'Of the Uncertainty of Life'

Abstruser and abstruser. In September 1808, Coleridge wrote the following in his Notebook:

Silence was a full answer of him who being asked what he thought of Human Life, said nothing, turned round, and vanished.

This is entry 3373 in Kathleen Coburn's monumental edition of The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Volume 3 1808-1819 (Princeton/Routledge 1973), and her annotation on it reads in full: 'Source untraced'.

It's actually quoted from Resolves, Divine, Moral, and Political (1623) by Owen Felltham or Feltham (1602-68). A new edition had been published by John Hatchard, out of Piccadilly, in 1806, and perhaps Coleridge was reading that.

The quotation in question is from an essay called 'Of the Uncertainty of Life'. It actually reads:

Miserable brevity! more miserable uncertainty of life! We are sure that we cannot live long, and uncertain that we shall live at all; even while I am writing this, I am not sure my pen shall end the sentence. Our life is so short, that we cannot in it, contemplate what ourselves are; so uncertain that we cannot say, we will resolve to do it. Silence was a full answer from that philosopher, who, being asked what he thought of human life, said nothing, turned himself round, and vanished. Like leaves on trees, we are the sport of every puff that blows. [pp 70-71 in the 1806 edition]

This is the first evidence we have that Coleridge read Feltham. Exciting, no?

No? Suit yourself.

George Dyer at Shakespeare's 1811-12 lectures

We know that Coleridge's friend, the important, if eccentric (and now-forgotten) poet George Dyer, was at some of the 1811-12 lectures. John Payne Collier records a post-lecture conversation at Charles Lamb's house, the evening of Wednesday 27th November 1811, in which Lamb, Hazlitt, John Rickman and Dyer discussed STC's most recent lecture. Hazlitt 'did not think Coleridge at all competent to the task he had undertaken of lecturing on Shakespeare', but Dyer disagreed: 'Dyer thought that Coleridge was the fittest man for a Lecturer he had ever known: he was constantly lecturing when in company, only he did it better' [Foakes, Lectures on Literature 1808-1819 (1987) 1:233]. Presumably he meant that Coleridge was a better lecturer in private than he had been in Scot's Corporation Hall, two days earlier, so a slightly back-handed compliment, really. But still.

Dyer himself included a reference to Coleridge's lecturing in his Poetics; Or a Series of Poems and Disquisitions on Poetry (2 vols 1812), and I don't think it has ever been noticed. Towards the end of the second volume of this work of Dyer explains that he had originally planned to include in it a discussion of the poetic imagination: 'it would have fallen in the natural course of the preceding Essay to contemplate the Imagination, as the peculiar province of Poetry, and to have shown, that she lives there under laws of her own, somewhat different from'those, by which Philosophy is governed.' But, he says, he decided to omit this discussion. Why?

When the printing of this volume was nearly finished [in late 1811], I was compelled to stop the press, and to direct my whole attention to other subjects. I was invited in the interim by my ingenious friend Mr. Charles Lambe [sic], to hear two of Mr. Coleridge's lectures. One happened to take a turn, which led Mr. Coleridge to consider Poetry, as it more immediately depends on the Imagination; and he judiciously made its characteristic difference from Philosophy, or Science, to consist, in its being the work of the Imagination. With what I heard, I was greatly delighted; but I immediately felt, that while the eloquent Lecturer had enlarged my-views, he had crippled my exertions. For I had certainly two or three more ideas, which belonged to this place; but perceiving myself in danger of going over the same ground with Mr. Coleridge, I struck out of the course: even the word, Imagination, I have studiously avoided, though naturally belonging to the place, and almost essential to my meaning. It matters not, whether what I have said is better or worse; but I gave a turn to my thoughts somewhat different from what I had meditated.

