How many of Coleridge's Latin poems are actually Coleridge's?

No-one is going to pretend that Coleridge is a great, or even an especially noteworthy neo-Latin poet. Landor aside (and Landor was sui generis) the validity of Neo-Latin verse had more-or-less died by the time of Romanticism. Indeed, the last Neo-Latin poet of truly international reputation and greatness was probably Casimir, in the seventeenth-century (the 'Polish Horace'); even such accomplished Latinist contemporaries of his as Cowley and Milton wrote primarily in their vernacular. Still, Coleridge read a lot of Latin, and sometimes wrote in Latin too. It's just that he wasn't always original when he wrote in Latin.

From time to time on this blog I've had reason to look at some of Coleridge's Latin verse. As often as not, as with his 'Ad Vilmum Axiologum' (1807) (which turns out to be mostly re-fried Ariosto), 1814's 'National Independence' or 'Magna Dabit (1812), I find that Latin poems attributed to Coleridge in the standard edition of his verse are not by him at all. Many of these, I have to say, are instances where poems that were never published in STC's day, and never intended to publication, are pulled out of his Notebooks; so it's hard to blame Coleridge himself for this. In many cases he clearly copied out some Latin that took his fancy, didn't attribute it, and energetic editors have assumed he composed it.

Still, I thought I'd have a look to see how many of the Latin poems attributed to Coleridge by J C C Mays in the Princeton Poetical Works are actually his. In what follows, Latin poetry attributed to STC but not actually by him is marked with an asterisk. [I am not counting the poem Mays numbers as 170, 'De Papa: Vaticinium Haud Valde Obscurum, Nee Incredibile' (1798), which was published anonymously in the Morning Post without a name, not collected or even mentioned anywhere by Coleridge. Mays sees 'reasonable grounds' for attributing it to STC, but I don't agree, since (a) though other neo-Latin writers, Landor not least, often did write mock epitaphs like this, Coleridge doesn't do it anywhere else; and (b) the Latin is very rough and unmetrical. But there's no way of proving Mays, or I, wrong or right on that].

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23. 'Honos Alit Artes'. A Latin ode in four quatrains, originally part of a letter sent to STC's brother George. It begins:

Cernis, volucris, quae regit alites
Inane vastum scandit ut altior,
Scanditque fixis viva Solis
Lumina suspiciens ocellis?

[You see that bird, monarch of winged creatures,
into the vast void climbing higher
and climbing, seeing the living sun's
light with unmoving little eyes?]

This poem is original to Coleridge

27. 'Ardua Prima Via Est'. This poem, which takes a famous Ovidian tag as title and extrapolates from it, is original to Coleridge. Neither the Latin nor the metre are very good, actually.

50. 'Latin Lines on Ottery's Inhabitants' (1793). Another poem included in a letter to George Coleridge, about the departure of their brother Edward Coleridge from the family home: 'Ast Hunc Otteriae Juvenes flerunt abeuntem', 'the flower of Ottery manhood mourned his departure'. Original to Coleridge.

*54. 'Latin Verses, Sent to George Coleridge'. Four stanzas beginning:

Ite mordaces, procul ite, Curae!
Me vocat notis Helicon viretis,
Me sacrum lauri nemus, et canorum
Phocidos antrum.

[Away from me, go far away, gnawing Care!
I hear the call of Helicon's familiar meadows
The call of the sacred laurel grove, and the white
cave of Phocis!]

This is not by Coleridge; it's from a poem by Casimir (1595-1640):

It's hard to say, actually, whether Casimir was so famous (Coleridge quite often translated him, as in 67 'Song: Imitated from Casimir' and 68 'To a Friend', also based on Casimir; and he also quotes him in the last chapter of the Biographia) to mean that George would be expected to recognise this poem, or whether this is an example of Coleridge trying to pass somebody else's work as his own. Since the context, in the letter, is him thinking about entering a poem for the Cambridge Browne medal, I'm suspicious it might be the latter.

71. 'Latin Lines on Mary Evans'. Original to Coleridge:

Vivit, sed mihi non vivit—nova forte marita,
Ah dolor! alterius carâ, a cervice pependit.
Vos, malefida valete accensæ insomnia mentis,
Littora amata valete! Vale ah formosa Maria!

