'Fancy in Nubibus' (1817)

One of Coleridge's late sonnets, this: written October 1817, first published in The Courier 30 January 1818, later reprinted in various places including Coleridge's own collections of his verse in 1828 and 1834:

O, it is pleasant, with a heart at ease,
Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies,
To make the shifting clouds be what you please,
Or let the easily persuaded eyes
Own each quaint likeness issuing from the mould    [5]
Of a friend’s fancy; or with head bent low,
And cheek aslant, see rivers flow of gold
’Twixt crimson banks; and then, a traveller, go
From mount to mount, through Cloudland, gorgeous land!
Or listening to the tide, with closèd sight,                [10]
Be that blind bard, who on the Chian strand
By those deep sounds possessed, with inward light
Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee
Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea.

The 1828 reprinting gets a touch shoutier with some select capitalisation:

It's a rather oddly-, if charmingly-, shaped poem, I think: opening with a mood of gentle reverie in order to execute a sort of knight's-move into a much grander and more stirring sestet. The opening, at any rate, has a kind of studied indolence, a confidently understated suavity of ease;—the first four rhymes barely exerting themselves to trouble the aaaa of minimum exertion into the abab actually required by the sonnet form; the second four rhymes going only a little better in terms of separating out the sounds of their cdcd. The way mid-line rhymes drape their hands in the water to make lazy ripples as the boat drifts on: head bent low/...see rivers flow of gold. Given that 'clouds' are mention in line 3, the line 'From mount to mount, through Cloudland, gorgeous land!' repeats mount, echoes cloud and doubles-up -land with land, in an effective monotony of iteration. The whole of the octave, in fact, cleverly recasts the activity of travel into a satisfying passivity: you needn't even keep your cheek upright, if you don't want it! Aslant let it lie, and project your effortless imaginary self rather than your laborious physical being into the rivers of gold and gorgeous hillocks of Cloudland. Who doesn't enjoy cloudwatching, after all?

The sestet, hinging on its 'Or...' moves from sky to sea, and from sight to blindness. There is supposed to be a 'turn' in a sonnet between octave and sestet, of course, but this one verges on the extreme. In the first eight lines a poet rhapsodises on the joys of a purely visual imaginary engagement. In the final six he shifts to the most famous of all blind poets, to hearing rather than sight, to water instead of cloudy air. There's another mode of shift, too: from originality into plagiary, for the critics have long noted that the sestet draws from Friedrich Leopold Stolberg's 'An das Meer' ('By the Sea' 1777). The whole of—to give him his rather magnificently Germanic official name—Graf zu Stolberg-Stolberg's poem is available online here, so you can see for yourself.

'An das Meer' is a poem made up of ten four-line stanzas. Most of the whole is given over to praise of swimming in the North Sea, something Stolberg loved to do, but which is much too strenuous an activity to fit STC's sonnet. Stolberg's last three stanzas, though, invoke Homer, and here we come closer to Coleridge's lines:

Der blinde Sänger stand am Meer;
Die Wogen rauschten um ihn her,
Und Riesenthaten goldner Zeit
Umrauschten ihn im Feierkleid.

Es kam zu ihm auf Schwanenschwung
Melodisch die Begeisterung,
Und Ilias und Odyssee
Entstiegen mit Gesang der See.

Hätt' er gesehn, wär' um ihn her
Verschwunden Himmel, Erd' und Meer,
Sie sangen vor des Blinden Blick
Den Himmel, Erd' und Meer zurück.

That means:

The blind singer stood by the sea;
The waves roared around him,
And the giant deeds of his golden time
Surged around him as a raiment.

It came to him like a swan's wing beating
The inspiration of his melodies,
And the Iliad and Odyssey
Rose with the singing of the Sea.

Could he have seen what surrounded him
Sky, earth and sea would have disappeared,
To sing before the blind gaze
And be returned as Heaven, earth and sea.

