks in silvery slips,</div><div style="text-align: left;">This drooping gait, this altered size:</div><div style="text-align: left;">But Spring-tide blossoms on thy lips,</div><div style="text-align: left;">And tears take sunshine from thine eyes!</div><div style="text-align: left;">Life is but thought: so think I will</div><div style="text-align: left;">That Youth and I are house-mates still.</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">Let’s go back to the beginning: start with the bee (you can click these, to embiggen):</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX3d4xaqk2ad7EWInaE8W4Ejx7fZ4e9FxSp6gVr2eDuJnaCjvwF_x2K4kz87UfPJukCRcvU1USPr_UOGnrXJV_0rfKMiz2p7mbqzELmuc7eZ8NUU4R04JyBbZFwz7nG4urUzM-1664Y2x3IHr0PeEthKw7rgNb7_UxivcTCjHADG3p4sOLnB0qVV6m/s968/Screenshot%20%28569%29.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="197" data-original-width="968" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX3d4xaqk2ad7EWInaE8W4Ejx7fZ4e9FxSp6gVr2eDuJnaCjvwF_x2K4kz87UfPJukCRcvU1USPr_UOGnrXJV_0rfKMiz2p7mbqzELmuc7eZ8NUU4R04JyBbZFwz7nG4urUzM-1664Y2x3IHr0PeEthKw7rgNb7_UxivcTCjHADG3p4sOLnB0qVV6m/s400/Screenshot%20%28569%29.png" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;">The Greek means “across my brain”, as STC's own parenthesis tells us. A “Rappee Spencer” is a type of jacket, named after <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Spencer,_2nd_Earl_Spencer">the 2nd Earl Spencer</a>, worn when taking snuff (and so generally covered in snuff dust): <i>rappee</i> is another word for snuff, from the French <i>tabac râpé</i>, “grated or powdered tobacco”; and a Spencer jacket was “<a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pompadour" target="_blank">pompadour</a>”, which is to say, scarlet or bright pink cloth, cut short at the back and to a flaring pattern. It is from Earl Spencer that we get the idea that a smoking jacket should be red.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinL42G7UzTHsg7REhyE46_5Xz-JEPZei7M-L0J7Uqj16OJvCIwFs8AR5iwUVH7pCNDCKTRgSXkyiiMcw1OIu5aN6fBgPC2yBBG2APlcAIuzeNYcUTNhOmga520gSOQZLnnh-z9lHZIs9Rz4FZ8o-yN_jZajejjpQm-Rc6Y_B7TmzTZezhlk7xKtZlM/s946/Screenshot%20%28570%29.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="463" data-original-width="946" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinL42G7UzTHsg7REhyE46_5Xz-JEPZei7M-L0J7Uqj16OJvCIwFs8AR5iwUVH7pCNDCKTRgSXkyiiMcw1OIu5aN6fBgPC2yBBG2APlcAIuzeNYcUTNhOmga520gSOQZLnnh-z9lHZIs9Rz4FZ8o-yN_jZajejjpQm-Rc6Y_B7TmzTZezhlk7xKtZlM/s400/Screenshot%20%28570%29.png" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;">Finish the outfit off with red-orange velvet trousers. I must say, I love this gentleman bee! </div></div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps we think orange and red an unusual coloration for a bumblebee—yellow and black is more conventional, after all—but I take it that Coleridge sees red as the darker of the two hues, and orange as running on a continuum from yellow, so not too far away. And actually, I think there’s a contemporary fashion note here. Around 1800 a new, bright orange dye was developed from chromate of lead and caustic lye, and for a while orange became a go-to colour for the fashionable dresser. Here's <i>The Gentleman's Monthly Miscellany</i> in 1802, reporting on the latest craze: <br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpL3Yns2aOQ8rcai2mzl1AuA1AWVAQna_OZ9mpgT9-srfoZ4X2_r0E9qHQ2mk3GnsbliZjy8HKjT1_8T1fd6fIgLrFCcw7OArw1A7PMHN_1g0KSYfgT_Iv5i1e1SIsyZz4HjmFORbXkT-w3KHqGrqi3T_p3sCahplJ9bxhnOjq3tIpVJKd8BYlB747/s620/Screenshot%20%28590%29.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="304" data-original-width="620" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpL3Yns2aOQ8rcai2mzl1AuA1AWVAQna_OZ9mpgT9-srfoZ4X2_r0E9qHQ2mk3GnsbliZjy8HKjT1_8T1fd6fIgLrFCcw7OArw1A7PMHN_1g0KSYfgT_Iv5i1e1SIsyZz4HjmFORbXkT-w3KHqGrqi3T_p3sCahplJ9bxhnOjq3tIpVJKd8BYlB747/s400/Screenshot%20%28590%29.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />From this bee Coleridge’s associative writing goes to a memory of his younger days, in the Quantocks, hearing bees and also birds. The transition is abrupt to “right over the Summit of Quantock”, and time shifts in STC's memory back many years and back to the start of the day, “at earliest Dawn, just between the Nightingale that I had stopt to hear in the Copse ... and the first Sky-Lark.” This latter bird, so often the topic of Romantic poetry praising its liquid song, flies out of hearing, “tho’ twice I beheld its mute shoot downward in the sunshine like a falling Star of melted Silver—”
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It is, in other words, the <em>sound</em> of the bee (sharp and <em>burry</em>), not his fashionable suit of clothes, that really engages Coleridge’s imagination. The buzz of the bee is contrasted with the ‘dashing up and sparkling’ songs of the Sky-Lark, striking what, in splendidly illogical zeugma, Coleridge calls ‘the ear’s eye’. Only a few years before, writing the <em>Biographia</em>, Coleridge had ridiculed Oliver Goldsmith’s couplet:
<blockquote>No more will I endure love's pleasing pain, <br />
Or round my <i>heart's leg</i> tie his galling chain</blockquote>
… though it’s hard to see that this ‘ear’s eye’ is any less absurd. Of the Goldsmith line STC says, somewhat sternly: “our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning.”<br /><br />
But here, only half a decade after the <i>Biographia</i>, STC's thoughts amphibiously move from seeing-ears to architecture, materialising the evanescent <i>sonic </i>beauty of the bird’s song into marmoreal figures of ‘full Column, or ornamented Shaft of Sound in the Order of Gothic Extravaganza’. These shafts rise up, and continue out of sight—Coleridge repeats the phrase twice, ‘out of Sight, over the Corn-fields on the Descent of the Mountain, on the other side out of sight’, as if his <i>ear’s eye</i> is searching for the pillar’d song, and not finding it. Finally, before he moves to poetry, he notes a soundlessness in the bird’s ‘mute’ plummet, ‘like a falling star of melted silver’. Red, orange, silver; buzz, birdsong, silence; a sound running δία ἐγκεϕάλου like an architectural spar, something solid (those occasions when Homer uses the phrase δία ἐγκεϕάλου the reference is always to an arrow or a spear <i>physically</i> bisecting the brainpan of a falling warrior) which is then offset by the upright pillars of birdsong. <br /><br />
The poem that follows this gorgeous paragraph, in either its first incomplete version or the version that was eventually published, is something of a let-down after such a brilliantly freewheeling associative section of poetic-prose. Something of the dynamic of the horizontal (bees buzzing from flower to flower) and vertical (those trees going straight up, those showers coming straight down) remains, and in the final version this is added to with the vertical-horizontal ‘aery cliffs and glittering sands’ Coleridge's youthful body (‘this breathing house not built with hands’) used to traverse with ease—but with this later draft, the bee is moved to the second line, and the poem soon leaves it behind. Now old age has come, a ‘masker’, to force a ‘strange disguise’ upon Coleridge’s sense of self: whence he works to his conclusion. ‘Life is but thought’, so Coleridge can use the power of his imagination to <em>think</em> himself young again. In a note on the MS, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dykes_Campbell" target="_blank">James Dyke Campbell</a> wrote “from the German of Gleim”, ‘a source,’ says J C C Mays, ‘which has remained untraced’. This is, I suppose, Campbell’s guess, long after Coleridge’s death (although maybe he had inside information, from Coleridge himself). Mays thinks it refers only to the last two lines of the final version of the poem, the ‘Life is but thought’ idea, in which case it is presumably to <a href="https://medium.com/adams-notebook/carroll-and-gleim-life-what-is-it-but-a-dream-f5c71bb7f58b" target="_blank">Gleim’s ‘Das Leben ist ein Traum’, 1784</a>. But it's possible Campbell's annotation refers to the entire poem, including the prose notes that function as the loam out of which the seed of the text sprouts, in which case I wonder if Coleridge wasn't thinking of this short poem by Gleim:</div><div><blockquote><b>
Die Gärtnerin und die Biene</b><br /><br /><i>
Eine kleine Biene flog<br />
Emsig hin und her, und sog<br />
Süßigkeit aus allen Blumen. <br /><br />
“Bienchen,” spricht die Gärtnerin, <br />
Die sie bei der Arbeit trifft, <br />
“Manche Blume hat doch Gift, <br />
Und du saugst aus allen Blumen?” <br /><br />
“Ja,” sagt' sie zur Gärtnerin, <br />
“Ja, das Gift laß ich darin!” </i><br /><br />
A little bee flew <br />
Busy back and forth, and drew<br />
Sweets from all the flowers. <br /><br />
“Little Bee," says the Gardener, <br />
whom she meets as she goes<br />
"Many blooms are poisonous, <br />
Yet you suck all the flowers?” <br /><br />
“Yes,” she tells the Gardener, <br />
“Yes, I leave the poison inside, there!”</blockquote>
Maybe not. But the bees are there in both versions of the poem, along with their flowers and their nectar, and sweet youth and poisonous old age are Coleridge's main theme: the contrasts that structure the poem, those verticals and horizontals, decrepit age and vigorous youth (Gleim's <i>Süßigkeit </i>and <i>Gift</i>). Dumbledore, now repurposed as the name of a fictional wizard, is an antique name for bumble-bee, and combines two elements: the bumbling, dumbling, mazy motion of the insect in flight, and the <i>noise it makes</i>: “dore” or “dor”, is the word for a buzzing insect
(from Old English <i>dora</i>, “one that hums”), related to the Old English <i>drān</i> “drone”). The sound, the motion, although also implying the rich dorade colours, golden yellow, pompadour, velvet and by opposition the “falling Star of melted Silver” into which the bee transforms itself in the crucible of Coleridge's imaginative memory.
</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4xWdeLF-c3vc3ILLJB3stM1uEBxxYimT0n6_pw6KGfZiI-nJ56IsZzWGOjQ_3MeAscn3eJBlFuPDd5yxo_848uaVnUhEShYC3K-dtvH2boJ8YRvynTvK3_OSSrs1Rn6fF4B5qjKaLYRQ0qk5FmF5ZYfWk7BF7Z0qokueHOU9lmynIq2R_SbkMUWv0/s2326/hornet.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2326" data-original-width="1564" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4xWdeLF-c3vc3ILLJB3stM1uEBxxYimT0n6_pw6KGfZiI-nJ56IsZzWGOjQ_3MeAscn3eJBlFuPDd5yxo_848uaVnUhEShYC3K-dtvH2boJ8YRvynTvK3_OSSrs1Rn6fF4B5qjKaLYRQ0qk5FmF5ZYfWk7BF7Z0qokueHOU9lmynIq2R_SbkMUWv0/w269-h400/hornet.jpg" width="269" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div></div>Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-72411240750992686282022-10-02T02:31:00.000-07:002022-10-02T02:31:04.551-07:00Coleridge’s “Church and State”: Thoughts<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Here's a stab at getting my <em>Church and State</em> thoughts in order (my read through of <a href="http://amechanicalart.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/coleridge-on-constitution-of-church-and.html">chapters 1-4 is here</a>, and <a href="http://amechanicalart.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/coleridge-on-constitution-of-church-and_8.html">chapters 5-12 here</a>). I have previously wondered: can Coleridge have coined the phrase ‘<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerisy#Nineteenth-century_European_modes_of_the_.27Intellectual_Class.27">clerisy</a>’ without being aware on some level of the rhyme with ‘heresy’? Is that a distraction, or a cunning piece of ironic wordplay? <div><br /></div><div>Or another fossilised thought from when I first read this book lo these many years since: there’s something compelling about writing a book setting out to nail-down the <em>Constitution of Church and State</em> when at the heart of your point is that none of the three words in the title have clear unambiguous meanings. After all, famously, Britain <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kingdom">does not have a written Constitution</a>: just a ragbag of parliamentary statute and judicial precedents.
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And Coleridge himself notes that the word ‘State’ means both the entirety of the entity we might call ‘Britain’ including the church, <em>and</em> those aspects of entity we might call ‘Britain’ <em>except</em> the church. You might think that the very title of STC’s book means he is pointing to the second these, but it’s not as simple as that—the Church is not an add-on or extra to be bolted <i>onto</i> the State in Coleridge’s vision: it’s integral to it, historically, morally and practically. And as for defining the term 'Church'—why: Coleridge defines not one but <em>three</em> separate meanings for this word. There's the actual church (to which Coleridge belonged, and with whose congregants he sometimes worshipped of a Sunday), the ‘Church of Christ’, an other-worldly divine ideal, and a sort of <em>tertium quid</em> church that his book is kind-of about.
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Indeed, given that it’s something of a cliché of <em>Church and State</em> studies that this book is a complex and baffling text [‘the book is a perplexing mixture of political commentary, social theory, and historical analysis’; <span style="font-size: x-small;">Peter Allen, <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709777">‘S. T. Coleridge's Church and State and the Idea of an Intellectual Establishment’</a>, <i>Journal of the History of Ideas</i>, 46:1 (1985), 89</span>] I was expecting to find my re-read a complexifying process. But actually it didn’t go down like that. This book is, I think, simpler than has been thought. The key, I think, is the ‘three churches’ idea. </div><div><br /></div><div>We should distinguish two aspects to religion; indeed, not grasping this was one of the flaws in the whole Dawkins/New Atheism movement earlier this century. So: there’s religious beliefs as a set of metaphysical propositions to which the believer assents (assents in the strong, Newman sense of that word)—there exists a God, I have an immortal soul, God cares what I do in the world and so on. This is the level at which Dawkins engages. By denying the truth of these beliefs he thinks he's done enough to pull-down the edifice of the Church. But as many people pointed out ‘religious people’ are not individuals who are defined merely by a set of beliefs in their heads. They are also defined by membership of a particular community, and engagement with a particular social praxis. This is the second aspect of contemporary religion, about which Dawkins has almost nothing to say: not only attending church, but helping run the church jumble sale, running soup kitchens, meeting with friends for coffee, belonging and trying to live the values of your religion in the world. Coleridge certainly understood that the Church was these two things together. But one of the novelties of the <em>Church and State</em> volume is the way it argues for a third sense of ‘Church’, extramural to the sorts of things seen as ‘Churchy’. </div><div><br /></div><div>There are two main things here: one that we would nowadays call ‘general taxation and the welfare state’; and two that falls under the heading of education (primary, secondary, tertiary and research). In the 21st-century these things are not seen as ‘churchy’, or at least they are not administered by the church (quite rightly not, it seems to me), not part of the usual duties of the church. Nor is STC saying that social workers, teachers and academics <i>should</i> be members of the church clergy. But he is saying that, even when they are not of the church, they are <i>clergy</i>-y. If you see what I mean. That there is something combined of a moulded church-ness <em>and</em> state-ness about this body of people he named ‘clerisy’.
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This doesn’t bring us any closer to the most obvious question we surely want to pose of Coleridge’s <em>Church and State</em>: does it have anything to teach us today? Or is it merely a historical curio, of its time and now exploded, out-of-date?
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We can break this question down a little more. One aspect is: was Coleridge <em>right </em>in arguing what he does in this book? And right or not, is what he says still viable today? <em>Church and State</em> makes a number of verifiable, or at least falsifiable, assertions and it is surely worth checking whether they are true or not. To pick out a couple: is his theory about the origin of the system of taxation as, essentially, religious tithes correct? (Short answer: no—taxation was a secular business in ancient Egypt and Persia; although titheing was also commonplace in the middle east). Does this have any bearing on the real point STC is making, though—that is, the advantages of disbursing tax income nationally in ways that are informed by a religious rather than secular rationale? I'm not sure it does.
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What about the ‘<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerisy#Nineteenth-century_European_modes_of_the_.27Intellectual_Class.27">clerisy</a>’? Here matters get a little tangled. As I noted in <a href="http://samueltaylorbloggeridge.blogspot.com/2022/09/reading-coleridges-church-and-state_0949136116.html">the earlier post</a>, one of the ways Coleridge’s clerisy idea developed is into the expansion of the university sector, not just to broaden educational opportunities for the citizenry but to furnish the nation with an intelligentsia. Given the glowing terms in which STC talks of ‘the clerisy’, it would be hard for any latter-day inheritor of the mantle—such as myself—to talk objectively about it. (People like me are of course liable to say: ‘<em>naturally</em> the State should pay for our upkeep—and pay us handsomely!’) But I don’t think Coleridge had, well, me in mind when he coined his term. It’s not just that I’m not religious, and that I’m part of a university system specifically set apart from the church. It’s that what we do is simply not disseminated into every corner of the realm.
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This is one reason—a practical reason—why STC models the clerisy on the clergy. The clerisy’s job is to educate the nation, practically and morally; and to do that it needs to go into every village, even into every home. Priests already do that. My sense is that STC can’t imagine a secular organisation having that same access without it becoming a horrific secret-police-style invasion of privacy. (The 1820s, and the established of the Metropolitan Police Force, was a time when the French-style invasion of state apparatus of law, order and control into private life was fiercely debated and as fiercely opposed).
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What about relevance? I want to limit this to the situation in the UK, simply to keep the discussion manageable; but that’s harder to do than it might otherwise be, since it is precisely globalisation that poses the biggest contemporary challenge to the argument Coleridge makes. Relevance becomes hard to assert.
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It’s one thing to note how influential Coleridge proved on the traditions of 19th-century Liberal and even Conservative political thought; it’s another to make the case for his continuing relevance. Indeed, it could be argued that the political world has changed since 1830 in ways that render Coleridge besides the point. It’s not just that the question of whether Catholics should be treated equally under the law is a dead one, for surely nobody would deny that they should. It is more to the point that two of the key salients of Coleridge’s discussion no longer obtain: first, religion is not the force it was—it no longer really makes sense, some might say, to talk of the UK as ‘a Christian nation’, partly because it is a much more ethnically and religiously diverse nation than it used to be, but also because Atheism has made so many inroads into popular belief. And secondly ‘we’ don’t really believe nations should be run by monarchs any more. The popularity of the House of Windsor has waned and waxed over the last few decades, hitting a low point immediately after the death of Diana (currently, the death of Elizabeth II resulted in an outpouring of genuine grief and loyalty, but I'd be surprised if that good-feeling is carried over into the reign of Charles III); but nobody really thinks the Queen should be anything other than a figurehead. Coleridge proposes a checks-and-balances system of government of a particular kind, with the Upper House (‘tradition’) exactly balancing the powers of the lower (‘innovation’); but in the UK over the last century or so we have seen a steady erosion of the powers of the House of Lords, and an increasingly ‘Presidential’ style government by the Commons, which means the Cabinet, which means the P.M. This is not what STC would have wanted. It has been excerbated by the behaviour of the Tory PMs since Brexit—itself a bitter example of a country divided almost exactly down the middle, in which one side has forced an extreme version of their political vision on the whole country, disregarding and indeed mocking as ‘traitors’ and ‘remoaners’ the half that disagreed, without the mediating influence of a Coleridgean sovereign to ameliorate the extremism. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_British_prorogation_controversy" target="_blank">Johnson's 2019 prorogation of Parliament</a> was, in fact, him as PM defanging and dismissing the Houses of Commons and Lords to prevent them assuming precisely such a role. The consequences have been, over and above the economic catastrophe of Brexit itself, a polarisation and demeaning of the climate of the country as a whole: more violent and angry and partisan. A fully STC/<i>Church and State</i> set-up, we might think, would have avoiding this disaster.<br />
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This in turn leads to a question of how far the terms of the debate mounted in Coleridge's book can be ‘transposed’ into a modern idiom. STC's bugbear is Catholics. Today ‘we’ are more worried about—let us say—Muslims (for valences of we that don't include actual followers of Islam, of course). But the questions are very similar: do Muslims ‘really’ belong to the UK, or is their allegiance necessarily to a foreign power in Mecca? Can ‘they’ be trusted, or do they represent a sort of fifth-column within the state? Does ‘accepting’ them (whatever that means) weaken the identity of the UK as a Christian nation? The code-work here is 'radicalising'; which means (since it doesn't really mean, whatever UKIP think, literally 'turning-into-a-terrorist') 'un-Britishizing'. This in turn could lead to a particular reading of <em>Church and State</em>, or perhaps an argument as to its contemporary relevance, of the sort which I’m sure I can leave to the reader as an exercise. </div><div><br /></div><div>A modern-day Coleridgean might say: we need to rebalance the constitution, taking power away from the executive of the Commons—and the P.M. in particular—and rebooting the Upper Chamber in some way that actually empowers it; plus we need a third element (a President, perhaps, if the monarch no longer has any political credibility) to adjudicate the two. And indeed, in one big way such a transposition has a lot to recommend it. Brexit is only one iteration of a larger issue, which is that the political landscape today is polarised between ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’ to a much greater degree than was the case in Britain in 1830, when ‘radical’ was (largely) a term of abuse, and liberalism was pretty much indistinguishable from old-school Toryism of the pre-Thatcher 1970s. In this world, where political commentators tend increasingly to pick a side and argue polemically from it, there might be something quite radical in the notion that a healthy body politic should have both these forces constitutionally balanced equally, with some notional arbiter (monarch, President, HAL-style computer, whatever) to ensure that the balance remains equal. I don’t know of any contemporary commentator who is arguing that, though.</div><div>
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There’s a very obvious objection to be made here. What Coleridge means by a Conservative is very different to what a voter in 2022 understands by the term. Indeed, the change wrought by the Thatcher-Reagan reconfiguration of ‘conservatism’ may be the biggest of all the socio-cultural changes between 1830 and now. For Coleridge a conservative is a landowner aristocrat who wants to conserve the old ways, and to resist any modification or amelioration of them. Theirs is an essential feudal view of the way society should operate. Coleridge opposes them to a set of merchants, financiers and professional classes who want to mobilise social change to maximize wealth-generation. This latter group sound very like modern-day Tories (and US Republicans). It’s hard to deny, in fact, that in the terms that Coleridge puts forward, the ‘Commons’ won—they swept the board in fact. They are the only game in town. This (my notional neoColeridgean might say) has proved a pretty mixed blessing; and there it would be to the good if we re-instituted some politically structural way of putting the breaks on unfettered ‘growth’. According to this reading, the contemporary relevance of <em>Church and State</em> would be a matter of replacing the ‘Barons’ of Coleridge’s original design with—let’s say—the Greens of today: a political force premised upon the notion that we have to rein-in change, ‘progress’ and unregulated capitalism in order to preserve something absolutely valuable, the land itself. The problem here, I think, is that the Greens, though certainly popular, are too marginal a force in contemporary politics.
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But stop a moment. Is ‘transposition’ into contemporary terms of reference the way to talk about this text? Put it another way: are monarchism, anti-Catholicism and the church all so passé? Back in 2014 Juan Carlos I of Spain formally abdicated: he had been a monarch in exactly the sense that Coleridge would have understood the term, which is to say, he did exactly what <em>Church and State</em> says a monarch <i>should</i> do—after Franco’s death in 1975, he restrained the Falangist authoritarian party and brought the progressive democratic party back into the political arena. As for anti-Catholicism: this, it seems to me, is an immensely deep-rooted prejudice in British cultural life. It is not, of course, that <i>active</i> discrimination against Catholics is any longer a feature of the law of the land. But it’s pervasive in a way people looking from outside sometimes find hard to credit. Charles II converted to Catholicism on his deathbed in 1685: he was, actually, functionally a ‘Catholic’ in his private beliefs; but after the Restoration he kept that to himself, believing that the British people would simply not accept rule by a Catholic. His openly Catholic brother James succeeded him, and lasted barely 3 years before the Brits chased him out in a revolution still called ‘Glorious’, replacing him with a foreigner whose chief merit was his Protestantism. Does this have any contemporary relevance? Have we ever had a Catholic Prime Minister? Until very recently the answer to that question was: no. Indeed, no Catholic had ever so much been leader of the Conservative or Labour parties—though Jews have held both positions. Tony Blair was a Christian, who steered clear of religion in his political dealings—Alastair Campbell famously said ‘we don’t do God’—and was an Anglican communicant throughout his term as PM. His wife, though, is Catholic; and almost as soon as Blair stepped down from being Prime Minister he himself converted. You think that timing was coincidental? The exception that proves the rule: Boris Johnson, by my reckoning, the first UK P.M. to have beem a Catholic, although we might add (a) though he was baptised a Catholic he was actually confirmed into the Church of England and spent most of his career as a notional Protestant; his return to Catholicism, if that's what it was, only came to light when he married his third, or thirteenth (I forget) wife in a Catholic church, 29th May 2021. And (b) one short year later he was announcing his resignation. His replacement, Liz Truss, is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Truss#Religion" target="_blank">an Anglican</a>.<br />
<br />I don't mean to descend into mere conspiracy theorising: Johnson was forced out of office for several reasons, and being a Catholic was not one. But I do suggest that Coleridge's focus on Catholicism as the ‘Other’ was not mere personal or individual prejudice, but tapped-in to something deeper in the British collective psyche. </div><div><br /></div><div>So for example: to judge by their dominance of the categories of ‘historical fiction’ and ‘screen drama’, the three historical periods with which contemporary Brits are most fascinated, or perhaps obsessed, are: the Tudors (all those sexy woman in elaborate dresses running the risk of getting their elegant swan-white necks chopped by the axe-man); the Victorians—everything from neo-Dickensian tales of urchins and prostitutes, to Steampunk and its variants—and World War 2. Putting the last one on one side for a moment, what is it that links the previous two? They are both outwith living memory, but are nonetheless times of national ‘belief’ that hinge, in crucial though largely hidden ways, on the relationship between Englishness and Protestantism, in contra-distinction to Catholicism. Henry VIII’s creation of the Church of England is the horizon of all those sexy Tudor stories. The emancipation of Catholics in 1829 is the context for (to return to the matter in hand) Coleridge’s <em>Church and State</em>.
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‘Religion?’ you say. ‘No, no: class is the crucial thing, nowadays. Or ethnicity.’ I don’t know. Maybe you're right. The main focus for the question of Catholicism was Ireland; and Ireland is still a live political issue—even after the Good Friday agreement and the reduction (though not cessation) of hostilities. ‘The Troubles’ shaped my own upbringing, in London in the 1970s as the IRA planted bombs to kill people like me. And the key question here is: why was it Irish nationalists who did this? There have been equally earnest Welsh and Scottish nationalist movements—the latter may be about to engineer an independent Scotland. But the Tartan Army never mobilized the way the IRA did. What this says to me is that these movements were not about ‘celtic-ness’, or about mere hostility to ‘England’, in both of which Scotland and Wales were surely as energised as was Ireland. They are about religion: wholly Protestant Wales, largely Protestant Scotland.
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Some 1830 context. The Jacobite rebellion of 1746 had been a sectarian as well as a Tory-political attempt to revolution; and Scotland suffered oppression in its aftermath, up to and including legislative strictures. But by the early 1900s Scotland was more-or-less re-assimilated into the UK, with the enormous success of Scott’s novels throwing a Romantic glamour over the land. The Irish equivalent would be <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Confederate_Wars">the Irish Confederate Wars</a>, a full century earlier (dragging on through the 17th-century until the Battle of the Boyne in 1690). A hundred years earlier! Yet the reaction from the mainland was both much more severe and long-lasting. Here’s a quick summary of the anti-Catholic ‘Penal Laws’ (mostly enacted after 1690’s Battle of the Boyne, although some predate that battle): exclusion of Catholics from most public offices; a ban on intermarriage with Protestants (repealed 1778); Catholics barred from owning guns or serving in the armed forces (repealed in the Militia Act of 1793); Catholics not permitted to be MPs (not repealed until 1829); Catholics excluded from voting (until 1793); not permitted to study at Trinity College Dublin (repealed 1793); Catholics excluded from the legal professions and the judiciary (repealed, respectively, 1793 and 1829); on a Catholic’s death his legatee could benefit by conversion to the Protestant Church of Ireland; a ban on converting from Protestantism to Catholicism ‘on pain of forfeiting all property estates and legacy to the monarch’ and ‘imprisonment at His Majesty’s Pleasure’; a ban on Catholics buying land under a lease of more than 31 years (repealed 1778); a ban on custody of orphans being granted to Catholics on pain of a £500 fine; a ban on Catholics inheriting Protestant land; Roman Catholic lay priests permitted to preach only after registering to do so according to the terms of the Registration Act of 1704 (but seminary priests and Bishops could not do even this until 1778); when allowed, Catholic churches to be built only from wood, not stone, and away from main roads; ‘no person of the popish religion shall publicly or in private houses teach school, or instruct youth in learning within this realm' upon pain of twenty pounds fine and three months in prison for every such offence’ (repealed in 1782). Is that enough context?
