Samuel Taylor Kακά-rich: ‘Ode on the Departing Year’ (1796)

 

The poem's title was originally ‘on the Departing Year’; ‘to’ was a revision for 1817's Sybilline Leaves.

 ODE on the Departing Year

Ἰοὺ ἰοὺ ὦ ὦ κακά.
Ὑπ' αν με δεινὸς ὀρθομαντείας πονός
Στροβει, ταράσσων φροιμίοις εφημίοις.
* * * * * *
Τὸ μέλλον ἥξει. Kαὶ σύ μην τάχει παρὼν
Αγαν γ' ἀληθόμαντιν μ' ἐρεις.
         ÆSCHYL. Agam. 1225.

ARGUMENT.
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.

STROPHE I.

SPIRIT, who sweepest the wild Harp of Time,
It is most hard with an untroubled Ear
Thy dark inwoven Harmonies to hear!
Yet, mine eye fixt on Heaven's unchanging clime,
Long had I listened, free from mortal fear,
With inward stillness, and a bowed mind:
When lo! far onwards waving on the wind
I saw the skirts of the DEPARTING YEAR!
Starting from my silent sadness
Then with no unholy madness, [10]
Ere yet the entered cloud forbade my sight,
I rais’d th’ impetuous song, and solemnized his flight.


STROPHE II.

Hither from the recent Tomb;
From the Prison's direr gloom;
From Poverty's heart-wasting languish;
From Distemper's midnight anguish:
Or where his two bright torches blending
Love illumines Manhood's maze;
Or where o'er cradled infants bending
Hope has fix'd her wishful gaze: [20]
Hither, in perplexed dance,
Ye WOES, and young-eyed JOYS, advance!
By Time's wild harp, and by the Hand
Whose indefatigable Sweep
Forbids its fateful strings to sleep,
I bid you haste, a mixt tumultuous band!
From every private bower,
And each domestic hearth,
Haste for one solemn hour;
And with a loud and yet a louder voice, [30]
O'er the sore travail of the common earth
Weep and rejoice!
Seiz’d in sore travail and portentous birth,
Let slip the storm and woke the brood of Hell:
(Her eye-balls flashing a pernicious glare)
Sick NATURE struggled! Hark—her pangs increase!
Her groans are horrible! But ô! most fair!
The promis’d Twins, she bears—EQUALITY and PEACE!


EPODE.

 
I mark'd Ambition in his war-array;
I heard the mailed Monarch's troublous cry—
“Ah whither does the Northern Conqueress stay? [40]
“Groans not her Chariot o'er its onward way?
Fly, mailed Monarch, fly!
Stunn'd by Death's “twice mortal” mace,
No more on MURDER's lurid face
Th’ insatiate Hag shall glote with drunken eye!
Manes of th’ unnumbered Slain!
Ye that gasp'd on WARSAW's plain!
Ye that erst at ISMAIL's tower,
When human Ruin chok'd the streams,
Fell in Conquest's glutted hour [50]
Mid Women's shrieks and Infants' screams;
Whose shrieks, whose screams were vain to stir
Loud-laughing, red-eyed Massacre!
Spirits of th’ uncoffin'd Slain,
Sudden blasts of Triumph swelling
Oft, at night, in misty train
Rush around her narrow Dwelling!
Th’ exterminating Fiend is fled—
(Foul her Life and dark her doom!)
Mighty Army of the Dead, [60]
Dance, like Death-fires, round her Tomb!
Then with prophetic song relate
Each some scepter'd Murderer's fate!
When shall scepter’d SLAUGHTER cease?
Awhile He crouch’d, O Victor France!
Beneath the light’ning of thy Lance,
With treacherous dalliance wooing PEACE.
But soon up-springing from his dastard trance
The boastful, bloody Son of Pride betray’d
His Hatred of the blest and blessing Maid. [70]
One cloud, O Freedom! cross’d thy orb of Light And sure he deem’d, that Orb was quench’d in night:
For still does MADNESS roam on GUILT’s bleak dizzy height!


ANTISTROPHE I.

DEPARTING YEAR! ‘twas on no earthly shore
My Soul beheld thy Vision. Where, alone,
Voiceless and stern, before the Cloudy Throne
Aye MEMORY sits; there, garmented with gore,
With many an unimaginable groan
Thou storiedst thy sad Hours! Silence ensued:
Deep silence o'er th' ethereal Multitude, [80]
Whose purple Locks with snow-white Glories shone.
Then, his eye wild ardors glancing,
From the choired Gods advancing,
The SPIRIT of the EARTH made reverence meet,
And stood up beautiful before the Cloudy Seat!


ANTISTROPHE II.

