"Prospectus of a course of lectures by S.T. Coleridge 1818"

Other duties have taken me away from STC for three weeks or so, but now I'm quit of them and the rest of the year, pretty much, will be all Coleridge all the time. Hopefully, that will entail new matter for this blog. Here, for the time being, is the syllabus of the course that has come to be known as the 'Lectures on European Literature'. I don't deal with these in my forthcoming edition, which restricts itself to the 1811-12 and 1818-19 Shakespeare lectures; but it's pretty interesting stuff.

The real question is whether my blogging in the weeks to come will attain to a manly, unaffected and Pure language, as per Lecture 14.

Number of the Bea-STC

Driving home from work today I got to thinking: 'I've been so immersed in Samuel Taylor Coleridge lately, maybe I'm missing something obvious. I mean, what if Providence were trying to tell me, somehow, that STC was actually the Antichrist?...'

The Latin 'Ad Vilmum Axiologum' (1807): Coleridge and Ariosto

Coleridge wrote two poems with the title 'Ad Vilmum Axiologum' ('To William Wordsworth'); one in English and another in Latin. The title includes a piece of Greek wordplay: ἀξία or ἀξίος ('the worth or value of a thing' L&S) plus λόγων (genitive plural of λόγος, word); hence ἀξίο-λόγων, the worth or value of words, words' worth. Presumably this piece of archness was concocted as a parallel to Coleridge's own piece of nominal Grecianism, ἐστηση ('S.T.C'), which means 'he has stood', and which crops up a lot in Coleridge's notes, letters and even his poems. The English 'Ad Vilmum Axiologum' is a measured, respectful response to hearing Wordsworth's early drafts of the Prelude:

This be the meed, that thy song creates a thousand-fold echo!
Sweet as the warble of woods, that awakes at the gale of the morning!
List! the Hearts of the Pure, like caves in the ancient mountains
Deep, deep in the Bosom, and from the Bosom resound it,
Each with a different tone, complete or in musical fragments—
All have welcomed thy Voice, and receive and retain and prolong it!
This is the word of the Lord! it is spoken, and Beings Eternal
Live and are borne as an Infant; the Eternal begets the Immortal:
Love is the Spirit of Life, and Music the Life of the Spirit!

Pretty dull.  Ah, but the Latin one is a far more anguished, accusing piece of poetry, relating to Coleridge's personal resentments and jealousies. So bear with me.

The broader context is that Coleridge, unhappily married, yet with divorce an impossibility legally and personally, had fallen deeply in love with Sara Hutchinson, the younger sister of Wordsworth's wife Mary Hutchinson. This was a desperate, unreciprocated passion that wrenched Coleridge. He poured his misery into entries in his notebook and sometimes into poems, disguising her identity under the flimsy anagram 'Asra'. There were long stretches of tantalising physical proximity through the first few years of the 1800s, then Coleridge moved to Malta, in part as a deliberate break with Sara and an attempt to cauterise his infatuation. It doesn't seem to have helped. On his return from the Mediterranean he several times visited the Wordsworths, and therefore Sara, who was living with them, and found himself still as smitten. On the 22 December 1806 Coleridge and his 10-year-old son Hartley arrived at Coleorton to spend Christmas with the Wordsworths. Coleridge had now effectively separated from his wife. He was fond of a drink, consuming large quantities of opium, and he experienced a flare-up in his passion for 'Asra'.

The proximate cause of the Latin 'Ad Vilmum Axiologum' poem is twofold. One, we intuit from the poem itself, is that Wordsworth rebuked his friend for his manner towards Sara Hutchinson. Perhaps he pointed out that Coleridge, separated but not divorced, could not offer her marriage, and stressed the indecency of any adulterous liaison (this last, if it happened, must have been a stabbingly ironic touch for Coleridge, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment). Whatever Wordsworth said, it clearly stung Coleridge.