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STC thinks that what holds societies together is always an idea. By this he means something halfway between the conventional sense of ideals or notions inside the heads of the many citizens (what a Marxist-influenced thinker might call ‘ideology’)—and a more specifically teleological truth: an idealised destination or aim or purpose. For him the crucial question is not whether laws can be framed to repeal these anti-Catholic oppressions; it is whether British Catholics can buy-in to the idea of being British, rather than French, Roman and whatever else. And his answer to that question is implicit in his three churches. The first of those three is different depending on whether one is a Protestant or a Catholic Church; the third of those three (presumably; for who can fathom divine Providence?) will see the erasure of all petty doctrinal differences over transubstantiation or whatever else. But it is the second, the medial church, that is the crucial battleground.
</div>Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-77240716864442539172022-09-28T16:01:00.007-07:002022-09-28T16:01:00.193-07:00Reading Coleridge’s “Church and State”: Part Two (Chaps 5-12)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDGXNXnOTuYrCL6ezTrR8hxMDxhHMX_J2ozJuJ2aTTaImFlSm033gNXs07dr5NwJ_6T-t0-AS731LwUInv00UT1V4ZXuplaktPLq7cErgsqEoH4Y_it37JHdAk2ztOfblHzluwQaL4kaNr/s1600/ChurchAndStatetitle.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDGXNXnOTuYrCL6ezTrR8hxMDxhHMX_J2ozJuJ2aTTaImFlSm033gNXs07dr5NwJ_6T-t0-AS731LwUInv00UT1V4ZXuplaktPLq7cErgsqEoH4Y_it37JHdAk2ztOfblHzluwQaL4kaNr/s400/ChurchAndStatetitle.png" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://amechanicalart.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/coleridge-on-constitution-of-church-and.html">Chapters 1-4, here</a>. Those first four chapters are the prelude to the main discussion of <em><a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_FTM_6q6G3gC&dq=coleridge%20constitution%20of%20church%20and%20state&pg=PP9#v=onepage&q=coleridge%20constitution%20of%20church%20and%20state&f=false">Constitution of Church and State</a></em>. We know this because STC opens chapter 5 with: ‘after these introductory preparations, I can have no difficulty in setting forth the right idea of a national Church.’ We leave the Levites behind to pot a history of the Church of England as a third estate, after the Lords Temporal and the Commons. The ‘Nationality’ (STC’s term for that portion of the national wealth extracted from the private hands of landowners and aristos by titheing) is there for the financial maintenance of this third estate. The twist is that, according to Coleridge, their duties were only partly ‘spiritual’—preaching, burying, marrying and so on. More important was that the church provided an educative and cultural lead. The clergy were<br />
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a permanent class or order, with the following duties. A certain smaller number were to remain at the fountain heads of the humanities, in cultivating and enlarging the knowledge already possessed, and in watching over the interests of physical and moral science; being, likewise, the instructors of such as constituted, or were to constitute, the remaining more numerous classes of the order. This latter and far more numerous body were to be distributed throughout the country, so as not to leave even the smallest integral part or division without a resident guide, guardian, and instructor; the objects and final intention of the whole order being these — to preserve the stores, to guard the treasures of past civilization, and thus to bind the present with the past … but especially to diffuse through the whole community and to every native entitled to its laws and rights, that quantity and quality of knowledge which was indispensable both for the understanding of those rights, and for the performance of the duties correspondent. [44-45]
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The clergy also had an ‘international’ role, in maintaining the nation’s ‘character of general civilization’, something which STC rather strikingly places ‘equal with, or rather more than’ tax-funded armies, navies and air forces (not that last one, obviously) as ‘the ground of its defensive and offensive power.’ What is it stops Putin invading? Why, a phalanx of our cultured and acculturing vicars, of course.
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So the model is: the Lords (temporal) work for ‘permanence’, the Commons, merchants, professionals and so on—work for ‘progression’. And? ‘The object of the National Church, the third remaining estate of the realm, was to secure and improve that civilization, without which the nation could be neither permanent nor progressive.’ ‘Clergy’, STC insists, is the same word etymologically as ‘clerk’, the educated or learned man. And here we get two central Coleridgean ideas. First the difference between the perfect ‘Church of Christ’ and the actual church. The first of these is an <em>ekklesia</em>. This is the Greek word for ‘church’ in the NT: from the older Greek for ‘assembly’, any place where people assembled, from where <em>the call went out</em> (ἐκ “out” καλέω “I call”); but Coleridge takes it in a special sense. The ‘out’ means ‘out of this world’; and the communion of this ‘Church’ is ‘the communion of such as are called out of the world’. I don’t honestly know whether STC means, by this, people who have departed the world altogether—who have, that is, died and gone to Christ; or whether he means people who have done the hermetic or monkish thing and left behind all worldly things. It probably doesn’t matter, since the emphasis here is not on this ‘out-of-the-world’ of the church; it’s on the in-the-world version of the church, the church that engages with actual peoples’ day-to-day living, and for that Coleridge coins the term ‘enclesia’, the ‘in-called’, what STC defines as ‘an order of men chosen in and of the realm, and constituting an estate of that realm’
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The second thing is the Big Idea to have come out of this book—the ‘clerisy’. Here’s what the chapter says:<br />
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The <span style="font-size: x-small;">CLERISY</span> of the nation, or national church, in its primary acceptation and original intention, comprehended the learned of all denominations;—the sages and professors of the law and jurisprudence, of medicine and physiology, of music, of military and civil architecture, of the physical sciences, with the mathematical as the common <em>organ</em> of the preceding; in short, all the so called liberal arts and sciences, the possession and application of which constitute the civilization of a country, as well as the Theological. The last was, indeed, placed at the head of all; and of good right did it claim the precedence. But why? Because under the name of Theology, or Divinity, were contained the interpretation of languages; the conservation and tradition of past events; the momentous epochs, and revolutions of the race and nation; the continuation of the records; logic, ethics, and the determination of ethical science, in application to the rights and duties of men in all their various relations, social and civil; and lastly, the ground-knowledge, the prima scientia as it was named, —<span style="font-size: x-small;"> PHILOSOPHY</span>. [47]
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In the first edition this definition gets hived off under the slightly strange sub-header ‘<span style="font-size: x-small;">PARAGRAPH THE FIRST</span>’. It’s been a pretty influential notion, not least in my own day-job profession of ‘Academic’. Because STC is clear that the duties of the clerisy are largely pedagogic: primarily to dispose of ‘materials of <span style="font-size: x-small;">NATIONAL EDUCATION</span>, the <em>nisus formativus</em> of the body politic, the shaping and informing spirit, which, educing or eliciting the latent man in all the natives of the soil, trains them up to be citizens of the country, free subjects of the realm’. ‘Nisus formativus’ means the forming force, the formative urge; and ‘educing’ (Latin: <em>educo</em> ‘I lead out, I draw out; I raise up, I erect”; via <em>e</em> ‘from, out of’; and <em>duco</em> ‘I lead, I conduct’) puts me in mind of my old English teacher at school, Mr Broadstairs. ‘Education is a drawing out, not a putting in’ he would announce ringingly: 'drawing <em>out</em>! not putting <em>in</em>!' ... and, ignoring our titters, he would then proceed to cram in as much as he could of the stuff we needed to pass the exams. Ah, the joys of a state school education.
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So, yes; the UK’s reliance on church schools (true to this day, although to a lesser extent than was the case in the 1820s) is a function of this idea of Coleridge’s clerisy: compare the resolutely secular school provision of France. But more to the point the development and expansion of the university sector in the later 19th and throughout the 20th-centuries was—right up to the Thactherite redefinition of education as a function of market-force-led adding value in a strictly monetary sense—a concerted and large-scale attempt precisely <em>to realise a non-clerical clerisy</em>, to create a new class—the academics—that would function as a British intelligentsia, with these larger Coleridgean ideals in mind.
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I’ll come back to the notion of the ‘clerisy’ in a moment. First a quick scan through chapter 6 (51-63)—a brief history of Henry VIII’s Reformation, and how it went wrong: in a nutshell, the pre-Reformation church had abused the Nationality for its own glory; Henry VIII, having seized the Nationality, <i>should</i> have returned this wealth to the nation by spending liberally on [1] ‘universities and the great schools of liberal learning’, [2], paying for ‘a pastor, presbyter, or <em>parson</em> in every parish and [3] ‘a schoolmaster in every parish’<br />
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— namely, in producing and re-producing, in preserving, continuing, and perfecting, the necessary sources and conditions of national civilization. [56]
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But Henry didn’t do this. Luckily for Coleridge’s purposes, he is not presenting the actual church Henry set-up as the model. ‘Let it be borne in mind,’ he reminds the reader, with some asperity, ‘that my object has been to present the <em>idea</em> of a National Church, not the history of <em>the</em> Church established in this nation.’ [61].
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Chapter 7 (63-71; ‘Regrets and Apprehensions’) notes that the nation is more prosperous than it was in Tudor times. Despite the absence of a ‘clerisy’ in the fullest sense, merchants, financiers, lawers and other professionals have grown rich. But, in rather clotted polemical style, STC spends this chapter attacking this wealth:<br />
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Yea, the machinery of the wealth of the nation made up of the wretchedness, disease and depravity of those who should constitute the strength of the nation! Disease, I say, and vice, while the wheels are in full motion; but at the first stop the magic wealth-machine is converted into an intolerable weight of pauperism! [65]
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The antiquated cod-Biblicalisms of this aside, there’s a strikingly up-to-date <i>Occupy</i>-esque outrage about all this. Coleridge lays into ‘Game Laws, Corn Laws, Cotton Factories, Spitalfields, the tillers of the land paid by poor rates, and the remainder of the population mechanized into engines for the manufactory of new rich men’. He attacks ‘a swarm of clever, well-informed men’ governing without wisdom or heart—‘Despotism of finance in government … and hardness of heart in political economy’ [69], and points to the fruit of such behaviour in mass alcoholism and a huge explosion in crime:<br />
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Gin consumed by paupers to the value of about eighteen millions yearly: … crimes quadrupled for the whole country, and in some counties decupled.
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None of this was mere rhetoric. In the 1820s 14 million gallons of gin were being consumed annually [<span style="font-size: x-small;">Peter Mathias, <em>The Brewing Industry in England, 1700-1830</em> (Cambridge Univ. Press 1959), 375</span>]. Gin drinking was widely perceived as a social problem of long-standing, and one which had been exacerbated by the reduction of Gin Duty in 1826, which, by lowering the price, resulted in an increase in gin-related drunkenness. As for crime—well in 1809 5,330 criminal trials resulted in 3,238 prosecutions. In 1815 those numbers had risen to 7,818 and 4,883 respectively, and by 1829 (when STC was writing <em>Church and State</em>) the numbers were 18,675 and 13,261. ‘Quadrupled’, in other words, is no exaggeration. [<span style="font-size: x-small;">Figures for England and Wales, from B .R Mitchell, <em>British Historical Statistics</em> (Cambridge Univ. Press 1988), 783</span>]
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So: Britain was going to hell in a handcart. What to do? Chapter 8 has the answer: a proper reorientation of the potential of the Nationality. Coleridge proposes, in essence, a sort of ur-Welfare State, although one with a primary focus on (religiously led) education and only secondarily on the maintenance of paupers—and even then only those too old and infirm to work.<br />
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Determin[ing] the nationalty to the following objects: 1<span style="font-size: x-small;">st</span>. To the maintenance of the Universities and the great liberal schools: 2<span style="font-size: x-small;">ndly</span>. To the maintenance of a pastor and schoolmaster in every parish: 3<span style="font-size: x-small;">rdly</span>. To the raising and keeping in repair of the churches, schools, &c., and, Lastly: to the maintenance of the proper, that is, the infirm, poor whether from age or sickness. [72]
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What’s interesting here, in hindsight, is that STC is not making the case for what actually (in essence) came to pass—that general taxation should be used to fund a welfare state. He’s adamant that the clerisy should be, at heart, agents of the National Church, not of the secular government. He concludes chapt. 8 with a gushing panegyric to the Church of England, lifted from <em>Biographia Literaria</em> (‘Protestant Church Establishment, <em>this</em> it is, which the patriot, and the philanthropist, who would fain unite the love of peace with a faith in the progressive amelioration of mankind, cannot estimate at too high a price—It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire’ and so on). Chapter 9 stresses the things that would disqualify a person from being a member of the clerisy: two big no-nos, one bigger than the other (it would be ‘a foul treason against the most fundamental rights and interests of the realm’):<br />
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what the reader will have anticipated, that the first absolute disqualification is allegiance to a foreign power: the second, the abjuration — under the command and authority of this power … — of that bond, which more than all other ties connects the citizen with his country. [83-84]
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A third thing creeps in as this chapter proceeds: the ‘compulsory celibacy’ of the clergy. No need for the clerisy to so limit their procreative urges. It is, clearly enough, a dig at the Catholics, this.
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We’re now declaredly into the ‘practical conclusion’, as Coleridge calls it, of the volume. Chapter 10 praises the necessity of the King as a unifying point for the nation: ‘as the head of the National Church,or Clerisy, and the protector and supreme trustee of the <span style="font-size: x-small;">NATIONALTY</span>’. STC makes several points in this chapter. Here's one:<br />
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The first condition then required, in order to a sound constitution of the Body Politic, is a due proportion of the free and permeative life and energy of the nation to the organized powers brought within containing channels.
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These two forces (‘free and permeative’ on the hand, ‘containing channels and organizing powers’ on the other) need to be in balance, but that balance can’t be relied upon to happen naturally. That’s why a monarch is needful, to adjudicate. And so to chapter 11, on the powers of Parliament and the necessary limitations of same, with the emphasis on the latter. Finally chapter 12 sums up: Parliament on its own is too fallible, too subject to the ‘fluctuating majorities’ of the popular vote—‘an Omnipotency which ha[s] so little claim to Omniscience’. As for the Lords, they may ‘be reasonably presumed to feel a sincere and lively concern, but who, the experience of ages might teach us, are not the class of persons most likely to study, or feel a deep concern in, the interests here spoken of, in either sense of the term <span style="font-size: x-small;">CHURCH</span>; — i.e. whether the interests be of a kingdom “not of the World”.
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Knowing this, our ancestors chose to place their reliance on the honour and conscience of an individual, whose comparative height, it was believed, would exempt him from the gusts and shifting currents, that agitate the lower region of the political atmosphere. [119]
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And the book concludes with a consideration of whether the King’s coronation oath restricts him from giving royal assent to the emancipation of Catholics. I say ‘concludes’: not for the first time in his publishing career Coleridge adds lengthy appendices—two long disquisitions on the ‘Idea of the Christian Church’ and another on the ‘Third’ Church ‘Neither National nor Universal’, which puts the boot into Roman Catholicism. But, lacking world enough and time, I won’t go into those two essays here. Then there’s a ‘Letter to a Friend’, about the specifics of the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Bill (the second edition entitled this ‘<span style="font-size: x-small;">AIDS TO A RIGHT APPRECIATION OF THE ACT ADMITTING CATHOLICS TO SIT IN BOTH HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT</span>’) and a glossary explaining the terminology of the preceding letter. The volume ends with a long letter, originally sent to Edward Coleridge in July 1826, here added-in as ‘Appendix’, which touches on some of the fundamentals of STC’s own faith. Phew!
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Tomorrow I'll post some thoughts on the whole thing, with particular attention to contemporary relevance etc.Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-29455013894040903952022-09-28T10:00:00.007-07:002022-09-30T09:22:10.929-07:00Reading Coleridge’s “Church and State”: Part One (Chaps 1-4)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Andrew Elfenbein has it right. ‘Victorianists,’ he says, ‘have not been entirely ignorant of Coleridge's tract ...’ Is there a but? There is a but:<br />
<blockquote><i>
But</i> it is generally relegated to the tomb of intellectual history, a victim of concise paraphrase. Paraphrases do not get Coleridge wrong, but they kill off his intellectual seriousness, ambition, and emotional longing. They do not convey why so many Victorians cared as much as they did about what Coleridge wrote. [<span style="font-size: x-small;">Elfenbein, ‘</span><a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/27793691"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Samuel Taylor Coleridge, <em>On the Constitution of the Church and State</em> (1829)</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;">’, <em>Victorian Review</em> 35:1 (Spring 2009), 19</span>]
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And care they did! This short book directly inspired and informed the political and social theories of John Stuart Mill, Thomas Arnold, Matthew Arnold, <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sidgwick/">Henry Sidwick</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Denison_Maurice">F D Maurice</a> and many others. Gladstone called the book 'masterly', and attempted to govern by its principles.
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It's a book that really deserves to be better known; and for that reason I’m now going to lay out precisely the kind of paraphrase Elfenbein is deprecating in that opening quotation. I’m doing so because it seems to me a useful first step in getting a hold of <em>Church and State</em>. This work, as Peter Allen says, ‘became his most immediately influential work, has inspired a succession of distinguished social critics and remains essential reading in the history of thought on educated elites’; but he’s also spot-on that ‘as descriptive catalogues go Church and State is brilliantly suggestive and maddeningly elliptical.’
[<span style="font-size: x-small;">Peter Allen, ‘</span><a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709777"><span style="font-size: x-small;">S. T. Coleridge's Church and State and the Idea of an Intellectual Establishment</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;">’, <em>Journal of the History of Ideas</em> 46:1 (1985), 89-106; 89</span>] So let me quickly step through the argument of this short book. I’m going to refer to the different chapters, even thought STC’s first edition doesn’t divide the work that way—Henry Nelson Coleridge’s 1839 edition, issued five years after Coleridge’s death, replaces the first two subheadings (‘Prefatory Remarks’, ‘Concerning the Right Idea of the Constitution’ and so on) with ‘Chapter 1’, ‘Chapter 2’, and then cuts up the remaining block of text into another 10 sections numbered chapters 3-12. And I shall follow him, even though it’s the first edition (<a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_FTM_6q6G3gC&dq=coleridge%20constitution%20of%20church%20and%20state&pg=PP9#v=onepage&q=coleridge%20constitution%20of%20church%20and%20state&f=false">available free online in its entirety from Google Books</a>) from which I’m working here.
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Chapter 1 starts with some remarks on the historical circumstance out of which the book was written: ‘the Bill lately passed for the admission of Roman Catholics into the Legislature’ (which is to say: the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Emancipation#Developments_of_the_1820s">Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829</a>). But the third paragraph gets to the meat of the issue without further to-doing. STC defines what he means by ‘Constitution’ and by ‘National Church’. <br />
<blockquote>The true Idea of a <span style="font-size: x-small;">CONSTITUTION</span>, and, likewise, of a <span style="font-size: x-small;">NATIONAL CHURCH</span>. And in giving the essential character of the latter, I shall briefly specify its distinction from the Church of Christ, and its contra-distinction from a third form, which is neither national nor Christian, but irreconcileable with, and subversive of, both. [3]</blockquote>
The latter is a three-part distinction. There is the actual Church (in Coleridge's case the Anglican Church) made up of its priests and its congregation, owning certain properties such as church-buildings, and performing religious services on Sundays and at other times, and doing all the things Anglicanism does—from organising fêtes on up. That’s A. Then there’s a kind of spiritual perfection of ‘the Church’, what it means to be a member of the body of Christianity in the eyes of God, under the species of eternity. That’s B. Then, Coleridge insists, there is a <em>third</em> thing meant by ‘Church’, which is somehow strung between the two. Park that idea; we’ll come back to it. For now we need to know what STC means by ‘idea’. Not Platonic form—not ‘generally held belief about’ a thing and not an notion abstracted from specific examples of a thing in the world. Coleridge means something much more teleological.<br />
<blockquote>
By an <em>idea</em>, I mean, (in this instance) that conception of a thing, which is not abstracted from any particular state, form, or mode, in which the thing may happen to exist at this or at that time; nor yet generalized from any number or succession of such forms or modes; but which is given by the knowledge of <em>its ultimate aim</em>. [3]</blockquote>
STC’s <em>idea</em> of the state, and of the Church, is where these two things should be going. In the next paragraph STC says that many people can <em>conceive</em> of what is meant by Church and State, few possess the <em>idea</em> of either. Most people, he says, do not possess an idea, they ‘are possessed by it’ [4]. I'm not sure about that myself, but OK.
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He gives the example of Rousseau’s Social Contract. As a ‘conception’, STC says, which is to say, positing it as something that literally and historically happened, it is clearly bobbins: ‘at once false and foolish’. No two humans ever signed such a contract, thereby inspiring others to structure society according to the rational equity of contractualism. But, says Coleridge, as an <em>idea</em>, the social contract is a powerful good.<br />
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But if instead of the <em>conception</em> or <em>theory</em> of an original social contract, we say the <em>idea</em> of an ever-originating social contract, this is so certain and so indispensable, that it constitutes the whole ground of the difference between subject and serf, between a commonwealth and a slave-plantation. And this, again, is evolved out of the yet higher idea of <em>person</em> in contra-distinction from <em>thing</em>—all social law and justice being grounded on the principle that a person can never, but by his own fault, become a thing, or, without grievous wrong, be treated as such; and the distinction consisting in this, that a thing may be used altogether and merely as the <em>means</em> to an end; but the person must always be included in the <em>end</em>. [7-8]</blockquote>
This, of course, is a Kantian ethics; and quite right too. What’s distinctively Coleridgean is the notion that the ‘social contract’ is valuable inasmuch as it tends towards an ideal future in which we contract freely with one another as autonomous individuals, each treating each always as an ends in itself rather than as a means to an end.
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Likewise, STC insists, with ‘free will’; it makes more ethical sense to think of this as an ‘idea’ than to delve into the brain chemistry of it as an actual fact. And thus, says Coleridge, is the ‘Constitution’ of the State. There is no actual British Constitution; but the <em>idea</em> of the Constitution is demonstrated by ‘our whole history from Alfred onward’ [11]. It is a principle, and thus exists ‘in the only way in which a principle can exist,—in the minds and consciences of the persons whose duties it prescribes, and whose rights it determines. In the same sense that the sciences of arithmetic and of geometry, that mind, that life itself, have reality ; the Constitution has real existence, and does not the less exist in reality, because it both <em>is</em>, and <em>exists as</em>, an <span style="font-size: x-small;">IDEA</span>.’ He goes on to compare ‘life’ as determined by ‘a vital principle’; and draws a parallel with the planets orbiting the sun. Kepler and Newton established certain facts about orbital mechanics, which is all to the good; ‘but the <em>principle</em> of gravity, the <em>law</em> in the material creation, the idea of the Creator, is pre-supposed in order to the existence, yea, to the very conception of the existence, of matter itself.’ [14]
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He ends the first chapter by lamenting the potential confusion of the term ‘State’. There are, he says, two senses in which the word signifies: there’s a larger sense, where State means ‘the entire realm, including the Church’ and a narrower sense in which the State is the secular architecture of social life, distinguished from the spiritual and religious architecture we call Church.
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Chapter 2 picks up on this, and explores ‘the Idea of a State in the larger sense of the term, introductory to the constitution of the
State in the narrower sense’. The main theme here is that the state is a balance—I’m tempted to say, a dialectic—of ‘permanence’ and ‘progression’. He glances at Roman history before setting out his stall: there are two main power blocs in modern society: on the one hand ‘the agricultural or possessors of land’ and on the other the ‘citizens’ (‘the mercantile, the manufacturing, the distributive, and the professional bodies, under the common name of citizens’). The former, broadly, want to keep things as they have always been; the latter, broadly, want to change things—as they see it, to change things for the better. The chapter then gallops through several historical examples: Dante’s Florence was a free principality, but Austria and Spain have degraded Italy into a feudal state, running-down commercial innovation and concentrating all power in the landowners' hands, such that Italy is now a nation of slaves ‘from the Alps to the Straits of Messina’. Britain, STC argues, is better placed: because the landowners own half the means of legislation—that is, the House of Lords—and the citizens own the other half—the House of Commons—with the monarch, by granting or withholding royal assent, acting as a kind of ‘beam’ or halfway point.<br />
<blockquote>
That harmonious balance of the two great correspondent, at once supporting and counterpoising, interests of the State, its permanence, and its progression; that balance of the landed and the personal interests was to be secured by a legislature of two Houses; the first consisting wholly of barons or landholders, permanent and hereditary senators; the second of the knights or minor barons, elected by, and as the representatives of, the remaining landed community, together with the burgesses, the representatives of the commercial, manufacturing, distributive, and professional classes, — the latter (the elected burgesses) constituting the major number. The king, meanwhile, in whom the executive power is vested, it will suffice at present to consider as the beam of the constitutional scales. [27]
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And so to the two brief chapters three: ‘on the National Church’ [30-35] and four ‘the Hebrew Commonwealth’ [35-42]. Here Coleridge sketches a history of religious establishment, drawing on the origins of ‘the church’ amongst the Scandinavian, Celtic, Gothic and Semitic tribes. This strikes me as a slightly eccentric narrative, but fair enough: nations get established, and land is distributed between ‘individual warriors’ and ‘heads of families’ and suchlike aristocrats; but the whole wealth of the land is not snaffled up by these people; a ‘reserve’ (what STC called the ‘Nationality’, opposed to the ‘Propriety’ of individual estates) is set aside ‘for the nation itself’. Chapter 4 then elaborates one specific example of this from the history of Israel. Twelve tribes, eleven of which divided the ‘Propriety’ amongst themselves; but Moses insists each have to pay a tithe to the tribe of Levi, who are intrusted not only with the material ‘Nationality’ of this commonwealth but also, and more importantly, with the duty of advance the ‘moral and intellectual character’ of the nation.
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The implication of this chapter is that Coleridge could tell a similar history concerning ‘the Celtic, Gothic, and Scandinavian’, but with two crucial salient differences. One is that these tribes have been historically feudal in essence, and more-or-less hostile to the mercantile and professional classes—where with Solomon the Jewish people actively embraced such (as we would say nowadays) ‘wealth-creating’ opportunities—hence all the Jewish merchants, money-lenders and professionals. The other is that these other tribes were polytheistic where the Jews were monotheistic. Both these things, STC thinks, are relevant to the history of Christianity.<br />
<blockquote>Relatively to the Jewish polity, the Jehovah was their covenanted king: and if we draw any inference from the former, the Christian sense of the term, it should be this—that God is the unity of every nation; that the convictions and the will, which are one, the same, and simultaneously acting in a multitude of individual agents, are not the birth of any individual; “that when the people speak loudly and unanimously, it is from their being strongly impressed by the godhead or the demon. Only exclude the (by no means extravagant) supposition of a demoniac possession, and <em>then</em> Vox Populi Vox Dei.” [44]
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That last bit loosely quoted from William Wordsworth’s <em>Convention of Cintra</em> (1808). Anyhow, Coleridge closes this chapter with the notion that ‘it was in the name of the KING, in whom both the propriety and the nationalty ideally centered.’<div><br /></div><div>[My <a href="http://samueltaylorbloggeridge.blogspot.com/2022/09/reading-coleridges-church-and-state_0949136116.html" target="_blank">read-through of chapters 5-12 is here</a>.] <br />
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</div>Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-79409528400861768962022-09-14T16:01:00.000-07:002022-09-14T16:01:00.151-07:00Prickett's "Words and The Word" (1986) and Coleridge<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Stephen Prickett's <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/be/academic/subjects/literature/literary-theory/words-and-word-language-poetics-and-biblical-interpretation?format=PB&isbn=9780521368384"><i>Words and "The Word": Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation</i></a> (1986) is about more than Coleridge; far more than I can touch on here. But I wanted, in a slight departure for this blog, to review what he <i>does</i> say about Coleridge. It's a pretty famous work, of course; at least among those who explore the intersections between scripture and literature, although it probably gets cited more often by theologians than literary critics.<br />
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<b>:1:</b></div>
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<i>Words and The Word</i> is an unusually wide-ranging work of literary and theological scholarship, very dense (or, if you prefer, rich) and as such it really does resist easy summary. In a nutshell, Prickett goes back to the eighteenth-century to trace the intricate lines of thought that sought to establish how we should read the Bible, and by extension what mode is the best one in which to approach the divine. He argues that nowadays there is a wall (a 'glacial moraine', he calls it, following <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Usener">Hermann Usener</a>: <i>gletscherwall</i>) separating biblical studies and the study of literature. He traces this back to the influence of Germany had on the establishment of universities in the later 19th-century, but notes that, for a short time, things looked different in England:<br />
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The work of Robert Lowth had made possible a new aesthetic appreciation of biblical poetry, and the fact that the first generation of English Romantic poets, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, so far from rejecting Christianity like Humboldt were devout Christians of one kind or another, helped them to find in the Bible far more powerful sources of inspiration than their German contemporaries or their immediate predecessors of the Enlightenment. [1-2]
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Nonetheless, Prickett thinks, by the end of the 19th-century, and for various reasons, 'the same wall that divided German scholarship had been successfully transplanted into English institutions and thought'. The consequence of this, he argues, has been a prolonged crisis not just in biblical hermeneutics, but literature as well ('in particular, poetry') which he thinks 'has also suffered a crisis of meaning in the twentieth century' [2]. The book as a whole is a superbly fine-grained, sometimes rather labyrinthine, discussion of the best way of apprehending the biblical 'word': science, hermeneutics, cultural contextualisation, 'the religious and the poetic', paradox, prophesy and metaphor.