[She lives but she does not live for me—it seems she is newly wed,
Ah sorrow! She hangs upon the beloved neck of somebody else.
Farewell to you, deceiving dreams of a fevered mind,
Beloved shores, farewell! Farewell, ah, lovely Mary!]

*323: 'Latin Lines to William Sotheby' (Sept 1802). These are from Italian poet Girolamo Fracastoro (c. 1476–1478–1553)'s 'Hiems, ad eundem'. I discuss them here.

*328. 'Latin Lines on a Former Friendship' (Nov 1802). Actually from the Libri Epistolarum (1735) by Manuel Martí (1663–1737), and I discuss it here.

374. 'Latin Lines to William Wordsworth as Judge' (1806-10). These 9 lines are original to Coleridge. I talk about them here.

*430. 'Ad Vilmum Axiologum' (1807). Most of this poem is from Ariosto's 'Ad Petrum Bembum' [Carmina, 7] I discuss it at length here.

435. 'Latin Lines to Accompany a Personal Emblem' (1808). Six lines: 'Eheu! dum me mea Psyche,/Dulce decus veris aprici,/Pulchra Comes et Zephyrorum,/Dum Psyche me fugit eheu!/Pallidulum me tua taeda/Quid juvat, o inamata Juno!' Alas when my Psyche (soul/butterfly) has (gone) from me/Sweet delight of sunny Spring/Lovely partner of the Zephyrs/When Psyche has abandoned me alas!/Your little torch cannot delight pale me, unloved Juno!' The emblem in question is a butterfly. This poem is original to Coleridge.

436. 'Latin Lines to Accompany a Second Emblem' (1808). Two lines: 'Sine sole, absque Leda/Quid juvat nos junonia Taeda?' 'Without sun, lacking Leda/What joy in Juno's pine-torch?' The torch represents marriage. Original to Coleridge.

440. 'Latin Elegaics on Guy Fawkes'. Two lines of deliberately bad Latin, a joke: supposedly 'a schoolboy construing Guy Vulpes'. Original to Coleridge.

489. 'Latin Lines Perhaps Connected with John Morgan'. Four sexually-explicit lines:

Infelix, ah plusquam infelicissimus Ille,
Semivir in thalamum qui duxit Sesqui-puellam,
Mutumque ossitiens, tantique voraginem hiatüs
Vix rigidi tubuli lacrymoso röre lacessit!

'Unlucky, ah more than unlucky he,/that Half-man who takes to his bed a woman half-as-much again,/And into her silent, thirsty, wide-open cavern/Weeps a little dew from his tiny, rigid tube.' As far as I can see this composition is original to Coleridge.

*493. 'Latin Distich on Giving and Receiving'. This is actually the publisher's or editor's dedication to a man called Faustus Petro Coardo Mecoenatusa, in a late 15th-century edition of Saint Ambrose's Praeit Epistola Nuncupatoria; variously reprinted. I discuss this couplet here.

*508. 'National Independence: A Latin Fragment'. This poem (discussed at length here) is mostly Claudian, with a few other bits and pieces Frankenstein's-monstered into the middle.

570. 'A Practical Problem Concerning Flies'. A four line squib:

Sit alba, sit fusca
(Ni res est absurda)
Quod fuit Merda in Muscă
Jacet Merda in Merdà

'Whether white or black-dye/(Unless it's absurd)/What was shit in the fly/Lies a turd in-turd'. The Notebook entry where this was drafted [CN 4:4710] makes the 'interred' joke plainer: the practical problem is one 'suggested by the Grave Problem', and whether a breed of flies might be raised capable of 'performing burial-service'. This is Coleridge's own composition.

*587. 'Latin Couplet'. As Mays notes, this couplet is based closely on a line from John Swan's Speculum Mundi (1670).

*625. 'Tò τού EΣTHΣE τού έπιθανούς Epitaphium testamentarium αύτóγραφον' (1826) [The at-death's-door "Testimentary Epitaph" of STC, written with his own hand]. This is a couplet:

Quae linquam nihil, aut nihili, aut vix sunt mea—sordes
Do MORTI;—reddo caetera, Christe! tibi

['That which is left behind is nothing, or nothingness, or barely even my own—the corruption/I give to DEATH: I return the rest, Christ!, to you.']. Despite STC calling this an autographon, it actually draws heavily on John Wigand's 1587 epitaph, which was often reprinted. Here, for instance, it is, in the Scots Magazine or Edinburgh Literary Review [71 (1809), 812]:

685. 'Specimen of Pure Latinity: Ex Tempore'. Two versions of the same four lines of (deliberately, and comically) bad Latin. Original to Coleridge.