J.C.C. Mays says this was first noticed by German translator of Coleridge's poems Ferdinand Freiligrath, in 1852. In fact it was noticed earlier than that: George Ripley's anthology of translated Continental poetry, Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature (London 1842) includes this slightly truncated version of Stolberg's poem:





Which leads us irresistibly to 'Note Q':





I think 'word for word' overstates this a tad. Clearly 'Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee/Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea' owes something to 'Und Ilias und Odyssee/Entstiegen mit Gesang der See', something reinforced by Coleridge's Germanic spelling of 'Odyssee'. But 'voiceful sea' is Coleridge's own contribution, and rather lovely it is too. Perhaps it gives the impression of having been translated from the German phrase Stimmegefüllt See, or something; but of course actually it's not. (If Coleridge took it from anywhere, it is more likely to be from English pastoral poet William Browne, whose Britannia's Pastorals (1613) positions the speaker ‘Near Tavy’s voiceful stream, to whom I owe/More strains than from my pipe can ever flow’).

It's not that Coleridge was shy of reworking and translating various Stolbergiana, something he sometimes did, after the manner of his characteristic delinquency, without acknowledging the fact. His splendid 'On A Cataract' (maybe written at the end of the 1790s) is actually a translation of Stolberg's 'Der Felsenstrom'; ‘Tell’s Birth-Place’ imitates Stolberg’s ‘Bei Wilhelm Telles Geburtstätte im Kanton Uri’ (although here STC at least adds 'Imitated From Stolberg' to his title); and Stolberg’s ‘Hymne an die Erde’ is largely present in Coleridge’s ‘Hymn to the Earth’. Then there are things like 'Wills of the Wisp: a Sapphic from Stolberg', probably written 1801. Indeed, as Stolberg-imitation goes, 'Fancy in Nubibus' is fairly oblique.

Or maybe a better way of putting that would be to say there's a clearer vector of imitation at work here, and its not German so much as it is Roman. I mean: just look at that title! Nubibus is the dative plural of the Latin nubes, cloud, which makes the title into two dactyls both in terms of prosodic quantity and stress: fancy in/nūbibus. Which is nice, I think; since it seems to me that the workhorse iambic prosodic skeleton of Coleridge's poem includes a kind of spectral inclination towards the dactylic: so that we hesitate between reading

oh, IT is PLEAsant, WITH a HEART at EASE,
just AFTer SUNset, OR by MOONlight SKIES,

and reading

O, it is pleasant, with a heart at ease,
Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies,

and so on. The dactyllic reading is slightly more energetic, a little more forceful; the lullaby rocking of the iambic is more restfully what we're used to. And that's also the tacit theme of Coleridge's sonnet: whether the poet's imaginative apprehension of the beauties of sky and water is perfectly passive, or a magically hidden force of active agency. I'd suggest that 'in nubibus' is there to make us think of Vergil, and of the famous two lines from Aeneid book 5, where, during the funeral games for Anchises, the Sicilian king Acestes (Ἄκέστης! It's almost like an externalised STC, ἐκ ἐστηση ...) fires an arrow into the clouds:

Namque volans liquidis in nubibus arsit harundo,
signavitque viam flammis, tenuisque recessit
consumpta in ventos, caelo ceu saepe refixa
transcurrunt crinemque volantia sidera ducunt. [Aeneid 5: 525-8]

There's your in nubibus, right there in line 525. These lines mean:

And then, soaring into the liquid clouds, his arrow caught fire, tracing a gleaming path of flame, before vanishing into the wind,—as a star will sometimes fall loose from the heavens drawing its fiery tresses behind it.

Aeneas interprets this portent regarding the divine favour bestowed on Acestes. When Walter Scott reviewed Southey's Curse of Kehama for the Quarterly Review in 1811 (a review Coleridge certainly knew) he deployed precisely this quotation:

Mr. Southey resembles Acestes, who shot merely to shew the strength of his bow, and the height to which he could send his arrow.

volans liquidis in nubibus arsit harundo,
signavitque viam flammis.

In this point of view, it is impossible to read the Curse of Kehama without conceiving the highest opinion of the author’s force of imagination and power of expression.

In Coleridge's expansion of this Vergilian tag the arrow fired is the metaphorical one of sight (the viewer with head bent low,/And cheek aslant, like an archer taking aim). It goes up into the air and is transformed into rivers of gold.