It is most probable, that Mr. Coleridge may have enforced some points in his lectures, which I did not hear, about which he and I may differ. Two people employed in thinking on similar topics, and, occasionally, perhaps, reading similar, or the same books, will naturally, and necessarily, have some sentiments in common; and, if possessed of any mind at all, they will sometimes differ. But as the whole of the volume, with the exception above mentioned, was printed off, before Mr. Coleridge's lectures commenced, it must appear, that as any harmony, or synchronism of thought, can only have been accidental, so any difference of sentiment could not have proceeded from any thing like premeditated opposition. [Dyer, Poetics, 2:213-4]

So, we know that Dyer attended two of Coleridge's lectures from the 1811-12. It is in Lecture 3 that STC makes the first brings in the idea that poetry is to be contradistinguished not from prose but from science, and using 'imagination' as the salient for true poetic inspiration: 'we must combine under the notion of true poet more than ordinary sensibility, occasioning a more than ordinary sympathy with the objects of nature or the incidents of human life. This, again, united with a more than ordinary activity of mind in general, but more particularly of those faculties of the mind we class under the names of fancy and imagination—faculties (I know not how I shall make myself intelligible) that are rather spontaneous than voluntary—they excite great activity, but such as is greatly beyond all proportion to the effects occasioned by them.'

Marginalia for Marginalia

That's an example of the way STC tended to jot down his Shakespeare thoughts (this particular one is in the British Library). It says:

This Play, which is Shakespeare’s throughout, is to me the most painful, say rather the only painful part of his genuine works. The comic and tragic parts equally border on the wanton, the one disgusting, the other horrible; and the pardon and marriage of Angelo not merely baffles the strong indignant claim of Justice (for cruelty, with lust and damnable Baseness, cannot be forgiven, because we cannot conceive them as being morally repented of) but it is likewise degrading to the character of Woman. Beaumont and Fletcher, who can follow Shakespeare in his errors only, have presented a still worse, because more loathsome and contradictory instance of the same kind in his Night-Walker, in the marriage of Alathe to Algripe. Of the counterbalancing Beauties of to Measure for Measure, I need say nothing; for I have already said, that it is Shakespeare’s throughout. S. T. Coleridge

But never mind the content: isn't it a striking piece of visual art? A kind of calligraphic Rothko.

The Name Game: Coleridge's Epitaph (1833)

Coleridge wrote his own epitaph, probably in 1833. It is, amongst other things, a poem knottily tangled up in the initials of Coleridge's name.

Stop, Christian passer-by!—Stop, child of God,
And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod
A poet lies, or that which once seemed he.
O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.;
That he who many a year with toil of breath
Found death in life, may here find life in death!
Mercy for praise—to be forgiven for fame
He asked, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same!

One of the games here involves STC asking passers-by to stop, to stand, such that the poem interpellates a reader who has stood. Coleridge several times referred to the cross-linguistic whimsy that his initials 'S.T.C.' actualised the Greek, ἐστηση, which means 'he has stood'. Then again, the whole of this little elegy plays with the s, the t and the c, as well as with the 'st': STop Christian; STop Child; pray for S.T.C.; do thou the Same Through Christ. Why does the poem request the passer-by read with his or her 'gentle breast' rather than with eyes (we don't normally read with our breasts, do we?) unless it is that the st at the end of the word has a greater claim on the poem than mere logic of content? The S of Samuel turns God to its rhyme-word, the corruptible Sod. 'Once seemed he' not only rhymes STC but jumbles up our nominal letters (onCe SeemTee).

Initials aside, the actual name 'Coleridge' does not appear in the poem, presumably because the author's earnest hope is that death will mean this C-name becomes wholly subsumed in another C-name, Christ. But the Samuel and the Taylor flicker around the middest points, I think.

That he who many a year with toil of breath
Found death in life, may here find life in death!

The whole of STCs life is summed up in that first line: laborious to the point of wheeziness, a life broken by disease and centered on toil—that is to say: Samuel Toiler Coleridge. Then again, we might want to read 'toil of breath' not as physical exhaustion and asthma so much as a straightforward description of the occupation of poet: s/he works at producing poems to be read aloud, breathed to the world. Maybe that's what 'read by the breast' means: spoken aloud. Intoned. It occurs to me that, after  the initial double stop, all the actions listed in the elegy either directly or else via double-meanings relate to things the breath does when it comes out of the mouth: read; lie; pray; praise; forgive; ask; hope. And there is an appositeness in this, since what else is an elegy but a motion of breath recording the moment when all breath stops?

There is, of course, a slightly spooky braiding together of life in death and death in life in any elegy and STC foregrounds that with his hope that he who 'found death in life, may here find life in death'. This is, I suppose, liable to make us think of Coleridge's most famous poem, 'The Ancient Mariner', and I daresay it was meant to. But there's another resonance here, surely: Samuel. It is but a vowel-tweak from stop to step: and the Biblical book of Samuel encapsulates, amongst many other things, the meat of this lyric: 'as thy soul liveth, there is but a step between me and death' [1 Samuel 20:3].

