Sunday 3 January 2021

"Fragment in Blank Verse" (1810)

 

Mays prints this as an original poem by Coleridge, as you can see. It was written into one of Coleridge's notebooks, probably in May 1810, with various embellishments added (again, as you can see from Mays' headnote: click to embiggen). The four corners of the page are marked with ‘W[illiam Wordsworth] + M[ary Wordsworth] + D[orothy Wordsworth] = W’, ‘Coleridge’, ‘Mary’ and ‘William’. The Greek words both refer to Sara Hutchinson. Still harping on EPOCHS, it seems.

                                I have experienc'd
The worst, the World can wreak on me; the worst
That can make Life indifferent, yet disturb
With whisper'd Discontents the dying prayer.
I have beheld the whole of all, wherein
My Heart had any interest in this Life,
To be disrent and torn from off my Hopes,
That nothing now is left. Why then live on?
That Hostage, which the world had in it's keeping
Given by me as a Pledge that I would live,
That Hope of Her, say rather, that pure Faith
In her fix'd Love, which held me to keep truce
With the Tyranny of Life—is gone ah whither?
What boots it to reply?—“tis gone! and now
Well may I break this Pact, this League of Blood
That ties me to myself—and break I shall”—
Printed as echt Coleridge in the James Dykes Campbell 1893 Complete Poems, this has gone on to receive quite a lot of critical attention. John Charpentier calls it ‘one of the most moving poems Coleridge ever wrote’ [Charpentier, Coleridge: the Divine Somnambulist (1970) 251], and Thomas McFarland quotes the poem to illustrate what he calls Coleridge's ‘phenomenology of fragmentation’ (‘His marriage, his friendship with Wordsworth, his love for Sara Hutchinson, his relations with his children, his poetic career itself, after initial strivings for wholeness, subsided into the phenomenology of fragmentation’ [McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (Princeton 1981), 6]).

It's pretty interesting, then, that these lines are not by Coleridge at all. They're by the Elizabethan-Jacobean poet and playwright Samuel Daniel. Specifically they're from his play The Queen's Arcadia (1605), Act 4 Scene 1.



You can see how Coleridge alters the original, either because he is quoting from memory and getting a few things wrong, or else because he is copying-out the text and reconfiguring it the more closely to capture his particular situation (tyranny of life, for instance):
                                I have seen
The worst the World can shew me; and the worst
That can be ever seen with mortal Eye.
I have beheld the whole of all, wherein
My Heart had any Interest in this Life,
To be disrent and torn from off my Hopes,
That nothing now is left. Why should I live?
That Hostage I had giv’n the World, which was
The Hope of Her, that held me to hold truce
With it and with this Life is gone, and now
Well may I break with them; and break I shall,
And rend that Pact of Nature, and dissolve
That League of Blood that ties me to my self.
The play, based on Italian pastoral drama, is set in Arcadia, as you might deduce from the title. The lines Coleridge quotes are spoken by the shepherd Amyntas, who is in love with the beautiful Cloris. Cloris is also loved by another shepherd, Carinus, and the wicked seducer Colax also has his lustful eye on her. Colax persuades the bawd Techne (she has previously obtained young girls for Carinus' bed) to use her wiles and drugs in order to make Cloris his. There's a deal of to-ing and fro-ing, but this scene initiates the play's climax. Amyntas, pouring his heart out to Techne (not realising her evil disposition), despairs of his love for Cloris, persuaded by Techne's libel that she is a wanton and not worth his affection. After exiting, Amyntas, heartbroken, tries to kill himself by swallowing posion. There's a deus ex machina, in which Amyntas is restored to life by a shadowy character called Urania, who is ‘skilled with herbs.’ The play ends happily with Amyntas and Cloris united. But at this point things are pretty bleak.  


I've spoken on this blog before about the way Coleridge used Elizabethan and Jacobean drama to process his misery, sexual jealousy and sense of betrayal at ‘Asra’ sleeping with Wordsworth—assuming the events of the ‘EPOCH’, discovering the two of them in bed together, were real, and not (as Coleridge tried later to convince himself) some kind of hallucination or phantasm. This post has the specifics, and identifies two pieces of poetry, previously believed to be Coleridgean, as actually being passages from Dekker's Honest Whore and Chapman's All Fools

This Danielian misattribution is clearly an example of him doing more of the same, although this passage records not just hurt and disgust (as do those earlier excerpts) but suicidal ideation. Coleridge has added the quotation-marks around the last two-and-a-half lines himself, by way, I presume, of pointing them up. He, like Amyntas, wishes to die, so desolating is the thought of the woman he loves betraying him with another man. Whether we want to add the wrinkle that Coleridge, having read the play, knows that Amyntas doesn't die—whether, that is, we think this leavens the bitterness of despair this passage represents—seems to me unclear.

What is clear, or at least perhaps clearer, is the reason Coleridge kept returning to these sorts of plays, (and also to Latin). He is, as he generally did with his life-experiences, mediating his emotional response through literature, and not all literature is relevant to the specific agony of sexual jealousy and rejection he is undergoing. Jacobean drama is bawdy enough, and deals very often with love-triangles, whores, seducers and so on; and there are Latin and neoLatin poets who do the same. But most of the literature Coleridge read (and in many ways he was quite the prude, where sexual matters were concerned: read his horrified account of the indecency of Maturin's play Bertram at the end of the Biographia Literaria if you don't believe me)—most of the literature Coleridge read was not bawdy, and did not deal with the tangle of sexual desire and disgust, the turmoil of Coleridge's unhappy, unreciprocated and as he believed betrayed love for Sara Hutchinson.

2 comments:

  1. I might add this comment, originally posted on fb: "Incidentally, I intend no disrespect here to J C C Mays, or any of the editors who have worked on STC. Before Google search and the mass digitization of old books there was simply no way to know if any particular verse in Coleridge's notebooks was by him or was him copying out somebody else. But we do now have the tools the winnow out those poems that have been assumed to be his (in this case, an assumption that goes all the way back to 1893) from those that actually are his. If I had time, and if Term weren't starting soon, I could go through collating all the examples of poems erroneously assumed to be Coleridge's. It'd be quite a labour, though."

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  2. As well as copying, another thing that mass digitization allows us to do is to spot invention of sources. When Coleridge and his contemporaries needed a Latin tag, I suspect they often simply made one up on the spot and attributed it to an unnamed classical or scholastic writer. Before mass digitization it was not possible to have much confidence that you had not merely failed to find the reference.

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