Coleridge's Hummel-Bee (1823)

Coleridge, on holiday in Ramsgate in 1823, saw (or heard) a bumblebee fly past his head, and wrote this in his notebook:

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 burry, right over the Summit of Quantock, item of Skiddaw 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 mute shoot downward in the sunshine like a falling Star of melted Silver— [CN 4:4994; PW 592; 1823]

The entry then shifts to verse:

Flowers are lovely; Love of is flower-like;
Friendship is a shelt’ring Tree;
O the joys, that came down shower-like,
Of Beauty, Truth, and Liberty—
When I was young, ere I was old—
O Youth that wert so glad, so bold,
What quaint Disguise hast thou put on.
Wouldn’t make believe, that thou art gone,
O Youth! Thy Vesper Bell has not toll’d
O Youth, so true, so fair, so free,
Thy Vesper Bell has not yet toll’d—
Thou always &c
Thou always were a Masker bold!—
To make believe, that thou art gone!
Ah! was it not enough that Thou
In they eternal Glory should’st outgo me?
Wouldst thou not Grief’s sad Victory allow?
Hope’s a Breeze that robs the Blossoms
Fancy feeds on murmurs the Bee
………………………embosoms
…………………………Poesy—

Coleridge later augmented and published this as ‘Youth and Age’ (it appeared in several annuals in the later 1820s, and was collected in STC’s Poetical Works in 1828). 

:

Verse, a breeze mid blossoms straying,

Where Hope clung feeding, like a bee—

Both were mine! Life went a maying

With Nature, Hope, and Poesy,

When I was young!

When I was young?—Ah, woful When!

Ah! for the change 'twixt Now and Then!

This breathing house not built with hands,

This body that does me grievous wrong,

O'er aery cliffs and glittering sands,

How lightly then it flashed along;—

Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore,

On winding lakes and rivers wide,

That ask no aid of sail or oar,

That fear no spite of wind or tide!

Nought cared this body for wind or weather

When Youth and I lived in 't together.

Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like;

Friendship is a sheltering tree;

O! the joys, that came down shower-like,

Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty,

Ere I was old!

Ere I was old ? Ah woful Ere,

Which tells me, Youth's no longer here!

O Youth! for years so many and sweet,

'Tis known, that Thou and I were one,

I'll think it but a fond conceit—

It cannot be that Thou art gone!

Thy vesper-bell hath not yet toll'd: —

And thou wert aye a masker bold!

What strange disguise hast now put on,

To make believe, that thou art gone?

I see these locks in silvery slips,

This drooping gait, this altered size:

But Spring-tide blossoms on thy lips,

And tears take sunshine from thine eyes!

Life is but thought: so think I will

That Youth and I are house-mates still.

Let’s go back to the beginning: start with the bee (you can click these, to embiggen):

The Greek means “across my brain”, as STC's own parenthesis tells us. A “Rappee Spencer” is a type of jacket, named after the 2nd Earl Spencer, worn when taking snuff (and so generally covered in snuff dust): rappee is another word for snuff, from the French tabac râpé, “grated or powdered tobacco”; and a Spencer jacket was “pompadour”, 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.

Finish the outfit off with red-orange velvet trousers. I must say, I love this gentleman bee! 

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 The Gentleman's Monthly Miscellany in 1802, reporting on the latest craze:

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—”

It is, in other words, the sound of the bee (sharp and burry), 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 Biographia, Coleridge had ridiculed Oliver Goldsmith’s couplet:

No more will I endure love's pleasing pain,
Or round my heart's leg tie his galling chain

… 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.”

But here, only half a decade after the Biographia, STC's thoughts amphibiously move from seeing-ears to architecture, materialising the evanescent sonic 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 ear’s eye 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 physically bisecting the brainpan of a falling warrior) which is then offset by the upright pillars of birdsong.

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 think himself young again. In a note on the MS, James Dyke Campbell 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 Gleim’s ‘Das Leben ist ein Traum’, 1784. 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:

Die Gärtnerin und die Biene

Eine kleine Biene flog
Emsig hin und her, und sog
Süßigkeit aus allen Blumen.

“Bienchen,” spricht die Gärtnerin,
Die sie bei der Arbeit trifft,
“Manche Blume hat doch Gift,
Und du saugst aus allen Blumen?”

“Ja,” sagt' sie zur Gärtnerin,
“Ja, das Gift laß ich darin!”

A little bee flew
Busy back and forth, and drew
Sweets from all the flowers.

“Little Bee," says the Gardener,
whom she meets as she goes
"Many blooms are poisonous,
Yet you suck all the flowers?”

“Yes,” she tells the Gardener,
“Yes, I leave the poison inside, there!”

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 Süßigkeit and Gift). 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 noise it makes: “dore” or “dor”, is the word for a buzzing insect (from Old English dora, “one that hums”), related to the Old English drān “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.