The death of Samuel entails one of the more curious episodes in a Bible not under-supplied with curious episodes. 'Now,' we are told, 'Samuel was dead, and all Israel had lamented him, and buried him in Ramah, even in his own city' [1 Samuel 28:3]. But Sam's successor, Saul, is in trouble with the Philistines, and seeks Samuel's post-mortem wisdom; so he disguises himself and approaches the Witch of Endor, a sorceress who has the power to raise Samuel's ghost. This she does, although Saul does not like the news he receives.

13 And the king said unto her, Be not afraid: for what sawest thou? And the woman said unto Saul, I saw gods ascending out of the earth.

14 And he said unto her, What form is he of? And she said, An old man cometh up; and he is covered with a mantle. And Saul perceived that it was Samuel, and he stooped with his face to the ground, and bowed himself.

15 And Samuel said to Saul, Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up? And Saul answered, I am sore distressed; for the Philistines make war against me, and God is departed from me, and answereth me no more, neither by prophets, nor by dreams: therefore I have called thee, that thou mayest make known unto me what I shall do.

16 Then said Samuel, Wherefore then dost thou ask of me, seeing the LORD is departed from thee, and is become thine enemy?

17 And the LORD hath done to him, as he spake by me: for the LORD hath rent the kingdom out of thine hand, and given it to thy neighbour, even to David:

18 Because thou obeyedst not the voice of the LORD, nor executedst his fierce wrath upon Amalek, therefore hath the LORD done this thing unto thee this day.

19 Moreover the LORD will also deliver Israel with thee into the hand of the Philistines: and to morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me: the LORD also shall deliver the host of Israel into the hand of the Philistines.

20 Then Saul fell straightway all along on the earth, and was sore afraid, because of the words of Samuel: and there was no strength in him.

The Night-mare Life-in-Death draws on this Witch, I think, as well as on other things.

Saul stops, right there, in the road, just as the first line of STC's epitaph commands. Here is a (quite long) blogpost that touches on the fact that Coleridge took 'Amalek' as a way of talking about his inner sinfulness, sloth and moral delinquency, rather than an external threat. This Biblical context, in other words, touches on the uncanny and unholy element in giving speech to the dead: and Samuel said to Saul, Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up? Might the S, in play throughout this little poem, be more Saul than Samuel? The 'c' in Coleridge is hard, like a k; but sometimes 'c' in English is soft, like an 's', which would give us 'Saul-eridge'. How confident is STC in this elegy thet he has obeyedst the voice of the Lord, and executedst His fierce wrath upon Coleridge's inner Amalek? Not wholly, I think. He asks, he hopes, he invokes mercy and forgiveness. But 'a poet lies' has, in this context and more broadly, two possible meanings, and that ambiguity is not a comfortable one for STC.

Better call Saul.

Sinning Heinously Against Purity and Decency: Coleridge's 'Christabel' (1799-1801)

We never get to the end of Christabel, Coleridge's superbly eerie and sensual Gothic verse-tale. He planned five parts; wrote one in the late 1790s, and wrote a second in 1800 hoping that the whole would be included in Wordsworth's second edition of Lyrical Ballads. When Wordsworth cut Christabel, Coleridge grew discouraged. He never finished it. That makes it more than a little tantalising. In the first part, the lovely and virtuous heroine Christabel leaves her father's castle one cold and moonlit night, to go into the nearby forest and there pray for her lover, a knight who is 'far away'. In the forest she encounters something strange.

There she sees a damsel bright,
Dressed in a silken robe of white,
That shadowy in the moonlight shone:
The neck that made that white robe wan,
Her stately neck, and arms were bare;
Her blue-veined feet unsandal'd were;
And wildly glittered here and there
The gems entangled in her hair.
I guess, 'twas frightful there to see
A lady so richly clad as she—
Beautiful exceedingly!
Mary mother, save me now!
(Said Christabel,) And who art thou? [Christabel 1:60-68]

This is the beautiful lady Geraldine, who claims to have been abducted by some rough knights, to have escaped them and now to be seeking sanctuary. Christabel leads Geraldine back inside her father's castle, tip-toes past his room so as not to wake him, and invites Geraldine to sleep in her bed.

But when Geraldine disrobes Christabel sees ... well, it's not clear what she sees:

The cincture from beneath her breast:
Her silken robe, and inner vest,
Dropt to her feet, and full in view,
Behold! her bosom, and half her side— —
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!