Coleridge, 'Verecundia: To William Wordsworth' (?1807-10)

Here's a pendant to my earlier 'EPOCH'al post, once again concerned with a Latin poem Coleridge addressed to William Wordsworth. In the previous example, 'Ad Vilmum Axiologum', STC wrote in Latin because he was adapting a Latin poem by Ariosto, about a girl's sexual infidelity and how the wronged man ought to deal with it. In this case we are dealing, I think, with an original poem by Coleridge, written in Latin not to veil its meaning (since Wordsworth read Latin too, it wouldn't hide anything from him) but rather because it is in part about the peculiarly Roman virtue identified in its first word. Coleridge wrote the poem in his notebook [CN 2:2750] and did not publish it in his lifetime.

Verecundia? imo, tyrannis hoc est!
Quod cuivis adulor, negabis ipse;
Nec non quod sapiam, haud negabis, Ergo
Mores, et Sophiam, sacrasque Musas
Uno nomine (dumque vivis ipse)
Dicturum, Gulielme,—quaeso, cur me,
Et quo Jure tuum “Veto” coercet?
Te vatem, atque Sophum, meumque Regem
Agnovi, usque lubens! At haud Tribunum.

The notebook entry includes a Coleridgean footnote on 'Regem', in line 8, there: 'Rex Meus for the most honored Friend/ Vide Martial V 22 et passim'. He means rex is not there to suggest that Wordsworth is in any sense Coleridge's king or ruler, but after the usage of Martial to imply that he's the best of friends. The Martial epigram specified makes an interesting intertext, actually: in it, the poet complains that, having travelled long and hard to see Paulus, his friend (or, as translators more usually render 'rex', his patron) he is told that Paulus is not at home. The final lines of Martial 5.22 are 'Semper inhumanos habet officiosus amicos:/Rex, nisi dormieris, non potes esse meus'; 'It's always the most attentive client who's most neglected by his friends. Sleep-in longer, or you can't be my rex' (usually this is rendered '... or you can't be my patron'). I suppose the last line means: please sleep in, don't leave your house too early, such that you've gone by the time I turn up. I'm not sure. Anyway: here’s an English version of Coleridge's hendecasyllabics:

'Knowing my place'? Not so! This is tyranny!
You must admit yourself I'm no-one's toady.
Nor do I lack of wisdom, you'll say; and so
By all that's moral, wise, by the sacred Muses
Under one name (as long as you yourself live)
What you said, William,—I ask, why me?
And what force does your "Veto" even have?
As prophet, as wise one and as my Chief Friend
I've gladly known you! But not as my Tribune.

There were two kinds of tribune in Ancient Rome: the military tribune and the tribunus plebis or tribune of the people. The latter was a kind of sacrosanct popular magistrate who could veto the commandments of the Senate and other officers of law if they felt such laws were disadvantageous for the plebs. They also had the power to call a popular meeting known as the concilium plebis that could enact legislation, and otherwise pass down judgement. Translating 'tribunus' as 'judge' as Kathleen Coburn (in her edition of the Notebooks) and J C C Mays (in his edition of the Poems) both do rather misses the point that the main power of the Tribunes of the Plebs was that of veto, which in turn drains the force from Coleridge's reference in line 6.

So: Wordsworth has rebuked Coleridge over some aspect of his behaviour, and threatened to impose some manner of veto upon him. But what kind of veto could Wordsworth, plausibly, have imposed on Coleridge? It's a little hard to imagine. He could not, for instance, stop him from publishing something if he wished to publish, or prevent him from (for example) lecturing in London, writing for the newspapers, living with the Morgans or anything of that kind. No, presumably the veto must have related to something in Wordsworth's power, which is to say: in Wordsworth's house. If the threat was one of banishing Coleridge from Coleorton (let's say), then veto would surely not have been the word used. It's more likely that Wordsworth proposed to veto some mode of Coleridge's interaction with Sara Hutchinson.