The second thing that happened stung him more, although details are rather opaque. Something deeply traumatic for Coleridge, certainly, although as Richard Holmes notes in his Coleridge: Darker Reflections the events are 'very difficult to reconstruct'. On the morning of Saturday 27th December Coleridge (perhaps having been up all night, and perhaps in an exhausted, opiated or drunken state) appears to have gone into Sara's room, seen something, and run away—literally run out of the house, over the fields, and into a tavern, where he stayed all day drinking and scribbling pages of desperate prose in his notebook under the portentous heading 'THE EPOCH'. He later tore these pages out and destroyed them, but the event stayed with him, and later notebook entries often refer to it. Here are a couple of examples of what I mean. See if you can piece together from them what it was that Coleridge saw in Sara Hutchinson's room that morning:

[September 1807] O agony! O the vision of that Saturday morning!—of the Bed—O cruel! is not he beloved, adored by two—& two such Beings.—And must I not be beloved near him except as a Satellite?—But O mercy, mercy! Is he not better, greater, more manly, & altogether more attractive to any but the purest Woman? And yet, he does not pretend, he does not wish, to love you as I love you, Sara! [Notebooks 2:2148]

'He' is Wordsworth; the two beings who adore him are presumably Sara and Mary, neither of whom adore poor old Coleridge. Half a year later STC wrote this:

[May 1808] O that miserable Saturday morning! ... But a minute and a half with ME and all the time evidently restless & going—An hour and more with Wordsworth—in bed—O agony! [Notebooks 2:3328]

The 'in bed' is written in English but with Greek characters, a code Coleridge often used when he wished to disguise something in his notes. This seems clearer. There's not much a man can do with an evidently unenthusiastic woman in a minute and a half, out of bed, beyond some fumbling and kissing; but a different man, married to that woman's sister though he might be, could do a lot more with her, in bed, for an hour and more. Were Wordsworth and Sara clothed when Coleridge stumbled in upon them? Well, some years STC later wrote of his agony at dreaming about Sara and William together and seeing ‘Asra's beautiful breasts uncovered’ [Notebooks, 4:4537]—an entry that may rehearse an actual memory of that morning, although it was perhaps simply a fantasy. The thing is, as Holmes points out, Coleridge also devoted a lot of time and energy in his notebooks to trying to convince himself that what he had seen was only a 'phantasm', an opium hallucination, a 'morbid Day-Dream' ('a mere phantasm and yet what anguish, what gnawings of despair, what throbbings and lancinations of positive Jealousy!'). This, though, looks to me more like the energetic attempt at self-delusion of a desperate man. Ockham's razor might suggest that whilst Coleridge probably was the worse for wear (he would hardly have stumbled unannounced into Sara's bedroom otherwise), he nonetheless saw what he saw: Wordsworth and Sara naked in bed together. It wouldn't, after all, be the first or last time in human history that a man had sex with his wife's sister; and the existence of Wordsworth's illegitimate daughter with Annette Vallon, to say nothing of the more lurid rumours surrounding his love-life, indicate that he was not what one might call an entirely sexually continent individual.

This then is the context for the Latin 'Ad Vilmum Axiologum':

Me n'Asrae perferre jubes oblivia? et Asrae
Me aversos oculos posse videre meae?
Scire et eam falsam, crudelem, quae mihi semper
Cara fuit, semper cara futura mihi?
Meque pati lucem, cui vanam perdite amanti,  [5]
Quicquid Naturae est, omne tremit, titubat?
Cur non ut patiarque fodi mea viscera ferro,
Dissimulato etiam, Vilme, dolore jubes?
Quin Cor, quin Oculosque meos, quin erue vel quod
Carius est, si quid carius esse potest!               [10]
Deficientem animam, quod vis, tolerare jubebo,
Asrae dum superet, me moriente, fides
At Fidis Inferias vidi! et morior!—Ratione
Victum iri facili, me Ratione, putas?
Ah pereat, qui in Amore potest rationibus uti!   [15]
Ah pereat, qui, ni perdite, amare potest!
Quid deceat, quid non, videant quihus integra mens est:
Vixi! vivit adhuc imraemor ASRA mei.