Her bosom, and half her side what? Is withered and deformed? Is that of a beast rather than a human? Is she particoloured, or covered in scales, tattooed or diseased? We're not told. In one MS draft there is an extra line, which STC later cut: 'Behold! her bosom, and half her side/Are lean and old and foul of hue'. A later MS version of the poem changes this: 'Behold! her bosom, and half her side/Dark and rough as the sea-wolf's hide'. In the event STC preferred the poem to print without specificity. There's enough here to indicate that Geraldine is clearly something malign; and she lays an enchantment upon Christabel that prevents her from speaking.

Part 2 is set the following day: Geraldine and Christabel meet Christabel's father, Sir Leoline, in 'the Baron's presence-room'. He is impressed by Geraldine's beauty, and moved by her declaration that she is the daughter of one of Sir Leoline's childhood friends, Lord Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine. The two men had fallen out, but Sir Leoline greets this as an opportunity to make-up with him, and orders his court bard, Bracy, to ride to the castle of Lord Roland and inform the peer that his daughter is safe. Bard Bracy demurs, citing a dream he had in which the Baron's pet dove, also called Christabel, was throttled by a snake 'green as the herbs on which it couched'.

Sir Leoline insists that Bard Bracy must go, nonetheless. Meanwhile Christabel catches a glimpse of Geraldine's eyes altering in her face:

The lady's eyes they shrunk in her head,
Each shrunk up to a serpent's eye,
And with somewhat of malice, and more of dread,
At Christabel she looked askance!—
One moment—and the sight was fled!
But Christabel in dizzy trance
Stumbling on the unsteady ground
Shuddered aloud, with a hissing sound;
And Geraldine again turned round,
And like a thing, that sought relief,
Full of wonder and full of grief,
She rolled her large bright eyes divine
Wildly on Sir Leoline.

Christabel overcomes the evil enchantment placed on her just enough to be able to beg her father to send this alarming woman away; but the old man grows angry at this imputation that he would slight his duties as a host, rebukes his daughter and leaves the chamber arm in arm with Geraldine.

That's as far as the story takes us. And, actually, story is the least of this poem: it generates its effect not through events but rather via a beautifully accumulative sense of erotic dread and uncertainty, a sensual evocation of the tropes and fittings of Gothic menace and atmosphere. In Part 1, do Christabel and Geraldine go to bed in the innocent way children will sleep together? The manifest content of the poem, with its stress on Christabel's purity, suggests so; but the latent content of the poem is positively dripping with secret sexual consummation, hidden pleasures and secret shame. When old Sir Leoline leads Geraldine out at the end of part 2, is he going to marry her? Has she used her weird lamia sklls to seduce him?

One hint as to what happens next is provided by a long note Coleridge wrote, in 1819, on the fly-leaf of the first (1816) printed edition of the poem (first reproduced by John Beer in The Review of English Studies in 1986):

I still cherish the hope of finishing this poem, and if by any means I can command two months' actual leisure at the sea side, I hope to finish it in the course of the present year. Enough at present to assure you, that Geraldine is not a Witch, in any proper sense of that word—That she is a man in disguise, is a wicked rumour sent abroad with malice prepense, and against his own belief and knowledge, by poor Hazlitt. Unhappy man! I understand that when one of his Faction had declared in a pamphlet ("Hypocrisy unveiled") the Christabel "the most obscene poem in the English Language" he shrugged himself up with a sort of sensual orgasm of enjoyment, and exclaimed—How he'll stare! (i.e. meaning me) Curse him! I hate him.—

When I reflect on such things, and know that to be real which otherwise I could not have believed possible, it is an unspeakable Comfort to me that I can with my whole heart obey the divine precept, Matth: V. 43, 44, 45, 46.—

S. T. Coleridge

Feb.y 3. 1819.

Highgate.