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According to Prickett <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lowth">Robert Lowth</a> plays a key role in this larger story, on account of his 1754 treatise <i>Praelectiones Academicae de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum</i>, later translated into English by George Gregory as <i>Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews</i> (1787), <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hdYMAAAAIAAJ&dq=Lectures%20on%20the%20Sacred%20Poetry%20of%20the%20Hebrew&pg=PR1#v=onepage&q=Lectures%20on%20the%20Sacred%20Poetry%20of%20the%20Hebrew&f=false">and very often reprinted</a>. 'Epoch making', Prickett calls this volume [41]. Now, one of the things Lowth argues is that a <i>prose</i> translation of the Hebrew songs can capture perfectly well many of the <i>poetic</i> qualities of the original. Prickett thinks this directly informed Wordsworth’s thesis, so important in the 1800 Preface to <i>Lyrical Ballad</i>s, that poetry and prose are not opposites, and that more than mere metrical regularity defines the former—dignity, passion, authenticity and so on. Coleridge discusses precisely this in the <i>Biographia</i>, including some of his own prose-poetic Biblical translations. It’s a cliché to note (though that doesn’t stop it being true) that Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ was one of the modern era's single most influential interventions into poetics; and for Prickett this has implications for how we read the Bible as much as it has for how poetry gets written. So for example, in his discussion of Manley Hopkins, Prickett notes that ‘for Hopkins the rediscovery of the Bible as “poetry” did not mean the progressive rediscovery of formal distinctions between verse and prose so much as a rediscovery of the <em>meaning</em> behind the traditional constructs.’ [Prickett, 119]. For Lowth, the calm and rational mind expresses itself in a way we might nowadays call 'scientific'—'the language of reason is cool, temperate, rather humble than elevated, well-arranged and perspicuous'—where where the passionate and agitated mind falls naturally into poetry:<br />
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The language of the passions is totally different:—the conceptions burst out in a turbid stream, expressive in a manner of the internal conflict; the more vehement break out in hasty confusion; they catch (without search or study) whatever is impetuous, vivid, or energetic. In a word, reason speaks literally, the passions poetically. The mind, with whatever passion it be agitated, remains fixed upon the object that excited it; and while it is earnest to display it, is not satisfied with a plain and exact description; but adopts one agreeable to its own sensations, splendid or gloomy, jocund or unpleasant. For the passions are naturally inclined to amplification; they wonderfully magnify and exaggerate whatever dwells upon the mind, and labour to express it in animated, bold, and magnificent terms. This they commonly effect by two different methods; partly by illustrating the subject with splendid imagery, and partly by employing new and extraordinary forms of expression, which are indeed possessed of great force and efficacy. [Lowth, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=V0AAAAAAYAAJ&dq=Lowth%20%22a%20turbid%20stream%22&pg=PA190#v=onepage&q=Lowth%20%22a%20turbid%20stream%22&f=false"><i>Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews</i>, 140</a>]
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One idea that runs through the work of many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers is that 'poetry is the natural language of religion', and that 'the Bible was to be treated as belonging to a higher, more sublime order of discourse than prose', which latter was 'an inferior and late medium fit only for describing the mundane and practical world of everyday affairs' [Prickett, 40]. The business of translating Hebrew and Greek into English becomes more than a series of practical textual difficulties; it stands for a chasm between divine revelation and mundane existence that is, in a strict sense of the term, sublime. Samuel Tongue summarises:<br />
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However, as Prickett claims, ‘…the <em>idea</em> of a language of primal of original participation in this sense is only possible to an age that no longer possesses it.’ A sense of the ‘original text’ in an ‘original language’ becomes a major project of discovery and animating absence for both types of Bible. The historical critics attempt an archaeology of biblical linguistics to excavate the authority of the ‘original’; poets and writers go on to attempt a new sense of the ‘originality; of religious-poetic genius in the sublime aesthetic authority of the poetic Bible. [Samuel Tongue, <em>Between Biblical Criticism and Poetic Rewriting: Interpretative Struggles over Genesis 32:22-32</em> (Leiden: Brill 2014), 41; quoting Prickett, 86]
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'Animating absence' is a well-chosen phrase. This necessary belatedness, this (Prickett doesn't use this term, but there <i>was</i> a lot of this sort of stuff about in 1986) <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/#H7">aporia</a>, is in an important sense constitutive of Christianity. <i>Words and The Word</i> doesn't discuss the <i>Qu'ran</i>—if Prickett wrote the book nowadays, I wonder if he would have done this—but the contrast is a fascinating one. Muslims are required to apprehend their holy book in its original Arabic, a feature of the core Islamic belief in the <i>Qu'ran</i>'s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27jaz">'inimitability' or <i>I'jaz</i></a>. There's really nothing like this in contemporary Christianity. Even self-professed literalists in as-it-might-be the US Bible Belt rest their claims that scripture must be interpreted literally on <i>translations </i>of scripture, rather than on the original Hebrew or Greek, languages very few of them are inclined to acquire. Islam is not like this; and one of the things I take Prickett to be arguing (in his roundabout way) is that in a sense it is this very <i>non</i>-inimitability that has proved constitutive of the modern development of Christianity. Not in the sense that Romantics like Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey felt licensed to disregard the 'original' in their poetic recreations (on the contrary, Prickett is clear that 'the most noticeable feature of the English "poetic" theological tradition leading from Lowth to the Romantics is its essential <i>conservatism</i>' [124]); but in the sense that a poetic apprehension of religion opens up rather than closes down 'meaning', that it is about animating absences, or opacities, as much as semantic presences.<br />
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Indeed, when considering this question Prickett can get very, well, prickly. He has a particular dislike for both the <i>New English Bible</i> and the <i>Good News Bible</i>, both of which he considers not only manifestly inferior to the <i>King James Version</i>, but based on a fundamental misunderstanding, viz. that it is possible to 'write out the meaning plainly' of the Bible.<br />
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This belief that religious experience, and the historic record of mankind's deepest questionings and insights can only be adequately described today in the slack, verbose and cliché-ridden language of international communication would be disconcerting if it were not ... so evidently self-defeating. How far is it possible, in the words of the <i>Good News Bible</i>'s Preface, 'to use language that is natural, clear, simple and unambiguous', when the Bible is <i>not about</i> things that are natural, clear, simple and unambiguous? or for the linguistically-enfeebled modern theologians struggling on the <i>New English Bible</i> to 'write out the meaning plainly' of what to the taut and concise translators of the seventeenth-century was essentially ambiguous and obscure? [Prickett, 10]
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Ouch. This is a little unfair, I think: neither the NEB nor the GNB present themselves as the <i>only</i> works capable of 'adequately' describing the Bible; and the belief that the bible is intrinsically complex, elusive and opaque, whilst flattering the kind of person (like me, I confess; like Prickett, I assume) who tends to valorise difficulty and density, surely doesn't really describe the bible <i>as such</i>, many portions of which are perfectly clear and intelligible. There's clearly merit in making scripture more accessible to the sort of people who would be turned away by the difficulty of the KJV. But you take his point, and there's something rather stirring in his desire to realign the Bible and poetry, or more modestly the Bible and literary criticism, in order ‘to restore a wholeness of approach that has been disastrously fragmented over the past hundred and fifty years’ [197].
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<b>:2:</b></div>
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What, in this larger context, does Prickett have to say about Coleridge? <i>Words and The Word</i> returns to my man several times, and could have done a lot more with him. He doesn't, for instance, discuss STC's close friendship with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_Hurwitz">Hyman Hurwitz</a>, the preeminent Hebraicist of his era in Britain, a friendship that included Coleridge editing and correcting the English of Hurwitz's <i>Vindiciae Hebraicae, being a Defence of the Hebrew Scriptures as a Vehicle of Revealed Religion</i> (1820) and translating Hurwitz's lengthy Hebrew lament 'On the Death of the Princess Charlotte' (1817). But Prickett does note how Coleridge located a wholeness of expressive poetic symbolicism in scripture, and quotes the famous passage from <i>The Statesman's Manual</i> to the effect that<br />
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the histories and political economy of the present and preceding century partake in the general contagion of its mechanic philosophy, and are the product of an unenlivened generalizing understanding. In the Scriptures they are the living <i>educts</i> of the imagination; of that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense, and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors. [LS, 29]
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Prickett discusses this passage, but I think misses a nuance. In his own copy of <i>The Statesman's Manual</i>, Coleridge scratched out 'educts' and wrote-in 'Produce', and then added this marginalium: 'Or perhaps these μóρφωματα of the mechanic Understanding as distinguished from the 'ποίησεις' of the imaginative Reason might be named <i>Products</i> in antithesis to <i>Produce</i>—or Growths.' The distinction between the two Greek terms, also developed in the <i>Biographia</i>, is elaborated <a href="http://amechanicalart.blogspot.co.uk/">in the headnote to this blog</a>.<br />
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I take it that Coleridge sees no functional difference between an <i>educt</i>, or a force that draws something out of us, and a ποίησεις or 'making', a force that 'produces' something <i>in</i> us. Coming out and going in are, he thinks, the same in this case. Or to be more precise, where the sacred 'myths' (in a non-judgmental sense of the word) of scripture are concerned these actions are indistinguishable. Prickett doesn't go into any of that, and when he says 'Biblical narrative ... lives as extensions from the creative or "poetic" imagination' [44] he's only sort-of right: I think Coleridge has in mind a more reciprocal arrangement than is implied by 'extension'. But Prickett is surely right that Coleridge sees the poetic symbol as essentially 'bi-focal', 'always partaking' (to quote <i>The Statesman's Manual</i> again) 'of the Reality which it renders intelligible' <i>and</i> 'abid[ing] itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative'.
<br />
<blockquote>
A symbol is thus the opposite of a generalization. The latter is a kind of lowest common denominator, deduced by the understanding from outward events according to the dead arrangement of a mechanical philosophy. In contrast, to describe a symbol, he uses the metaphor of a lens: it is 'translucent'—focusing the universal generality through the concreteness of a particular example. [Prickett, 44]</blockquote>
'There is more [in it] that <i>finds me</i>,' was how Coleridge described the Bible 'than in all other books put together.' This is a beautifully reciprocal way of putting it: you go into your Bible, and your Bible goes into you. You look for things in the Bible; the Bible finds things in you.
<br />
<br />
In the 'Book of Nature' chapter Prickett brings Coleridge back in. There's a good account of his reading of Horne Tooke's linguistic system: 'Tooke believed that he had shown the stable and unchangeable nature of words. Coleridge fell delight upon his "proof" and rapidly deduced the opposite: the flux and constant change of language. Hartley had assumed a fixed relationship between words and ideas; in attempting to prune back all words to their roots, Tooke had shown Coleridge the astonishing diversity and luxury of the undergrowth that had sprung up' [Prickett, 136-37]. Prickett quotes one of STC's letters:<br />
<blockquote>
Are not words etc parts and germinations of the plant? And what is the Law of the Growth?—In something of this order I would endeavour to destroy the old antithesis of <i>Words and Things</i>, elevating, as it were, words into Things, and living Things too.
</blockquote>
This is another iteration of Coleridge attachment to the word-made-flesh Logos as the cornerstone of his religious and literary life. There's some stuff on desynonymy, from the 1819 'Philosophical Lectures' (which concept Paul Hamilton, in <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Coleridge_s_Poetics.html?id=hTusAAAAIAAJ"><i>Coleridge's Poetics</i></a> (1983) applies as the key to unlock the whole of Coleridge's thought, although not entirely convincingly), but just as things get going we read this:<br />
<blockquote>
One could say much more about Coleridge's theories of language. It is a fascinating subject and one that has by no means been fully explored. [138]
</blockquote>
And off we go elsewhere. A shame! Instead Prickett argues that most of Coleridge's attempts at desynonymising have failed to catch on. They 'proved over-subtle and too complex to have passed into the language':<br />
<blockquote>
His distinction between 'types' and 'symbols' has not survived; his attempt to anglicize the Kantian polarity of 'Reason' and 'understanding' survives only in relation to Idealist philosophy rather than in standard usage; and the carefully elaborated bnaries of <i>Church and State</i> such as 'opposite' and 'contrary' have not passed even into the technical vocabulary of dialectics whose terms are more often from Germany and France. [Prickett, 141]
</blockquote>
This is broadly right I think (although 'opposite' and 'contrary' do figure as distinctions in the Greimas square; and that's proved quite influential. Fredric Jameson seems to build all his books around them, for instance. Greimas, as a literature specialist, presumably knew about Coleridge). Aha, you're thinking: what about the distinction between 'imagination' and 'fancy', one of Coleridge's most influential ideas? Surely that piece of desynonymising has passed into popular currency? But Prickett's not having that:<br />
<blockquote>
This distinction has suffered a curious and possibly unique fate in the history of semantic separations. On the one hand it has become famous—every student of literature in the English-speaking world finds himself supposed to have heard of it; on the other, it is scarcely ever <i>used</i>, and never in common speech. [Prickett, 141]
</blockquote>
I'm not sure that's correct, actually; but it's hard to know how the assertion could be proved, one way or the other. Prickett thinks the imagination/fancy distinction actually folds three separate concepts into its dyad, which is correct (I think); and makes the case that the fusing of the two modes of imagination is actually what Coleridge intended (which I'm not so sure about). Prickett ties his discussion together with the logos ('the subordinate <i>logos</i> of nature is a repetition in the finite human mind of God's eternal act of creation' is how he puts it, which is tricky), and quotes <i>The Statesman's Manual</i> one last time:<br />
<blockquote>
The great book of Nature has been the music of gentle and pious minds in all ages, it is the <i>poetry</i> of all human nature.
</blockquote>
This leads into a kind of Prickettian peroration:<br />
<blockquote>
We are here very close to what Abrams has designtaed 'apocalypse by cognition'. Behind the continual Romantic reiteration of the 'poetic' as a metaphor for religious experience lies what we have seen is the very ancient association of poetry with divinity, but here the 'peculiar language of heaven' has been translated into a typology of psychological and spiritual states. As in Dante, poetry is a kind of imaginative psychopomp leading the soul towards a mystical and otherwise inexpressible bliss, or 'apocalypse', in which the partaker is caught up in the divine vision. But just as Schiller's 'third kingdom' of aesthetic liberation ... is not merely an internal state, but also a social one, so Coleridge's poetic 'apocalypse' is at once individual and communal. The difference is that Coleridge's mature theory of language and his later Trinitarian Anglicanism (as always in his thought, all elements are connected) no longer involves seeing this transformation as part of a future ideal state, but, in true New Testament style, proclaims that it is <i>already</i> here. [Prickett, 144]
</blockquote>
In other news: 'Imaginative Psychopomp of Bliss' is the name of my next band.Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-79306333598878125272022-09-12T01:23:00.000-07:002022-09-12T01:23:07.157-07:00"Non Sphinx sed Sphincter"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO2Lj20AWrEXFG93zCcowbriHnIDUkCKYgjGIGtLC-X5mQK2fCgJdmGhqKLQkE3RNCxTEycm10nvoTydMl_suDxA1_FyZ-99SygSK6ayYekKzMClIfw-KIhx1_pGWR0wEbtf1drtbO2Vg/s1600/sphinx.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="704" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO2Lj20AWrEXFG93zCcowbriHnIDUkCKYgjGIGtLC-X5mQK2fCgJdmGhqKLQkE3RNCxTEycm10nvoTydMl_suDxA1_FyZ-99SygSK6ayYekKzMClIfw-KIhx1_pGWR0wEbtf1drtbO2Vg/s400/sphinx.jpeg" width="275" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
In April-May 1802 was Coleridge revolving, among other things, a Miltonic something. In late April he jotted in his notebook an idea for a new poem: ‘Milton, a Monody in the metres of Samson's Choruses—only with more rhymes/—poetical influences—political—moral—Dr Johnson/’ [<i>Notebooks</i> 1:1155]. This particular poem never got itself written, but a few days later a grumpy, or perhaps wryly scatological, Coleridge jotted down the following:<br />
<blockquote>
Unintelligible? As well as call a Fart unintelligible / it tells you at once what it is—it is nonsense—enigmata quia non Sphinx sed Sphincter anus. [<i>Notebooks</i> 1:1184]
</blockquote>
<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Coleridge_Notebooks_Pt1_Pt2.html?id=Tv8ePwAACAAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y">Kathleen Coburn</a> translates the Latin (‘riddles not from the Sphinx but the sphincter’ is her version, omitting the entry's terminal word) but doesn't realise it's a quotation, and so speculates about his point: ‘abuse need not be intelligible in itself; it requires only to be recognized as abuse.’<br />
<br />
In fact the Latin is taken from Milton's sixth <i>Prolusion</i> ¶ 3, where an individual is ridiculed for uttering ‘<i>aenigmata quaedam nolens effutiat sua non Sphinx sed sphincter anus, quae medicis interpretanda non Oedipo</i>’, ‘riddles merely farted out, issuing not from the Sphinx but the anal sphincter, more fitting for doctors to interpret than Oedipus’. This wasn't exactly typical Miltonic Latin, although, as Anna Beer points out, neither was it wholly uncharacterstic. Beer notes that in Milton’s day ‘performing in Latin was a cornerstone of the Cambridge experience’ and that whilst most of Milton’s surviving Latin speeches are ‘dull’ (for instance: ‘Prolusion 1’ on the question of whether day or night is better, or ‘Prolusion 2’ on the music of the spheres) <i>Prolusion 6</i> is considerably saucier.<br />
<br />
In May 1628 Milton ‘was approached to be “Father” during a “salting”, a traditional feast of misrule, which focused on the initiation of young men into the college.’ Initiates might find themselves having to drink salted ale, but in addition to literal salt, there was metaphorical salt: ‘the occasion was full of <em>sales</em>, salty, sexual wit, redolent of licenced indecorum … Milton’s role in the Cambridge salting was as master of ceremonies. He was “Father” for the day, elevated above his “brothers” in this licensed folly.’ He started things off with a speech full of rudery (in Latin of course). Beer notes how tempting was the ‘opportunity for humour, particularly for a chaste figure like the nineteen-year-old John’. [Anna Beer, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nchEHcU6_ecC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Beer,+Milton:+Poet,+Pamphleteer+and+Patriot&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiN9bW72KneAhUJIMAKHQiUCM8Q6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q&f=false"><em>Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot</em></a> (London: Bloomsbury 2011), 75]. The Latin was first published in <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=eR7zGm1HfOgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Epistolarum+Familiarium+Liber+Unus&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi298mt16neAhXMAcAKHQy5A3UQ6AEINjAC#v=onepage&q=Epistolarum%20Familiarium%20Liber%20Unus&f=false"><i>Joannis Miltonii Angli, Epistolarum familiarium liber unus quibus accesserunt, ejusdem, jam olim in collegio adolescentis, prolusiones quaedam Oratoriae</i></a> (1674).<br />
<br />
It's quite cool to be able to track this allusion down, actually, not least because it suggests Coleridge wasn't necessarily jotting something down out of pique because <i>he</i> had been called ‘unintelligible’ (and indeed it's a little hard to make sense of the entry on those terms). Rather he's using the apparent dignity of Miltonic Latin to suggest that <i>everything means</i>, even if it only ‘means’ on the level of performing itself as non-meaning. And given that whatever prompted this notebook entry put STC in mind of this particular Miltonic prolusion, conceivably he was thinking about laughter as such: a sort of utterance that is, on the level of semantic content, merely unintelligble noises, but which nonetheless signifies, richly.Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-12665061185346282032022-09-02T07:46:00.001-07:002022-09-02T07:46:04.741-07:00Xanadu du du/Push pineapple/Shake the Tree<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmiLPCrUPAdu370YaQ1Kjyu39Y5PY1oKD-D-OWLFQ8V_EIHzL0ZRj8jQGaItaS55aomN51ze6-W1zTYuiaFiI581mf1m0R0NQvo_y8jogK54ha-VsQxdVatTI3xMMhZ0YYFL4Z8IPz4Rjcb8LKNNS26Okzpiqha3JFWZJFKBlmlXM37G_T2zKQLLc4/s976/xanadu.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="549" data-original-width="976" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmiLPCrUPAdu370YaQ1Kjyu39Y5PY1oKD-D-OWLFQ8V_EIHzL0ZRj8jQGaItaS55aomN51ze6-W1zTYuiaFiI581mf1m0R0NQvo_y8jogK54ha-VsQxdVatTI3xMMhZ0YYFL4Z8IPz4Rjcb8LKNNS26Okzpiqha3JFWZJFKBlmlXM37G_T2zKQLLc4/s320/xanadu.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>This post is basically some source-hunting for Coleridge's great poem. Yes, I have read John Livingstone Lowes's <i>The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination</i> (1927) thank you very much. This is stuff that's not in there, capacious though Lowes's book is.</div>
<br />
So, Coleridge's poem describes the layout of Kubla's palace as follows:<br />
<blockquote>
So twice five miles of fertile ground<br />
With walls and towers were girdled round:<br />
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,<br />
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;<br />
And here were forests ancient as the hills,<br />
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. (lines 6–11)</blockquote>
The so-called '<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubla_Khan#The_Crewe_Manuscript">Crewe Manuscript</a>' contains slightly different measurements:<br />
<blockquote>
So twice six miles of fertile ground<br />
With Walls and Towers were compass'd round.