This means:

You command me to endure Asra's neglect? and Asra's
eyes turned from me, something I see very well for myself?
To know her to be false, cruel, who to me has always
been dear, who always will be dear to me?
I must endure this light: I've vainly loved a false woman, [5]
at which the whole of Nature trembles and stutters?
Why not order my own bowels stabbed with a sword,
and then pretend, William, that it does not hurt?
Why not tear out my heart, or my own eyes, or something else
that is even dearer, if anything could be dearer!               [10]
I'd command my weary soul to endure anything,
if only Asra, though it killed me, remained faithful.
But I've seen the funeral of her fidelity! and I'm dying!—Reason
is too easily defeated, you really think Reason can help me?
Ah, perish the man who can subordinate love to reason!    [15]
Ah, perish any man who does not love to perdition!
What's decent, what's not, let the sane decide on that:
My life is over! Though ASRA lives on, unmindful of me.

'The funeral of her fidelity' in line 13 is rather weak-beer, I'm afraid. The Latin makes reference to the inferiae, which were 'sacrifices in honour of the dead' or 'sacrifices to the dead' [Lewis and Short]. Richard Holmes, in his Penguin Selected Poetry [187] translates the line 'I have seen the last rites of her faithfulness', which is a little too decorous I think. Coleridge may be thinking of the similar line in Angelo Poliziano's Silvae (line 373), where Achilles sacrifices victims to the dead with 'savage fury'; in which case an even more forceful translation might be justified: 'I have seen her fidelity sacrificed on the altar of the dead'.

The main thing to note is that this hardly counts as an original composition by Coleridge. It is, rather, a Frankenstein text stitched together from various bits and pieces of other Latin poets. 'Perferre jubes' ('commanded to endure') is from Horace's Epistles 1:13 line 7; 'aversos oculos' ('eyes turned away') is from Vergil's Aeneid (1:482 and 6:469); 'semper cara' ('always dear' or 'always beloved') is a standard phrase, seen often on gravestones and so on. More to the point, the second half of the poem consists of passages lifted wholesale from another poet. Lines 9-12

Quin Cor, quin Oculosque meos, quin erue vel quod
Carius est, si quid carius esse potest!
Deficientem animam, quod vis, tolerare jubebo,
Asrae dum superet, me moriente, fides

is word for word from Ariosto's 'Ad Petrum Bembum' [Carmina, 7], the poem written in the early 1500s to his friend, the Italian scholar, poet and later Cardinal Pietro Bembo (1470-1547): there's only one change, as Coleridge alters (wrenches, rather) Ariosto's 'Dum superet dominae me moriente fides' to replace 'dominae', 'my lord', with Asra's name ('Asrae dum superet, me moriente, fides'). The same poem also provides lines 15-16:

Ah pereat, qui in Amore potest rationibus uti!
Ah pereat, qui, ni perdite, amare potest! ['Ad Petrum Bembum', 23-24]

This couplet is Ariosto's specific rebuke to his friend's advice, recorded in Bembo's prior poem 'Ad Melinum', that he shouldn't get too worked up over his girlfriend's infidelity:

Ah pereat, quicunque suae peccata puellae
Obiciit et flentem sustinuisse potest

Ah, perish the man who is moved by his girl's transgressions,
Able to withstand her denials and tears

(I take the last line to mean 'who is not able to withstand etc'; or perhaps 'you should be able to withstand' ...). Bembo's advice is: don't get too worked up over the fact that your girl has slept with somebody else. Ariosto's reply, slightly comically inflated in its melodramatic repudiation of his pal's advice, is that he is too deeply in love for such cynicism, and would rather die a heartbroken death than subordinate his passion to mere common-sense and reason.