On every Harp, on every Tongue,
While the mute Enchantment hung;
Like Midnight from a thundercloud,
Spake the sudden SPIRIT loud—
“Thou in stormy Blackness throning [90]
“Love and uncreated Light,
“By the Earth's unsolac'd groaning
“Seize thy terrors, Arm of Might!
“By Belgium's corse-impeded flood!
“By Vendee steaming Brother's blood!
“By PEACE with proffer'd insult scar'd,
“Masked hate and envying scorn!
“By Years of Havoc yet unborn;
“And Hunger's bosom to the frost-winds bar'd!
“But chief by Afric’s wrongs [100]
“Strange, horrible and foul!
“To the deaf Senate, ‘full of gifts and lies!’
“By Wealth's insensate Laugh! By Torture's Howl!
“Avenger, rise!
“For ever shall the bloody Island scowl?
“For aye, unbroken, shall her cruel Bow
“Shoot Famine's arrows o'er thy ravag’d World?
“Hark! how wide NATURE joins her groans below—
“Rise, God of Nature, rise! Why sleep those bolts unhurl'd? [110]


EPODE II.

The Voice had ceas'd, the Phantoms fled,
Yet still I gasp'd and reel'd with dread.
And ever when the dream of night
Renews the vision to my sight,
Cold sweat-damps gather on my limbs;
My Ears throb hot; my eye-balls start;
My Brain with horrid tumult swims;
Wild is the tempest of my Heart;
And my thick and struggling breath
Imitates the toil of Death! [120]
No uglier agony confounds
The Soldier on the war-field spread,
When all foredone with toil and wounds
Death-like he dozes among heaps of Dead!
(The strife is o'er, the day-light fled,
And the Night-wind clamours hoarse;
See! the startful Wretch's head
Lies pillow'd on a Brother's Corse!)
O doom'd to fall, enslav'd and vile,
O ALBION! O my mother Isle! [130]
Thy valleys, fair as Eden's bowers,
Glitter green with sunny showers;
Thy grassy Uplands’ gentle swells
Echo to the Bleat of Flocks;
(Those grassy Hills, those glitt'ring Dells
Proudly ramparted with rocks)
And Ocean mid his uproar wild
Speaks safety to his Island-child.
Hence for many a fearless age
Has social Quiet lov'd thy shore; [140]
Nor ever sworded Foeman's rage
Or sack’d thy towers, or stain’d thy fields with gore.
Disclaim’d of Heaven! mad Av’rice at thy side,
At coward distance, yet with kindling pride—
Safe 'mid thy herds and corn fields thou hast stood,
And join'd the yell of Famine and of Blood.
All nations curse thee: and with eager wond’ring
Shall hear DESTRUCTION, like a vulture, scream!
Strange-eyed DESTRUCTION, who with many a dream
Of central flames thro’ nether seas upthund'ring [150]
Soothes her fierce solitude, yet (as she lies
Stretch’d on the marge of some fire-flashing fount
In the black chamber of a sulphur’d mount,)
If ever to her lidless dragon eyes,
O ALBION! thy predestin’d ruins rise,
The Fiend-hag on her perilous couch doth leap,
Mutt'ring distemper'd triumph in her charmed sleep.

Away, my soul, away!
In vain, in vain, the birds of warning sing—
And hark! I hear the famin’d brood of prey [160]
Flap their lank pennons on the groaning wind!
Away, my Soul, away!
I unpartaking of the evil thing
With daily prayer, and daily toil
Soliciting my scant and blameless soil,
Have wail’d my country with a loud lament.
Now I recenter my immortal mind
In the long sabbath of high self-content;
Cleans’d from the fleshly Passions that bedim
God’s Image, Sister of the Seraphim. [170]

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 can 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. [Note: 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.]

Coleridge is here following the success of Gray’s ‘Pindaric’ ode ‘The Bard’ (1757)—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 to Pindar. The Horatian ode 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.’)

Coleridge wrote his poem reflecting on the tumultuous year of 1796. His thoughts were particularly catalysed by the death of Catherine II of Russia (17th November 1796)— ‘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 the Poles had risen up in 1794 she had crushed the rebellion with overwhelming military force and extreme brutality. After the Battle of Praga (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 had risen in opposition to la révolution française, 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). 

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 [‘The 1796 earthquake inflicted heavy damage in the Rhine Valley region’; 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’ Eclogae Geologicae Helvetiae 96 (2003), 364]. 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].

It’s worth noting that Coleridge does something quite odd with his odic structure. A classical ode goes strophe-antistrophe-epode, 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’).

The convention, as Carl Woodring notes, was to write odes optimistically addressed ‘To The New Year’.