What of verecundia? This is a particular Roman virtue, relating to modes of behaviour that are not specifically determined by law or custom; behaviour that is mindful, fitting, tactful, socially conscious, aware of your place and your duties and responsibilities to others. Translating this as ‘deference’ (as J.C.C.Mays does) or ‘modest respect’ (as Kathleen Coburn does) really doesn't get at what's going on in the poem. Robert A. Kaster discusses 'verecundia' at length, beginning with the observation that 'the epitaph of the Republican poet Pacuvius is preserved by the scholar and litterateur Aulus Gellius, who presents it to us as “verecundus and pure in the highest degree and worthy of [the poet’s] superbly discriminating dignity (elegantissima)”. Kaster goes on:

Verecundia animates the art of knowing your proper place in every social transaction and basing your behaviour on your knowledge; by guiding behaviour in this way verecundia establishes or affirms the social bond between you and others, all of whom (ideally) play complimentary roles. Most fully, this means that you will each gauge your standing relative to the others; you will each present yourself in a way that at least will not give offence—for example, by confrontation or importunity—and that preferably will signal your full awareness of the others’ face, the character they wear in the transaction and the respect that that character is due—not obliterate your own face, the character you are wearing and the respect that it is due. This is the script, the sequence of interlocking motives and moves, that someone experiencing verecundia—a verecundus person—enacts; by enacting that script, the verecundus person draws a line for the self to observe, in settings where no such line is drawn by formal or external authority, where he or she must improvise a performance as a well-socialized person. [Robert A. Kaster, ‘Between Respect and Shame: Verecundia and the Art of Social Worry’, in Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome (Oxford University Press 2005), 13-15]

Coleridge may have been thinking of virtue in a Roman sense, or may be remembering a specific discussion with Wordsworth on that topic. But there is also a Christian context. Some Christian writers were suspicious of verecundia, precisely because it locates the individual's moral and social compass in their own tact and judgement, rather than in obedience to external authority and divine commandment. For example, Jesuit theologian Diego de Baeza argues that 'ubi verecundia nimia, potentissima diaboli tyrannis?' Where there is excessive verecundia, is there not the devil’s most potent tyranny? [Diego de Baeza, Commentariorum moralium in evangelican historiam (1644), 394]. I’ve no idea if Coleridge read this (he wasn’t really in the habit of browsing Jesuitical theology); but he was surely aware that Thomas Aquinas defends a proper verecundia as a key Christian virtue: he devotes two whole sections of the Summa Theologica to demonstrating that ‘verecundia est virtus’. Here, a couple of decades after Coleridge wrote his poem, is the Quarterly Review's definition of the word:

Verecundia ... comprises many distinct sensibilities. It implies regard for the opinion of others, the fear of injuring them, bashfulness, emulation, respect for superior power, humility, personal affection: it is, in short, in morals, what faith is in religion—the grapple by which men, during the process of education and instruction, are retained under the moral influence of others, until the love of virtue, for its own sake, has been infused into their mind. ['Tyler on Oaths', Quarterly Review 61 (1834), 394]

It is in morals, what faith is in religion. If this was the ground of Wordsworth's specific rebuke to his friend, no wonder it stung.

There's another context, though, which may be relevant here; and that is the close relation between verecundia and pudicitia, the word for a woman’s proper modesty and sexual chastity. Kate Wilkinson’s recent Women and Modesty in Late Antiquity (Cambridge Univ. Press 2015) discusses this:

After pudicitia, the most common term indicating a woman’s modesty in the late ancient era was verecundia … Verecundia for men is the delicate feeling of restraint which guards one from slighting the reputation of another man while still maintaining one’s own reputation. It is the gatekeeper for social ‘face’ in a competitive and hierarchical setting. Women’s verecundia keeps them out of masculine public spaces like the forum or the courtroom, encourages proper respect for their husband’s superior social status, and protects puditicia. While puditicia often refers to the behaviour protecting sexual purity as well as the physical state of purity, verecundia is that shyness, bashfulness or restraint which maintains … “their face as chaste persons”. [Wilkinson, 16]

So, for example, Pelagius’s treatise on the chastity of the Virgin Mary praises the mother of God specifically for her stupenda verecundia and her pudoris verecundia, her ‘stupendous reserve’ and the ‘bashfulness of her chastity’.