*701. 'Splendida Bilis'. Another short comic piece: various Latin terms for various illness, glossed with punning Englishness: 'mucus' - 'miew! curse!' and so on. One would hardly call this an original composition (it's not metrical, for instance).

702. 'Latin Address to Christopher Morgan'. Nothing much is known of this Morgan; although he appears to have been a kind of pimp and (as we would now say) drug dealer to George IV. These four lines (the fourth unfinished) are original to Coleridge.

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So: that's twenty-one Latin poems collected by Mays (not counting 170) as by Coleridge, of which nine are not by Coleridge. A strike rate of a little over half.

'A Practical Problem Concerning Flies' (1820)

So as you can see from the last few posts, I have been working, in a more or less desultory way, through those Latin poems attributed to Coleridge in J C C Mays' Poetical Works, to see which were actually by him. But I think the best thing to do with this is not drip-feed it out in an interminable series of dull individual posts, but rather to bundle it all into one super-long bulletin, and so dispose of it. Meanwhile, I thought I'd pause over one Latin poem that Coleridge definitely did write himself, a four line squib introduced in the relevant Notebook entry [CN 4:4710] as 'A Grave Problem', but printed by Mays [as poem 570: 1.2:991] under the title given at the top of this post. Coleridge wonders 'whether the advantage of the transmutation of waste matter into flies is equaled by the excretions and extrusions of those same flies'. Then there's the poem:

Sit alba, sit fusca
(Ni res est absurda)
Quod fuit Merda in Muscă
Jacet Merda in Merdà

Mays translates as 'Be it white or be it black/(Unless it's absurd)/What was dung on the fly/Lies as turd on turd.' 'Fuscus' ‎('dark, swarthy, dusky') is liable to make us think of the dark-coloured academic dress code known as 'subfusc', which in turn makes me wonder if we could go with:

Whether white or black-tie
(Howsoever absurd)
What was shit in the fly
Lies as turd in-turd

The Notebook entry makes the 'interred' joke plainer: the practical problem is one 'suggested by the Grave Problem', whether a breed of flies might be raised capable of 'performing burial-service'. But maybe 'black-tie' is too much of a stretch. And maybe it's a shame to lose sight of the fact that Coleridge uses the same word, 'merda', three times in the last two lines. At least the following would maintain the internal rhyme:

Whether white or dark dye
(Howsoever absurd)
What was merde in the fly
Lies as turd in-turd

Or maybe:

Whether white or dark dye
(Howsoever absurd)
What was merde in the fly
Lies as merde im-mured

Tricky to bring it off, actually.

'Latin Lines on a Former Friendship' (Nov 1802)

I appreciate these sorts of posts are pretty dull; but I've got a few to log, here, for my own benefit (if not for anyone else's). So: Mays includes this poem as number 328; but, once again, it's not a Coleridge composition. It is from the Libri Epistolarum (1735) of Manuel Martí (1663–1737), Spanish archeologist, humanist, poet and Hellenist.

This reveals the name that Coleridge omitted from the beginning of that first line: 'Mignana' (an Italian surname, though I haven't been able to unearth the identity of the original person here). The Latin Coleridge quotes means: '[Mignana], my one-time steadfast comrade/Our delight, charming, pleasant/Whose silent absence, for all these sad years,/I have endured on the unwritten page/If a tiny spark of the old love still endures/still living amongst these ashes/Then I am not entirely dead myself!' The poem is from this collection:



And this is what Marti looked like:

'Latin Lines to William Sotheby' (Sept 1802)

J C C Mays prints this poem as no. 323, and notes that it comes from 'a letter to Sotheby dated 28th Sept 1802', adding: 'C has just imagined or remembered himself walking with the Sothebys in summer ... he goes on to speak in the poem of a meeting Sotheby's fireside':

Frigidus at sylvis Aquilo si increverit, aut si
Hyberni pluviis dependent nubibus Imbres
Nos habeat domus, et multo Lar luceat igne.
Ante focum mihi parvus erit, qui ludat, Iulus,
Blanditias ferat, et nondum constantia verba:
Ipse legam magni tecum monumenta Platonis!