Coleridge's appropriation of these lines is interesting ('appropriation' rather than plagiary, since he never actually published this poem). It positions Wordsworth as, in effect, the Bembo character: so perhaps Wordsworth's admonishment was not as I speculated above, but was more worldly-wise, more Bembo-esque: 'be reasonable, my friend. So what if we went to bed together, she and I? It is not the end of the world. Try to keep it in perspective. No I'm not in love with her, we're just having a bit of fun' and so on. That would certainly explain the specifics of the Latin that Coleridge then wrote.

I'm not sure how plausible this is, mind you. One of the oddest features of the whole 'THE EPOCH' business is that after this hysterical and upset Saturday, Coleridge continued staying with the Wordsworths; and indeed that William and his wife and Dorothy and Sara Hutchinson and Coleridge all settled down in the kitchen on Sunday evening the following week to listen to Wordsworth read passages from the Prelude. To me, this suggests a rather different narrative: that Wordsworth told Coleridge 'I don't know what you think you saw, addled on opium and sleeplessness as you were, but there's nothing going on between Sara and myself'; and that Coleridge, perhaps very remorsefully, agreed that he'd had a horrible vision, a phantasm and so on, and then spent (literally) decades trying to convince himself that this was the truth.

And calling this poem, as I do above, a Frankenstein-text is a little unfair. This was the way public schoolboys were taught to write Latin verse: consulting a Gradus to discover appropriate words and phrases in order to stitch these together into a whole poem. This was needful less in terms of digging out appropriate vocabulary. Turning an English sentiment into Latin is not hard; what's hard is turning it into Latin that adheres to one or other of the exacting metrical patterns in which such verse must be written, and this is what the Gradus is especially helpful with, since it lists words and whole phrases already marked-up with long and short syllables, elisions and so on. That Coleridge, in the Biographia, later mocks contemporary Latin poets (like George Canning) for, well, doing exactly that is only slightly inconsistent with his practice here. And, we must add, stealing a whole chunk of Ariosto would have incurred the wrath of any schoolmaster who spotted the theft. Though, to repeat myself, Coleridge never published this poem.

The Ariosto context strongly suggests, though, that Coleridge's Latin 'Ad Vilmum Axiologum' is more than a response to some mild Asra-related scolding by Wordsworth. It is a much more visceral (as per the phallic imagery of being 'viscerally' penetrated in line 7) reaction to witnessing a woman one had thought 'chaste' sacrificing her sexual fidelity on the altars of death. Strong stuff.

On the Name 'Asra'

'Asra' was Coleridge's private name for Sara Hutchinson (1775-1835). There she is, in the image above (from Richard Holmes's Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1998); on the left Wordsworth's own silhouette of her, and on the right a figure from Ciro Ferri's 'The Marriage of Boas and Ruth', that Coleridge saw in Bolton Abbey in 1810, and which he claimed reminded him of Sara.

She was the younger sister of Mary Hutchinson, who married Wordsworth in 1802; Sara lived with her sister and new brother-in-law for many years. By most accounts she was an attractive woman, lively, diminutive and curvaceous; although some disliked her (some members of the Wordsworth circle, having failed to fall under her spell, called her large-chinned and -nosed, dumpy and wearing. Harsh!). Coleridge, however, fell deeply in love with her after meeting her in 1799. Nothing came of this. Sara seems to have been fond of Coleridge, and was in many ways a good friend to him, going so far as to act as amanuensis during the long composition of The Friend, 1809-10. But she doesn't seem to have desired him physically, or loved him, certainly not with the intensity that he desired and loved her; and when we factor-in her respectability (agreed upon by all), and already-married Coleridge's own deeply-held religious scruples where adultery and divorce were concerned,  we can be pretty sure the 'affair' was unconsummated. But that doesn't negate the intensity of Coleridge's despairing longing; quite the reverse, of course. His notebooks and many of his poems return obsessively to 'Asra', to his love and desire and despair about her. Some of his finest poems, indeed, were inspired by her, although, as Richard Holmes notes in his thumbnail portrait (from his Penguin Coleridge: Selected Poetry, 1996):

... she was not a conventionally romantic, dreamy Muse. She was cheerful and outgoing, a small energetic figure with a mass of auburn hair, quick and neat in the house, and daring and eager on country walks. Many of Coleridge's tenderest memories of her are in the snug, firelit farmhouse kitchen.