Beer's article goes into detail as to how former close friends Coleridge and Hazlitt had, by 1819, fallen out to the extent indicated here. The pamphlet does indeed disparage Coleridge's poem. You can read it for yourself here: Hypocrisy unveiled, and Calumny detected: in a review of Blackwood's Magazine (1818): :

If after all this, the sapient editors of Blackwood’s Magazine can hope to impose upon, gull, and deceive the public any longer, they are certainly deceived in the highest degree themselves ... to make this farfamed representation of virgin purity, of matronly and religious feeling, the more striking, they have taken care to inform us, in language too licentious to be repeated here, and fit only for some “ melodious advocate of lust,” that Raphael was enabled to pourtray this object of worship to catholic Europe, by studying the figures of his mistresses ... We may also add, as a summing up of their wretched inconsistencies, that the same writer, or at least his sworn brother, the LEOPARD, has praised Byron’s Parisina, and Coleridge's Christabel, poems which sin as heinously against Purity and decency as it is well possible to imagine. [Hypocrisy Unveiled, 50]

The 'Leopard' is one of the two pseudonymous Blackwood's contributors on which the pamphlet focusses its ire; the other being 'the Scorpion'. John Beer notes that this pamphlet provoked Coleridge to several reactions:

On 31 January Coleridge had written to Southey, 'Some Genius in a pamphlet entitled Hypocrisy unveiled written against Mr Wilson has pronounced poor Christabel "the most obscene Poem in the English Lang[uage]". It seems that Hazlitt from pure malignity had spread about the Report that Geraldine was a man in disguise.' ... Coleridge returned to the question of Hazlitt's 'frantic hatred' in a letter of 9 February to William Mudford: 'It was, as I am given to understand, this same Gentleman who against his own knowledge set about the report, that the GERALDINE in my Christabel was a man in disguise, and that the whole Poem had an obscene purpose, referring to me at the same time with a shrug of malicious anticipation—Curse him! how he'll stare!—And one of his clan has had the effrontery in a published Pamphlet to declare the Christabel "the most obscene Poem in the English Language". [Beer, 41]

So Coleridge, smiling as far as he can, though clearly with his teeth gritted, wants to imply that Christabel is not the most obscene poem in English. He is at least clear that Geraldine is not a man in drag. This assertion, though, casts doubt over one of the often-reprinted versions of the way the rest of the story was going to develop, recorded by James Gillman:

The following relation was to have occupied a third and fourth canto, and to have closed the tale. Over the mountains, the Bard, as directed by Sir Leoline, 'hastes' with his disciple; but in consequence of one of those inundations supposed to be common to this country, the spot only where the castle once stood is discovered, —the edifice itself being washed away. He determines to return. Geraldine being acquainted with all that is passing, like the Weird Sisters in Macbeth, vanishes. Re-appearing, however, she waits the return of the Bard, exciting in the mean time, by her wily arts, all the anger she could rouse in the Baron's breast, as well as that jealousy of which he is described to have been susceptible. The old Bard and the youth at length arrive, and therefore she can no longer personate the character of Geraldine, the daughter of Lord Roland de Vaux, but changes her appearance to that of the accepted though absent lover of Christabel. Next ensues a courtship most distressing to Christabel, who feels—she knows not why—great disgust for her once favoured knight. This coldness is very painful to the Baron, who has no more conception than herself of the supernatural transformation. She at last yields to her father's entreaties, and consents to approach the altar with this hated suitor. The real lover returning, enters at this moment, and produces the ring which she had once given him in sign of her betrothment. Thus defeated, the supernatural being Geraldine disappears. As predicted, the castle bell tolls, the mother's voice is heard, and to the exceeding great joy of the parties, the rightful marriage takes place, after which follows a reconciliation and explanation between the father and daughter. [Gilmann, Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1838) 1:304]

If not a man, or at any rate transgender woman-man, aiming sexually to possess Christabel, then what?

I have a suggestion, although it may smack rather of anticlimax. But then again, could it be that Coleridge was thinking in terms of studied anti-climax from the beginning? There are aspects of this poem that point not towards the expert creation of an eerie mood so much as the deliberate clumsiness of comedy. Anya Taylor calls it 'a poem that can drive readers "mad" or make them feel "stupid."' From its opening-"Tu-whit!-tu-whoo!"— its lulling, almost lobotomized repetitions—"Is the night chilly and dark?/The night is chilly but not dark"—its shifting narrative voices, and its metrical hesitations and forward rushes, it lures listeners into its twilight' [Taylor, 'Coleridge's "Christabel" and the Phantom Soul' SEL 42:4 (2002), 707]. Perhaps this awkwardness of tone is gesturing less at the mystic-transcendental and more at the Northanger-Abbey-style deflation of Gothic pomposity?

