‘Work Without Hope’ (1827): What Work?

 The first publication of ‘Work Without Hope’, in The Bijou (1828). Click to enlarge. 

Let’s have a look at this poem:

Work Without Hope
Lines Composed 21st February 1827

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair;
The Bees are stirring—birds are on the wing;
And Winter slumb’ring in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I, the while, the sole unbusy Thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet well I ken the banks where Amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of Nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye Amaranths! bloom for whom ye may—
For Me ye bloom not! Glide, rich Streams! away!
With lips unbrighten’d, wreathless Brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the Spells, that drowse my soul?
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.

(This is the version of the poem printed in J.C.C. Mays' standard Poetical Works [Princeton 2001] 16:2, 1030).

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.

Anyway: there is an, as it were, standard reading of this poem, and I think that reading is wrong. I’ll explain why.

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. 

Now: it seems that Coleridge performed a sort-of chivalric amour, an I love you 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 real love, intense and vital. 

Which brings us to this poem. Coleridge wrote it in his notebook, 21st February 1827—or to be more precise, he wrote a longer, 36-line poem, the first 14 lines of which were extracted and published, without Coleridge’s permission, in the illustrated annual The Bijou (1828). That first-published version is at the head of this post. I’ll come to the remaining section of the poem in a bit.

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

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 fancied he saw Symptoms of Alienation.

Then there is a deleted line: ‘N.B. The Thoughts and Images being modernized and turned into English’.

That's from J.C.C. Mays' Poetical Works [CC 16.2 606] and, as ever, you can click to embiggen and clarify.

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.

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 thinks 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 JACOB HODIERNUS, 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.

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 fancied 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.

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 can work, and has 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?

One final jigsaw-piece: in the notebook, Coleridge added a footnote to the word ‘Amaranths’, omitted in the Bijou version of the poem, but restored by Mays in his Collected Poems: ‘*Amaranths—*Literally rendered is Flower Fadeless, or never fading—from the Greek—a not and marainō to wither.’

This is right. What I mean is, the word does indeed derive from Ancient Greek, ἀμάραντος (amárantos, “eternal, undying, unfading, unwilting; amaranth; everlasting flower”) from ᾰ̓- + μαραίνω (“to shrivel, wither”). Why did Coleridge add this note? The editor of the Bijou, 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 Biblical reference, one obvious enough that it surprises me no critics seem to have noticed it. (Kathleen Coburn, in her edition of the Notebooks, speculates this ‘may be a recollection of the use of [amaranth] 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.)

Look again at the poem. The opening sestet riffs on Herbert, as Coleridge notes (and generations of critics have recorded)—here’s Herbert’s ‘Employment 1’ (1674): 

All things are busie; onely I
Neither bring hony with the bees,
Nor flowres to make that, nor the husbandrie
            To water these.

I am no link of thy great chain,
But all my companie is a weed.
Lord place me in thy consort; give one strain
           To my poore reed.

But I think generations of critics have misread 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?

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.

Nectar, here, is the drink of the gods (like amaranth, it means deathlessness: νέκταρ from Proto-Indo-European *neḱ- “to perish, disappear” + *-terh₂ “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’

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 laborare et [est] orare. Jacob is invoked not as the would-be lover of Rachel, but as the Jewish and therefore Christian patriarch. This is the man who wrestled with God: who, that is, struggled with his religious faith.

The remaining portion of the poem in its notebook form confirms this reading, I think:

I speak in figures, inward thoughts and woes
Interpreting by Shapes and Outward Shews:
Where daily nearer me with magic Ties,
What time and where, (wove close with magic Ties
Line over line, and thickning as they rise)
The World her spidery threads on all sides spun
Side answ’ring side with narrow interspace,
My Faith (say I; I and my Faith are one)
Hung, as a Mirror, there! And face to face
(For nothing else there was between or near)
One Sister Mirror hid the dreary Wall,
But that is broke! And with that bright compeer
I lost my object and my inmost all—
Faith in the Faith of THE ALONE MOST DEAR!

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 The Bijou. In this second section, ‘Outward Shews’ is from Merchant of Venice 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.