Perhaps this is a poem actually about the oppressive aspect of the public face of sexual chastity. STC is being pressured into a mode of bashful timidity that he deems tyrannical. It could well be that whatever rebuke Wordsworth dished-out, and whatever veto he threatened to impose, it had to do with the pudor of Sara Hutchinson, and the sexual impropriety of Coleridge's behaviour, which in turn Coleridge repudiates in this poem. Wordsworth may be a Vates, and the embodiment of that kind of wisdom best called Sophia, and he may be Coleridge's Chief of Friends, but in sexual matters he has no right to impose strict behavioural standards on STC. He is no Tribunus sexualis.

Coleridge and the 'Ode on the Eucharist'

Here is one of STC's Notebook entries, from June 1810 [Coburn (ed), Notebooks 3.1:3765]:

3765 17.163 Ode on the Eucharist
Great allegorical Reality!—
Substance & Symbol!—
{Necessary Will of God} το εν κ’αγάθων λόγος—στοργὴ at the first contemplation of the λόγος—from the στοργὴ, the τα εν λόγω, and first the divine Humanity—Creation of free will of God—Finiteness—and free will in the finite—the Fall—the mysterious corruption of the Human Will, evidently as a fact compatible with free will because accompanied with remorse/ the process of Redemption by the descent of the divine Humanity—the outward manifestation & life of Jesus the allegorical Reality vouchsafed by God, & properly called revelation/it is manifested by the assumption of a double or [?clouted] Veil—

The Greek means 'the one and the logos of the good—the storgèe at the first contemplation of the logos—from the storgèe, the things of the logos and first the divine Humanity'. στοργὴ/storgèe means 'love, affection; especially of parents and children/(rarely) sexual love'; 'deep love and affection, as of a mother for her child'. 'Good', there, should be 'goods', if that didn't make us think of 'goods and services': αγάθων is the genitive plural of ᾰ̓γᾰθός, so the Greek actually means 'the one and the Logos of the many good things', or '... the Logos of the virtues'. Clear? OK.

Kathleen Coburn thinks the 'Ode on the Eucharist' must be an abortive project which Coleridge himself planned to write ('a work projected by himself'), since 'the description does not apply to The Eucharist or the Holy Sacrament of Our Lord's Supper: A Divine Poem (1751) or The Eucharist (1737)'. I think we need to go back a bit earlier than that; indeed all the way to a 16th-century poem written by Suor (that is, sister) Laurentia Strozzi (1514-1591), a Dominican nun and Latin poet. The poem in question is 'Ode in Eucharistiam', from Strozzi's Hymni (1588)

Strozzi is a fascinating figure: a highly intelligent, well-educated daughter of the influential Strozzi family who entered a convent by choice and wrote some of the best Latin verse of her generation (you can read more about her here). Here's an English version of her Eucharist Ode:

Sky of earth applauds; and so, believers, ye rejoice:
   Born of a supernal father and chaste mother, into Time,
   He sets his all-lasting Passover to save the people.
As the hour of death approached him, eating with his sons:
   He'd perfected the old Law, given to the Patriarchs:
   Now ordains a new one, passes it into his sons’ breasts.
Sweet the Manna given to the world under the figure of wheat,
   Bread of angels now become the true believer's food,
   Changes wine, through the Thunderer’s words, into blood
Offered to the multitude, and JESUS spoke this word,
  This take as my body, and we dearly so receive it:
   Everyone of purer mind may taste, the master pledged it.
Then he handed them the cup, and he said these sacred words,
   In atonement's name my blood is given to the living,
   So that, drinking it, they may renew the Maker’s passion,
So the priest speaks whilst completing purest sacrifice:
   Offering it daily there before the Father's greatness,
   And he calls to guiltless souls to join the holy feast.
Christ commands a pure heart, clean from sinfulness:
   He floods on the innocent mind like a river in full spate,
   Anyone with guilt inside will never bear sweet fruit.
He will feed and shelter virtue, sacred heaven victim he
   Sheds the impious in death, and leads them down to hell
   Lusting to drive themselves to wickedness's furthest realms.
Hail, though gate-of-life food, sweeter milk and honey,
   Christ JESUS, radiant sun, the most powerful of joys,
   Let your worshippers be carried gladful home. Amen.