</blockquote>
<em>Purchas His Pilgrimes</em> says:<br />
<blockquote>
In Xamdu 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
</blockquote>
Sixteen miles, not 'twice five' or 'twice six'. Why did Coleridge not write 'twice eight'? Impossible to know for sure, but it makes me wonder if reading Purchas happened <i>between</i> the writing of the poem and the writing of the preface, and the proximate inspiration for the poem wasn't a completely different book? Or maybe if Coleridge was reading other accounts of Xanadu at the same time? It seems unlikely I know: not only because the rhythm of 'In Xamdu did Cublai Can [build] a stately ...' seems so directly to inform the first line of Coleridge's poem, but also because of the use of the word 'fertile'. But bear with me. In Peter Heylyn's <i>Cosmographie</i> (1657) we read<br />
<blockquote>
the Great Chan's residence ... Xaindu the Royal Palace of the Emperour, of a foursquare figure, every side extending eight miles in length: within this Quadrant is another, whose sides are six miles long, and within that another of four miles square, which is the Palace it self, between those several Walls are Walks, Gardens, Orchards, Fish-ponds, places for all manner of exercise, and Parks, Forests, and Chases for all manner of Game ... and <i>Careansu</i>, near which there groweth an herb called <i>Chiny-Cathay</i>, of admirable effect against many Diseases; and so esteemed of by the Natives, that they value an ounce of this at a sack of Rhubarb. [Heylyn, <i>Cosmographie</i> (1657), 174]
</blockquote>
'Six miles' is one of the measurements in there, at any rate. Of course it's likely Heylyn derived this account from Purchas, and moreover that he mistakenly transcribed the latter's sixteen square mile plain as a square meauring eight miles along each side (which would be <i>sixty-four</i> square miles in total). But this account does have what Purchas doesn't: incense bearing trees. More, Purchas describes the Khan's palace as a kind of tent ('which may be moved from place to place'), where Heylyn appears to be describing a much more substantial and fixed structure, more akin to Coleridge's mighty dome. We do know that Coleridge read Heylyn (though he had a low opinion of him as a Christian: 'I scarcely know a more unamiable Churchman, as a writer, than, Dr. Heylin'), though I can't find specific evidence that he read this particular work. It was a famous and popular book, though, often reprinted.<br />
<br />
I also don't know if Coleridge ever came across <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=MkJm--lsCZAC&dq=Politia%20Regia&pg=PP7#v=onepage&q=Politia%20Regia&f=false">Giovanni Botero's <i>Politia Regia</i> (1620)</a>, and can't find any evidence that he did. At any rate, Botero himself <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Botero">is quite a famous figure</a>, and his book includes the following:<br />
<blockquote>
et cum Cublai Cham ex illis cognovisset, illam civitatem rebellem futuram, curavit adificari aliam, cui nomen est Taindu, illi vicinam, qua in ambitu 24. miliaria continet, praeter suburbia: quodque in Palatio, quod in Xaindu habet, multi Astrologi & Nicromantici sint. [Giovanni Botero, <i>Politia Regia: in qua totus imperiorum mundus eorum admiranda, census, aeraria, opes, vires, regimina et fundata stabilitataque</i> (1718), 106. <span style="font-size: x-small;">This is the later Latin edition of Botero's <i>Della ragion di Stato</i>, which he had completed in 1589. It is likely that Purchas derived his material on Xanadu from this book</span>.]</blockquote>
The Latin means: 'When Cublai Cham realised that the city planned, in the future, to rebel against him, he built another city, called <i>Taindu</i>, enclosing 24 miles within its circuit, including the suburbs, and in this palace, which is in <i>Xaindu</i>, are a great many astrologers and necromancers'. This suggests that Xaindu or Xanadu is the name of the province (Heylyn thinks it the name of the city; Purchas and Coleridge are ambiguous on the matter). According to Botero the name of the city itself is Taindu. That's quite interesting. Also, it seems the city is full of wizards. That could come in handy, in any future war Kubla Khan himself is planning ...Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-11705637573769236102022-08-21T01:00:00.044-07:002022-08-21T09:36:52.594-07:00“The Spot of Time is Eternity”: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Nicholas of Cusa<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZvK50lfZ5sUBMYK3qUSGpSo4bkGd-R_uHSW5kUToxopFtEiIHPkSqjVt1rqyeXDjp7SsPkViyyKjrHoikz4_17CX9gPhRtj1zp8XF0T2JzASNvKxuhV2JvW8ymuG4nhL-XsC2j2SrFXh6sxTnAusyePUnvFFUzD6sxIxFXdQpJ4Ar9Vok-mHehwwn/s1000/grasmere-lake-district-uk.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="625" data-original-width="1000" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZvK50lfZ5sUBMYK3qUSGpSo4bkGd-R_uHSW5kUToxopFtEiIHPkSqjVt1rqyeXDjp7SsPkViyyKjrHoikz4_17CX9gPhRtj1zp8XF0T2JzASNvKxuhV2JvW8ymuG4nhL-XsC2j2SrFXh6sxTnAusyePUnvFFUzD6sxIxFXdQpJ4Ar9Vok-mHehwwn/s320/grasmere-lake-district-uk.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p><b>:1:</b></p><p>From <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25599871" target="_blank">the earliest iterations of <i>The Prelude</i></a>, Wordsworth built his poem around various ‘Spots of Time’: each one a remembered moment, vividly recreated in Wordsworthian blank verse, of intense experience or apperception he had had in his life. These <i>spots</i> possess not just in-the-moment intensity, transcendent acuteness and borderline-inexpressible concentration of affect — they also have the capacity to <i>stay with</i> the individual, to be recalled later in life. Examples include: walking the streets of London and noticing a blind beggar, or young Wordsworth waiting, in blustery weather, for the horses to take him home for Christmas at the end of the school term — or in one of the most famous examples, even younger Wordsworth riding a pony through the lake district on a windy day and seeing a girl carrying a pitcher of water. </p><p>Wordsworth's account of this latter incident begins with a brief definition of the term:
</p><blockquote>
There are in our existence spots of time,<br />
That with distinct pre-eminence retain<br />
A renovating virtue, whence, depressed<br />
By false opinion and contentious thought,<br />
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,<br />
In trivial occupations, and the round<br />
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds<br />
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;<br />
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,<br />
That penetrates, enables us to mount,<br />
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen. [Prelude, 12:210–221]
</blockquote>
The talk of psychological or, if we prefer, spiritual nourishment and repair sells this experience hard as a ‘virtue’; but the actual spots of time themselves are neither happy nor sad in the moment, in the conventional senses of those words. In this example: Wordsworth recalls the day he went for a trip across country. He was a young child, barely old enough to hold a pony’s bridle, and his ride across the moors was to be accompanied by ‘an ancient servant of my father’s house’. But the child and his guide get separated, and young Wordsworth rides alone down into a valley where in older times there had stood a gibbet upon which a murderer had been executed and his body left to rot. The frame and bones are long gone, ‘but on the turf,/Hard by … some unknown hand had carved the murderer’s name.’ Alarmed by this grim memorial, young Wordsworth rides up out of the valley up to the higher ground:
<blockquote>
Then, reascending the bare common, saw<br />
A naked pool that lay beneath the hills,<br />
The beacon on the summit, and, more near,<br />
A girl, who bore a pitcher on her head,<br />
And seemed with difficult steps to force her way<br />
Against the blowing wind. It was, in truth,<br />
An ordinary sight; but I should need<br />
Colours and words that are unknown to man,<br />
To paint the visionary dreariness<br />
Which, while I looked all round for my lost guide,<br />
Invested moorland waste, and naked pool,<br />
The beacon crowning the lone eminence,<br />
The female and her garments vexed and tossed<br />
By the strong wind. [<i>Prelude</i>, 12:253–265]
</blockquote>
And that’s the moment. The phrase, ‘visionary dreariness’, there, is the nub of the matter: ‘it was, in truth,/An ordinary sight’ says the poet, as if he himself is as surprised as we are that something so trivial could affect him so hugely, and moreover that it continues to affect him: ‘I should need/Colours and words that are unknown to man,/To paint the visionary dreariness’. Markus Poetzsch excellent monograph <i>Visionary Dreariness</i> (Routledge 2006), frames the experience as a kind of Sublimity (his monograph’s subtitle is: <i>Readings in Romanticism’s Quotidian Sublime</i>). And of course the Sublime is, for both Burke and Kant, at root a glimpse of God, something towering over mundanity (though Burke is insistent the Sublime can inhere in small things as well as great, in scorpions as well as Mont Blanc and the night sky).<p></p>
In another celebrated spot of time from the poem — my favourite in the whole <i>Prelude</i>, actually — young Wordsworth the schoolboy is waiting at term’s end for the horses that will take him home from school for the holidays. The spot-of-time here inheres in a drystone wall, a single sheep, a ‘blasted hawthorne tree’ and strong wind, all of which the boy stares-at from his waiting place. Now: we later learn that this particular Christmas holiday was the time Wordsworth’s father died, which in a way associates the spot-of-time with death; but it is not that death, or Wordsworth’s reaction to it, that the poem itself recalls: it is very particularly the dreariness of the long wait, bored and anxious and constantly checking up the road to see if the horses are coming, staring at the sheep and the tree. The scene is ‘a dreary time’, yet afterwards —
<blockquote>
… afterwards, the wind and sleety rain,<br />
And all the business of the elements,<br />
The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,<br />
And the bleak music from that old stone wall,<br />
The noise of wood and water, and the mist<br />
That on the line of each of those two roads<br />
Advanced in such indisputable shapes;<br />
All these were kindred spectacles and sounds<br />
To which I oft repaired, and thence would drink,<br />
As at a fountain [<i>Prelude</i> 12:321f]</blockquote>Michael O’Neill makes what is, really, a rather obvious, yet often ignored, point about the spots of time. He notes that <i>The Prelude</i> is subtitled ‘the growth of a poet’s mind’, and often reverts to the primacy of mind (‘the mind’ we are told ‘is lord and master, and that outward sense/Is but the obedient servant of her will, <i>Prelude</i>, 11: 271–3). But, as O’Neill says,
<blockquote>
the spots of time proper precede and outstrip the analysing that would keep pace with them, and complicate Wordsworth’s moral, if by ‘the mind’ is meant the faculty that allows comprehension …. Enigma attaches to the ‘visionary dreariness’ experienced by the poet in the aftermath of and possible reaction against the experiences of disorientation in stumbling upon a place where ‘a Murderer had been hung in iron chains’. Enigma also pervades the bewildered, charged location of all that coheres in memory as powerful in the Waiting for the Horses passage. [<span style="font-size: x-small;">O’Neill, ‘Poetic Education: Wordsworth, Yeats, Coleridge and Shelley’, <i>The Wordsworth Circle</i>, 46:2 (2015), 82</span>]
</blockquote>
‘These moments are still among the most arresting and haunting in English poetry,’ says O’Neill, ‘because they refuse to obey any evident pattern of conceptualization.’ He goes on, rightly I think:
<blockquote>
They educate the poet in the fact that the ‘mind of man’ needs to confront greater mysteries than have been dreamt of in previous philosophies. Signposts such as ‘sublimity’ or ‘the numinous’ neutralize the shock of Wordsworth’s writing. Recollection confers barely graspable significance. Intimations of uniqueness embody themselves in a near monosyllabic bareness: ‘The single sheep, and the one blasted tree.’</blockquote>This gets at something important about the spot of time: it is localised and specific, but yet general; it happened at a particular moment in time and yet suffuses the whole of Wordsworth's life; it is both unique <i>and</i> universal. But though it is the Sublime, which is to say God, it doesn't entirely apprehend Wordsworth's actual poetry merely to peg it to that term.<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>:2:</b></div><div><br /></div><div>I'm now going to ask a very elementary question about this key Wordsworthian trope, something I'm uninhibited from doing because it seems to me nobody else has asked or attempted to answer it: why <i>spot of time</i>? Why that particular phrase? What does it mean, exactly, and from where did Wordsworth get it? As to the last part of the query, perhaps he simply made it up, although I'm going to hypothesise that he drew it from a particular source: from, in fact,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_of_Cusa" target="_blank"> Nicholas of Cusa</a>. But before we get to that, I'll say a few more things.</div><div><br /></div><div>The first thing is that <i>spot</i>, here, means location (<i>locus</i>), not, as it might be, stain or disfiguring mark (<i>macula</i>). You might want to argue, and I might even want to join you, that Wordsworth is playing with the ambiguity between these two English meanings of ‘spot’; but the most obvious thing about the phrase is that Wordsworth has coined it as an analogue for ‘spot of delight’, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_amoenus" target="_blank">locus amoenus</a>. This is of course a poetic trope of very long standing: Ernst Robert Curtius's discussion of it in <i><a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691157009/european-literature-and-the-latin-middle-ages" target="_blank">European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages</a></i> (1953) encompasses fully twenty pages (pp.183-202). Curtius calls the <i>locus amoenus</i> ‘the Pleasance’, which has a nice archaic ring-to-it in English, and says that ‘from the [Roman] Empire to the sixteenth-century it forms the principal motif of all nature description’. Its ‘minimum ingredients’ are, Curtius notes: ‘a tree (or several trees), a meadow, and a spring or brook. Birdsong and flowers may be added’ [Curtius, 195]. We can see how Wordsworth reconfigures the Pleasance into something more bracing, with the emphasis not on sensual enjoyment so much as spiritual stimulation, without sacrificing the conventions Curtius lists: most of his spots of time entail landscape, water, a tree (in the waiting for the horses episode quoted above, it's a single blasted hawthorne tree; in the girl with the pitcher episode, the gibbet) and song, even if it is only the sound of wind whistling in an old stone wall.</div><div><br /></div><div>But a spot <i>of time</i> is not the same thing as a spot <i>of pleasance</i>. And this is where I bring in Cusa, for the relevant Latin equivalent to <i>locus amoenus</i> would be <i>locus temporis</i>, and, so far as I can discern Cusa was the only Latin writer who used that phrase (indeed, it's a rather self-contradictory phrase in Latin, mixing up time and space in a muddling way).</div><div><br /></div><div>The problem is: I can find no evidence that Wordsworth read Nicholas of Cusa, and it doesn't strike me as terribly likely that he would have done so. Which brings me to Coleridge, the topic of this blog more generally: because here the likelihood turns about. It's certainly possible that Coleridge read Cusa; for he is exactly the kind of writer and thinker Coleridge found congenial. That means that it's possible Wordsworth picked up the idea of the <i>locus temporis</i> from his friend. Then again, I can't find any direct evidence Coleridge actually read Cusa either, which is a little irksome. </div><div><br /></div><div>What there is in Coleridgean criticism is a conviction, amongst certain writers, that Cusa is the sort of writer and thinker that Coleridge would have found fascinating, and that he <i>might</i> have read him. Philosopher and Inkling <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Barfield" target="_blank">Owen Barfield</a>, who certainly did read Cusa, spends quite a lot of <i><a href="https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=30589682059&cm_mmc=ggl-_-UK_Shopp_RareStandard-_-product_id=bi%3A%2030589682059-_-keyword=&gclid=Cj0KCQjwjIKYBhC6ARIsAGEds-Jl0abSr_AP19CUdhtDiw1erRnDnqYJDovciIZG9Wf0NdtdOMxxosEaAqWFEALw_wcB" target="_blank">What Coleridge Thought</a></i> (1971) speculating on the ‘dynamical’ relationship between Cusa's thought and Coleridge's, without ever producing evidence that the latter read the former. In a ‘non-static interpretation’ of the two thinkers, he proposes Cusa's argument ‘that relation between the whole and the part, by virtue of which the whole is present in each part, and ultimately the infinite is present in the finite’, Cusa's <i>coincidentia oppositorum</i>, radically informs Coleridge's own thinking on these matters [Barfield, 189]. We can agree that it certainly looks very Coleridgean.</div><div><br /></div><div>But did STC <i>actually </i>read the echt Cusa? We know he had a strong interest in the German mystics (Protestant mystics; but Cusa in many ways anticipates those figures). Moreover there was a seventeenth-century tradition of reading Cusa as a kind of Neoplatonist. Chance Woods [<span style="font-size: x-small;">‘Infinite Horizons: Nicholas of Cusa and Seventeenth-Century Cambridge Platonism’, <i>American Cusanus Society Newsletter</i> 35 (2008), 14-23</span>] shows how much Henry More and Ralph Cudworth owed to Cusa, and Coleridge was certainly a great reader of both those Divines. But, lacking a smoking gun (as it might be: an edition of Cusa's <i>Excitationum ex sermonibus</i> or <i>De docta ignorantia</i> annotated by Coleridge in the 1790s) Coleridgeans are reduced to pointing out the parallels: ‘Both Coleridge and Cusa,’ says Douglas Hedley, ‘are metaphysicians of unity and their theological speculations concerning the Trinity belong within a Pythagorean-Parmenidean-Platonic framework [which] Coleridge inherited from seventeenth-century Divines’ [Hedley, ‘Coleridge and Theology’, in Frederick Burwick (ed), <i>The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge</i> (OUP 2009), 482]
</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't mean to make heavy weather of this. Let's go back to Wordsworth. Imagine him getting ready to write <i>The Prelude</i> in 1798, in close consultation with Coleridge (who, of course, was the initial impetus for the project, urging his friend ‘to compose a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society’). Early in the process, it even looked for a time as though the poem might be co-authored, although of course in the end it was written by Wordsworth alone. In conversation, as Wordsworth tries to pin-down the enigmatic yet vital experiences that have punctuated his life, the retelling of which will be key to his project—universalising experiences of time that are nonetheless tied to specific incidents and moments and above all specific places—Coleridge suggests that this sounds like a concept out of Nicholas de Cusa, the <i>locus temporis</i>. Wordsworth agrees to thumbnail the experience with the English translation of that phrase: the spot of time.
</div><div><br /></div><div>Fanciful, alas; and certainly wholly unevidenced. Still, not only can I find nobody else who talks about the <i>locus temporis</i> in neo-Latin writing (theological or otherwise) other than Cusa, it strikes me that what Cusa says speaks directly to Wordsworth's conception.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here for example is one of Nicholas de Cusa's sermons from the early 1450s: <i>Ubi est qui natus est rex Iudæorum</i>, ‘Where it is that the King of the Jews was born’. The answer to this titular question is, obviously, more than merely: ‘Bethlehem’. Cusa's point is that the identification of any particular location, and particular time, for the coming-into-being (the birth) of an infinite, atemporal God strikes a suggestive paradox. Here's the sermon:<blockquote>
<i>In loco, omnia sunt in quiete: & extra locum suum, omnia sunt in inquiete, quia non sunt quo tendunt. Sicut Salomon vidit, omnia flumina reverti ad locum unde exeunt, sic omnia revertuntur ad locum unde exierunt. Omnia autem ut sunt, ab essentia sunt, sicut alba ab albedine, &bona à bonitate, & vera à veritate. Essen tia igiť, à qua omnia que sunt exiverunt, est locus ad que omnia tendût. Ex quo enim extra locum suum omnia sunt inquieta, & ad locum suum omnia tendunt & recurrunt, & in proprio loco tutantur, & tuta quiescunt universa: ideò Deus non inconvenienter potest dici locus, supra modum conceptus nostri infirmi. Sic loannes in Apocalypsi ait verbum dixisse: ego sum A & Ω, principium & finis: sed finis, requies, & bonum, sunt idem. Deus enim est locus animæ, ut Psalmista, & Augustinus, & alii fatentur. Sed quia Deus est, unde omnia recipiunt ut sint: ideò requietio omnium est. Quae enim non sunt, ad seuocat ut sint: esse autem, est ad quod omnia vocatur ut sint. Et extra esse: sunt inquieta: nam quae non sunt, non appetunt nisi ut sint, ubi quiescāt. Esse igitur quod est principium omnium quae sunt, est finis, locus, seu requies omnium: uti in omnibus, quae ab arteuel natura siunt, conspicimus, cum sunt, tunc in esse quiescunt. Locus temporis est æternitas, sive Nunc, sive præsentia: & locus motus, est quies: & locus numeri, est unitas.</i> [Nicholas de Cusa, <i>Excitationum ex sermonibus</i> (1457) Book 7; ‘Ex sermoné: ubi est qui natus est rex Iudæorum’] <br /><br />
In their place, all things are at rest, and outside their place, all things are in restlessness, because they are not where they tend. As Solomon saw, all rivers return to the place from which they issue, so all things return to the place from which they issued. But all things, as they are, are from their essences, as white from whiteness, and good things from goodness, and truths from truthfulness. Being is such a place, from which all things that are came forth, and it is the place to which all things tend. For where all things are restless out of their place, and as all things tend and return to their location, and are secured in their proper place where all things rest secure: therefore it is not inappropriate to call God a place, beyond the scope of our feeble conception. Thus John says in the <i>Apocalypse</i> that He declared: I am ALPHA and OMEGA, the first and last: where the end, the rest-point, and the good are the same thing. For God is the place of the soul, as the Psalmist, Augustine, and others tell us. And because he is God, from whom all things receive their being therefore he is the place-of-rest of all. For things that are not, he calls them to be; and to be is that to which all things are called. And to be outside makes things restless: for things that are not only desire to be, where they rest. Being, therefore, which is the beginning of all things that are, and is also the end place, or rest of all things: as in all things that come from art or nature we see that <i>when</i> they are, <i>then</i> they rest in being. The location of time is eternity, or the Now, or the present: and the location of motion is rest: and the location of number is unity.</blockquote>
The phrase that my slightly halting translation renders, in that final sentence, as ‘the location of time’ is <i>locus temporis</i>, and could just as easily be Englished as <i>spot of time</i>. And this whole passage glosses <i>The Prelude</i> with remarkable metaphysical penetration, I think: Wordsworth's autobiography is not a narration of the events of a dead past, but on the contrary a vivifying account of how the past remains vitally alive in the present; it is not a list of particulars but an account of how particularity of lived experience touches the universal and transcendent. The spot of time, the <i>Prelude</i> is saying, is eternity, or the Now, or the present: and the place of motion is rest: and the location of all the many numbers is unity.</div> Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-80746401955764208012022-08-13T00:23:00.000-07:002022-08-13T00:23:10.983-07:00A Little Cottle<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Cottle">Cottle</a> was Coleridge's friend and publisher; but also a poet in his own right. I've been reading <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xrhcAAAAcAAJ&dq=Joseph%20Cottle%20Poems&pg=PA4#v=onepage&q=Joseph%20Cottle%20Poems&f=false">his 1795 collection of <i>Poems</i></a>, off and on, to get a sense of what he was about. And I don't mean only to snark; some of his lines are quite good. But some are not. Today's examples are from his long poem in heroic couplets 'John the Baptist':<br />
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<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xrhcAAAAcAAJ&dq=Joseph%20Cottle%20Poems&pg=PA4&ci=67%2C589%2C871%2C493&source=bookclip"><img src="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xrhcAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA4&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&sig=ACfU3U2knBrAk4pi1OlAWJST-ZeXgEf_mg&ci=67%2C589%2C871%2C493&edge=0" /></a>
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'The God of Abraham tun'd his mental ear'. No. I can't visualise a 'mental ear' either.
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<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xrhcAAAAcAAJ&dq=Joseph%20Cottle%20Poems&pg=PA8&ci=66%2C221%2C879%2C131&source=bookclip"><img src="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xrhcAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA8&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&sig=ACfU3U1-JjJr_Q27m7evGmWWTVogR3Dilw&ci=66%2C221%2C879%2C131&edge=0" /></a>
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What's a 'latchet'? No matter. Have you ever wondered how it is birds are able to fly? If you guessed: <i>invisible hands, holding them up from underneath</i> then congratulations, you win our star prize!
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<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xrhcAAAAcAAJ&dq=Joseph%20Cottle%20Poems&pg=PA9&ci=67%2C550%2C855%2C436&source=bookclip"><img src="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xrhcAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA9&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&sig=ACfU3U1E-067xpO2q6uoW5RE4YanNxINeA&ci=67%2C550%2C855%2C436&edge=0" /></a>
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'Plumy tribes' is particularly wincing.Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-77387641781568067422022-02-24T01:46:00.026-08:002022-06-17T23:36:44.097-07:00On Westminster Bridge (1743, 1803)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhRZplYlBpNukE7f6hchNBE-dUSv28zG7ZQPGcrrCu8UfBUffA5RrQl758sP_SiPYsju_a3VSna0jv19Qi6omJ67eNLPdTPCSpzetSJOSw1T9syCvTNmaS8klR-1cA05CTah5bup8-U4xsCHadJjMhXJJMIH35-xcUjHFgZLm-bNaS5PmfRjaj4viJl=s1024" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="770" data-original-width="1024" height="301" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhRZplYlBpNukE7f6hchNBE-dUSv28zG7ZQPGcrrCu8UfBUffA5RrQl758sP_SiPYsju_a3VSna0jv19Qi6omJ67eNLPdTPCSpzetSJOSw1T9syCvTNmaS8klR-1cA05CTah5bup8-U4xsCHadJjMhXJJMIH35-xcUjHFgZLm-bNaS5PmfRjaj4viJl=w400-h301" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>Something a little different on this blog today: Wordsworth rather than Coleridge. But interesting, I think.</p><p>There, at the head of the post, is Canaletto's splendid painting ‘London: Westminster Bridge from the North on Lord Mayor's Day’ (1747). </p><p>There were several projects to build a bridge across the river at Westminster in the late 17th- and early 18th-centuries, all stymied by the Corporation of London, who wanted to preserve the rights and income of the barge- and ferrymen who worked the crossing. But eventually, in 1736, an Act of Parliament approved the project. Privately financed (including by a lottery), construction started in 1739 under the supervision of Swiss engineer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Labelye" target="_blank">Charles Labelye</a>, who had invented a new technology, ‘<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caisson_%28engineering%29" target="_blank">caissons</a>’ (sealed underwater structures supplied with air from above in which workman could dig the foundations for the bridge's piers into the riverbed). The bridge opened on 18 November 1750. </p><p>It was on this structure that Wordsworth stood, early in the morning of September 3rd 1803. From that vantage <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Poems_in_Two_Volumes/pzgJAAAAQAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=wordsworth+%22on+westminster+bridge%22&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank">he wrote this very famous sonne</a>t:</p><blockquote>
Earth has not any thing to show more fair:<br />
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by<br />
A sight so touching in its majesty:<br />
This City now doth, like a garment, wear<br />
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,<br />
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie<br />
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;<br />
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.<br />
Never did sun more beautifully steep<br />
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;<br />
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!<br />
The river glideth at his own sweet will:<br />
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;<br />
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
</blockquote>The date of composition is in the title of the poem. <div><br /></div><div>There's a nice piece of wordplay, a mode actually of irony, here. The poem is ‘On Westminster Bridge’, and the poet is actually standing, physically, <i>on</i> Westminster bridge. This doubled sense of <i>on</i> as meaning ‘positioned physically upon’ and ‘concerning, about’ reverts on (!) the poem itself which, famously, <i>doesn't talk about the bridge at all</i>: it's all the houses and temples of London, and the river passing through, gliding at its own sweet will—it is, really, ‘<i>From</i> Westminster Bridge’, not on it at all. Although by the same token, Wordsworth could hardly write the poem without the bridge supporting him. And, as we read the sonnet, we can hardly avoid being struck by its poised tensions of contradictions: the city, an urban space, described entirely in pastoral terms, as if it were a natural phenomenon. The city is somehow both clothed in a ‘garment’ and naked, ‘bare’: its ‘majesty’ is low-key <i>touching</i>, hardly the affective response usually provoked by the awe-inspiring sublime force of <i>majesty</i>. And that final image of a heart lying perfectly still takes calmness too far into death.<div><br /></div><div>To be clear: I am not accusing the poem of being incoherent, or more precisely I am not pegging these incoherences as a failing or a problem. Rather they exist, as do the engineering forces that hold the arches of a bridge in place and support the road overhead, in a mode of creative tension. This is an affecting, beautiful poem: a description of transcendent calm that is also an evocation of such calm, and poem very particularly placed in place (this specific London bridge) and time (September 3rd 1803) that is also placeless and timeless, the city Zion, the time paradise's eternal sunrise. <i>Heart</i> means we're at the centre of the city, which, being London, is in turn at the centre of the world. Which is to say, this poem, which critics discuss as if it never so much as mentions the bridge, ends with a reference to it: ‘lying’ over the river, the vantage-point from which everything is written. It's all <i>on</i> the bridge, after all.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEglQFa9Sky_iBiN4H4FcqOM4LApYwhExeZc-J4z1g5NJdEDoLmGOA9H8L7pWRndddmjn-IH_4r5PkY5N1MHCFZBMjCQT5_5eYJ0ocoYXjc8DRv6jKWSTg8yBsBR1Rzb_Cxiez9ARs5J6kn8nE4-twdGDGtDo-ONizWqeN1_M5uTnadJrIyR8jbQXrdX=s765" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="765" data-original-width="655" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEglQFa9Sky_iBiN4H4FcqOM4LApYwhExeZc-J4z1g5NJdEDoLmGOA9H8L7pWRndddmjn-IH_4r5PkY5N1MHCFZBMjCQT5_5eYJ0ocoYXjc8DRv6jKWSTg8yBsBR1Rzb_Cxiez9ARs5J6kn8nE4-twdGDGtDo-ONizWqeN1_M5uTnadJrIyR8jbQXrdX=s320" width="274" /></a></div><br /><div>Anyway: lately I have been reading some of the neo-Latin poetry of Englishman <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Bourne" target="_blank">Vincent Bourne</a> (1695-1747). (<a href="https://medium.com/adams-notebook/vincent-bourne-patience-lightens-what-sorrow-may-not-heal-1734-11ac25191122" target="_blank">Here is a different blog I wrote about one of Vinny's poems</a>). The later eighteenth-century and Romantic poets read him and thought highly of him. In a letter to the Reverend John Newton (10 May 1781) William Cowper declared ‘I love the memory of Vinny Bourne. I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in his way except Ovid, and not at all inferior to him.’ <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2007/english-literature-history-childrens-books-and-illustrations-l07411/lot.56.html" target="_blank">Coleridge owned a copy</a> of <i>The Poetical Works of Vincent Bourne</i> and Charles Lamb translated eight of Bourne’s Latin poems into English, recommending him to Wordsworth: ‘since I saw you,’ Lamb wrote to WW in 1815, ‘I have had a treat in the reading way, which comes not every day — the Latin poems of Vincent Bourne, which were quite new to me. What a heart that man had, all laid out upon town-scenes, a proper counterpart to some people’s extravagancies … what a sweet, unpretending, pretty-mannered, matterfull creature! Sucking from every flower, making a flower of everything. His diction all Latin, and his thoughts all English. Bless him!’ [Ainger (ed) <i>The Letters of Charles Lamb</i> (1904), 1:341].</div><div><br /></div><div>With that in mind, it's likely Wordsworth, writing his poem ‘on’ Westminster Bridge, was aware of this Bourne poem from <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Poematia/_qs9AAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=inauthor:%22Vincent+Bourne%22&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank"><i>Poematia</i> (1743)</a>, ‘Pons Westmonasteriensis’:<blockquote><i>
Tamisi, regales qui praeterlaberis arces,<br />
quam se magnificum, suspice, tollit opus!<br />
quanto cum saxis coalescunt pondere saxa!<br />
quo nexu incumbens sustinet arcus onus!<br />
ardua quam iusto pendet libramine moles </i>[5]<br /><i>
qua partes haerent partibus harmonia! </i><br /><i>
quos, cerne, ad numeros, ab utrovis litore sensim</i><br /><i>
sunt supra acclives alterutrinque viae!</i><br /><i>
pontis aperturae quam distant legibus aequis,</i><br /><i>
exterior quae vis interiore minor! </i>[10]<br /><i>
hunc artis splendorem inter nihil impedit undas</i><br /><i>
quove minus placidus vel taciturnus eas.</i><br /><i>
nil tibi descensum accelerat; non vorticis ullus</i><br /><i>
impetus in praeceps unde ferantur aquae,</i><br /><i>
fluxu idem, refluxu idem, lenissimus amnis </i>[15]<br /><i>
incolumem subtus sternis, ut ante, viam:</i><br /><i>
seris indicium saec'lis quo principe tanta</i><br /><i>
haec tibi surrexit gloria, liber eris</i>. <br /><br /><b>
Westminster Bridge</b><br /><br />
O Thames, as you flow past regal citadels,<br />
see what a fine structure has raised itself here!<br />
With what heft does stone connect with stone!<br />
How well the curving arch sustains its weight! <br />
With perfect balance the tall structure hangs, [5]<br />
its parts assembled with such harmony! <br />
And see how, ranked upon either shore, <br />
the rising paths each balance either side! <br />
How equidistant are this bridge's arches, <br />
the outer smaller than the inner ones! [10]<br />
Through this wondrous art the unimpeded<br />
river glideth calmly, silent onwards. <br />
Nothing hurries your motion; no inrushing<br />
whirlpool tangles the headlong current:<br />
It flows the same, reflows the same, gently [15]<br />
passing safely underneath the paved road.<br />
Later generations will admire the prince <br />
who erected so great a glory: you'll be free.
</blockquote><div>This looks, on its face, like a very different poem to Wordsworth's, concerned solidly with the bridge itself from start to finish. Bourne does not describe the view <i>from</i> the bridge: understandably, since the bridge wasn't opened until 1750, seven years in the future as the poem is composed (and, in the event, after Bourne himself died). The only lines that, perhaps, Wordsworth Englishes in <i>his</i> Westminster Bridge poem are 11-16, describing the calmly gliding unimpeded flow of the river (Wordsworth's line 12 perhaps owes something to this).</div><div><br /></div><div>But I'd suggest a different reading. Bourne's poem is about the fabric of the bridge, about the balance, the harmony and the tension of that structure: about what holds it up, maintains it. And that means it is about the structural qualities of poetry as well. Any poem is a balance between the interruptions to flow occasioned by the form and sturcture (metre and prosody, line-breaks, zeugmas and figures, sometimes rhyme) and the flow of the poem's musicality and sense. Bourne signed this poem <i>Milliaria</i>: that is, ‘columns’, ‘pillars’. He is thinking about the architectonics both of his subject and of his verse.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhHEHCqYwMlAZjlzRTJmWT_puJho_L1wuHf0VCMLcy5zu1-HGLPgvJN0pNioL7Zo2eisgxBvvQ7fHIOtCBapVttmO4-5S4dKSnzm89FOcL-PcwlDs27ZLqGU2cnPYc8HiUd4GkxjmQQGyevTuDLa_ehHznlqXqmwT9wODqQ57CsUVKgnz4RKqS9CMg6=s787" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="787" data-original-width="563" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhHEHCqYwMlAZjlzRTJmWT_puJho_L1wuHf0VCMLcy5zu1-HGLPgvJN0pNioL7Zo2eisgxBvvQ7fHIOtCBapVttmO4-5S4dKSnzm89FOcL-PcwlDs27ZLqGU2cnPYc8HiUd4GkxjmQQGyevTuDLa_ehHznlqXqmwT9wODqQ57CsUVKgnz4RKqS9CMg6=s320" width="229" /></a></div><br /><div>Look again at Bourne's piece: it addresses not the bridge but <i>the river</i>. Its focus is on the bridgework from the point of view <i>of</i> the river: how it interrupts, or doesn't, the flow of the Thames. We intuit a poet's point-of-view on the river (in a boat, perhaps). But Wordsworth, in his sonnet, is also on the river: which is to say, he is on a bridge on the river. We're <i>on</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>On the surface Bourne's poem looks like a panegyric to Westminster's bridge's solidity: its rock-fitted-against-rock heft and permanence. And the main rhetorical device is the counterpunctual μέν ... δέ on the one hand/on the other hand: ‘fluxu idem, refluxu idem’ [15] and so on—appropriate to a bridge, we could say, since a bridge links two banks in one span made up of linking arches. Estelle Haan notes the poem's anaphoric balance: ‘the symmetry that lies at the heart of the poem is replicated in its own syntax and structure, most noticeably in the seven successive rhetorical exclamations upon which the whole is balanced: <i>quam</i> (2), <i>quanto</i> (3), <i>quo</i> (4), <i>quam</i> (5), <i>qua</i> (6), <i>quos</i> (7), <i>quam</i> (9). Such exuberant anaphora is for the most part matched by respective line endings proclaiming individual aspects of the bridge's physical structure: its <i>opus</i> (2), <i>saxa</i> (3), <i>onus</i> (4), <i>moles</i> (5), <i>harmonia</i> (6)’ [<span style="font-size: x-small;">Haan, ‘<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/20020415" target="_blank">Classical Romantic: Identity in the Latin Poetry of Vincent Bourne</a>’, <i>Transactions of the American Philosophical Society</i> 97:1 (2007)101</span>]
</div><div><br /></div><div>But Bourne's poem includes some similar ironies to Wordsworth's: the bridge's arches are <i>aequis</i>, equal, and yet some are bigger than others [10-11]; the bridge does not impede the flow of the river, and generates no whirlpools, and yet the poem very specifically describes the flow as a flux-reflux eddy.