Here is where I bring in Cervantes, an author we know Coleridge read and admired. Let's imagine him reading Don Quixote in the 1790s, something he would almost certainly have done in Smollett's celebrated translation (1755). It is well within the bounds of possibility that he also read the spurious sequel, Second Volume of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha: by the Licenciado (doctorate) Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, of Tordesillas, which was translated into English by William Augustus Yardley in 1784. Let's imagine he did, at any rate. So: we bear in mind the salients of Christabel Part 1: the protagonist ventures into a dark wood, hears a beautiful maiden in distress, believes her to have been abducted by knights and marked in some supernatural way by demonic or magical powers; bear in mind also that this demonic mark involves, in some way, physical deformity. Then read Chapter 5 ‘Of the Strange and Dangerous Adventure Don Quixote’s Valiant Squire Had the Hardiness to Undertake’:

Don Quixote and his companions were now about half way on their journey to the inn where they were to lie that night; when, palling by the side of a little wood of fir-trees, they observed a doleful voice issue from among them, as it were of a woman in distress. They halted, the better to listen to it; and, being near enough, heard these words distinctly—'Alas! unhappy woman that I am! shall I find nobody to relieve me in this extremity? ...' As soon as the knight heard these words, he said to his companions—'Behold here, gentlemen, the most glorious and most dangerous adventure I ever met with since I received the order of knighthood! The wood which we now see is enchanted, and very difficult to be penetrated; the wise Friston, my ancient enemy, has in it a spacious cavern, wherein he holds a great number of knights and princesses enchanted. To theft he has lately added the sage Urganda the Unknown; she is cruelly bound with mighty iron-chains to a vast mill'stone, which two deformed demons continually whirl about; and every time her body violently strikes the rock on which the mill-stone stands, the terrible pain she endures makes her cry out in the manner we have heard.' Information like the foregoing was perfectly new and strange to the alderman; who, being by nature not over wise, answered with the utmost simplicity—'Sir Knight, enchanters are not at all used in this country; and I do not believe there is any thing of what you say in this wood; all we can judge of it is, that some highwaymen have dragged some woman into the wood, where they have robbed and abused her. It behoves us to go in and see whether she is still in a condition to be helped.'—'Mr. Alderman,'answered Don Quixote very sternly, 'do not you know I do not love to contend, and especially with little aldermen, who ought to hold their peace before knights-errant!' Bracamonte, to prevent any contest, drew near the alderman, and in few words let him into Don Quixote's character; who, as one deeply concerned in Urganda's deliverance, had already drawn his sword, and was entering the wood; affirming, that to him alone it belonged to finish that adventure. [The History And Adventures Of The Renowned Don Quixote (1784) 3:85]

In the event Sancho Panza begs the honour of the adventure, and with much comic tremulousness he goes into the woods, whilst the maiden continues calling aloud for help: 'Holy Mother of God!' (compare Christabel's 'Jesu, Maria, shield her well!') Sancho eventually 'espied a woman naked to her shift.' However, 'this sight threw him into such a consternation, that, dropping down plumb from his ass, he took to his heels, without minding which way he went, yelling with horrible vociferation—' Help! 'Murder!—Now, master Don Quixote, your trusty squire is slain!' Though she is but a woman, Sancho sees her as a damned soul liable to have 'swallowed me down like a stewed prune; for she has not eaten any thing else these six thousand years'. Don Q, on the contrary, declares the woman to be 'Zenoba, that great Queen of the Amazon', frees her and takes her to the inn. Actuality is less exotic: her real name is 'Barbara Hacked-Face': some 'fifty years of age', disfigured on one half of her body: 'her right cheek adorned with the seam of a long wound, which extended even to her ear, and which had probably been inflicted in her younger days, for her holy life and modest conversation!'

Christabel takes Geraldine's scarred or deformed half-side to be a diabolic mark, and all readers, as far as I can see, have followed her in that. Conceivably, though, the whole poem is instead a riff upon this Quixotic episode; that when STC wrote 'that Geraldine is not a Witch, in any proper sense of that word' he might have been gesturing to such a revelation. We could take him at his word. We don't want to, though, because we are as invested in the fantasy version of this unfinished poem as any Quixote.

This would explain Coleridge's cagey responses to queries about how the poem was to develop, and explain why he didn't rebut Hazlitt et all simply by spelling out his plans for the poem. He wanted to keep his Scooby-Doo twist ending in reserve. But it might also explain why he never finished it: he had done such a good job of evoking Gothic mystery and supernatural erotic frisson, he couldn't quite bring himself to puncture the bubble he had himself blown. For readers now, the truly heinous sin would be the reading of the poem that denies its impurity and indecency.