So why 'Asra'? As anagrams go, it's a pretty flimsy code for 'Sara'; although since Coleridge's wife was also called Sara it at least helps critics and biographers to distinguish between them. The impression Coleridge gives in his notebooks where his wife is concerned is one of sexual frigidity (of course, we're only getting his side of the picture): in one entry he laments that when the two of them get naked together 'all [is] as cold & calm as a deep Frost' adding that she 'is uncommonly cold in her feelings of animal Love' [Notebooks 1:979]. By contrast, 'Asra' is characterised in his notes in terms of warmth: firelight, warm climates, exoticism.

The first intimation of the 'Asra' nickname is in a present Coleridge gave Sara Hutchinson for Christmas 1800: an edition of Anna Seward's Original Sonnets (1799), which he inscribed: 'to Asahara, the Moorish Maid'. Presumably this records some private joke that the auburn-haired Sara had an oriental look about her: I suppose that 'Asahara' filters the Arabic 'Ashura' or maybe the Assyrian deity 'Ashur' via the letters of 'Sara'. Conceivably it also picks up on the female-personified 'orient' IMAGINATION which Seward writes about, and who adorns the frontispiece to the Original Sonnets. 'Come, bright IMAGINATION come relume/Thy orient lamp' says the legend under the picture, quoting from Seward's first sonnet.  Did Coleridge fancy a resemblance between Sara Hutchinson and this figure? Did he make a joke of it with her, and so orientalise her name? Did he secretly yearn that she would come and *coughs* relume his orient lamp? I'm guessing: yes. Yes he did.

Coleridge's physical desire for Sara was inextricably tangled not only with its own impossibility, but with his deep reservoirs of self-disgust. This in turn leads me to believe that Coleridge had in mind ἀσαρα ('ἀσ'ρα'): a shortened form of the Ancient Greek ἀσαραός, sometimes spelled ἀσηραός, which means (to quote Liddell and Scott) ‘causing nausea’, or ‘feeling disgust or disdainful of a woman’. L&S cite Sappho 78 for this latter meaning. Perhaps this seemingly simple anagram encodes physical disgust. He was presumably also aware that the Ancient Greek for the vagina (what L&S primly call 'pudenda muliebria') is a 'sara' word: σάραβος.

Coleridge's 'Recollections of Love': the Dream Within the Dream

This sad little love-poem was first published in Sybilline Leaves (1817). Scholars have had trouble piecing together when it was written. The first four stanzas were drafted as metrical experiments in Coleridge's notebook: in October 1804 according to Kathleen Coburn; in 1807 according to the Norton editors, Halmi, Magnuson and Modiano (J C Maas's Princeton edition of the poem helpfully dates it: 'Oct 1804? 1806-7?'). The Norton editors also note that 'a later draft of stanza 3 is in an 1810 notebook and headed "Questions and Answers in the court of Love", and speculate that 'the final stanzas may have been written when Coleridge was preparing copy for Sybilline Leaves in 1814-15' [Halmi, Magnuson and Modiano (eds), Coleridge's Poetry and Prose (Norton 2004), 193]. What I offer in this blogpost is some evidence to support this latter speculation, and indeed to push the composition of the last two stanzas even later than the Norton editors do. At any rate, here's the poem:

I.
How warm this woodland wild Recess!
LOVE surely hath been breathing here;
And this sweet bed of heath, my dear!
Swells up, then sinks with faint caress,
As if to have you yet more near.

II.
Eight springs have flown, since last I lay
On sea-ward Quantock's heathy hills,
Where quiet sounds from hidden rills
Float here and there, like things astray,
And high o'er head the sky-lark shrills.