</div><div><br /></div><div>Most of all, the poem praises as finished and solidly secure a structure that was, in 1743, neither. On the contrary, the construction of the bridge was beset with reverses and controversy as Labelye went over-budget and over-deadline, struggling to get his new caisson technology to work, losing in total five boats over the course of the building with horrifying casualties among the workmen, and sourcing his stone from great distances with inevitable associated delays in shipping (much of it came from Swanage, and supplies were repeatedly interrupted when the navy pressed the cargo boat sailors for this or that military emergency). </div><div><br /></div><div>Nor was the finished bridge
especially robust. It lasted a century, plagued with subsidence and requiring repeated and expensive remedial maintainance. Eventually the city decided it couldn't put up with it any longer, and commissioned Thomas Page to design a new bridge. Opened in 1862, this is the bridge currently standing, the lovely seven-arch, cast-iron structure linking Lambeth and Westminster that we all know and love. </div><div><br /></div><div>The controversy over the bridge was a live one in the 1740s, when Bourne was writing his poem. Here is the pamphlet published by London architect and designer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batty_Langley" target="_blank">Batty Langley</a> in 1748: you can see from its title that he is not a fan.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjzg71AohaPooGKRaERlVmPv5jStKZEuF6yCkiZLfnwLPzuOIPsj6qs4vqJ3j59Q3U_m0nRA1SZYsKKofnFkRMi1g-0sTJGhkVndu9q4xHWNLk3I8VYVag3BQKu_E2WwnlsnADd9iKKOtO4_Wj9jLbVJkpH06BBIpNoWfxpJgpG1ezq4Jh26khPqrdS=s779" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="779" data-original-width="543" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjzg71AohaPooGKRaERlVmPv5jStKZEuF6yCkiZLfnwLPzuOIPsj6qs4vqJ3j59Q3U_m0nRA1SZYsKKofnFkRMi1g-0sTJGhkVndu9q4xHWNLk3I8VYVag3BQKu_E2WwnlsnADd9iKKOtO4_Wj9jLbVJkpH06BBIpNoWfxpJgpG1ezq4Jh26khPqrdS=s320" width="223" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><i><a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/A_Survey_of_Westminster_Bridge_as_tis_No/eJtbAAAAQAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=A+Survey+of+Westminster+Bridge+As+Tis+Now+Sinking+Into+Ruin&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank">A Survey of Westminster Bridge As Tis Now Sinking Into Ruin</a></i>: this is two years before the bridge is even opened! Already sinking into ruin? Golly. Langley blames the design: the foundations inadequate to the weight of the whole. He would have designed it differently, he says, and he includes a diagram in which Labelye is shown, strikingly, hanging from a gibbet in the background.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhF1Vjs5Eri2DNcoDoFIbfzomIPr7kgmEn39UcFF6zuVT-SBCunZQ5BGpz_fs4gg0EY88r700yQh7dy5iB9dxMiUMmRPijgPA0c9kzIa87zFJ8WvoX0K667OF-gzVIjt_FOuSGlUFH_7lQo5eBV47jRjT2iCdX1PKST1Wj0Jt-Tk8_Ns6Np4G1r04tL=s710" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="710" data-original-width="379" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhF1Vjs5Eri2DNcoDoFIbfzomIPr7kgmEn39UcFF6zuVT-SBCunZQ5BGpz_fs4gg0EY88r700yQh7dy5iB9dxMiUMmRPijgPA0c9kzIa87zFJ8WvoX0K667OF-gzVIjt_FOuSGlUFH_7lQo5eBV47jRjT2iCdX1PKST1Wj0Jt-Tk8_Ns6Np4G1r04tL=s320" width="171" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhTh1SAPeA4tdgBQzHyKu4BxgADj9qUMcVed1KYmhSt7kXPyYmPe7RUyHY4YABmdvuwwqPqnNiUa-fdnz_oyt2NKLn42DLB_ZuPJOM-eYYb5cPdBfze3bsdgLgQUWMMRsVYY_OM6Xlk1jbGf8tCSLhhuhR7LW2bu7DUZWMLusxjeWDvgvZQ6Xgmkurm=s728" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="723" data-original-width="728" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhTh1SAPeA4tdgBQzHyKu4BxgADj9qUMcVed1KYmhSt7kXPyYmPe7RUyHY4YABmdvuwwqPqnNiUa-fdnz_oyt2NKLn42DLB_ZuPJOM-eYYb5cPdBfze3bsdgLgQUWMMRsVYY_OM6Xlk1jbGf8tCSLhhuhR7LW2bu7DUZWMLusxjeWDvgvZQ6Xgmkurm=s320" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>Batty Langley was a fairly eccentric individual, but the opposition to the bridge came from many quarters. The <i>Westminster Journal</i> (2nd Sept 1742) published ‘<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_gentleman_s_magazine/iU1GAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=On+The+Sinking+Of+Westminster+Bridge&pg=PA433&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank">A Lucubration on the Sinking of Westminster Bridge</a>’.</div><div><br /></div><div>This makes me wonder if we shouldn't read Bourne's poem as an ironic exercise? Is he praising for its solidity a structure everybody knew wasn't particularly solid? Irony is exactly the kind of structural or semiotic tension that is embodied by the stress-and-tension logic of the arch. Perhaps the ironies of Wordsworth's ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’ are responding, in their way, to the ironies of Bourne's ‘Pons Westmonasteriensis’.</div><p></p></div></div>Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-14686684387975078692022-02-13T06:00:00.036-08:002022-02-13T23:02:15.789-08:00‘Work Without Hope’ (1827): What Work? <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhFHdYmzfpIGrPwnj9dFitAmEWeFJnUpVpT-UR65cl3gxNBpJg8e8ZbXRmGCaK8kvXG9xYkccvPrquqLA_m2g3ygnVlGkIwwa11mRUWwQLI7bmu6HAlm6U_UMf6obusKvMp2b1_XkEFWMxBJiH6FyrSFgXN8i2u_7-kayn4WFx9rKQ_AYelaZ3Fs40G=s817" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="765" data-original-width="817" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhFHdYmzfpIGrPwnj9dFitAmEWeFJnUpVpT-UR65cl3gxNBpJg8e8ZbXRmGCaK8kvXG9xYkccvPrquqLA_m2g3ygnVlGkIwwa11mRUWwQLI7bmu6HAlm6U_UMf6obusKvMp2b1_XkEFWMxBJiH6FyrSFgXN8i2u_7-kayn4WFx9rKQ_AYelaZ3Fs40G=w320-h299" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> The first publication of ‘Work Without Hope’, in <i>The Bijou</i> (1828). Click to enlarge. </span></div><div><br /><p></p><p>Let’s have a look at this poem:</p></div><blockquote><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Work Without Hope</span></b><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">
Lines Composed 21st February 1827</span><br /><br />
All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair;<br />
The Bees are stirring—birds are on the wing; <br />
And Winter slumb’ring in the open air, <br />
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring! <br />
And I, the while, the sole unbusy Thing, <br />
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing. <br /><br />
Yet well I ken the banks where Amaranths blow, <br />
Have traced the fount whence streams of Nectar flow. <br />
Bloom, O ye Amaranths! bloom for whom ye may—<br />
For Me ye bloom not! Glide, rich Streams! away! <br />
With lips unbrighten’d, wreathless Brow, I stroll: <br />
And would you learn the Spells, that drowse my soul? <br />
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, <br />
And Hope without an object cannot live. </blockquote>
(This is the version of the poem printed in J.C.C. Mays' standard <i>Poetical Works</i> [Princeton 2001] 16:2, 1030).<br /><br />
One of Coleridge’s more famous later works, this: an inverted sonnet—the sestet coming first, hymning nature’s industriousness and lamenting the poet’s comparative non-productivity; then the octet, in which the poet confirms that he knows about a more-than-natural realm, where unfading flowers bloom and nectar flows, but that he is excluded from that place and its joy because he has no object upon which to fix his hopes, and without hope work is fruitless. It’s a fine poem, with a particularly well-turned final couplet. I have sometimes wondered if the image of ‘nectar in a sieve’ works through a kind of creative ambiguity: if the reference is to something like wine (often called ‘nectar’, especially in religious contexts) then the fluid will fall straight through the sieve as we try and scoop it. But I suppose most readers nowadays would think more botanically, of nectar as a honied syrup or thicker gloop, in which case the sieve will lose most but will retain some. I wonder if that makes the final image more poignant.<br /><br />
Anyway: there is an, as it were, standard reading of this poem, and I think that reading is wrong. I’ll explain why. <br /><br />February 1827, the date specified by Coleridge’s subtitle, was a few weeks away from the end of ten years of him living with the Gillmans—James, a young doctor, and his wife Ann—in north London. The Gillmans took Coleridge into their home and family, looked after him (under James’s care STC was able to reduce, although never quite quit, his opium addiction) and hosted the many visitors who came to sit at the feet of, or dine with, the ‘sage of Highgate’. Coleridge even went on holiday with the family. He lived with the Gillmans from March 1816 right through to his death in July 1834. <div><br /></div><div>Now: it seems that Coleridge performed a sort-of chivalric amour, an <i>I love you</i> rigmarole, where Ann Gillman was concerned. Actual adultery was not on the table and we have to presume that both parties were aware of the effective fictionality of this romantic gubbins. Since separating from his wife two decades before, Coleridge had fallen for a number of women, an actress here, the wife of a friend there, a succession of inamoratas, some more and some less ‘in’ on the game of Coleridge's passion—the modern idiom “had a crush upon”, though anachronistic and a little infantilising, probably gets at the nature of old-man Coleridge’s moonings-after. Then again, there was an important sense, important for STC himself, in which these crushes were <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax7krBKzmVI" target="_blank">real love</a>, intense and vital. <br /><br />
Which brings us to this poem. Coleridge wrote it in his notebook, 21st February 1827—or to be more precise, he wrote a <i>longer</i>, 36-line poem, the first 14 lines of which were extracted and published, without Coleridge’s permission, in <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Bijou/OBofAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22The+Bijou%22&pg=PR8&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank">the illustrated annual <i>The Bijou</i> (1828)</a>. That first-published version is at the head of this post. I’ll come to the remaining section of the poem in a bit. <br /><br />
The notebook version of the poem comes with a lengthy prose introduction in which Coleridge reports he had imagined (‘a fancy—struck across the Eolian Harp of my Brain’) two mutually-reflecting mirrors: ‘two Looking-glasses fronting, each seeing the other in itself, and itself in the other.’ The note (you can read the whole of it below) ends by calling the poem a<blockquote>
Strain in the manner of G. HERBERT—: which might be entitled THE ALONE MOST DEAR: a Complaint of Jacob to Rachel as in the tenth year of his Service he saw in her or <em>fancied</em> he saw Symptoms of Alienation.
</blockquote>Then there is a deleted line: ‘N.B. The Thoughts and Images being modernized and turned into <em>English</em>’. <br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiuzOeRGGk9x_kyXHMacVy-aLumJdfedpX6GYXMXyle0ud2H_GY3qtzbcfdrUIIMyFFTXPiL0zf4cZs5FTax3srrk_mpVBx2DBk1RW_Lyfin-AiBsJl4e8NhxVgxBJqKaooBrycNGlDkjyV67iOLalK0lKui2Bi_HUCbze8ZIyFJYD64vPLAK0LJwUq=s777" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="777" data-original-width="761" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiuzOeRGGk9x_kyXHMacVy-aLumJdfedpX6GYXMXyle0ud2H_GY3qtzbcfdrUIIMyFFTXPiL0zf4cZs5FTax3srrk_mpVBx2DBk1RW_Lyfin-AiBsJl4e8NhxVgxBJqKaooBrycNGlDkjyV67iOLalK0lKui2Bi_HUCbze8ZIyFJYD64vPLAK0LJwUq=s400" /></a></div>
<br />That's from J.C.C. Mays' <i>Poetical Works</i> [<i>CC</i> 16.2 606] and, as ever, you can click to embiggen and clarify.</div><div><br /></div><div>In other words, Coleridge here refers the poem to the story of Jacob and Rachel in Genesis 29—Jacob having travelled to Haran, and seeing Laban’s beautiful daughter Rachel, agreed to work for Haran for seven years to be worthy of marrying her. Here, Coleridge is Jacob, Ann Gillman is Rachel, and the ‘ten years’ being the decade he had spent in Highgate in the Gillman’s house. In the Biblical story, as I’m sure you know, Jacob was tricked: after his seven years, Haran fobbed him off with Rachel’s less-comely older sister Leah, and Jacob had to work another seven years before he finally obtained Rachel. <br /><br />
So we have a biographical reading of the poem, one preferred by all the critics, so far as I can see: having yearned after Ann Gillman for ten years, like Jacob labouring for Rachel, Coleridge now sees, or <i>thinks </i>he sees, her going off him (‘symptoms of alienation’) and so he writes this despairing poem. He can’t work (write poetry) because his love is hopeless, and hopelessness vitiates his productivity. He signs the poem <span style="font-size: x-small;">JACOB HODIERNUS</span>, which means ‘The Modern-Day Jacob’, ‘Today’s Jacob’. It’s an inverted sonnet (sestet then octave) because regular sonnets sing of love’s consummation and this poem does the opposite.</div><div><br /></div><div>One added twist: Ann Gillman, who read this notebook entry, annotated it in pencil: next to ‘in the tenth year of his Service he saw her or <em>fancied</em> he saw Symptoms of Alienation’ she wrote ‘It was fancy’. So it wasn’t true that she was going off him! He misread her mood. Shucks! Heartbreaking, really.<br /><br />
Then again, there is a paradox in all this: because the fact that he has written this poem (about how he can’t work, about how he never produces anything) proves that he <em>can</em> work, and <em>has</em> produced something. And although Coleridge’s preface to ‘Work Without Hope’ tags, via the Jacob and Rachel reference, himself and Ann Gillman, there is nothing fundamentally trustworthy about Coleridge’s preface-writing—think of the famous note before ‘Kubla Khan’ for one. Is that really what the poem is about?<br /><br />
One final jigsaw-piece: in the notebook, Coleridge added a footnote to the word ‘Amaranths’, omitted in the <em>Bijou</em> version of the poem, but restored by Mays in his <em>Collected Poems</em>: ‘*Amaranths—*<em>Literally</em> rendered is Flower Fadeless, or never fading—from the Greek—a <em>not</em> and <em>marainō</em> to wither.’ <br /><br />
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<br />This is right. What I mean is, the word does indeed derive from Ancient Greek, ἀμάραντος (<a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/amaranth" target="_blank"><i>amárantos</i>, “eternal, undying, unfading, unwilting; <i>amaranth</i>; everlasting flower”</a>) from ᾰ̓- + μαραίνω (“to shrivel, wither”). Why did Coleridge add this note? The editor of the <em>Bijou</em>, clearly, could see no good reason for it, and cut it. But I think the amaranth reference is key, and more to the point I think makes a <i>Biblical</i> reference, one obvious enough that it surprises me no critics seem to have noticed it. (Kathleen Coburn, in her edition of the <i>Notebooks</i>, speculates this ‘may be a recollection of the use of [<i>amaranth</i>] by Plotinus’ and then quotes a passage in which Luther describes the flower as one that grows in August and ‘is more stalk than flower’. I don’t think either of these is the proper intertext here, I must say.)<br /><br />
Look again at the poem. The opening sestet riffs on Herbert, as Coleridge notes (and generations of critics have recorded)—here’s <a href="https://www.ccel.org/h/herbert/temple/Employment.html">Herbert’s ‘Employment 1’ (1674)</a>: <blockquote>All things are busie; onely I<br />
Neither bring hony with the bees, <br />
Nor flowres to make that, nor the husbandrie<br /> To water these. <br /><br />
I am no link of thy great chain, <br />
But all my companie is a weed. <br />
Lord place me in thy consort; give one strain<br /> To my poore reed. </blockquote>
But I think generations of critics have <em>mis</em>read the remaining eight lines of the poem. Who is the ‘thy’ addressed by Herbert, there? To what is the amaranth in Coleridge’s poem a reference?
<br /><br />
It’s Biblical. Specifically, it refers to 1 Peter 5:4's καὶ φανερωθέντος τοῦ ἀρχιποίμενος κομιεῖσθε τὸν ἀμαράντινον τῆς δόξης στέφανον; ‘And when the chief Shepherd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away.’ ‘That faded not away’ is ἀμαράντινον, amaranthine. Another way of translating the Greek here would be: ‘ye shall receive a wreath of amaranths’. This is the one and only reference to amaranths in the Bible. <br /><br />
Nectar, here, is the drink of the gods (like amaranth, it means deathlessness: νέκταρ from Proto-Indo-European *<i>neḱ-</i> “to perish, disappear” + *<i>-terh₂</i> “overcoming”; literally, “overcoming death”, and so called because it gave immortality.) Look again at the octave. The poet observing the fecundity of nature, laments that he cannot work. But he knows the bank where the immortal ‘Flower Fadeless’ grows, by which flow streams of immortal nectar (in the Septuagint, Moses’ “land flowing with milk and honey” flows with milk and νέκτᾰρ; and the same is true of Job 20:17’s heavenly ‘rivers, the floods, the brooks of honey and butter.’) The poet sees the Christian heaven, the wreaths of amaranth promised in 1 Peter, and yet he strolls on with ‘wreathless brow’
<br /><br />This is not a love poem, in the sense of sexual love. This is a poem about religious despair. The ‘work’ Coleridge is unable to do is not the poet’s work of writing poems, since he has here manifestly written a poem. It is the Christian’s <em><a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/herbert-laborare-est-orare-t01455" target="_blank">laborare et [est] orare</a></em>. Jacob is invoked not as the would-be lover of Rachel, but as the Jewish and therefore Christian patriarch. This is the man who <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_wrestling_with_the_angel" target="_blank">wrestled with God</a>: who, that is, struggled with his religious faith.<br /><br />
The remaining portion of the poem in its notebook form confirms this reading, I think:<blockquote>
I speak in figures, inward thoughts and woes<br />
Interpreting by Shapes and Outward Shews: <br />
Where daily nearer me with magic Ties, <br />
What time and where, (wove close with magic Ties<br />
Line over line, and thickning as they rise) <br />
The World her spidery threads on all sides spun <br />
Side answ’ring side with narrow interspace, <br />
My Faith (say I; I and my Faith are one) <br />
Hung, as a Mirror, there! And face to face<br />
(For nothing else there was between or near) <br />
One Sister Mirror hid the dreary Wall, <br />
But that is broke! And with that bright compeer<br />
I lost my object and my inmost all—<br />
Faith in the Faith of <span style="font-size: x-small;">THE ALONE MOST DEAR</span>! </blockquote>
The alone most dear is God, not Anna Gillman—though we can imagine it was Anna, browsing STC’s notebooks, seeing this draft, and assuming it was about her, who had extracted the first fourteen lines (leaving this later passage behind) and sent it to <em>The Bijou</em>. In this second section, ‘Outward Shews’ is from <em>Merchant of Venice</em> 3:2:75 (‘So may the outward shews be least themselves’), but the doubled mirror is clearly the glass, through which STC peers darkly as per 1 Corinthians 13:12, and in which he sees not God as God, but himself reflected back infinitely in God’s glass.
</div>Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-47217516590642060872021-10-21T04:51:00.013-07:002021-10-21T07:48:34.993-07:00Coleridge's Farting Nightingale<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZuXpdPjEAI5bZEfq-Hn8oGAhNjvW64JiuNOcuUkjdGRdFJw1E_4AlfSMKX8U_RsUwy9oUXbj2pKvmsgQjEpF7N5J5hxW8gFK_PlReHTeAYHmHkPQ5XtoT7Us0qDp8RW_V-dmIaxP_euE/s1200/nightingale.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1200" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZuXpdPjEAI5bZEfq-Hn8oGAhNjvW64JiuNOcuUkjdGRdFJw1E_4AlfSMKX8U_RsUwy9oUXbj2pKvmsgQjEpF7N5J5hxW8gFK_PlReHTeAYHmHkPQ5XtoT7Us0qDp8RW_V-dmIaxP_euE/s320/nightingale.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /> <br />
Coleridge's ‘conversation poem’ ‘<a href="https://www.coleridgememorial.org.uk/the-poetry-stone/more-coleridge-poetry/the-nightingale/" target="_blank">The Nightingale</a>’ first appeared in <i>Lyrical Ballads </i>(1798). It was a replacement piece: originally Wordsworth and Coleridge were going to include a different poem, <a href="https://samueltaylorbloggeridge.blogspot.com/2016/06/lewti-or-circassian-love-chant-1798.html" target="_blank">Coleridge's ‘Lewti’</a>. Indeed, some early proofs of the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> volume have ‘Lewti’ set up in type and listed on the contents page. But there was a problem, or so Wordsworth thought. In April 1798 Coleridge had published ‘Lewti’ under his own name in the <i>Morning Post</i>. But <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> was to be an anonymous volume, no names on the title page, and this prior publication compromised that. People would surely, Wordsworth thought, put two and two together and link Coleridge's name with the book. So, late in the process of the publication, the two men agreed to substitute the hitherto unpublished ‘Nightingale’ instead. <div><br /><div>I'm not going to talk specifically about <a href="https://www.coleridgememorial.org.uk/the-poetry-stone/more-coleridge-poetry/the-nightingale/" target="_blank">the poem itself</a> in this post, although it's worth the talking: a very interesting poem, to which I'll surely come back. As Christopher Miller notes: ‘nothing could be more traditional than writing a poem about a nightingale; it was a perennial emblem of the poet pouring out beautiful music in the dark.’ But, as Miller says, Coleridge's treatment of this topic entails an ‘interplay of tradition and innovation’: on the one hand, the melancholy bird of Milton and the sorrowful Greek myth of Philomela, raped, silenced by having her tongue cut out and finally transformed into a nightingale; on the other, Coleridge enjoying a lovely night, with his best friend Wordsworth, a ‘gentle Maid’ (that is, Dorothy) and his own baby son Hartley. [<span style="font-size: x-small;">Miller, ‘Coleridge and the English Poetic Tradition’, in Frederick Burwick (ed) <i>The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge</i> (OUP 2009), 525</span>] Like the nightingale, and like Philomela, Hartley is ‘capable of no articulate sound’, but <i>un</i>like the traditional melancholy associations of those two, but like the actual nightingale father and son can hear singing under the stars, Hartley is full of joy: at the moon and stars, at the birdsong, at being with his Dad, a ‘tipsy Joy that reels with tossing head’.</div><div><br /></div><div>My focus in this blog is not on the poem as such, but on a para-text of the poem, a sort of doggerel preface. When Coleridge first sent the piece to Wordsworth, he added this self-deprecating prelude:<blockquote>
In stale blank verse a subject stale<br />
I send per post my Nightingale;<br />
And like an honest bard, dear Wordsworth,<br />
You'll tell me what you think, my Bird's worth.<br />
My own opinion's briefly this—<br />
His bill he opens not amiss;<br />
And when he has sung a stave or so,<br />
His breast, & some small space below,<br />
So throbs & swells, that you might swear<br />
No vulgar music's working there.<br />
So far, so good; but then, ’od rot him!<br />
There's something falls off at his bottom.<br />
Yet, sure, no wonder it should breed,<br />
That my Bird's Tail's a tail indeed<br />
And makes its own inglorious harmony<br /><i>
Æolio crepitû, non carmine</i>.
</blockquote><div>This is clear enough: the ‘head’ of the poem, a description of a beautiful night and a quotation from Milton, is stately and beautiful; the ‘tail’ or (to use a word Coleridge would not, though that's the implication of the text here) ‘arse’ of the poem is about a giggling baby. Babies produce a quantity of stuff out of <i>their</i> bottoms, of course; as do birds. What about that Latin? Well, it's a sort of parody of Horace. <i>Odes</i> 4.3 addresses Melpomene, Muse of Lyric Poetry, and praises Rome as the true inspiration for the poet: <i>sed quae Tibur aquae fertile praefluunt</i>/<i>et spissae nemorum comae</i>/<i>fingent Aeolio carmine nobilem</i>; ‘... but the waters that flow through the fertilising Tiber, and the thick leaves of the groves, will ennoble [a poet] in his Aeolian verse.’ Aeolus was the Greek god of wind. Elsewhere in the <i>Odes</i> (3.30, since you ask) Horace claims that he was ‘the first to have adapted Aeolian verse to Italian tunes’; which is to say, the first Latin poet to rework the Greek forms (four-line alcaic and sapphic stanzas mostly) to Roman language and themes.</div><div><br /></div><div>STC expects Wordsworth to recognise the reference to <i>Aeolio carmine</i>, and to laugh at the way he has changed it. <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0059:entry=crepo" target="_blank"><i>Crepo</i> means</a> ‘to rattle, crack, creak, rustle, clatter, tinkle’ (it's the root of our English word <i>crepitate</i>) and also ‘to boast, to prattle, to chatter’. But Coleridge isn't using the word in either of those senses. Because there's a third meaning: <i>crepo</i> also means ‘to fart’. The Latin at the end of Coleridge's little verse-preface there can be Englished as: ‘Aeolian farting, rather than song’. <i>Wind</i>, you see.
</div><div><br /></div>
We think of neo-Latin as a serious, even ponderous idiom: all those scientific tomes, all that theological discussion! But a lot of neo-Latin was quite lighthearted, and some was thoroughly scatological. For instance: farting. <a href="https://samueltaylorbloggeridge.blogspot.com/2018/10/non-sphinx-sed-sphincter.html" target="_blank">Here's an old blog from this very site about a bit of John Milton's Latin on that subject</a>. Or consider Spanish neo-Latin scholar <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Mart%C3%AD" target="_blank">Manuel Martí</a> (1663-1737), famous for his Hellenism and classical scholarship, who also wrote a book called <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Oratio_pro_crepitu_ventris_habita_ad_pat/whigamqW8hUC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=crepitu&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank"><i>Pro crepitu ventris</i></a> (Madrid, 1737), ‘In Celebration of the Winds of Farting’. Here is a page from one of those bibliographies of curious volumes, an entire library assembled by a French count on the subject of farting and other bottom-related matters: <i>Catalogue des livres rares et précieux de la bibliothèque de feu M. le comte de Mac-Carthy Reagh</i> (1815) [‘de feu’ means ‘of the late’ or ‘of the recently deceased’]. You can see Martí's volume in there: popular enough to have been reprinted in 1768.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiakCKcI58WJxnrZ7XKHmhAKyCD09eGXENzR2uNecTG6oGLTzIbV7WaDYqnONhWkePwGTOEBuqK0tCDUrRN6ceDs-SZVzKRQjA8Azzj20jZ7uRSXGhv6WiUwNWToKzAUUW7Szekhc3t4B0/s748/Screenshot+%2528344%2529.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="650" data-original-width="748" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiakCKcI58WJxnrZ7XKHmhAKyCD09eGXENzR2uNecTG6oGLTzIbV7WaDYqnONhWkePwGTOEBuqK0tCDUrRN6ceDs-SZVzKRQjA8Azzj20jZ7uRSXGhv6WiUwNWToKzAUUW7Szekhc3t4B0/s320/Screenshot+%2528344%2529.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>Ah, those eighteenth-century French aristocrats! Nothing better to do with their time and wealth than assemble libraries of <i>très singulièr et rares</i> arse-themed volumes. No wonder there was a revolution and they all got guillotined. </div><div><br /></div><div>Still, I'd suggest that there is something more than mere low humour at work here. Coleridge was fascinated by all this stuff, and for him there was a serious—or, say rather (since <i>serious</i> doesn't capture what he finds so engaging and important about it) importance and eloquence in it all. Certainly, his notebooks <a href="https://samueltaylorbloggeridge.blogspot.com/2018/03/notebook-scatology.html" target="_blank">are full of references to shitting, farting and other bowelly-scatological subjects</a>. I'm going to conclude this blog with a lengthy quotation from the second half of the old post linked-to there.
</div><div><br /></div><div>You see, I take all this in Coleridge as more than mere lavatorial humour, or occasional ribaldry; as something rather more notable; indeed, as touching on something quite profound and important in Coleridge's poetic and philosophical imagination. </div><div>
<br />
Consider the following two notebook entries, neither of them merely jokey. Here is Coleridge considering a bowl of piss:<br />
<blockquote>
What a beautiful Thing Urine is, in a Pot, brown yellow, transpicuous, the Image, diamond shaped of the of the [sic] Candle in it, especially, as it now appeared, I having emptied the Snuffers into it, & the Snuff floating about, & painting all-shaped Shadows on the Bottom. [Dec. 1803, <i>Notebooks</i> 1:1766]
</blockquote>
This is the very essence of the Coleridgean notebooks, and one of the things aficionados love about them (<a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/coleridges-notebooks-9780198712022?cc=us&lang=en&">Seamus Perry</a> calls the notebooks ‘the unacknowledged prose masterpiece of the age ... a work, by turns, of philosophical profundity, descriptive beauty, verbal brilliance and human comedy—and sometimes tragicomedy, and sometimes tragedy’, and I agree with him). That STC could spin such a beautifully vivid and expressive paragraph about something so apparently unpromising as the contents of his pisspot seems to me a marvellous thing. It might have been merely pretentious, but somehow it isn't: rather it reverts our attention back onto something we have been acculturated to consider abject and untouchable to bring out its aureate loveliness.<br />
<br />
<i>Transpicuous</i> means transparent, but Coleridge is surely thinking of Milton (‘that light/Sent from her through the wide transpicuous air,/To the terrestrial Moon to be as a star’, <i>Paradise Lost</i> 8:140-142), which positions the piss less as a fluid and more as a medium, as, indeed, a kind of lens through which we see certain things more clearly. It is a candlelit colour, warm and precious, and those little slips of the pen (‘the of the’) run the risk of distracting us from how exquisitely this little section of prose plays with language. At the risk of sounding like Malvolio pulling the <i>c</i>s, <i>u</i>s and <i>t</i>s from his lady's letter: look at how prolific this passage is with ‘p’s and ‘i’s and ‘s’s of <i>piss</i>: pot, appeared, painting, is-in-in-it-it-I-into-it, tran<i>sspic</i>uous shaped especially as snuffers snuff shaped shadows. Or again, look how rapidly Coleridge's imagination skips from association to association in what amounts to a chain of Latin punnery, consciously framed as such or otherwise: <i>urine</i> in Latin is <i>urina</i>; pot in Latin <i>urna</i>; burnt-colour (brown, yellow) <i>uro</i>; ‘to plunge into water’, like a diver (or like an dicarded snuffer) is <i>urino</i>. And shadow (<i>umbra</i>) isn't that far away. Coleridge isn't piddling around here: he is shaping a verbal text that captures beauty in the unmentionable, the discarded, the impolite.