[If the chill north wind blows the woodlands more strongly, or if
wintry showers hang down from the rainy clouds
we'll remain indoors, and let the great fire burn in our hearth.
And before the fire my little one will play, Iulus,
And give us caresses and not-yet fully formed words:
Whilst you and I read together the remains of the great Plato!]

Very nice, but not Coleridge. It's from a short poem by the sixteenth-century Italian poet Girolamo Fracastoro (Latin: Hieronymus Fracastorius; 1476–1553), called 'Hiems, ad eundem' ('Winter, to the same', that is, addressed to the same person as the previous poem, 'Joannus Baptista Turrianus Veronensus'):

As you can see, Coleridge has picked six from the original twelve lines of this poem, and made one change: Fracastoro's original has him snuggling up to read 'Maronis', which is to say: Vergil (indeed, Fracastoro's opening makes the literary pedigree explicit: 'frigidus et silvis aquilo' is quoted from Vergil, specifically from Georgics 2:403: 'frigidus et silvis aquilo decussit honorem', 'the chill north wind shook the woodland's coronal'). Coleridge changes it to Plato, presumably because he and Sotheby had been working their way through the Greek philosopher together.

Fracastoro was a reasonably famous Renaissance Latin poet. It was his 1539 pastoral poem Syphilis sive morbus gallicus ("Syphilis or The French Disease"), about a shepherd boy named Syphilus punished by Sun-god with a ghastly sickness, that gave us the name 'Syphilis' for the notorious sexually transmitted disease. The question is: would we say that Fracastoro is well enough known, especially in his minor works, to mean that Coleridge could reasonably expect Sotheby to recognise these lines? I'm going to say no, and suggest that STC is being naughty here: Sotheby would surely assume that Coleridge himself had written this verse (as Mays, much later, also did). Coleridge certainly does nothing in his letter to disabuse either man of this assumption. And with that in mind, I'm going to finish with the story of Fracastoro's ball:

A marble portrait statue of Girolamo Fracastoro by the Carrarese sculptor Danese Cattaneo (completed 1559) stands on a beautiful arch in the central Piazza dei Signori of Verona, near the monument to Dante Alighieri. On its base is the inscription: "HIER FRACASTORIO \ PAULLI PHILIPPI F \ EX PUBLICA AUCTORITATE \ DICATA \ AN SAL MDLIX". According to a popular legend the stone ball Fracastoro holds in his right hand, symbolizing the world, will fall on the first honorable person to walk under the arch. Over the centuries many people have passed every day under the arch but the ball remains in place.

Here's the statue:

Coleridge could walk under that, no worries.

'To Delia' (Oct-Nov 1799?)

So, there has been a hiatus, when other duties took me away from this blog; but now I return to Coleridge, at least for a while. Unfortunately this post, and the next few, will be concerned with some pretty dry matters of attribution; but in a little while I hope to get back into more substantial blogging here.

Not today though: today I'm looking at 'To Delia', included by J.C.C Mays in his edition of Coleridge's Poetical Works as poem 251 (2:602-3). As you can see at the head of this post, there, Mays is far from certain about the attribution: 'the identification of the hand is uncertain' and so on. Nor is it a very good poem.

Mays was right to be cautious, and wrong to include it in his edition. It's not by Coleridge; it's by 'Peter Pindar', which is to say, by John Wolcot (1738-1819), and can be found in his Collected Poems. The only wrinkle is that Wolcot published it as 'To Cynthia' rather than 'To Delia', although these sorts of poetic stylised lady-monikers are fairly interchangeable. Here it is in an 1802 edition:

Romanticism Blog

I'm teaching an 'Advanced Romanticisms' course this term, and have set up a course blog. I link to it here because it occasionally includes Coleridgeana, alongside various posts culled from various places, mostly by me but sometimes by course members, on general Romantic topics.