III.
No voice as yet had made the air
Be music with your name; yet why
That asking look? that yearning sigh?
That sense of promise every where?
Belovéd! flew your spirit by?

IV.
As when a mother doth explore
The rose-mark on her long-lost child,
I met, I loved you, maiden mild!
As whom I long had loved before—
So deeply had I been beguiled.

V.
You stood before me like a thought,
A dream remembered in a dream.
But when those meek eyes first did seem
To tell me, Love within you wrought—
O Greta, dear domestic stream!

VI.
Has not, since then, Love's prompture deep,
Has not Love's whisper evermore
Been ceaseless, as thy gentle roar?
Sole voice, when other voices sleep,
Dear under-song in clamor's hour.

It's a poem about returning to the Quantocks after a period away. It's also, with a topographic oddness that recalls dream logic, also somehow about the north west. 'Greta' in stanza V is the river that runs behind Greta Hall, in the Lake District, into which Coleridge moved in July 1800. ‘The river Greta flows behind our house,’ he wrote to Josiah Wedgwood in November 1800, ‘roaring like an untamed Son of the Hills, then winds round & glides away in the front—so that we live in a peninsula [CL 1 644]. That's Greta Hall, and the river, at the top of the post (drawn by W. Westall and engraved by E. Francis in 1829); the house is now a posh B&B, with a 'Coleridge Wing' that is, apparently, 'perfect for a family holiday'. Quite tempting, that.

This is also a poem about meeting again the woman with whom the poet has long been in love. The gently sexually-suggestive 'breathing love', 'sweet bed' and 'caress' of stanza 1, start to go 'astray' in stanza 2, and then the poem fragments into the rather desperate questions of stanza 3. The poet's love had not been reciprocated, and meeting her again has failed to rekindle, or indeed kindle, it. The poem then reiterates how deeply 'beguiled' the poet has been by the woman, and the last stanzas compare his love for her to the sound of the river, always audible as an undercurrent, or 'under-song', behind the day-to-day clamour of life. Easy enough to picture here Coleridge and his hopeless passion for Sara Hutchinson.

It makes for a pleasant, bittersweet sort of poem, elevated from the run-of-the-Coleridgean-mill by two (it seems to me) more striking images, or moments. The first is Stanza IV's image of the mother exploring 'the rose-mark on her long lost child'. This, when you come to think of it, is a pretty strange way of talking about the physical intimacy of a lover's caress. So: Coleridge is comparing re-encountering the woman he (hopelessly) loves, and reassuring himself that he still loves her, to a mother who has lost her child, who recovers him (her?) and reassures herself that she has the right child by running fingers over a birth-mark. There's a jolting turn to the quasi-incestuous in this, not inappropriately so for a man who wants to relate to the woman he loves and cannot have as both a pure sister and a secret erotic focus (and there's fair amount of anxiety about incest in Coleridge over this decade: his 1811 lecture on Romeo and Juliet segues disconcertingly from discussing the erotic passion of Shakespeare's two lovers into an earnest meditation on the incest taboo). But it's surely rather odd to conceptualise this kind of love according to a parent-child vector. Is Coleridge the mother, imaginatively caressing the 'rose-mark' of Sara Hutchinson? That's potentially quite rude. Or is Sara Hutchinson the mother, and Coleridge is imaginatively projecting himself into an infantile state of perfect intimacy with her? That's even odder.

The second striking moment in the poem occupied the final two stanzas, and brings me back to the matter of dating.

V.
You stood before me like a thought,
A dream remembered in a dream.
But when those meek eyes first did seem
To tell me, Love within you wrought—
O Greta, dear domestic stream!

VI.
Has not, since then, Love's prompture deep,
Has not Love's whisper evermore
Been ceaseless, as thy gentle roar?
Sole voice, when other voices sleep,
Dear under-song in clamor's hour.