<br />
<br />
And finally here is a notebook entry from a few years later, about a hawk in flight: unpublished in Coleridge's lifetime, but to me a piece worthy to stand with Shelley's ‘To A Skylark’:
<br />
<blockquote>
The soil that fell from the Hawk poised at the extreme boundary of Sight thro' a column of sunshine—a falling star, a gem, the fixation, & chrystal, of substantial Light, again dissolving & elongating like a liquid Drop—how altogether lovely this is to the Eye, and to the Mind too while it remained its own self, all & only its very Self—. What a wretched Frenchman would not he be, who could shout out—charming Hawk's <i>Turd</i>!—[Sept 1808; <i>Notebooks</i>, 3:3401]
</blockquote>
This seems to me gorgeous writing, but I have to concede those critics who have deigned to notice it haven't taken it so seriously as I do. John Worthen, for instance, notes the ‘rapturous’ tone of the paragraph, but swiftly qualifies his judgement: Coleridge, he says, ‘also knew such language teetered on the edge of absurdity’ [<span style="font-size: x-small;">Worthen, <i>The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge</i> (Cambridge Univ Press 2010), 76</span>]. I'm not sure he did know that, because I'm not sure that such language <i>does</i>, actually. 'Frenchman' is a generic insult, of course; but the entry is saying: <i>don't</i> be that Frenchman. Delight in the hawk's turd! It is, in its own specific way, a miracle of flight (<i>turdus</i> in Latin is a variety of bird—it means thrush, of course); and as such becomes a rebus for the spiritually transcendent beauty of all created things, poetry not the least. This particular notebook entry continues:<br />
<blockquote>
O many, many are the seeings, hearings & tactual Impressions of pure Love, that have a Being of their own—& to call them by the names of things unsouled and debased below even their own lowest nature by Associations accidental, and of vicious accidents, is <i>blasphemy</i>—What seest thou yonder? X.—The lovely countenance of a lovely Maiden, fervid yet awe-suffering, with devotion—her face resigned to Bliss or Bale, &c &c.—Y. <i>A Bit of Flesh</i>.<br />
That which cannot be seen unless by him whose very seeing is more than an act of mere sight.
... The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polykleitos">Polyclete</a> that created the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_Callipyge">Ἀφροδίτη Καλλίπυγος</a> thought in acts, not words—energy divinely languageless—(<u>ο λογος</u> εκ θεῳ και συν θεῳ θεος)—δια τον Λογον, oυ συν επεσι—thro' <i>the</i> word, not with <i>words</i>.
</blockquote>
The last bit of Greek glosses the famous phrase with which St John's opens his gospel, and means ‘(<u>the word</u> from God and with God, God)—via the Word not with words’. Nor is it irrelevant that it is the famous sculpture named in the previous bit of Greek ‘<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_Callipyge">Aphrodite of the Beautiful Buttocks</a>’ (we could say: ‘Aphrodite Cute-Arse’) that enters into Coleridge's thought as an embodiment of the expression of non-verbal beauty. This sexualised bottom balances the implied functional shitting bottom, as a way of dignifying sexual desire and bodily functions, rather than dragging classical sculpture into the gutter. This is not the edge of any absurdity, unless we want to expand that word to encompass the leap of faith as such. It is Coleridge saying that the dropping turd of the hawk in flight is beautiful, as the backside of Aphrodite is beautiful: transcendentally so. To treat it as vulgar, either for comic or lustful purposes, is actually a kind of blasphemy. This, to rework Blake's famous phrase, is Coleridge seeing Heaven in a grain of shit.<br />
<br />
Coleridge's notional interlocutors in that notebook entry, X and Y, do not see the same thing when they see a woman. For the latter she is only flesh to be lusted over; but the former really sees her, sees her for what she is, and that means he sees that something spiritually fine has been erected out of a universally excremental material. Dickens, a generation later, makes a similar play with the word <i>dust</i>: the ‘dust-heaps’ that are the source of the Boffins' fortune in <i>Our Mutual Friend</i> are collections of all the rubbish of London, and contain waste matter wet as well as dry, faecal as well as functional (indeed, the ‘night soil’ men of London made good money repurposing human and animal shit as fertilizer; for though not every crop can be safely grown in the former waste, some, like tomatoes, can). Behind the social reportage of an actual feature of 19th-century London life is a spiritual insight, as is often the case with Dickens. In this case, the whole novel is haunted by one of the most famous of Biblical verse: <i>for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return</i>. We may sanitize this mortal verse (Genesis 3:19) by thinking of something powdery and dry, but human corruption is rather wetter than drier, rather more excremental than powdery—and so, after all, is human conception. We don't produce a clean dry pollen like the plants of the field, after all. Indeed, whilst I'm no connoisseur of modern porn (I know: they all say that ...) I've often been struck that one of the most pathological aspects of that ubiquitous form of contemporary cultural production is now weirdly <i>clean</i> it all is: how washed and buffed, how depilated and teeth-bleached and plastic the players all are; how all human dirtiness and shoddiness and ordinary inadequacy has been banished from the whole performance. In that, Coleridge's X and Y mini-conversation seems to me still to have real relevance.
<br />
<br />
I don't want to stray from the Coleridgean point, for I do think these sorts of questions genuinely engaged him. Read his autobiography, and you can't help but be struck by how much grief his own bowels gave him. Severe constipation is one of the side-effects of opium (that is, heroin) addiction, and STC often had to endure what he understandably enough saw as the demeaning indignity of repeated enemas: clyster pipes inserted into his anus by an old female nurse for the purpose of forcably irrigating out his compacted shit.<br />
<br />
For STC constipation was more than a mere physical inconvenience. He took it as symptomatic of a more *clears throat* fundamental spiritual problem: a blockage of the soul, an inability to work through and move healthfully on in his life and his work that Coleridge autodiagnosed as a pathology of the will. Being helpless in the grip of opium addiction will tend to do that to a person, I suppose. Nowadays we are less inclined to blame addicts. But Coleridge certainly blamed himself, vehemently and often self-laceratingly. In July 1808, prompted by stabbing stomach pains from a prolonged constipated episode so severe that he actually thought he might die, he wrote in his notebook: ‘O misery! when the occasion of premature Death is that which makes Death terrible! Savage Stab! that transpierces at once Health and Conscience! Body and Spirit!—ΩΠΜ’ [Notebooks, 3:3352] Those last three Greek letters, that <i>Oh</i>, <i>Pee</i>, <i>Em</i>, indicate the root of the issue. A drug like heroin takes away the shittiness of the world, and therein lies precisely its problem. That it takes away the actual, normal passage of excrement is almost too apposite.
<br />
<br />
Here, I think, we touch upon one of the great, if almost entirely overlooked, themes of Coleridge's intellectual and imaginative life. A book like Edward Kessler's <i>Coleridge's Metaphor's of Being</i> (Princeton Univ. Press 1979) does solid critical work isolating a series of focus-points for Coleridge's core poetic ideas: what Kessler calls ‘the Eddy-Rose’ (a sort of composite metaphor that combines eddies, whirlpools and the like with the patterns of petals of a beautiful flower); phantom life; Limbo and so on. But Kessler doesn't talk about the turd, in part because respectable published-in-his-lifetime Coleridge, critic and poet, doesn't bring turds into his work very often. But the notebooks are full of it, and as metaphors of being go it is, I think, hugely important. I understand why critics have generally avoided writing about it; but it does seem to me distorting.<br />
<br />
The whole process of eating, drawing sustenance, and shitting out waste is an organic through-line that iterates the dream of health, both physical and more importantly spiritual, as far as Coleridge is concerned. His greatest poetic achievements are potent dramatisations of the breakdown of that healthful flow. The subterranean river in ‘Kubla Khan’ flows not out into the open ocean, but round and down in a turbid eddy that loses itself somewhere hidden and sunless. The Ancient Mariner's cursed, blocked voyage replicates a whole string of nightmare-death-in-life constipations (until, at least, a mystic Christian blessedness and forgiveness intervene: but even there the Mariner is caught in a recurring cycle of obsessive-compulsive retellings of his tale). ‘Christabel’ can't even (if you'll excuse me) shit out its own ending, so trapped it is in its recirculation of blocked and morbid desire. For Coleridge, shit, like the beauteous airborne turd of the flying falcon, is a symbol of health, of through-flow and freedom.<br />
<br />
My friend <a href="http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2017/06/topsy-turvy-tono-bungay.html">Alan Jacobs has coined the phrase “excresacramental” for a particular sort of art</a>, a Swiftian cacography that articulates not only the expressivity but actually the <i>holiness</i> of the abject-physical. From the point of view of the Incarnation, God becoming man is not God becoming the bizarrely soap-washed, clean-linen, dazzling-bleached-smile icon of modern cleanliness that many images of Jesus peddle to modern-day believers, complete with cleaner-than-clean halo shine, like the gleam of newly rinsed glasses in the dishwasher. It is, rather, the non-material taking on flesh and <i>all</i> that flesh is heir to. It is God becoming dust, wet and foul-smelling as well as dry and smoky.</div><div><br /></div><div>The point is, as Coleridge might say, that unless you can truly see that the hawk shitting its load into a sunbeam is as beautiful and holy an image as the white dove flying over blue waters beneath a new rainbow, then you haven't actually seen what beauty in the world fully means. The paraclete is also un(para)clean. For Coleridge, an apprehension of that place where religious transcendence, pure love, sexual desire (for instance, desire for a well shaped set of buttocks) and the healthy bowel-movement all express one another is not a satirical denigration of love: there's nothing of Swift's ‘Celia Celia Celia <i>shits</i>’ horror in STC's writing. Rather it is a strangely, unusually, wonderfully expressive epitome of the central mystery of a genuinely religious writer: the spiritualisation of matter, the materialisation of spirit. One end of the nightingale produces sublime, uplifting song, and the other end farts and shits, and both are integral to the whole sight of Coleridge's poetic vision. Samuel Taylor <i>Kaka</i>leridge.</div></div>Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-1004206619712466012021-08-22T09:10:00.010-07:002021-08-22T09:43:38.141-07:00By Charles James Fox On His Deathbed <p></p><div style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzDhdWb7YvJ5wvXsHMhk4Zj8yDPq0PLnRbTMvFgdMY1ZfIYb6zTgPVVeQGagqy0gnai2aRLtWYIQGejlduP9KagX7CXgj4Ru35XVwJFpl_f-17VH-jdR9Gnz6TDB6EFFWxyTPlE69oFoM/s2048/DarkLadye.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzDhdWb7YvJ5wvXsHMhk4Zj8yDPq0PLnRbTMvFgdMY1ZfIYb6zTgPVVeQGagqy0gnai2aRLtWYIQGejlduP9KagX7CXgj4Ru35XVwJFpl_f-17VH-jdR9Gnz6TDB6EFFWxyTPlE69oFoM/w320-h240/DarkLadye.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>Click to embiggen and, indeed, clarify.</p><p>So: I've been reading Walter Scott's <i>St Ronan's Well</i> (1823), and came across the above-reproduced note. In Chapter 6 the love-interest in the novel, beautiful young Clara Mowbray, has yet to be introduced into the story, and the young hero Francie Tyrrel, who has returned to the Scottish spa-town of St Ronan's Well hoping to be reunited with her, hears her described by the fashionable ladies at dinner in Coleridgean terms:</p><blockquote>
“I own, madam,” [Tyrrel said], “I was a little surprised at seeing such a distinguished seat unoccupied, while the table is rather crowded.”<br /><br />
“O, confess more, sir! ... What if <i>the Dark Ladye</i> should glide in and occupy it?—would you have courage to stand the vision, Mr. Tyrrel?—I assure you the thing is not impossible.” ...<br /><br />
“Who is expected?” said Tyrrel, unable with the utmost exertion to suppress some signs of curiosity, though he suspected the whole to be merely some mystification of her ladyship.
<br /><br />
“How delighted I am,” she said, “that I have found out where you are vulnerable!—Expected—did I say expected?—no, not expected.<blockquote>
<i>She glides, like Night, from land to land,<br />
She hath strange power of speech.</i></blockquote>
—But come, I have you at my mercy, and I will be generous and explain.—We call—that is, among ourselves, you understand—Miss Clara Mowbray, the sister of that gentleman that sits next to Miss Parker, the Dark Ladye, and that seat is left for her.—For she was expected—no, not expected—I forget again!—but it was thought possible she might honour us to-day, when our feast was so full and piquant.—Her brother is our Lord of the Manor—and so they pay her that sort of civility to regard her as a visitor—and neither Lady Binks nor I think of objecting—She is a singular young person, Clara Mowbray—she amuses me very much—I am always rather glad to see her.”
<br /><br />
“She is not to come hither to-day,” said Tyrrel; “am I so to understand your ladyship?”
<br /><br />
“Why, it is past her time—even her time,” said Lady Penelope. [<i>St Ronan's Well</i>, ch 6]
</blockquote><p></p>A footnote at this point directs the reader's attention to the endnote at the head of this post.<br /><br />Two things interest me here. One is the reference to Coleridge's poem ‘<a href="https://www.bartleby.com/333/450.html" target="_blank">The Ballad of the Dark Ladie</a>’ (1799), a fragment of sixty lines that
was intended to be a full-fledged ‘Gothic’ ballad of about one-hundred-and-ninety. It's an interesting if rather critically-neglected poem, this; and the function of the reference to it here in Scott's novel is ironic (the joke is that superannuated, affected Lady Penelope Penfeather sees everything through a ‘Romantic’ filter. When we finally meet Clara she is nothing like Coleridge's doomed Gothic maiden). It's tempting to read ‘The Ballad of the Dark Ladie’ as a dry-run for Coleridge's later <i>Ancient Mariner</i>, a gender-swapped version of a couplet from which is what Lady Penelope actually quotes in the above passage. (Is this a joke at the expense of her ignorance, maybe? Or is her fluency with Coleridge a sign of the depth of what nowadays we would call her <i>fandom</i> of STC?)<br /><br />But there's another thing. When ‘Dark Ladie’ was first published [in the <i>Morning Post</i>, 21st Dec 1799] it was preceded by a 34-stanza ballad-form prologue. When ‘Dark Ladie’ was published in book-form (in the 2nd edition of <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> in 1801) Coleridge separated this prologue, trimmed seven stanzas from it top-and-tail and published it as a separate poem called ‘Love’. In his Princeton edition of Coleridge's <i>Poems</i> (<a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691004839/the-collected-works-of-samuel-taylor-coleridge-vol-16-part-1" target="_blank">2001; 16:605</a>), J C C Mays says this:<blockquote>
The originally drafted ‘Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie’ and the later, pruned version, ‘Love’, were popular from the first, and were frequently reprinted in newspapers and anthologies in C's lifetime. Walter Scott told the actress Sarah Smith, ‘the verses on Love ... are among the most beautiful in the English language’ [Scott <i>Letters</i> III:400] and John Gibson Lockhart described the poem as ‘better known than any of its author's productions ... many hundreds of our readers have got it by heart long ago, without knowing by whom it was written’ [<i>Blackwood's Magazine</i>, Oct 1819]
</blockquote>I won't quote the whole poem (you can <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43993/love-56d222e917181" target="_blank">read it here, if you like</a>), though it begins:<blockquote>
All thoughts, all passions, all delights,<br />
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,<br />
All are but ministers of Love,<br />
And feed his sacred flame.<br /><br />
Oft in my waking dreams do I<br />
Live o'er again that happy hour,<br />
When midway on the mount I lay,<br />
Beside the ruined tower.<br /><br />
The moonshine, stealing o'er the scene<br />
Had blended with the lights of eve;<br />
And she was there, my hope, my joy,<br />
My own dear Genevieve!
</blockquote>... and ends:<blockquote>
She half enclosed me with her arms,<br />
She pressed me with a meek embrace;<br />
And bending back her head, looked up,<br />
And gazed upon my face.<br /><br />
'Twas partly love, and partly fear,<br />
And partly 'twas a bashful art,<br />
That I might rather feel, than see,<br />
The swelling of her heart.<br /><br />
I calmed her fears, and she was calm,<br />
And told her love with virgin pride;<br />
And so I won my Genevieve,<br />
My bright and beauteous Bride.
</blockquote>What intrigues me about Scott's note, at the top of this blogpost, is the suggestion that Whig politician <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_James_Fox" target="_blank">Charles James Fox</a> so loved this poem that he had it read to him on his deathbed. I've spent a while poking around in biographies and online resources to see if I can find any corroboration for this fact, but without success. Where did Scott (a deep-dyed Tory and no friend of the Whiggish-radical Fox) hear it? From the horse's mouth, perhaps—which is to say, not from Fox himself, but from someone present at his end? Or was it a common story? If so I can't track it down anywhere else.
<p>Is it true? (If so, why does nobody else talk of it?) Fox certainly loved poetry, although his real passion was for classical verse: he carried an edition of Horace in his pocket wherever he went. The 4-vol <i>Memorials and Correspondence of Charles James Fox</i> (1857) is full of passages celebrating Greek and Latin classics, with the occasional praising note concerning his ‘great partiality to the Italian poets’, whilst at the same time deprecating Milton (‘there is a want of flow, of ease, in his blank verse which offends me more perhaps than it ought’). Fox does express a favourable opinion of Spenser, and there's plenty of flow and ease in Coleridge's ‘Love’, so it's not impossible that Fox rated it. And in 1806, when Fox died, Coleridge had begun, and had not yet completed, the process of crossing the political topography of left-and-right, radical-to-Tory. Young STC had been inspired by Fox's writing, and although slightly-older STC criticizes Fox's closeness to Napoleonic France in <i>Essays on His Times</i>, he does so respectfully enough. And we know that Wordsworth sent a copy of the 1801 <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> to Fox, so he would have known, or at least had the opportunity to read, the poem.</p><p>It would be nice to have some other confirmation, nonetheless.</p><p>And then, whilst poking around, I came across the following in a critical study of Crabbe:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjINRiX1LFAzOgAcshxYj6KZ4q_64WBnX7ZTKG7NYPGlko0XFkbvUXh8qMptLNFLCxdsUCRsuu1YTPIdDPB4XzNyWDAevpXPNIPzcGfopwv45HRIYSnIFOppaMEwFSRYhuR8eyPB1TOUdE/s1124/Screenshot+%2528255%2529.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="282" data-original-width="1124" height="100" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjINRiX1LFAzOgAcshxYj6KZ4q_64WBnX7ZTKG7NYPGlko0XFkbvUXh8qMptLNFLCxdsUCRsuu1YTPIdDPB4XzNyWDAevpXPNIPzcGfopwv45HRIYSnIFOppaMEwFSRYhuR8eyPB1TOUdE/w400-h100/Screenshot+%2528255%2529.png" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /></div>The source here appears to be Crabbe himself, which opens the possibility that Scott heard the story that Fox read ‘Love’ on his deathbed from <i>Coleridge</i> himself (certainly possible). Did all the Romantic poets go around boasting that Charles James Fox selected one of <i>their</i> poems to read immediately before shuffling off his mortal coil?<div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRez7OHM13dXwDEmmLwmp99UapGfFubQrb8KESo_bOMzxlF_hOWTRoPVeUMkr2onnotZRuBjeZWnCrvUNQ1X16T5iVrvK8ukK_OQ4F-irQGsPQ09UC5vAvNg7EJNkeCaKAoLjWoi9Khv4/s2048/Comforts-of-a-Bed-of-Roses-Gillray.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1487" data-original-width="2048" height="232" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRez7OHM13dXwDEmmLwmp99UapGfFubQrb8KESo_bOMzxlF_hOWTRoPVeUMkr2onnotZRuBjeZWnCrvUNQ1X16T5iVrvK8ukK_OQ4F-irQGsPQ09UC5vAvNg7EJNkeCaKAoLjWoi9Khv4/s320/Comforts-of-a-Bed-of-Roses-Gillray.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>[<span style="font-size: x-small;">‘Comforts of a Bed of Roses’ (1806), in which Gillray depicts Death crawling out from under Fox's covers, entwined with a scroll inscribed ‘Intemperance, Dropsy, Dissolution’.</span>]</div>Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-27438031381441957802021-06-06T06:26:00.026-07:002021-06-06T07:08:39.652-07:00Buried Together<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrVAJ8dYqfeiURRlY-r3TjJK4vWPPP0fEGnCNs9VRVNWUbY5Ob4D3EZr9GCMghDqLkJ3_7i2NT2p3Dy4sKPT8B4joABYWsOfr-P3gi7YaIjl3HkkIOvzTIxZmVjcMQ2yW7OGl95we8T5k/s1094/Screenshot+%2528167%2529.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="642" data-original-width="1094" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrVAJ8dYqfeiURRlY-r3TjJK4vWPPP0fEGnCNs9VRVNWUbY5Ob4D3EZr9GCMghDqLkJ3_7i2NT2p3Dy4sKPT8B4joABYWsOfr-P3gi7YaIjl3HkkIOvzTIxZmVjcMQ2yW7OGl95we8T5k/w400-h235/Screenshot+%2528167%2529.png" width="400" /></a></div><div>This is a notebook entry written some time between 1808 and 1810, when Coleridge was experiencing his most acute despairing-yearning for Sara Hutchinson, <a href="https://samueltaylorbloggeridge.blogspot.com/2015/11/on-name-asra.html">his ‘Asra’</a>. 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: </div><div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUxKRKspC8WlkrXpKLWaC1v45_Im2YkgFJt2aSNZUtroNOSzy7vkicqrighcjjXa1YKa_OjQLbXuhq7XV7bXK__9ZarlNgs8x6Ei5a9Wj5kaZ2yDuh7FsbJnAZwGKUgUM-lOScO7AhXrA/s1030/Screenshot+%2528168%2529.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="517" data-original-width="1030" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUxKRKspC8WlkrXpKLWaC1v45_Im2YkgFJt2aSNZUtroNOSzy7vkicqrighcjjXa1YKa_OjQLbXuhq7XV7bXK__9ZarlNgs8x6Ei5a9Wj5kaZ2yDuh7FsbJnAZwGKUgUM-lOScO7AhXrA/w400-h201/Screenshot+%2528168%2529.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />If that looks a little blurry, click on it and it will embiggen and clarify.</div><div><br /></div><div>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.<p>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.
</p></div>Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-72869515750937958272021-06-06T05:57:00.011-07:002021-06-06T06:00:20.887-07:00"Craving the Flesh of the Starling"<p> In 1808 (maybe a little later, in 1809 or 1810) Coleridge copied this passage into his notebook.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia6oUIwhKX2J60nh5nRkcaVBZ3RAJT3vaZ8zIpjYQbRo6bFGm1h66FMEDKy_S6a-eZlEHap-936ggXnEs305Mb8oV-RgUS_OTUCYv55jkmCns77QNgDksEChVMsyF30jDvfOETaVLyUbw/s1327/Screenshot+%2528166%2529.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="246" data-original-width="1327" height="74" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia6oUIwhKX2J60nh5nRkcaVBZ3RAJT3vaZ8zIpjYQbRo6bFGm1h66FMEDKy_S6a-eZlEHap-936ggXnEs305Mb8oV-RgUS_OTUCYv55jkmCns77QNgDksEChVMsyF30jDvfOETaVLyUbw/w400-h74/Screenshot+%2528166%2529.png" width="400" /></a></div><p>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.’</p><p>Where is it from? ‘Untraced’ is all <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Coleridge_Notebooks_V3_Notes/8x-yDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=coleridge+notebooks+3298&pg=PA871&printsec=frontcover">Kathleen Coburn can give us</a>. In fact it's from the dedication to <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ZDZqSxoem88C&pg=PR19&lpg=PR19&dq=%22a+mangiar+sempre+starne%22&source=bl&ots=QeJEfiSVt3&sig=ACfU3U1Jmknif0-ssBFD5F-OUHjHkJLcWA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjz_paQg4PxAhWLDmMBHT_NAU8Q6AEwAXoECAUQAw#v=onepage&q=%22a%20mangiar%20sempre%20starne%22&f=false"><i>Il malmantile racquistato colle note di Puccio Lamoni, di Lorenzo Lippi</i></a> (1688). The deal here is that <a href="https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_Lippi">Lorenzo Lippi</a>, very famous in his day as a painter of portraits and heroic subjects, came after his death to be better known for his <i>Malmantile Racquistato</i>, a racy mock-heroic poem written in Florentine dialect. Here's wikipedia:<blockquote>
[In 1660] he wrote his humorous poem named <i>Malmantile Racquistato</i>, which was published under the anagrammatic pseudonym of Perlone Zipoli. The <a href="https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_Malmantile_racquistato"><i>Malmantile Racquistato</i></a> 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 <i>testo di lingua</i>. Lippi is remembered more for this poem than by his paintings. It was published posthumously in 1688.</blockquote>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.
</p>Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-75154747982988218402021-03-12T02:53:00.017-08:002021-03-13T00:21:13.237-08:00Coleridge's Latin Verse<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4HxhfsmmyTVsuV4dZb8lSlR6gW2vCIhfsCrI8IxNm5SigBO4PM3a0NPSfPgIgrvmiuneKi1IS6hjv-XFWJ-QLnU5aC1nXVNbrD1SQ5jk05r-w2_Q7PNjsh6nCkXBWOPY2juDXW_q4ewI/s933/Screenshot+%2528407%2529.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="555" data-original-width="933" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4HxhfsmmyTVsuV4dZb8lSlR6gW2vCIhfsCrI8IxNm5SigBO4PM3a0NPSfPgIgrvmiuneKi1IS6hjv-XFWJ-QLnU5aC1nXVNbrD1SQ5jk05r-w2_Q7PNjsh6nCkXBWOPY2juDXW_q4ewI/s320/Screenshot+%2528407%2529.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg55d4Z6k2yQ0ZGahRBIzOQezswH-CRHuKi4QufN74y-Q0BC7THgibY-RIpqGmEiMUEh2ENnUcH2TGNJznk6dyBB0NIQKh3MifNJJEmGvqD-v_OVtU2CzlP-Q8SWJjy7mf-I_uZYHl1HJE/s929/Screenshot+%2528408%2529.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="753" data-original-width="929" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg55d4Z6k2yQ0ZGahRBIzOQezswH-CRHuKi4QufN74y-Q0BC7THgibY-RIpqGmEiMUEh2ENnUcH2TGNJznk6dyBB0NIQKh3MifNJJEmGvqD-v_OVtU2CzlP-Q8SWJjy7mf-I_uZYHl1HJE/s320/Screenshot+%2528408%2529.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>I've briefly mentioned this short Latin poem, ‘Lines For A Second Emblem’, <a href="https://samueltaylorbloggeridge.blogspot.com/2016/04/how-many-of-coleridges-latin-poems-are.html" target="_blank">before on this blog</a>. What I want to do in this post is dig a little deeper into it. My claim is not that this is a good poem, since it really isnt. It's a doodle, a notebook entry in which STC flexed his Latinist muscles but slightly, and that went no further. But I <i>am</i> interested in the process by which Coleridge, more or less desultorily, produced the text. I say <i>desultory</i> because he not only never published this, he didn't prefer it for its stated purpose: as a motto or legend appended to a pictoral emblem, engraved jewel or brooch [click the header images to embiggen them, and you can see J C C Mays explanation of the context]. He was manifestly doodling his thoughts, and did so in Latin on this occasion because Latin is the traditional language in which such mottoes are cast.</p><blockquote><i>
Eheu! dum me mea Psyche,<br />Dulce decus veris aprici,<br />Pulchra Comes et Zephyrorum,<br />Dum Psyche me fugit eheu!<br />Pallidulum me tua taeda<br />Quid juvat, o inamata Juno!</i><br /><br />Alas when my Psyche (soul/butterfly) has (gone) from me<br />Sweet delight of sunny Spring<br />Lovely partner of the Zephyrs,<br />When Psyche has fled, alas!<br />Pale little me: your torch<br />What joy does it bring, unloved Juno!</blockquote>The emblem in question is a butterfly. Juno's torch would accompany a wedding, and so is out of place in this mournful situation, when the speaker's butterfly-woman soulmate has abandoned him.<div><br /></div><div>So the larger question is: how might an anglophone poet go about writing a poem in Latin? <div><br /></div><div>There are two main obstacles. One is the business of writing a poem in a language that is not one's mother-tongue. Two is, more specifically, the <i>prosodic</i> difficulty of composing metrically valid verse according to a system not (as in English) of ictus—patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables—but of <i>arsis</i>, or quantity (patterns of long and short vowels).</div><div><br /></div><div>To take the question of fluency first. Plenty of writers and poets have managed to write well in a second or even a third language, of course, and some (Conrad, Nabokov, Achebe) have created great art that way. Latin, however, is not a living language. One cannot pick up conversational Latin by moving to Ancient Rome for a year or two. It <i>is</i> possible to become a reasonably accomplished Latin speaker by immersing oneself in the language, but only with unusual effort. When Latin was still living, or half-alive, as Europe's lingua franca (when it was still the language of the Catholic mass, and scientific and literary texts were still being published in it) such immersion was more achievable. Erasmus spoke Latin so well and so much that, reputedly, he forget how to speak Dutch. Montaigne, sent to school with a German teacher who spoke no French, was educated exclusively in Latin and became confidently expressive in that language. That Latin had not entirely lost its function as lingua franca into the 17th century certainly facilitated the career of Casimir (Polish poet Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski), famous across Europe as ‘the last Latin poet’ and <i>Horationis par</i>, ‘the equal of Horace’. His own ease with Latin owed much to the fact that he was a Jesuit priest, which made Latin a working as well as a classical language for him. There is nothing equivalent in Coleridge's life.</div><div><br /></div><div>Indeed the comparison shows up one of the main fault-lines of neo-Latin discourse for a writer like Coleridge: viz., that writing in Latin actualises both the (for him, good!) heritage of classical, or more narrowly Augustan, Rome and the (bad!) associations of continental Roman Catholicism. Coleridge's engagement with neoLatin must undertake a ticklish navigation of this, for him, problematic territory. Not where Casimir is concerned, I should add (Coleridge often quotes, and indeed translates, Casimir's poetry), although Casimir's fame was such as to transcend his connection with Catholicism. But in other regards Coleridge's attitude was indicative of his era. In the words of A M Juster:</div><div><blockquote>
Nineteenth and early twentieth century British scholars largely defined the field, and they did so in their own image. Their worldview tended to incorporate strong emotional connections between the Roman Empire and their British Empire, which is why they focused on the perceived glory days of the Augustan era, downplayed the repulsive aspects of that era, only grudgingly studied the following century, and then largely ignored the empire’s literature after about 100 AD.