Arguing the Suicide (1828)

Drafted 1811, first published in 1828 (that's a screenshot of the first edition), this strange little poem is not often discussed. The first four lines, we presume, are spoken by an individual contemplating suicide. He says: I didn't ask to be born. He says: if life is a question, then it can be answered in more than one way. Perhaps the answer to life is: we should live on. But perhaps the answer is: we should die. To this position Nature herself responds. Life, she says, was given to you, and suicide amounts to a refusal of this gift, an attempt to return the donation to the donor. Accordingly the giver is entitled to say: look here, this gift is not in so pristine a state as it was first proffered. The suicidal individual's life is 'worse for wear'. What used to be innocence, hope, health, genius and 'an ample scope' has become 'guilt, lethargy, despair'. Nature instructs the potential suicide to draw up an inventory comparing 'what you ARE' and 'what you WERE', to see how little he has made of his life, how he has wasted his potential. When the nameless individual has done this, Nature seems sure he will no longer have the nerve to contemplate suicide.

Now, this is very odd. One thing is clear: an immiserating sense of how far things have gone wrong in one's life, from promising beginnings to present-day guilt, lethargy and despair, is liable to provoke rather than to allay suicidal impulses. This makes 'The Suicide's Argument' incompetent to its supposed task of dissuading self-murder. The questioner makes two points: one, I didn't ask to be born; and two, if life is a question, then it can be 'answered' in more than one way. Nature's reply tacitly concedes both points: you were given life as a gift, you didn't ask for it; and dying is an option you have. I suppose the 'die if you dare!' with which the poem ends is a rebuke designed to shame the suicide out of his actions. Or perhaps it is more of a threat: do it, and see what comes next. But the most striking, and strange, thing about Nature's answer is its implication that suicide would be fine if the suicide were as innocent, hopeful and healthy as he had been at birth. Then the gift could be returned in the same state it had been handed out, the inventory drawn-up and everything satisfactorily squared off.

Now presumably this is not the logic Coleridge thought he was expressing. Perhaps he thought he was putting together a kind of common-sense 'pull yourself together!' rebuke to the self-indulgence of suicidal depression. But I'd be surprised if he were as foolish as that. Depression, especially depression of the sort of intensity that leads to active parasuicidal and suicidal ideation, is indeed self-indulgent, in a manner both pathological (which is to say, in a way that is not the sufferer's 'fault') and tragic; but 'pull yourself together!' is absolutely not an effective strategy for addressing it. The strongest argument against suicide is the terrible effect it has on loved-ones and people left behind, what Mark Twain eloquently called 'the awful famine in their hearts'; and anything liable to encourage suicidal people to think 'oh I'm so terrible they'd be better off without me' is liable to be catastrophically counter-productive.

Another way of putting thus would be to describe Coleridge's 'Suicide's Argument' as a poem written from within the logic of suicidal depression, rather than a poem capable of stepping up to any objective kind of pou sto from which to critique that logic. And this in turns suggests that it functions more as an argument in favour of than an argument against taking your own life. Just taking the poem on a formal level: look at the way its first word rhymes with its last, both of which are then rhymed with 'despair', in a barren closed-circle sort of way. The way it starts with birth in line one, and ends with death (die, die, dare) in line ten. The way the word 'no', its cognates ('not'), reversals ('on', 'questi-on') and rhyme words ('so') chime through the first four lines:

Ere the birth of my life, if I wished it or no
No question was asked me—it could not be so!
If the life was the question, a thing sent to try
And to live on be YES; what can NO be? to die.

No, no, no, no. The slightly tangled syntax and the overall feel of repetitive reiteration here embody something of the psychologically corrosive monotony of depression. It's all monosyllables, too, which makes for an awkwardly clip-clop feel, with the one exception of the twice-repeated 'question', a disyllable lifted from Hamlet's famous suicide soliloquy. The final seven lines wrongfoot us prosodically: I keep tripping up over how we're supposed to scan some of these lines:

NATURE'S ANSWER
Is't returned, as 'twas sent? Is't no worse for the wear?
Think first, what you ARE! Call to mind what you WERE!
I gave you innocence, I gave you hope,
Gave health, and genius, and an ample scope,
Return you me guilt, lethargy, despair?
Make out the invent'ry; inspect, compare!
Then die—if die you dare!