The syntax is quite interesting here. The dash after 'Love within you wrought' reads as though a sentence has been abruptly broken off: wrought what? Or if the sense is 'your meek eyes told me that love was being wrought within you' then ... what? The 'But when' calls out for an answering clause, instead of which the poem shifts to the description of the stream. I suppose the '... has not' might be thought as completing the unit of sense; but there's a mismatch between the two elements that wrongfoots the reader. Perhaps it is supposed to do precisely that.

The best two lines in the whole poem seem to me

You stood before me like a thought,
A dream remembered in a dream

A beautifully poised acknowledgement of the emotional and psychological distance opening up between the two individuals. If Coleridge's love for Sara was only a dream eight years ago, now it is only the dream of a dream. From the physical immediacy and intimacy of the poem's early stanzas, to this etiolated 'thought' of love.

The dream of a dream. We know that Coleridge owned and annotated a copy of Rachel Baker's Devotional Somnium (1815), although sadly the copy has now been lost. It's a strange pamphlet. Baker was a New York woman who created something of a local sensation in the early 18teens by falling asleep and preaching the gospel in that state; her sermons were then collected and published by 'Several Medical Gentlemen', together with various related accounts of unusual somnolence, sleep-walking and the like. It's the kind of thing well-fitted to Coleridge's peculiar interests, and it's likely he read it closely. What did he write in those margins, I wonder? More to the point, I wonder if this passage snagged his interest:

But the most curious circumstance of the mind in the state of dream is, the power it has to become the agent of every person, character, and thing, of which it dreams. It carries on conversation with several, asks questions, hears answers, gives and receives information, and it acts all these parts itself. But though the imagination cannot supply the place of real memory, it has the wild faculty of counterfeiting memory. It dreams of persons it never knew, and talks to them as if it remembered them as old acquaintance. It relates circumstances that never happened, and tells them as if they had happened. It goes to places that never existed, and knows where all the streets and houses are, as if we had been there before. The scenes it creates are often as scenes remembered. It will sometimes act a dream within a dream, and, in the delusion of dreaming, tell a dream it never dreamed, and tell it as if it was from memory. [Baker, 'Devotional Somnium', Collection of Prayers and Exhortations (1815), 173]

This is not by Baker herself, but is from 'An Interesting Essay on Dreams' that the editors of Baker's sermons include in the volume (it was, we are told, 'conceived by a vigorous mind, and written by an able hand' and is 'inserted in the present publication', on account of its 'profound sagacity and intrinsic merit ... deserv[ing] the consideration of all those who study the mind and its operations'.)

This has two implications. One is that, if this passage is behind the last two stanzas here, then they may been written 1815-16, and not earlier. And the second is that it throws over the whole poem a rather more desolating cast than might be otherwise the case. 'Recollections of Love' becomes about the uncertainty of recollection itself, or more specifically, it becomes a (deeply Coleridgean) meditation of the ways imagination and desire tangle with memory, and a love-object retreats to the position of being a 'dream within a dream'. This is certainly the Devotional Somnium take on the imagination: 'it will sometimes act a dream within a dream, and, in the delusion of dreaming, tell a dream it never dreamed, and tell it as if it was from memory.'

Nature, Stepmother

Joseph Cottle records this letter by Coleridge to his friend Mr Wade in his Early Recollections;: Chiefly Relating to the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge [(2 vols 1837), 1:171]. It dates from 1796 and contains a little poem:

My dear friend,

* * * I succeeded very well here at Lichfield. Belcher, Bookseller, Birmingham; Sutton, Nottingham; Pritchard, Derby; and Thomson, Manchester, are the publishers. In every number of the Watchman, there will be printed these words, 'Published in Bristol, by the Author, S. T. Coleridge, and sold &c. &c.' I verily believe no poor fellow's idea-pot ever bubbled up so vehemently with fears, doubts and difficulties, as mine does at present. Heaven grant it may not boil over, and put out the fire! I am almost heartless! My past life seems to me like a dream, a feverish dream! all one gloomy huddle of strange actions, and dim-discovered motives! Friendships lost by indolence, and happiness murdered by mismanaged sensibility! The present hour I seem in a quickset hedge of embarrassments! For shame! I ought not to mistrust God! but indeed, to hope is far more difficult than to fear. Bulls have horns, Lions have talons.