<br /><br />
The dissolution of the Roman Empire was painful for British classicists not only because of the parallels to their own nation’s international decline, but because the literature became increasingly Catholic. Hatred of Catholicism was a standard failing of the British elite through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and classicists were no different. Most classicists of that period viewed Late Antique Latin poetry as degenerate, and simply did not study it or teach it.
</blockquote>
Juster rightly notes ‘the strangeness of this bigoted cutoff for the study of a language’s literature’ (‘French departments do not stop teaching French literature after Moliere and Racine, Italian departments do not stop teaching Italian literature after Dante and Petrarch, so why do almost all classics departments feel they have no duty to study and teach Latin literature after Juvenal, Martial and Seneca?’). </div><div><br /></div><div>Two is the prosodic question. I will be honest here and confess that I find this actually quite difficult to judge. English-speakers (in my experience of teaching poetry) generally have a good ear for ictus, can pick which syllables in any given line of verse are stressed and which are unstressed. Couple this with the easily taught table of the four most common metrical patterns in stressed verse—the iambic (de <span style="font-size: x-small;">DUM</span> de <span style="font-size: x-small;">DUM</span> de<span style="font-size: x-small;"> DUM</span>), the trochaic (<span style="font-size: x-small;">DUM</span> de <span style="font-size: x-small;">DUM</span> de <span style="font-size: x-small;">DUM</span> de), the anapestic (diddy <span style="font-size: x-small;">DUM</span> diddy <span style="font-size: x-small;">DUM</span> diddy <span style="font-size: x-small;">DUM</span>) and the dactylic (<span style="font-size: x-small;">DUM</span> diddy <span style="font-size: x-small;">DUM</span> diddy <span style="font-size: x-small;">DUM</span> diddy) and you've basically got it. There are other metrical patterns, obviously, and you may need the occasional <span style="font-size: x-small;"> DUM</span>-<span style="font-size: x-small;">DUM </span>spondee to make your prosodic analysis work out, but that's basically it. Then it's a simple matter tracing the iambic pulse in a Shakespearian line, or contrasting the dactylic<blockquote>
Blow the wind southerly,<br />
Southerly, southerly,<br />
Blow the wind south o'er the<br />
Bonny blue sea</blockquote>
with the famously anapestic<blockquote>
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,<br />
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;<br />
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,<br />
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.</blockquote>
that used to be Byron's most memorised poem. All well and good. But this later European tradition of scanning verse by stressed and unstressed syllables is quite different to the tradition that obtained in ancient Greek and Latin verse. Their metrical feet are the same: iambs, anapests and so on. But in place of stress, the ancients heard length. Robert Graves described the difference of modern and ancient poetics as being that between the hammer and anvil of the blacksmith—ictus—and the long and short strokes of the boatsman's oar—classical prosody. Maybe that gives you a sense of the distinction.</div><div><br /></div><div>Whether the Ancients also heard stress is a moot point, but their poets, and their grammarians, certainly analysed poetry in terms of the pattern of long and short syllables, not in terms of patterns of ictus. And that's a distinction we can understand too: we hear the difference between the long e (Greek η) in <i>feel</i> and the short e (Greek ε) in <i>fell</i>; between the omega (ω) in <i>dole</i> and the omicron (ο) in <i>doll</i>. But the fact that we can distinguish those sounds in individual words doesn't mean we can all hear the complex patterns of long and short syllables in passages of Homer or Vergil.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here's my rather shaming confession: I studied this stuff as an undergraduate doing a Classics degree, and went into it in greater detail for my PhD (where it was really quite important), but I'm still not sure I can properly ‘hear’ the dactyls in Homer or Vergil as I read them aloud. Certainly not in the way I can ‘hear’ the stress patterns in English verse. I can <i>see</i> those patterns in Homer and Vergil, when the verse is written down, and can analyse it and so on; but I suppose ictus just strikes me as intuitive and common-sense in a way patterns of long and short vowels don't.</div><div><br /></div><div>It doesn't help that there's no way of working out which vowels in Latin words are long and short. You just have to know. Which is to say, since nobody (realistically) is going to acquire that degree of expertise, you need a guidebook. For British schoolboys, and for those who persisted in the exacting and largely fruitless exercise after their schooldays, this meant the <i>Gradus</i>.</div><div><br /></div><i>Gradus ad Parnassam</i>, or ‘steps to Parnassus’, is a book listing Latin words in which the quantities of vowels are marked, to facilitate the slotting of the various words into the requisite metrical wire-frames of verse composition.
<blockquote>
The first ‘step’ or lesson is contained in the title phrase itself, because <i>gradus</i> being a fourth-declension noun (a step), with a short ‘<i>-us</i>’ in the singular, becomes <i>gradūs</i>, with a lengthened ‘<i>-ūs</i>’, in the plural (steps). The difference in meaning teaches one to observe the difference in vowel quantity between two forms which look the same but have different grammatical properties, and so to pronounce the title of the dictionary correctly. Then ‘Parnassus’ is a poetic figure alluding to the Muse (of poetry): and the second function of the thesaurus is even so, to illustrate such figures. Therefore, the whole expression <i>Gradus ad Parnassum</i> is not just a title but an epitome of the work itself, combining declension, construction, scansion and figure. [<span style="font-size: x-small;">Chisholm, Hugh, ‘Gradus’, <i>Encyclopædia Britannica</i> (11th ed.: Cambridge University Press 1911), 12:314</span>]</blockquote>
There were several <i>Gradus ad Parnassum</i>s published. The one with which Coleridge was familiar from his own schooldays was the English translation of Paul Aler's (the famous revision of this by John Carey wasn't published until 1818). The problem, of course, was that painstakingly assembling a poem out of these units, like a child fitting lego-blocks together to make a tower, negates the organic fluency of Coleridgean imaginative creation, and throws the writer back on mere ‘fancy’: derivative quasi-plagiaristical rote-work. Early on in the <i>Biographia</i>, Coleridge mocks a contemporary neo-Latin poet, and his reliance on the <i>Gradus</i>, in precisely such terms. First he makes the general point:<blockquote>
This style of poetry, which
I have characterized above, as translations of prose thoughts into
poetic language, had been kept up by, if it did not wholly arise
from, the custom of writing Latin verses, and the great importance
attached to these exercises, in our public schools. Whatever might
have been the case in the fifteenth century, when the use of the
Latin tongue was so general among learned men, that Erasmus
is said to have forgotten his native language; yet in the present
day it is not to be supposed, that a youth can think in Latin, or
that he can have any other reliance on the force or fitness of his phrases, but the authority of the writer from whom he has adopted
them. Consequently he must first prepare his thoughts, and then
pick out, from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, or perhaps more compendiously
from his Gradus, halves and quarters of lines, in which to
embody them. [<span style="font-size: x-small;">Coleridge <i>Biographia Literaria</i> (1817), ch 1</span>]</blockquote>Then, in a footnote, the specific:<blockquote>
In the Nutricia of Politian, there occurs this line:<blockquote><i>
Pura coloratos interstrepit unda lapillos</i>.</blockquote>
Casting my eye on a University prize poem, I met this line:<blockquote><i>
Lactea purpureos interstrepit unda lapillos</i>.</blockquote>
Now look out in the <i>Gradus</i> for <i>Purus</i>, and you find, as the first synonime, <i>lacteus</i>; for <i>coloratus</i>,
and the first synonime is <i>purpureus</i>. I mention this by way of elucidating one of the
most ordinary processes in the ferrumination of these centos.
</blockquote>The line from Italian poet Poliziano means: ‘the pure stream goes murmuring over little coloured pebbles’. The synonymical
line means: ‘the milky stream goes murmuring over the little purple pebbles’.
Actually the quoted Latin is from Poliziano’s <i>Rustica</i> (1480s) not his <i>Nutricia</i>. The
‘University poem’ from which the second line is quoted is the Oxford Prize Poem
of 1789, <i>Iter Ad Meccam</i> [‘The Pilgrimage to Mecca’] by George Canning (1770-1827)—the same Canning who went on to become Prime Minister. Coleridge had
been ridiculed in Canning’s reactionary newspaper <i>The Anti-Jacobin</i>, and the young
STC had attacked the whole of Pitt’s Napoleonic War cabinet (which had included
Canning). But he had later been introduced to Canning by Frere, and seems to have
mellowed towards him. The actual force of the note, in other words, is an obscure,
if gentle, mockery of a prominent political figure. ‘Ferrumination’ seals the joke: it is
an Anglicisation of the Latin <i>ferrumino</i>, which means ‘to cement, solder, glue, unite,
bind, join’. ‘Soldering’ is, of course, the principle strategy involved in
canning (Peter Durand’s patent on his new method for preserving food using tin cans
had been granted in 1810).<div><br /></div><div>Still: absent an Erasmian absolute fluency in Latin, what was the neo-Latin poet to do? I don't believe (though I can't prove) that Coleridge fumbled through an actual copy of his old schooldays Gradus when he composed in Latin, but there's no denying that much of his Latin verse is derivative, fanciful rather than imaginative. Indeed, some of it hugs the coast so closely that it approaches the plagiaristic.</div><div><br /></div><div>I think his praxis, in writing such poetry, involved one or two approaches. Sometimes,<a href="http://samueltaylorbloggeridge.blogspot.com/2021/01/ariostos-ad-petrum-bembo-c1500.html" target="_blank"> as with ‘Ad Vilmum Axiologum’ (‘To William Wordsworth’ 1808)</a>, Coleridge actually sat with a specific Latin poem in front of him—in this case a Latin poem by Ariosto—and reworked it, writing-out and adapting the original. On other occasions, he drew on his internal reference library. STC read very widely, in Latin and neo-Latin literature, and possessed an unusually capacious literary memory. It is surely likely that, as he put pen to paper, the compositional wheels span in his head and he withdrew likely-sounding half-lines and lines from that storehouse. Which brings me back to the brief ‘Lines for a Second Emblem’:</div><div><blockquote>
Eheu! dum me mea Psyche
</blockquote>This is a version of a line of neo-Latin verse by Samuel Johnson. Nothing suspect or Catholic about him as a source! Coleridge has read, and remembered: ‘qualia dii! vidi dum me mea nympha secuta est’, a line from a poem co-authored by Johnson and Stephen Barrett, ‘<a href="http://www.yalejohnson.com/frontend/sda_viewer?n=106852" target="_blank">Contributions to Poems by Others</a>’ (1745) that means: ‘ah, what sights I saw, ye gods, when my nymph walked with me!’ Coleridge shrinks this to a tetrameter, lopping off ‘qualia, dii!’ and substituting the more conventional alas, <i>eheu</i>, which, since it is a trochee, can substitute metrically for the two long syllables of <i>vidi</i>. Then, because Sara Hutchinson is more than just any old nymph, but is in some crucial sense his <i>soul</i> (his inspiration, love and life) he changes the trochaic <i>nympha </i>for the spondaic <i>psyche</i>. That's OK, though, because by curtailing he is also prosodically adjusting the anapestic hexameter of Johnson's line, availing himself of the convention by which the two unstressed syllables of an anapest can be swapped for a single stressed syllable, as with a spondee.
</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't want to labour the point, but the whole poem is assembled this way. <i>Dulce decus</i> is Horatian (is, indeed, right from the beginning of that schoolroom essential author: it's <i>Odes</i> 1.1, line 2). <i>Pulchra comes</i>, ‘lovely companion’, is common in Latin verse (Johannes Silos ‘Epigram <span style="font-size: x-small;">CCV</span>’ [1673]; Hugo Grotius uses the phrase in his Latin translation of the <i>Greek Anthology</i>, <span style="font-size: x-small;">CLXXX</span>). <i>Me fugit eheu</i> is a standard Latin tag, most famous in relation to the phrase derived from Vergil and Horace <i>tempus fugit eheu</i>. <i>Quid juvat</i> is from Claudian. And so on.</div><div><br /></div><div>What this means, arguably, is that we are better served if we ‘read’ Coleridge's Latin poems precisely in terms of their intertexts:—as, in other words, poems as much about their prototypes. or more precisely about the way their prototypes express or reflect latter-day concerns, as for their own sakes. This motto poem is not a very good example of that, except in the sense that it is indicative of Coleridge's strategy. The Ariosto poem, and Coleridge's anguished reworking of it (<a href="http://samueltaylorbloggeridge.blogspot.com/2021/01/ariostos-ad-petrum-bembo-c1500.html" target="_blank">already discussed on this blog</a>), is a better example, but even there where STC deviates from his working text, he does so via a series of props and stays, a walking-frame of familiar tags and phrases he already knows fit the rigours of Latin prosody. Still: not just the specifics of the choices Coleridge makes in composing his partly or wholly refried neoLatin texts, but the fact that he chooses to write in Latin at all is significant.</div><div><br /></div>
Kenneth Haynes suggests that writing in a language other than their mother-tongue ‘gives writers the option to choose a language in order to reach, or to elude, a particular audience.’ Coleridge does both of these things: sometimes aiming to connect with a certain scholarly or (as with this motto) formal-traditional mode, other times aiming to free himself from the restrictions of Emnglish propriety, or prudishness, or perhaps simple manners. Latin is teh key language here, as Haynes notes:<blockquote>
Latin, in particular, was available both to enlarge one's audience in one respect (as when religious controversialists like Luther, Calvin, Milton and many others chose the international language) and to restrict is in another (by excluding the Latin-less from discussions of sensitive matters) ... Latin literature offered writers new literary possibilities, from the magnificence of the high style to the urbanely bawdy. [<span style="font-size: x-small;">Kenneth Haynes, <i>English Literature and Ancient Languages</i> (Oxford Univ Press 2003), 19-20</span>]
</blockquote>
<div>This utility of Latin outweighs, for Coleridge, the limitations of writing in the language, the way it shifts him back towards Fancy and away from Imagination.</div><div><br /></div></div>Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-37176780218418303952021-03-06T03:32:00.009-08:002021-03-09T05:04:03.954-08:00Church, State<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />[<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Note</b>: this is an older post (pre-Brexit as you can tell) that I've re-upped. The thing is, going through the earlier postings to this blog I spotted some typos in this post and opened it to editing to correct them. BUT, when I went back to the blog everything pre-2015 seemed to have vanished. I'm not sure what's going on, but I suspect it's Gone For Good. Now, much of the pre-2015 material here has been written-up in one or other of my Coleridge books; but it's a worrying thought that the vagaries of internetdom are wiping away years of assiduously worked-up blogposts. Anyway, since the edit window was still open, and since I didn't seem to be able to locate this post on the actual blog, I thought I'd repost it. One consequence, mind, is that it's prompted me to stop dithering and actually pull together all my Coleridge and Latin posts into something resembling a book, lest they all disappear one morning, like breath into the wind. AR</span>]<br /><br />
Here's me trying to pull some of my <em>Church and State</em> thoughts into a more coherent order (my read through of <a href="http://amechanicalart.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/coleridge-on-constitution-of-church-and.html">chapters 1-4 is here</a>, and <a href="http://amechanicalart.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/coleridge-on-constitution-of-church-and_8.html">chapters 5-12 here</a>). I have previously wondered: can he have coined the phrase ‘<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerisy#Nineteenth-century_European_modes_of_the_.27Intellectual_Class.27">clerisy</a>’ without being aware on some level of the rhyme with ‘heresy’? Is that a distraction, or a cunning piece of ironic wordplay? Or another fossilised thought from when I first read this book lo these many years since: there’s something compelling about writing a book setting out to nail-down the <em>Constitution of Church and State</em> when at the heart of your point is that none of the three words in the title have clear unambiguous meanings. After all, famously, Britain <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kingdom">does not have a written Constitution</a>: just a ragbag of parliamentary statute and judicial precedents.
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And Coleridge himself notes that the word ‘State’ means both the entirety of the entity we might call ‘Britain’ including the church, <em>and</em> those aspects of entity we might call ‘Britain’ <em>except</em> the church. You might think that the very title of STC’s book means he is pointing to the second these, but it’s not as simple as that—the Church is not an add-on or extra to be bolted onto the State in Coleridge’s vision: it’s integral to it, historically, morally and practically. And as for defining the term 'Church'—why: Coleridge defines not one but <em>three</em> separate meanings for this word. There's the actual church (to which Coleridge belonged, and with whose congregants he worshipped of a Sunday), the ‘Church of Christ’, an other-worldly Platonic ideal, and a sort of <em>tertium quid</em> church that his book is kind-of about.
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Indeed, given that it’s something of a cliché of <em>Church and State</em> studies that it is a complex and baffling text [‘the book is a perplexing mixture of political commentary, social theory, and historical analysis’; Peter Allen, <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709777">‘S. T. Coleridge's Church and State and the Idea of an Intellectual Establishment’</a>, <i>Journal of the History of Ideas</i>, 46:1 (1985), 89] I was expecting to find my re-read a complexifying process. But actually it didn’t go down like that. The book is, I think, simpler than has been thought. The key, I think, is the ‘three churches’ idea. It is almost commonplace, in our Dawkinsy militant atheist times, to distinguish two aspects to religion. There’s religious beliefs as a set of metaphysical propositions to which the believer assents (assents in the strong, Newman sense of that word)—there exists a God, I have an immortal soul, God cares what I do in the world and so on. This is the level at which Dawkins engages: denying the truth of these beliefs. He thinks this is enough to pull-down the edifice of the Church; but as many people have pointed out ‘religious people’ are not individuals who are defined merely by a set of beliefs in their heads. They are also defined by membership of a particular community, and engagement with a particular social praxis. This is the second aspect of contemporary religion, about which Dawkins has almost nothing to say: not only attending church, but helping run the church jumble sale, running soup kitchens, meeting with friends for coffee, helping out and trying to live the values of your religion in the world. Coleridge certainly understood that the Church was these two things together. But one of the novelties of the <em>Church and State</em> volume is the way it is arguing for a third sense of ‘Church’, extramural to the sorts of things seen as ‘Churchy’. There are two main things here: one that we would nowadays call ‘general taxation and the welfare state’; and two that falls under the heading of education (primary, secondary, tertiary and research). In many ways, in the 21st-centry, these things are not ‘churchy’: they are not administered by the church (quite rightly not), not part of the usual duties of the church. Nor is STC saying that social workers, teachers and academics <i>should</i> be members of the church clergy. But he is saying that, even when they are not of the church, they are clergy-y. If you see what I mean. That there is something combined of a moulded church-ness <em>and</em> state-ness about this body of people he named ‘clerisy’.
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This doesn’t bring us any closer to the most obvious question we surely want to pose of Coleridge’s <em>Church and State</em>: does it have anything to teach us today? Or is it a text of merely historical interest?
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We can break this question into at least two, I think. One is: was Coleridge <em>right</em>? And right or not, is what he says still relevant today? <em>Church and State</em> makes a number of verifiable, or at least falsifiable, assertions and it is surely worth checking whether they are true or not. To pick out a couple: is his theory about the origin of the system of taxation as, essentially, religious tithes correct? (Short answer: no—taxation was a secular business in ancient Egypt and Persia; although titheing was also commonplace in the middle east). Whether this has any bearing on the real point STC is making—the advantages of disbursing tax income nationally in ways that are informed by a religious rather than secular rationale—is another matter.
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What about the ‘<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerisy#Nineteenth-century_European_modes_of_the_.27Intellectual_Class.27">clerisy</a>’? Here matters get tangled. As I noted in <a href="http://amechanicalart.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/coleridge-on-constitution-of-church-and_8.html">the earlier post</a>, one of the ways Coleridge’s clerisy idea developed is into the expansion of the university sector, not just to broaden educational opportunities for the citizenry but to furnish the nation with an intelligentsia. Given the glowing terms in which STC talks of ‘the clerisy’, it would be hard for any latter-day inheritor of the mantle—such as myself—to talk objectively about it. (We’re liable to say: ‘of <em>course</em> the State should pay for our upkeep—and pay us handsomely!’) But I don’t think Coleridge had, well, me in mind when he coined his term. It’s not just that I’m not religious, and that I’m part of a university system specifically set apart from the church. It’s that what we do (increasingly so, with the introduction of tuition fees) is simply not disseminated into every village and home of the realm.
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This is one reason—a practical reason—why STC models the clerisy on the clergy. The clerisy’s job is to educate the nation, practically and morally; and to do that it needs to go into every village, even into every home. Priests already do that. My sense is that STC can’t imagine a secular organisation having that same access without it becoming a horrific secret-police-style invasion of privacy. (The 1820s, and the established of the Metropolitan Police Force, was a time when the French-style invasion of state apparatus of law, order and control into private life was fiercely debated and as fiercely opposed).
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What about relevance? I want to limit this to the situation in the UK, simply to keep the discussion manageable; but that’s harder to do than it might otherwise be, since it is precisely globalisation that poses the biggest contemporary challenge to the argument Coleridge makes. Relevance becomes hard to assert.
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It’s one thing to note how influential he was on the traditions of 19th-century Liberal and even Conservative political thought; it’s another to make the case for his continuing relevance. Indeed, it could be argued that the political world has changed since 1830 in ways that render Coleridge besides the point. It’s not just that the question of whether Catholics should be treated equally under the law is a dead one, for surely nobody would deny that they should. It is more to the point that two of the key salients of Coleridge’s discussion no longer obtain: first, religion is not the force it was—it no longer really makes sense, some might say, to talk of the UK as ‘a Christian nation’ for instance, partly because it is a much more ethnically and religiously diverse nation than it used to be, but also because Atheism has made so many inroads into popular belief. And secondly ‘we’ don’t really believe nations should be run by monarchs any more. The popularity of the House of Windsor has waned and waxed over the last few decades, hitting a low point immediately after the death of Diana (currently, and rather bafflingly to my eyes, the royal family is very popular); but nobody really thinks the Queen should be anything other than a figurehead. Coleridge proposes a checks-and-balances system of government of a particular kind, with the Upper House (‘tradition’) exactly balancing the powers of the lower (‘innovation’); but in the UK over the last century or so we have seen a steady erosion of the powers of the House of Lords, and an increasingly ‘Presidential’ style government by the Commons, which means the Cabinet, which means the P.M. This is not what STC would have wanted
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This in turn leads to a question of whether the terms of the debate could be ‘transposed’ into a modern idiom. As it might be: STC talks about Catholics; today ‘we’ are more worried about—let us say—Muslims. But the questions are very similar: do Muslims ‘really’ belong to the UK, or is their allegiance necessarily to a foreign power in Mecca? Can they be trusted, or do they represent a sort of fifth-column within the state? Does ‘accepting’ them (whatever that means) weaken the identity of the UK as a Christian nation? This precise question has been asked more than once in Parliament and the media recently, actually; a few years ago the UK media worked itself into a lather about 'Muslim schools' in Birmingham supposedly 'indoctrinating' kids into Islam. The code-work here is 'radicalising'; which means (since it doesn't really mean, whatever the right-wing think, literally 'turning-into-a-terrorist') 'un-Britishizing'. This in turn could lead to a particular reading of <em>Church and State</em>, or perhaps an argument as to its contemporary relevance, of the sort which I’m sure I can leave to the reader as an exercise. A modern-day Coleridgean would say: we need to rebalance the constitution, taking power away from the executive of the Commons—and the P.M. in particular—and rebooting the Upper Chamber in some way that empowers it; and we need a third element (a President, perhaps, if the monarch no longer has any political credibility) to adjudicate. And indeed, in one big way such a transposition has a lot to recommend it. The political landscape today is polarised between ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’ to a much greater degree than was the case in Britain in 1830, when ‘radical’ was (largely) a term of abuse, and liberalism was pretty much indistinguishable from old-school Toryism of the pre-Thatcher 1970s. In this world, where political commentators tend increasingly to pick a side and argue polemically from it, there might be something quite radical in the notion that a healthy body politic should have both these forces constitutionally balanced equally, with some notional arbiter (monarch, President, HAL-style computer, whatever) to ensure that the balance remains equal. I don’t know of any contemporary commentator who is arguing that, though.
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There’s a very obvious objection to be made here. What Coleridge means by a Conservative is very different to what a voter in 2021 understands by the term. Indeed, the change wrought by the Thatcher-Reagan reconfiguration of ‘conservatism’ may be the biggest of all the socio-cultural changes between 1830 and now. For Coleridge a conservative is a landowner aristocrat who wants to conserve the old ways, and to resist any modification or amelioration of them. Theirs is an essential feudal view of the way society should operate. Coleridge opposes them to a set of merchants, financiers and professional classes who want to mobilise social change to maximize wealth-generation. This latter group sound very like modern-day Tories (and US Republicans). It’s hard to deny, in fact, that in the terms that Coleridge puts forward, the ‘Commons’ won—they swept the board in fact. They are the only game in town. This (my notional neoColeridgean might say) has proved a pretty mixed blessing; and there it would be to the good if we re-instituted some politically structural way of putting the breaks on unfettered ‘growth’. According to this reading, the contemporary relevance of <em>Church and State</em> would be a matter of replacing the ‘Barons’ of Coleridge’s original design with—let’s say—the Greens of today: a political force premised upon the notion that we have to rein-in change, ‘progress’ and unregulated capitalism in order to preserve something absolutely valuable, the land itself. The problem here, I think, is that the Greens, though certainly popular, are too marginal a force in contemporary politics.
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But stop a moment. Is ‘transposition’ into contemporary terms of reference the way to talk about this text? Put it another way: are monarchism, anti-Catholicism and the church all so passé? The news has recently been full of the abdication of Juan Carlos I of Spain, a monarch in exactly the sense that Coleridge would have understood the term who did exactly what Coleridge, in <em>Church and State</em>, says a monarch should do—after Franco’s death in 1975, he restrained the Falangist authoritarian party and brought the progressive democratic party back into the political arena. As for anti-Catholicism—this, it seems to me, is an immensely deep-rooted prejudice in British cultural life. It is not, of course, that <i>active</i> discrimination against Catholics is any longer a feature of the law of the land. But it’s pervasive in a way people looking from outside sometimes find hard to credit. Charles II converted to Catholicism on his deathbed in 1685: he was, actually, functionally a ‘Catholic’ in his private beliefs; but after the Restoration he kept that to himself, believing that the British people would simply not accept rule by a Catholic. His openly Catholic brother James succeeded him, and lasted barely 3 years before the Brits chased him out in a revolution still called ‘Glorious’, replacing him with a foreigner whose chief merit was his Protestantism. Does this have any contemporary relevance? Have we ever had a Catholic Prime Minister? (Answer: oh no). No Catholic has ever so much been leader of the Conservative or Labour parties—though Jews have held both positions. Tony Blair was a Christian, who steered clear of religion in his political dealings—Alastair Campbell famously said ‘we don’t do God’—and was an Anglican communicant throughout his term as PM. His wife, though, was Catholic; and almost as soon as Blair stepped down from being Prime Minister he himself converted. You think that timing was coincidental?
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To judge by their dominance of the categories of ‘historical fiction’ and ‘screen drama’, the three historical periods which which contemporary Brits are most fascinated, or perhaps obsessed, are: the Tudors (all those sexy woman in elaborate dresses running the risk of getting their elegant swan-white necks chopped by the axe-man); the Victorians—everything from neo-Dickensian tales of urchins and prostitutes, to Steampunk and its variants—and World War 2. Putting the last one on one side for a moment, what is it that links the previous two? Outwith living memory, but times of national ‘belief’ that hinge, in crucial though largely hidden ways, on the relationship between Englishness and Protestantism, in contra-distinction to Catholicism. Henry VIII’s creation of the Church of England is the horizon of all those sexy Tudor stories. The emancipation of Catholics in 1829 is the context for (to return to the matter in hand) Coleridge’s <em>Church and State</em>.
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‘Religion?’ you say. ‘No, no: class is the crucial thing. Or ethnicity.’ I don’t know. The main focus for the question of Catholicism was Ireland; and Ireland is still a live political issue—even after the Good Friday agreement and the reduction (though not cessation) of hostilities. ‘The Troubles’ shaped my own upbringing, in London in the 1970s as the IRA planted bombs to kill people like me. And the key question here is: why was it Irish nationalists who did this? There have been equally earnest Welsh and Scottish nationalist movements—the latter may be about to engineer an independent Scotland. But the Tartan Army never mobilized the way the IRA did. What this says to me is that these movements were not about ‘celtic-ness’, or about mere hostility to ‘England’, in both of which Scotland and Wales were surely as energised as was Ireland. They are about religion: wholly Protestant Wales, largely Protestant Scotland.
