Water, Water Everywhere ...

 

Could these be Coleridge's most famous lines?

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink. [Ancient Mariner (1834 version), lines 119-122]

Where did they come from? Out of Coleridge's pure imagination, perhaps. Still: ‘it is scarcely practicable for a man,’ as he once noted, ‘to write in the ornamented style on any subject without finding his poem, against his will and without his previous consciousness, a cento of lines that had pre-existed in other works’ [Griggs (ed), Coleridge: Collected Letters (1956-71), 3:469-70].

We know that Coleridge read Angelo Poliziano, or Politian (1454-94). He talks about him in Church and State [CC 10:64] and variously in the Marginalia and Notebooks [374, 1673, 2670]. And in the Biographia he mocks George Canning for plagiarising some Poliziano in his university prize-winning poem Iter ad Meccam, ‘The Pilgrimage to Mecca’:

‘In the Nutricia of Politian, there occurs this line:

“Pura coloratos interstrepit unda lapillos.”

Casting my eye on a University prize poem, I met this line:

“Lactea purpureos interstrepit unda lapillos.”

Now look out in the Gradus for purus, and you find, as the first synonyme, lacteus; for coloratus, and the first synonyme is purpureas. I mention this by way of elucidating one of the most ordinary processes in the ferrumination of these centos.’ [Biographia, ch 1]

Centos again. Coleridge's mind was running on questions of plagiary, advertent or inadvertent. The first line of Latin quoted there (it's from Poliziano’s Rustica rather than his Nutricia, but who's counting) means: ‘the pure stream goes murmuring over little coloured pebbles’. The plagiarised line means: ‘the milk-white stream goes murmuring over the little purple pebbles.’ Canning capped his time as a student at Oxford by winning the poetry prize in 1789. He went on, of course, to become Prime Minister. Here Coleridge pays back the ridicule Canning had subjected him to in his reactionary newspaper The Anti-Jacobin, by accusing the eminent statement of plagiary (‘ferrumination’ seals the joke: the Latin ferrumino means ‘to cement, solder, join’, and ‘soldering’ is, of course, the principle strategy involved in canning, a process patented in 1810). 

What does all this have to do with the Ancient Mariner? Well, here's one of Poliziano's more famous short poems, ‘In Amicam’ [Epigrammata, 64]:

Allicis, expellis, sequeris, fugis, es pia, et es trux;
   me vis, me non vis, me crucias, et amas.
promittis, promissa negas, spem mi eripis, et das.
   iam iam ego vel sortem Tantale malo tuam.
durum ferre sitim circum salientibus undis,
   durius in medio nectare ferre sitim.

P.'s ‘amica’ is the woman he loves, and her treatment of him is not consistent. Tricky to capture the compression of the Latin in English, mind. Here's a fairly slack version:

You lure me, you banish me; you follow, you flee; you're kind and are cruel;
   you want me, you don't want me; you torment me, you're in love.
You promise then deny your promise, you snatch away my hope and offer it.
   Right now I feel like Tantalus in wanting you:
how hard my thirst, surrounded by salty waves,
   how hard my thirst in the midst of such nectar!

Here's another version:

You tease, reject; follow, flee; are kind, cruel;
   want me, don't want; torment me, are loving.
You vow, break your vow, crush hope and give it.
   Right now I'm Tantalus in wanting you:
hard thirst surrounded by salty waves,
   hard in the midst of such nectar to thirst

That's probably a bit elliptical. At any rate, it strikes me that Coleridge's potent image of desperate thirst in the midst of salt water has an antecedent in Poliziano's little love poem. Then again, I'm not accusing him of Canning-like plagiary. These things register, sinking into the mulch of the creative imagination, and are reworked. By excerpting the image from Poliziano's mannered itinerary of erotic contrasts Coleridge frees it from its rather starchy wit and re-somatizes it as something universal, something indeed existential. Immature poets, as Eliot said, imitate, mature poets steal and good poets make what they take into something better.