'Gave health, and genius, and an ample scope' seems to throw an awkwardly unwanted stress on the 'an' in 'an ample scope', and 'Return you me guilt, lethargy, despair?' stalls on the unidiomatic second-syllable stress in laTHARgy, before running out of steam by the line's end: decasyllabic, but halting to its final point, as if drained of the energy in the more anapestic and twelve-syllabled 'Is't returned, as 'twas sent? Is't no worse for the wear?' Maybe that's the point: that the verse is enacting the psychologically crippled awkwardness of the state it describes. But that oughtn't to be Nature's voice. Nature, here, presumably stands for something more robust and dependable. No?

I think there is a way to make this poem seem less counter-intuitive and tangled, and that way is to read it as a specific reaction to a specific text. The text in question is by Swedish-German philosopher Johan Robeck, and is called Exercitatio philosophica de eulogo exagoge sive morte voluntaria (1736).

A book with a Graeco-Latin title: ἐξαγωγη (or ἐξαγωγέ) refers to 'a leading out of soldiers', and by extension means 'a going out, the end of life': so that's 'A Eulogy for Dying, or On Suicide'. There are two names on that title-page, and there's a particular reason for that. The actual author, Johan Robeck, was a Jesuit who was moved to write a defence of suicide. Robeck's argument is that life is a gift, given to us by God. He insists that once a gift is given, it stops being the property of the donor and becomes the property of the receiver; and that this being so, the receiver can do what he wants with the gift, including, if he so chooses, destroying it. Therefore, suicide is legitimate. But instead of publishing this book, Robeck left it on his desk, walked out and drowned himself in the river Weser in 1735. It was Robeck's friend and fellow-Jesuit, Nicolaus Funccius, who saw the book through publication, and in doing so he added a lengthy commentary to the piece that set out to refute Robeck's arguments step by step.

It makes for an interesting read. Here's a representative page, in which Robeck is developing his core argument, and Funccius is footnoteishly attempting to refute it.

Here Robeck is attempting to overturn the argument made by Josephus that receiving a gift, a donum, places an obligation upon the recipient: Euertimus argumentum beneficiarium sive quod ex beneficiis extorquetur, says Robeck. Hic vero Iosephus ita nugatur: Deum vero non indigne ferre arbitramini, cum donum eius homo despiciar. Аst vero donum non despicit, qui illi renunciar, dum sibi est inutile, vel perniciosum quoque. Which is to say, Josephus is wrong: giving someone a gift does not entitle the donor to extort ('extorquetur') the beneficiary once the giving is over with. If man decides to set God's gift of life itself at naught ('despiciar'), God Himself will not be angry ('indigne'). Indeed, renouncing a gift is not the same thing as treating that gift as despicable, since only the recipient is in a position to judge whether the gift has proved a useless or even perhaps a dangerous thing. But there, in the footnotes, is Funccius, trying his best to contradict the main argument. When you think of all the good things God has given us, he says in footnote zp—to destroy that gift is to be guilty of ingratitude, at the very least. A gift from God is not the same as a gift from a regular person.

So it goes, through the hundreds of pages, one man arguing in favour of the suicide he had, evidently, already decided to perform; the other haranguing his now-dead friend, urging him not to do what he had already done. Very sad, really. But here, I think, also is the germ of Coleridge's little poem. I think he wrote 'The Suicide's Argument' because he'd been reading Robeck, or been reading about him. After all, Robeck's book was widely discussed through the later 18th-century. Voltaire even makes fun of its thesis in Candide (1759), where we are told that 'only eight people have ever voluntarily put an end to their miserable lives', those eight being 'three negroes, four Englishmen, and a German professor called Robeck.'

Coleridge has been pondering the logic of suicide not from the point of view of the actual psychopathology of depression (however much personal experience he had of that), but from a more theological perspective, in the light of the metaphysics of the gift. And when we read the poem in this light it makes more sense. STC suggests a two-part critique to the Robeckian thesis. We could summarise: that whether or not receiving a gift imposes any moral obligations on the beneficiary, a gift such as life cannot be destroyed. That's not in the nature of the gift. Rather it is returned to its donor, who is also its creator. And in the light of that, there is a delinquency in returning a gift in a markedly worse state that you received it. I don't know how convincing I find this reasoning, but it makes more sense of the poem, I think, than the earlier reading I suggested.