<br />
<br />
Some 1830 context. The Jacobite rebellion of 1746 had been a sectarian as well as a Tory-political attempt to revolution; and Scotland suffered oppression in its aftermath, up to and including legislative strictures. But by the early 1900s Scotland was more-or-less re-assimilated into the UK, with the enormous success of Scott’s novels throwing a Romantic glamour over the land. The Irish equivalent would be <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Confederate_Wars">the Irish Confederate Wars</a>, a full century earlier (dragging on through the 17th-century until the Battle of the Boyne in 1690). A hundred years earlier! Yet the reaction from the mainland was both much more severe and long-lasting. Here’s a quick summary of the anti-Catholic ‘Penal Laws’ (mostly enacted after 1690’s Battle of the Boyne, although some predate that battle): exclusion of Catholics from most public offices; a ban on intermarriage with Protestants (repealed 1778); Catholics barred from owning guns or serving in the armed forces (repealed in the Militia Act of 1793); Catholics not permitted to be MPs (not repealed until 1829); Catholics excluded from voting (until 1793); not permitted to study at Trinity College Dublin (repealed 1793); Catholics excluded from the legal professions and the judiciary (repealed, respectively, 1793 and 1829); on a Catholic’s death his legatee could benefit by conversion to the Protestant Church of Ireland; a ban on converting from Protestantism to Catholicism ‘on pain of forfeiting all property estates and legacy to the monarch’ and ‘imprisonment at His Majesty’s Pleasure’; a ban on Catholics buying land under a lease of more than 31 years (repealed 1778); a ban on custody of orphans being granted to Catholics on pain of a £500 fine; a ban on Catholics inheriting Protestant land; Roman Catholic lay priests permitted to preach only after registering to do so according to the terms of the Registration Act of 1704 (but seminary priests and Bishops could not do even this until 1778); when allowed, Catholic churches to be built only from wood, not stone, and away from main roads; ‘no person of the popish religion shall publicly or in private houses teach school, or instruct youth in learning within this realm' upon pain of twenty pounds fine and three months in prison for every such offence’ (repealed in 1782). Is that enough context?
<br />
<br />
STC thinks that what holds societies together is always an idea. By this he means something halfway between the conventional sense of ideals or notions inside the heads of the many citizens (what a Marxist-influenced thinker might call ‘ideology’)—and a more specifically teleological truth: an idealised destination or aim or purpose. For him the crucial question is not whether laws can be framed to repeal these anti-Catholic oppressions; it is whether British Catholics can buy-in to the idea of being British, rather than French, Roman and whatever else. And his answer to that question is implicit in his three churches. The first of those three is different depending on whether one is a Protestant or a Catholic Church; the third of those three (presumably; for who can fathom divine Providence?) will see the erasure of all petty doctrinal differences over transubstantiation or whatever else. But it is the second, the medial church, that is the crucial battleground.Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-52708310110529227202021-03-03T01:56:00.013-08:002021-03-04T23:26:30.820-08:00Sara Amam<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCiPljP0A_pRvoJ_3pTecKuac6oa9aWXvxq50-nRb7F3Hyp8MYjaDZdQG6ohSuZjrmbAUTSw03Lp4qrlgEfCH8BHl19OsgbTmf1sAZV8rY1KH8sSNrGIKpAhcF4U64x-DNx8P1L5srQcA/s780/Screenshot+%2528401%2529.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="569" data-original-width="780" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCiPljP0A_pRvoJ_3pTecKuac6oa9aWXvxq50-nRb7F3Hyp8MYjaDZdQG6ohSuZjrmbAUTSw03Lp4qrlgEfCH8BHl19OsgbTmf1sAZV8rY1KH8sSNrGIKpAhcF4U64x-DNx8P1L5srQcA/s320/Screenshot+%2528401%2529.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>Click to embiggen. Notebook entry 3347 is that two-word phrase: <i>Sara Amam</i>. Sara of course is <a href="https://wordsworth.org.uk/blog/2017/11/01/sara-hutchinson/" target="_blank">Sara Hutchinson</a>, whom Coleridge loved with a hopeless and unreciprocated passion. I don't know what ‘amam’ means.</p><p><strike>It's possible <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/coleridge-notebooks-pt1andpt2-v3/kathleen-coburn/9780415291019" target="_blank">Kathleen Coburn</a> unravels the meaning in her note; but although I own the ‘text’ half of the two-part <i>Notebooks</i> Vol 3 (1808-19), I don't happen to possess a copy of the ‘notes’ half, and in lockdown I can't just pop to my university library and check it out</strike>. [See below]</p><p>It looks like Coleridge is jotting down, in Latin, the bare fact of his continuing love for Asra, such that <i>Sara Amam</i> would mean something like ‘Beloved Sara’. The thing is: it doesn't mean that (‘beloved Sara’ would be <i>Sara Amata</i>). <i>Amam</i> is not part of the conjugation of <i>amo.</i> So unless this is a transcription or other error for <i>Sara Amem</i> (which would be the first-person present subjunctive ‘were I in love with Sara ...’, unlikely on several fronts) I'm not sure it makes sense. Nor is there any Liddell and Scott entry under (as it might be) ἀμάμ, although there is a word used in Sappho and elsewhere <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=a%28ma/macus">ἀμάμαξυς</a> (‘a vine trained on two poles’): again, surely not what Coleridge is gesturing towards, howsoever apropos it might be as description of <a href="http://samueltaylorbloggeridge.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-latin-ad-vilmum-axiologum-1807.html">post-EPOCH</a> Sara Hutchinson. Which leaves me with: nothing.</p><p>When lockdown lifts I'll go see if Coburn's note on this entry sheds any light. </p><p>-------</p><p>[<b>Update</b>] Chris Hind, via Twitter, has kindly sent me a scan of Coburn's note, which, it turns out, sheds no light on the matter at all. Hmm. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmgeB4bB-sVptSs75lIlrpFpHkP5CxdGqDyfMX5S5JA8wZ3ZxY9k2WAiSlZwEI52UnvdWsjaMjeX04FdXc5650gaNxV-B8WfYwmeYIjmrK88q9iVoXJD1sjSXsI4-CyZs3RI_U0EgUN5g/s968/Screenshot+%2528402%2529.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="265" data-original-width="968" height="110" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmgeB4bB-sVptSs75lIlrpFpHkP5CxdGqDyfMX5S5JA8wZ3ZxY9k2WAiSlZwEI52UnvdWsjaMjeX04FdXc5650gaNxV-B8WfYwmeYIjmrK88q9iVoXJD1sjSXsI4-CyZs3RI_U0EgUN5g/w400-h110/Screenshot+%2528402%2529.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-19817270829094688272021-01-19T00:06:00.022-08:002021-01-22T06:26:06.330-08:00Ariosto's "Ad Petrum Bembo" (c.1500)<p></p><div style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8WSOz5y-IkLu5DPhb4vG_cv0xlYCK28AMo55wldf6CaUbn0o7MI6L8sTimxEVHFPK-qHh65POtHX6p-BbSpTXwfuXNLLvYCUib424T3uot2lTh7rcNNIKxpfNUDaQuPetVg5LkuJlTv4/s1200/Ludovico_Ariosto_1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8WSOz5y-IkLu5DPhb4vG_cv0xlYCK28AMo55wldf6CaUbn0o7MI6L8sTimxEVHFPK-qHh65POtHX6p-BbSpTXwfuXNLLvYCUib424T3uot2lTh7rcNNIKxpfNUDaQuPetVg5LkuJlTv4/s320/Ludovico_Ariosto_1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p>In an earlier post on this blog (‘<a href="http://samueltaylorbloggeridge.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-latin-ad-vilmum-axiologum-1807.html" target="_blank">The Latin “Ad Vilmum Axiologum” (1807): Coleridge and Ariosto</a>’) I talked about how Coleridge, stung by what he had seen—or perhaps, by what he had hallucinated—on the morning of Boxing Day 1806, ran out of the house and into a nearby tavern, where he spent the day drinking and scribbling-out his agony into his notebook under the portentous title ‘THE EPOCH’. What had he seen? Wordsworth in bed, naked, with Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth's wife's sister, and the object of STC's profound and unreciprocated desire. Coleridge later tore-out most of these pages and destroyed them, but references to the events recur in his notes and poems for many years. How could Wordsworth cheat on his wife? How, more importantly, could Wordsworth betray <i>him</i>? How could Asra?</p><p>The main focus of that earlier blogpost was one such later reaction to ‘THE EPOCH’, the Latin ‘Ad Vilmum Axiologum’ (‘To William Wordsworth’), a blistering poem of hurt and rebuke aimed at his friend.</p><blockquote><i>
Me n'Asrae perferre jubes oblivia? et Asrae<br />
Me aversos oculos posse videre meae?<br />
Scire et eam falsam, crudelem, quae mihi semper<br />
Cara fuit, semper cara futura mihi?<br />
Meque pati lucem, cui vanam perdite amanti,</i> [5]<br /><i>
Quicquid Naturae est, omne tremit, titubat?<br />
Cur non ut patiarque fodi mea viscera ferro,<br />
Dissimulato etiam, Vilme, dolore jubes?<br />
Quin Cor, quin Oculosque meos, quin erue vel quod<br />
Carius est, si quid carius esse potest!</i> [10]<br /><i>
Deficientem animam, quod vis, tolerare jubebo,<br />
Asrae dum superet, me moriente, fides<br />
At Fidis Inferias vidi! et morior!—Ratione<br />
Victum iri facili, me </i>Ratione, <i>putas?<br />
Ah pereat, qui in Amore potest rationibus uti! </i> [15]<br /><i>
Ah pereat, qui, ni perdite, amare potest!<br />
Quid deceat, quid non, videant quihus integra mens est:<br />
Vixi! vivit adhuc imraemor ASRA mei</i>.
</blockquote>
Here's how I translated this poem, in that original blogpost:
<br />
<blockquote>
You command me to endure Asra's neglect? and Asra's<br />
eyes turned from me, something I see very well for myself?<br />
To know her to be false, cruel, who to me has always<br />
been dear, who always <i>will</i> be dear to me?<br />
I must endure this light: I've vainly loved a false woman, [5]<br />
at which the whole of Nature trembles and stutters?<br />
Why not order my own bowels stabbed with a sword,<br />
and then pretend, William, that it does not hurt?<br />
Why not tear out my heart, or my own eyes, or something else<br />
that is even dearer, if anything <i>is</i> dearer! [10]<br />
I'd command my weary soul to endure anything,<br />
if only Asra, though it killed me, remained faithful.<br />
But I've seen the funeral of her fidelity! and I'm dying!—Reason<br />
is too easily defeated, you really think <i>Reason</i> can help me?<br />
Ah, perish the man who can subordinate love to reason! [15]<br />
Ah, perish any man who does not love to perdition!<br />
What's decent, what's not, let the sane decide on that:<br />
My life is over! Though <span style="font-size: x-small;">ASRA</span> lives on, unmindful of me.
</blockquote>In that earlier blog I showed that this poem is not an original composition, but appropriates and reworks Ariosto's early 16th-century poem, ‘Ad Petrum Bembo’ (‘To Pietro Bembo’). What I'm doing in <i>this</i> blog is digging a little deeper into that.<div><br /></div><div>Here's the whole of Ariosto's poem, together with my new translation:<br />
<blockquote><i>Me tacitum perferre meae peccata puellae?<br /> Me mihi rivalem praenituisse pati?<br />
Cur non ut patiarque fodi mea viscera ferro<br /> dissimulato etiam, Bembe, dolore iubes?<br />
Quin cor, quin oculosque meos, quin erue vel quod</i> [5]<br /> <i>carius est, siquid carius esse potest. <br />
Deficienteni animam quod vis tolerare iubebo, <br /> dum superet dominae me moriente fides.<br />
Obsequiis alius faciles sibi quaerat amores,<br /> cautius et vitet tetrica verba nece;</i> [10]<br /><i>
qui spectare suae valeat securus amicae<br /> non intellecta livida colla nota;<br />
quique externa toro minimi vestigia pendat,<br /> dum sibi sit potior parvo in amore locus.<br />
Me potius fugiat nullis mollita querelis,</i> [15]<br /> <i>dum simul et reliquos Lydia dura procos.<br />
Parte carere omni malo, quam admittere quemquam<br /> in partem; cupiat Iuppiter, ipse negem.<br />
Tecum ego mancipiis, mensa, lare, vestibus utar;<br /> communi sed non utar, amice, toro. </i> [20]<br /><i>
Cur ea mens mihi sit, quaeris fortasse, tuaque <br /> victum iri facili me ratione putas.<br />
Ah! pereat qui in amore potest rationibus uti!<br /> Ah! pereat qui ni perdite amare potest. <br />
Quid deceat, quid non, videant quibus integra mens est;</i> [25]<br /> <i>sat mihi, sat dominam posse videre meam</i>.</blockquote><blockquote>Am I to endure in silence my girl's cheating?<br /> To permit my rival outshining me?<br />
Why not order me to stab my guts with an iron knife<br /> all the while hiding, Bembo, my agony?<br />Why not rip-out my heart, or my eyeballs, or [5]<br /> something dearer to me (if anything <i>is</i> dearer)? <br />
I'd order my drooping spirit to bear up, <br /> if only my mistress stayed true til I died.<br />Let another man easily surrender to his lover,<br /> dodging harsh words like death to keep love alive; [10]<br />
watching with eyes, trusting his lover, though he<br /> can't comprehend the strange lovebites on her neck;<br />overlooking signs a stranger has shared her bed,<br /> so long as he feels she loves him more, or as much.<br />
Fine if she blanks me, if my begging doesn't soften her— [15]<br /> hard-hearted Lydia—<i>if</i> she avoids her <i>other</i> men too.<br />
I'd rather lose the whole, than to let anyone else<br /> have any part; if Jupiter himself desired her, I'd say no.<br />
I'll share my slaves, my table, house, my clothes;<br /> with you my friend, but not my bed! [20]<br />
Why do I say so, you ask? You might think you could<br /> cool my anger with a piece of your clever logic.<br />
Ah! may the man perish who measures love by logic!<br /> Ah! may he perish if love doesn't absolutely slay him! <br />
Let the clear-sighted concern themselves with propriety; [25]<br /> for me, all I care about is seeing my mistress.</blockquote><div>You can see that Coleridge has done two things to Ariosto's poem. One is swapping the names: <i>Vilme</i> for <i>Bembe</i> (addressing William rather than Bembo) and specifying Asra as the <i>puella</i> in question. The other is condensing the poem from 26 to 16 lines. This latter is achieved by a process of selection, filling in gaps with Coleridge's own Latin. So: STC’s first line adapts Ariosto’s opening line. Lines 2-6 are STC’s own. His lines 7-10 are Ariosto’s lines 3-6 and his lines 11-13 are a bridge to Ariosto’s line 22 (which STC reworks as his lines 14-15). The last four lines are, name-change aside, the same as Aristo’s last four lines. (The linking passages are not exactly original Coleridgean compositions either: for instance line 5's <i>puella perdite amanti</i>, I have loved a worthless girl, is Propertius <i>Elegies</i> 2.1. But I shan't get into all that here). </div><div><br /></div>
Ariosto's poem was a response to a short poem by his friend <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2011.01.0317%3Asection%3D1%3Asubsection%3D10" target="_blank">Bembo, ‘Ad Melinum’</a>. I won't quote it (it's on the other end of that link if you're interested) but here's John Grant's summary of it:<blockquote>
The speaker, adopting the role of <i>praeceptor amoris</i>, advises the addressee, who is
to be identified with the poet Pietro Mellini, to stop accusing or suspecting his lover
of infidelity. For if he does not do so, he will lose her (lines 1-4). The central section of
the poem (5-12) expands upon this advice. <i>Puellae</i> [girls] are by nature <i>infirmae</i> [weak] and can be
seduced by <i>blandae preces</i> [smooth or beguiling entreaties]. Men should recognize that fact, but pretend to be unaware
of it. That is how a love affair lasts. In the concluding four lines the speaker brings his
own situation into the poem. “If I saw my girl friend being unfaithful,” he says, “I
would not want to admit to it.” And he closes by addressing Mellini again as he had at
the beginning, urging him to follow his example and comforting him with the assurance that he is worrying needlessly; the situation he fears will not arise. [<span style="font-size: x-small;">John N. Grant, ‘Propertius, Ovid and Two Latin Poems of Pietro Bembo’, <i>International Journal of the Classical Tradition</i>, 1:4 (1995), 51</span>]
</blockquote>This smoothly cynical attitude to love and sex provokes Ariosto's impassioned retort. <div><br /></div><div>It's not clear to me if Coleridge was aware of both poems, or had only read Ariosto's. This matters, since it speaks, at least potentially, to the circumstances out of which Coleridge wrote, or adapted, his poem. Did Wordsworth, having been discovered by Coleridge in flagrante with Asra, adopt a Bembo-like suavity? He might have said something like ‘yes I slept with her, but, come now! We're both men of the world. You know what women are like, don’t get so het-up, be rational’ and so on. This doesn't strike me as impossible, although it also doesn't seem to me particularly likely. It's surely more probable that Wordsworth pressed the ‘you were drunk, or opiated, and imagined the whole thing’ line. </div><div><br /></div><div>The vision, whatever it was, wouldn't leave Coleridge alone. I assume he was reading neo Latin poetry (as we know he was doing in this period, pursuant to his plan to publish his own translations of select neo-Latin poets) and came across this poem. We can picture him caught by its applicability to his situation with Wordsworth and Asra, copying it out and adapting it as he did to point-up that specificity. Yet Coleridge's poem is (I'm suggesting) different to Ariosto's tonally, characterised by its earnest outrage and sincerity. I'm not sure Ariosto's original is especially sincere (hence my going to the bother of restranslating it). For instance: the couplet ‘Quin cor, quin oculosque meos, quin erue vel quod/carius est, siquid carius esse potest’ [5-6] (which Coleridge copies across) involves, we can assume, a comically oblique reference to Ariosto's prick. And more than that, it's a <i>recycled </i>joke, riffing off <a href="https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0003%3Apoem%3D82" target="_blank">Catullus 82</a>:</div><div><div><blockquote><i>
Quinti, si tibi vis oculos debere Catullum<br />
aut aliud si quid carius est oculis,<br />
eripere ei noli multo quod carius illi<br />
est oculis seu quid carius est oculis</i>.<br /><br />Quintus, if you want Catullus to owe you his eyes<br />
or another thing (if there is one) dearer than his eyes,<br />
do not steal from him that which he holds dearer<br />
than his eyes or the things dearer even than eyes.<br />
</blockquote>Catullus is begging Quintus not to steal his girl. You might as well (he says) rob me of my eyes, or of my balls, which are of course <i>even more important</i> than my eyes! The joke here is: being cuckolded is emasculating, a kind of castration. I mean I say that: older commentators (E T Merrill et al), a little prudishly, suggest that the thing that is more valuable to Catullus than his eyes is his love, Lesbia. That's not what the poem actually says, though (it says his eyes are dear to him, the things that are dearer to his eyes are dearer, and Lesbia is dearer still than both). Plus it's surely funnier the first way.</div><div><div><br />That said: I don't get that Catullian vibe from Coleridge's poem. There's nothing ribald, even in a coded way, about this expression of his anguish over Asra, here, I'd say.</div><div><br /></div><div>There's more to say, perhaps, about the extent to which, or perhaps about whether, Coleridge saw in Ariosto's relationship with Bembo his own relationship to Wordsworth—beyond, that is, the fact that Bembo seems to have shagged Ariosto's girlfriend, I mean. Bembo was an important cultural figure, a collector and arbiter of taste, wealthy and well-connected. Ariosto, as a poet, wrote often in Latin; it was Bembo who persuaded him to write his masterpiece, the <i>Orlando Furioso</i>, in Italian (strictly, in Tuscan). Both men were what we might, to use the anachronistic term, playboys, but Bembo's mistresses were of a higher class than Ariosto (he had a famous, or notorious, affair with Lucrezia Borgia for instance). But if Coleridge is Ariosto in terms of wounded sexual feeling, Wordsworth is Ariosto in terms of epic ambition. Coleridge of course is a major poet, but he himself always ceded to Wordsworth the true poetic laurels, and took the Bembo role of advice and exhortation whe it came to his friend's ‘philosophical epic’. It's a complex set of conflicting identifications, actually.</div><div><br /></div></div></div></div>Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3453811476257464806.post-76225212231379547832021-01-09T03:00:00.016-08:002021-01-10T23:49:09.355-08:00Coleridge quotes Cowley<p style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEy_lfj29EAxlyGbxTsavRH-MRxdLVjb8ABSXdO2oZMLb-Hhu7uJulkoCpzyfXnmntyTYJdZe3Juy7mf40H9dWuKA9OkI5s9PhMMwbLHAralcm3lqc8d0jvNkmGEXng81i4B_FH6wPG4Y/s1203/Screenshot+%2528303%2529.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="617" data-original-width="1203" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEy_lfj29EAxlyGbxTsavRH-MRxdLVjb8ABSXdO2oZMLb-Hhu7uJulkoCpzyfXnmntyTYJdZe3Juy7mf40H9dWuKA9OkI5s9PhMMwbLHAralcm3lqc8d0jvNkmGEXng81i4B_FH6wPG4Y/w400-h205/Screenshot+%2528303%2529.png" width="400" /></a></p><p></p><p>Coleridge copied-out this passage into his notebook, late 1808 or perhaps early 1809. It (entry 3196, as you can see) is one of several that respond to Cowley's neo-Latin epic, <i>Davideidos</i> (entry 3198 copies-out a line from Herodotus that Cowley quotes in a note to his own poem, and entry 3199 speculates on the physical dimensions of Hell, again following up one of Cowley's own footnotes). But for now I want to concentrate on this quotation.</p><p>Abraham Cowley was a late 17th-century Royalist poet who wrote with equal fluency in English and Latin. In general terms Coleridge was not exactly a fan: in the <i>Biographia</i> he speaks of the ‘seductive faults, the dulcia vitia, of Cowley’ as a poet. George Whalley quotes the following assessment: ‘for competitors in barbarism with Cowley's Latin <i>Poem de Plantis</i>, or even his not quite so bad <i>Davideid</i>, we must go I fear to the <i><a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Introduction_to_the_Literature_of_Europe/F-Y9AQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Deliciae+Poetarum+Germanorum&pg=PA145&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank">Deliciae Poetarum Germanorum</a></i>, or other Warehouses of Seal-fat, Whale Blubber and the like Boreal Confectionaries selected by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Gruter" target="_blank">the delicate Gruter</a>.’ He had a higher opinion of some of Cowleys shorter English poems, praising his ‘discursive intellect’ and calling him ‘a legitimate child of Donne’ and ‘probably the best model of style for modern imitation in general.’ </p><p>There are a couple of reasons why Coleridge might have written out this particular passage. Maybe it just struck him and he made a memorandum of it. Maybe he was thinking ahead to one of the various projects he was planning—a lecture series on literature (which he did eventually deliver), his translations of a selection of the best modern Latin poems (which he never did)—and had picked this passage out as an example to use later.
<br /><br />
Cowley's first plan for an epic poem was called <i>The Civil War</i>, which he hoped would commemorate and heroize King Charles' martial struggles and victory. After the king's cause went pear-shaped Cowley abandoned this plan (the unfinished portion was re-discovered in manuscript in the 1960s, and finally published in 1971). Instead he reworked some sections into a new epic, based on the life of the Biblical David. Cowley started this in Latin. Ambitiously enough, his plan was for twelve books, like the <i>Aeneid</i>. In the event he finished only the one book in Latin (it was published as <i>Davideidos Liber Primus</i> in Cowley's 1656 <i>Poems</i>) before changing tack, and starting over in English. He completed four books of <i>Davideis, a Sacred Poem of the Troubles of David</i>, but got no further (these four were also published in the 1656 collection). It's worth noting that the first book of the English <i>Davideis</i> is close to, but not an exact transation of, the <i>Davideidos</i>.
</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD7cfRTlRYoTB95-GCYfICvIhsk4iRVHcGGDEX-oX2XdM1_L_kEEncjusIZIJ-dbEEvSQotUmbp2pgvERTKGDhsxKN0JEXhyphenhyphen4rCO-Q_ztShTgpn0LtMCVrZZXRAUUMeJskOUKSE-cKpSQ/s961/Screenshot+%2528307%2529.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="749" data-original-width="961" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD7cfRTlRYoTB95-GCYfICvIhsk4iRVHcGGDEX-oX2XdM1_L_kEEncjusIZIJ-dbEEvSQotUmbp2pgvERTKGDhsxKN0JEXhyphenhyphen4rCO-Q_ztShTgpn0LtMCVrZZXRAUUMeJskOUKSE-cKpSQ/s320/Screenshot+%2528307%2529.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>Let's look at the passage that caught Coleridge's eye:</div><blockquote>
Dic mihi, <i>Musa</i>, sacri quæ tanta potentia <i>Versus</i><br />
(Nam tibi <i>scire</i> datum, & <i>versu memorare potenti</i>,<br />
Cuncta vides, nec te poterit res tanta latere <br />
In <i>regno, Regina, tuo</i>) vim <i>Diva</i> reclusam <br />
<i>Carminis</i>, & late penetralia ditia pande,<br />
Thesaurósque & opes, & inenarrabile <i>Sceptrum</i>:<br />
Quæ sprevere homines, tandem ut mirentur amento; <br />
<i>Divisque</i> accedat reverentia justa <i>Poetis</i>.
[<i>Davideidos</i>, 1:499-506]
</blockquote>Kathleen Coburn's note on the entry, understandably but a little misleadingly, translates by quoting the equivalent passage in Cowley's <i>Davideis</i> (it's 1:441-56):<blockquote>
Tell me, oh Muse (for Thou, or none canst tell<br />
The mystick pow'ers that in blest Numbers dwell,<br />
Thou their great Nature know'st, nor is it fit<br />
This noblest Gem of thine own Crown t' omit)<br />
Tell me from whence these heav'nly charms arise;<br />
Teach the dull world t'admire what they despise,<br />
As first a various unform'd Hint we find <br />
Rise in some god-like Poets fertile Mind, <br />
Till all the parts and words their places take, <br />
And with just marches verse and musick make;<br />
Such was Gods Poem, this Worlds new Essay;<br />
So wild and rude in its first draught it lay;<br />
Th' ungovern'd parts no Correspondence knew, <br />
An artless war from thwarting Motions grew; <br />
Till they to Number and fixt Rules were brought <br />
By the eternal Minds Poetique Thought.
</blockquote>This striking notion of the world as ‘God's poem’ (prescient of what was, really, a core Romantic idea, and an especially core Coleridgean idea, as per his ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ imagination) is indeed in Cowley's English epic. But it's not in the Latin Coleridge actually quotes, which stops before it gets to that bit. Line-by-line, that passage means:
<blockquote>
Tell me, O Muse, of the holy power of such Poetry<br />
(since you know such things and are mindful of poetry's power,<br />
having seen it all; nor should we fail to acknowledge<br />your kingdom, O Queen), the revealed power, Goddess,<br />of Song: open wide its rich inner sanctum,<br />
its treasures, its wealth, its inexpressible sceptre:<br />
though men scorn you, amaze them at last with love;<br />
may you teach them to reverence divine poets.
</blockquote><div>With <i>inexpressible sceptre</i>, your guess is as good as mine. The ‘God's poem’ stuff is a bit later on (‘<i>Sic magnum Mundi divino ex ore Poema</i>/<i>Prodiit</i>’; lines 513-14) and Coleridge didn't choose to write it out into his notebook. Instead he selected one further line, from the next page: ‘<i>hinc in nos nata est Numerorem sancta potestas</i>’ [line 541]. This means ‘thus it is that the holy power of Numbers is born’ (‘numbers’ in the sense of metrical lines, poems), a meaning not quite reproduced by the line from the <i>Davideis</i> Coburn quotes: ‘from thence blest Musick's heav'nly charms arise.’ The thing from which poetry's holy power springs is ‘<i>Harmonia</i>’, harmony, personified as a goddess. ‘There is so much to be said of this Subject,’ Cowley says in a footnote to this latter passage, ‘that the best way is to say nothing of it. See at large <em>Kercherus</em> in his tenth book <em>de Arte Consoni & Dissoni</em>.’ Mum's the word!</div><div><br /></div><div>If you're curious how this whole passage fits into the larger context of Book 1 of Cowley's poem, here's his summary of the action (click to embiggen): </div><div>
<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCBDomphT6bibxjKslh-kgj3hkzHBa6w-TRUEJDrFpii_-S-skKKa2a5iXfFpBtjOARVswzDheFx8zHUGTS55xDZGRefpye2VBH5EoXW9IQLs4wbA0IJDtYSE8gbGpNaTWHEeN6k-I9F0/s991/Screenshot+%2528306%2529.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="647" data-original-width="991" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCBDomphT6bibxjKslh-kgj3hkzHBa6w-TRUEJDrFpii_-S-skKKa2a5iXfFpBtjOARVswzDheFx8zHUGTS55xDZGRefpye2VBH5EoXW9IQLs4wbA0IJDtYSE8gbGpNaTWHEeN6k-I9F0/s320/Screenshot+%2528306%2529.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>It's from a digression, in other words. My sense is that Coleridge wrote the Latin down because he liked what it said about poetry as a sacred art, not because it's especially notable or euphonious verse as such.</p></div>Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com6