'When Absent Soon To Meet Again' (1810)

This may be stating the obvious, but the opening prose section of this Coleridge March 1810 Notebook entry (much scribbled over and crossed out in the original) is actually a run-on draft of a poem. Now, lines 5-20 of the set-as-verse section of this, the passage beginning 'I have experienc'd/The worst, the World can wreak on me', was published after Coleridge's death, in Ernest Hartley Coleridge's Poetical Works (1912), as 'Fragment 35'. But what of the earlier lines?

A little judicious reconstruction gives us:

When absent soon to meet again
That morning, and that last Employ
Had only so much certain Pain
As fears of Hope detract from Joy.
And now—O then I'm least opprest
When with the cleansing stream I mix
My tears, and oft I'd fain neglect
Myself, as anguish sinking down
Comes o'er me—yet I cannot own
The love-enchanted spirit fixed.
For not death, absence nor demerit—
Can free the love-enchanted spirit;
And I seem always in her eyen,
And she'll no more appear to mine.

The first quatrain is clear enough; the later lines are open to a variety of possible reconstructions from the muddle of STC's initial thoughts, and I'm not sure this is the best of them. You can see where his pre-revision poet's imagination shifts gear, from rhymed octosyllabic self-pity into decasyllables ('Such anguish and such sinking down of heart' and so on) that in turn shift him towards a blank verse expression of more public misery.  'Comes o'er me, yet never can I' lacks a two-syllable top-off: 'escape' maybe; and then we're into the next four lines, laid out as verse.

I think, then, that this is two poems: one an embryonic tetrameter lyric, the other (lines 5-20) a more finished blank verse meditation. Now, one argument against my 'reconstruction' of the first of these is that Coleridge was not a poet who particularly favoured half-rhymes like 'opprest/neglect' and 'mix/fixed' (plus I freely concede that 'eyen'/'mine' is a stretch on my part). Me, I like half-rhymes. But let's say we give ourselves even more latitude and try to second-guess how STC might have shifted things about to preserve a fuller rhyme-scheme:

When absent soon to meet again
That morning, and that last Employ
Had only so much certain Pain
As fears of Hope detract from Joy.
But now—O then I'm least opprest
When with the cleansing stream I mix
My tears, and oft I'd fain transfix
Myself, as anguish sinking down
Comes o'er me—yet I cannot drown
My grief or ever bring it rest.
For not death, absence nor demerit—
Can free the love-enchanted spirit;
And I seem always in her eye,
And she'll ne'er more appear to mine.

Not sure if the first 'love-enchanted spirit' line needs altering to avoid its repetition (as I have done in this more speculative second version), or whether the repetition is itself a good poetic effect.

Kathleen Coburn, in her edition of the Notebooks, suggests that this self-pitying piece of writing was provoked by Sara Hutchinson's decision (in March 1810) to leave the Wordsworths' house and go live with her brother Tom and cousin John Monkhouse in Wales: keeping house for the two men whilst they farmed. This she did, and seems to have enjoyed it, although it took her out of the ambit where Coleridge was likely to meet her (and indeed, he never visited her in Wales). Hence: anguish. Hence, also perhaps, a bitter recall, here, of 'the EPOCH', from three-and-a-bit years previously. It's tempting to read the 'that morning' of line 2 as a reference to the morning of Saturday 27th December 1806. The first four lines are 'then'; the latter ten 'now', and the difference between the two sections is that Coleridge believes he's never going to see the woman he loves again.

There's a degree of artificiality (a less sympathetic reader might say: of bodge-job) about this reconstructed poem, of course; but I quite like it nonetheless. It's like a sort of anti-sonnet. Not entirely un-maudlin, it's true; but it holds its 'I'll never see her again, so I shall go drown myself in the river' psychological melodrama at enough of an arm's-length to squeeze real pathos out of its sorrow.

Whoo!

There are gems in even the most abstruse and theological of Coleridge's marginalia. Take the above, an annotation to James Relly's The Believer's Treasury, or the Union, Consanguinity and Affinity of Christ and His Church (1824). Sometimes speculation about the guilt-by-association of an incarnation of guiltlessness provokes the Keanu in us all.