The Fox, and Statesman subtile wiles ensure,
The Cit, and Polecat stink and are secure;
Toads with their venom, Doctors with their drug,
The Priest, and Hedgehog, in their robes are snug;
Oh, Nature! cruel step-mother, and hard,
To thy poor, naked, fenceless child the Bard!
No Horns but those by luckless Hymen worn,
And those, (alas! alas!) not Plenty's Horn!
With naked feelings, and with aching pride,
He bears th'unbroken blast on every side!
Vampire Booksellers drain him to the heart,
And Scorpion Critics cureless venom dart!

S. T. C.

This, though it looks like it, is not an original Coleridge poem. In fact it is a sort of compressed adaptation of a section from a longer poem by Robert Burns: 'The Poet's Progress' (1788) lines 17-36 of which read.

Foxes and statesmen subtle wiles ensure;
The cit and polecat stink, and are secure:
Toads with their poison, doctors with their drug,
The priest and hedgehog, in their robes, are snug:
E'en silly women have defensive arts,
Their eyes, their tongues-and nameless other parts.

But O thou cruel stepmother and hard,
To thy poor fenceless, naked child, the Bard!
A thing unteachable in worldly skill,
And half an idiot too, more helpless still:
No heels to bear him from the op'ning dun,
No claws to dig, his hated sight to shun:
No horns, but those by luckless Hymen worn,
And those, alas! not Amalthea's horn:
No nerves olfact'ry, true to Mammon's foot,
Or grunting, grub sagacious, evil's root:
The silly sheep that wanders wild astray,
Is not more friendless, is not more a prey;
Vampyre-booksellers drain him to the heart,
And viper-critics cureless venom dart.

Naughty Coleridge: it's this kind of thing that gets him a reputation for plagiary. Mind you, the alterations, small though they be, are pretty interesting. I suspect that Coleridge had been reading John Jortin (he quotes an anecdote from Jortin in the 1811-12 Lectures on Shakespeare). John Jortin's Tracts, Philological, Critical, and Miscellaneous (2 vols 1790) was recently out, and it is Jortin who ‘If there were no GOD, we should have no father but only a cruel step-mother, called Nature’ [2: 532]; Burns may have read the same passage, but Coleridge makes the allusion that much clearer.

The Genius of an Onion

Craig Raine's early and still famous poem 'The Onion, Memory' (1978) draws the force of its comparison between the vegetable and the mental process not on account of shared layering (though it might have done), but via tears:

Outside the trees are bending over backwards
to please the wind: the shining sword
grass flattens on its belly.
The white-thorn's frillies offer no resistance.
In the fridge, a heart-shaped jelly
strives to keep a sense of balance.

I slice up the onions. You sew up a dress.
This is the quiet echo—flesh—
white muscle on white muscle,
intimately folded skin,
finished with a satin rustle.
One button only to undo, sewn up with shabby thread.
It is the onion, memory,
that makes me cry.

Might Raine have picked this up from Coleridge? Or have I merely reached that level of scholarly immersion in my author where I start to see him everywhere? Swap Rainean pathos for mockery, and step back to the Great Room of the London Philosophical Society, 16th December 1811, where Coleridge is lecturing on Shakespeare.

Shakespeare was often spoken of as a Child of Nature, and many had been his imitators, who attempted to copy real incidents; and some of them had not even genius enough to copy nature, but still they produced a sort of phenomenon of modern times neither tragic nor comic, nor tragicomic, but the Sentimental. This sort of writing consists in taking some very affecting incidents, which in its highest excellence only aspired to the genius of an onion,—the power of drawing tears; and in which the author, acting like a ventriloquist, distributes his own insipidity.

Layers. Layers everywhere.