(Not much of a translation, this; although I have at least tried, very roughly, to capture something of the trochaic form of the Latin). If Coleridge did read this poem, then I wonder if his focus on στοργὴ responds to the way Strozzi describes Christ not as son, but as father, sitting at the last supper with his disciples and motivated by a paternal love:—eating with his sons, instilling love into his sons' breasts. The 'double or [?clouted] Veil' (should that be 'pleated', I wonder?) might connect Strozzi's own adoption of the Dominican veil with the double allegory in his ode: for Christ, here, is both bread, 'angelorum panis unde fit cibus credentium', and the sun, 'Sol refulgens'. And indeed, this double figure is itself doubled, or pleated; since the bread that he is figures divine Manna: 'Manna praebet dulce Mudo, sub figura tritici'. The stuff about 'descent of the divine Humanity' into 'the finite' perhaps reflects Strozzi's description of the incarnation as happening 'in tempore', in Time. And the free will speculation may riff off the doubled-sense, in the last lines of the poem, that Christ both 'leads' (ducit) the wicked to Hell, and they take themselves there on account of their own concupiscence.

Coleridge had a rather, well, seventeenth-century attitude to the eucharist: that is to say, he thought about it a great deal, it mattered to him, as a crucial feature of Christian worship. He took communion as a student at Cambridge in the early 1790s, but then stopped until 1827, late in his life, when he started again. According to a letter written by his daughter after his death 'my Father's views on the Eucharist ... were deep and spiritual, but in perfect harmony & analogy of his view of baptism, and all his other ways of conceiving religious subjects—they were perfectly—I think what Pusey would call rationalistic':

He would subscribe to no form of words supposed to convey a religious truth, on a merely supposed external evidence, such as what is called the tradition of the Church. All doctrines of the Eucharist which connected a spiritual presence with the elements, apart from the soul of the receiver, were separated from his faith by an equally impassable chasm. He sometimes discussed the different forms and phases of this doctrine, as I might turn over pink, yellow or blue garments, with no thought of wearing such but only of considering which will suit others best. Just in this spirit S.T.C. used to defend Transubstantiation, & contend that it was a more convenient form of belief than our Anglo-Catholic theory of the real presence. [quoted Coburn, 3:2 3847]

One thing is clear: that around this time, mid to late 1810, Coleridge was reading and thinking a lot about the Eucharist. His reaction to Strozzi's poem (if that is what he is reacting to) is one example, probably from early June 1810; later in June he wrote two lengthy Notebook entries [3847, 3934] on the subject, and around this time he was reading, or re-reading, the 17th-century Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson's Discourse Against Transubstantiation (1684) [see Notebooks, 3868]. It was also at this time that Coleridge (in Richard Holmes' words) 'began the remarkable group of entries concerning St Theresa of Avila', prompted by his reading of her Life and Works (1671). Holmes thinks he grew 'more and more fascinated by the mixture of spiritual and erotic mysticism in her visions' [Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Visions (1998), 205], visions he read as psychological manifestations rather than divine inspiration, but as eloquent and powerful nonetheless. Holmes astutely singles out Coleridge's version of the way Theresa used 'water metaphors' to describe the four stages of prayer:

Prayer begins as an act of "seeming unassisted poor labouring Will", like water drawn up painfully from a well in a bucket, "by mere force of the arm"; later it is assisted "by the wheel & pulley"; thirdly it becomes easier "like the drawing off streamlets from a River & great Fountain"; and lastly it becomes the effortless pouring down of "copious rains from Heaven." [Holmes, 206]

The connection with the Ancient Mariner is the obvious one ('My lips were wet, my throat was cold/My garments were all dank;/Sure I had drunken in my dreams/And still my body drank'). But Strozzi's poem is also about the way Christ is actual as well as spiritual refreshment to us: how he fills our mind like a full-flowing river ('menteis replet alto fluimine'), how his flesh is sweeter than fruit or Manna, the bread of the angels, his blood wine. Does it stretch matters to see in the opening line of Strozzi's poem an oblique reference to the refreshing rain falling from the sky?—just as the Mariner, and before him, Theresa slaked their thirsts on rainfall? (If not, then what does that first line mean, I wonder?)