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 Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge 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 (London Chronicle 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” (London Chronicle, 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. [Morton D. Paley, ‘Apocalypse and Millennium in the Poetry of Coleridge’ The Wordsworth Circle, 23:1 (1992), 28]

It’s not that Coleridge’s ‘Ode’ was an entirely radical departure; William Newton (the ‘Peak Minstrel’) published his ‘Sonnet to the Departing Year’ in The Gentleman’s Magazine [67 (1790), 79]:

Year! That hast seen my hopes and comforts fall
Huddled in dark’ning vest, like Night-hag old,
And breathing chill a baleful vapour cold,
On thee abhorr’d with banning voice I call.

(‘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 odes to the departing year before Coleridge’s.

It's a poem that went through a number of revisions. It first appeared in the Cambridge Intelligencer (a Liberal weekly newspaper that ran from 1793 to 1803 edited by Benjamin Flower) 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 Poems (1797), adding:

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 Religious Musings, I know, are—but not this. [Peter Mann, ‘Two Autograph Letters of S. T. Coleridge’ Review of English Studies 25:99 (1974), 314]

J C C Mays, in his edition of the Poetical Works, 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 Poems (1797)’ where in Sibylline Leaves (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.

+++

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 Mays could identify (‘source untraced’) although Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson and Raimonda Modiano usefully track it to Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1745), which poem laments that once rationality has eroded sustaining religious faith, the prospect of dying becomes ‘tenfold’ more terrifying, ‘and dips in Venom his [that is, Death’s] twice-mortal Sting’ [4:765]. 

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 Cambridge Intelligence 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’).

Excellent though their edition is, Halmi, Magnuson and Modiano aren’t sure of the provenance of the poem’s final image:

Now I recenter my immortal mind
In the long sabbath of high self-content;
Cleans’d from the fleshly Passions that bedim
God’s Image, Sister of the Seraphim.

What does it mean? H., M. and M. 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 SERAPHIM.’ But that’s not it, and actually it’s quite important that it isn’t.

In fact Coleridge is here quoting from one of Jeremy Taylor’s sermons (specifically, from Sermon IX Part 2 in XXVII Sermons): ‘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’ [Notebooks 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, anima, is a feminine noun. And that’s interesting, because the poem begins with a reference to the soul, too:

SPIRIT, who sweepest the wild Harp of Time,
It is most hard with an untroubled Ear
Thy dark inwoven Harmonies to hear!

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 vates, 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:

The Voice had ceas'd, the Phantoms fled,
Yet still I gasp'd and reel'd with dread.
And ever when the dream of night
Renews the vision to my sight,
Cold sweat-damps gather on my limbs;
My Ears throb hot; my eye-balls start;
My Brain with horrid tumult swims;
Wild is the tempest of my Heart;
And my thick and struggling breath
Imitates the toil of Death!
No uglier agony confounds
The Soldier on the war-field spread,
When all foredone with toil and wounds
Death-like he dozes among heaps of Dead!
(The strife is o'er, the day-light fled,
And the Night-wind clamours hoarse;
See! the startful Wretch's head
Lies pillow'd on a Brother's Corse!) [113-28]

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 Cymbeline, Act 4, scene 2, where Caius Lucius discovers ‘Fidelius’ (actually Imogen in disguise) asleep, with a dead body as her pillow. Lucius is horrified:

For nature doth abhor to make his bed
With the defunct, or sleep upon the dead.

(I don’t know if Coleridge had read, or was aware of, Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker (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]).

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:

All nations curse thee: and with eager wond’ring
Shall hear DESTRUCTION, like a vulture, scream!
Strange-eyed DESTRUCTION … (as she lies
Stretch’d on the marge of some fire-flashing fount
In the black chamber of a sulphur’d mount,)
If ever to her lidless dragon eyes,
O ALBION! thy predestin’d ruins rise. [147-55]

Is there a relationship between this bird, and Vergil’s caucaseae volucres [Eclogues 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 (aquila) or a vulture (vultur, voltur, volucer) that was sent by Zeus to torture Prometheus: vultur is derived from vellere, from vello ‘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.

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.

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 Agamemnon, not the Prometheus Bound. 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 mottophilist, and almost a motto-manist—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 muttum 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.

Ἰοὺ ἰοὺ ὦ ὦ κακά.
Ὑπ' αν με δεινὸς ὀρθομαντείας πονός
Στροβει, ταράσσων φροιμίοις εφημίοις.
* * * * * *
Τὸ μέλλον ἥξει. Kαὶ σύ μην τάχει παρὼν
Αγαν γ' ἀληθόμαντιν μ' ἐρεις.

Uh! Uh! Oh! Oh! It’s all shit.
Those fucking prophetic agonies are on me again:
Dizzying, messing me up with their bloody presages.
…
The future's set: coming fast for all of you
Then you’ll know I was a fighting true-prophet.

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.