The Notebook entries of the second half of 1810 paint the picture of a man craving some kind of heart-food, some refreshment of spirit and mind. And there is a clear enough biographical reason for this: March 1810 was when Sara Hutchinson, abruptly, left the Wordsworths' house to go and live with her brother Tom and a man called John Monkhouse on the two men's farm in Wales. Coleridge, as Holmes put it, 'felt he had been stung to death'; and in the months that followed his despair curdled when 'Asra' didn't write or contact him, and he felt he had been utterly abandoned by her. His own letters record his 'depression of spirits, little less than absolute Despondency', and mourn, not unangrily, Asra's 'cruel neglect & contemptuous silence ever since' [Letters 3:287].

There's clearly a danger in reading everything Coleridgean 1799-1810 through the lens of his hopeless love for Sara H.; but in this case it strikes me as very likely that that's what's going on. Coleridge is craving a particular body, is desperately hungry for it, and the fact that it has moved wholly out of his ken only makes his sense of craving more acute. He generalises his starvation into a larger, spiritual narrative of bread and wine, refreshment and atonement. This, I'd say, is why he discusses στοργὴ, here. His erotic obsession with Asra had always had a strange quasi-incestuous element to it: he often refers to her in writing as his 'sister', and in his lyric of love-longing, 'Recollections of Love', he describes meeting Sara Hutchinson again as a strange mix-up of adult sexual desire and maternal storgèe:

As when a mother doth explore
The rose-mark on her long-lost child,
I met, I loved you, maiden mild!

This in turn opens into a broader discussion of food and drink in Coleridge, the role they played in his life and his imagination. It's hard to put it this way without sounding condescending, but one way desire becomes a physical appetite for consumption is when it shades towards a sort of oral infantilism. But it's not just that: not just, that is, the adult-erotic fantasy of forever feeding at the ever-supplying maternal breast (Strozzi's lacte melle dulcior).  Two years before his death, Coleridge began—though he never finished—a piece of autobiographical prose, the 'Folio Notebook'. Here's Theodore Leinwand useful account:

In what is called the 'Folio Notebook,' Coleridge begins with his childhood, passes on to his father's death, and then to his years at Christ's Hospital school. He remembers that a stranger gave him borrowing privileges at a circulating library in King's Street, Cheapside, and that he 'read thro the whole Catalogue, folios and all. ...' He describes how his 'whole Being was with eyes closed to every object of present sense—to crumple myself up in a sunny Corner, and read, read, read,—finding myself in Rob. Crusoe's Island, finding a Mountain of Plum Cake, and eating out a room for my self, and then eating it into the shapes of Chairs; Tables—Hunger and Fancy—'. [Theodore Leinwand, 'Shakespeare, Coleridge, Intellecturition', Studies in Romanticism, 46:1 (2007), 81]

'What struck me when I first read this,' Leinwand adds, 'was what Kathleen Coburn calls Coleridge's "solitariness," I was brought up short when I found Coburn shrewdly asking us to notice that "the plum-cake room had tables and chairs, in the plural, for sociability".'That is a good point: eating, for Coleridge, even in this Erysichthonic extremity of hungry-devouring-reading, is about making a connection with another, not just about the selfish indulgence of appetite. Coleridge is metaphorically eating his way into the world, sculpting his world through a strange hybrid reading-devouring. And this brings me back, at the end of this very lengthy post, to his thoughts on Strozzi's Ode on the Eucharist'. The doubled, or clouted, metaphor at work here is not only that of divine eating, and not only the frisson of engaging with the inspired writing of a beautiful woman (as with Saint Theresa). It is also about reading. We read this poem about eating; and reading is a process Coleridge considers an eating. The argumentum in circulo he (boldly, I think) valorises in the Biographia Literaria as the truth of individual engagement in faith finds its actualisation in this conceptual gyre: not that the bread turns magically into the body of Christ, one thing linearly becoming another thing, but rather that reading the divine word, or logos, and eating his sustaining food, and the craving the erotic intimacy of another body, are all revealed as versions of one another, reverting back upon one another, and circling round as strophe and antistrophe.

'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.