The Pains of Sleep (1803)

Written in 1803, when what were probably withdrawal symptoms from his opium addiction caused Coleridge such suffering that (he wrote to his friend Poole) 'my repeated Night-yells had made me a Nuisance in my own home.'

Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,
In humble trust mine eye-lids close,
With reverential resignation
No wish conceived, no thought exprest,
Only a sense of supplication;
A sense o'er all my soul imprest
That I am weak, yet not unblest,
Since in me, round me, every where
Eternal strength and Wisdom are.

But yester-night I prayed aloud
In anguish and in agony,
Up-starting from the fiendish crowd
Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:
A lurid light, a trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,
And whom I scorned, those only strong!
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
Still baffled, and yet burning still!
Desire with loathing strangely mixed
On wild or hateful objects fixed.
Fantastic passions! maddening brawl!
And shame and terror over all!
Deeds to be hid which were not hid,
Which all confused I could not know
Whether I suffered, or I did:
For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe,
My own or others still the same
Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame.

So two nights passed: the night's dismay
Saddened and stunned the coming day.
Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me
Distemper's worst calamity.
The third night, when my own loud scream
Had waked me from the fiendish dream,
O'ercome with sufferings strange and wild,
I wept as I had been a child;
And having thus by tears subdued
My anguish to a milder mood,
Such punishments, I said, were due
To natures deepliest stained with sin,—
For aye entempesting anew
The unfathomable hell within,
The horror of their deeds to view,
To know and loathe, yet wish and do!
Such griefs with such men well agree,
But wherefore, wherefore fall on me?
To be loved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed.

There's a lot to say about this, but for now I'm only going to note one small thing: the title. This ('doloribus somnum') is a piece of medical terminology, and speaks to a particular medical diagnosis. Here is Eduard Sandifort (1742-1814), the Dutchman who became one of the most famous physicians of the 18th-century, reporting in 1769 on a man aged 30 (coincidentally the same age that Coleridge was when he wrote his poem):



The key phrase is in the middle: 'Doloribus somnum excutientibus misere transegit noctem': he passed the night sadly, suffering paralysing pains of sleep. (You can see from that passage that, on day 5, the doctor managed to clear his costive bowels with an enema, but that on day 6 'extremum effudit spiritum', he poured out his final breath. Poor chap.)

The point here is that Coleridge is stressing the physicality of his situation: it's not a way of referring to 'bad dreams': it is very much a medical referent to somatic suffering enduring whilst sleeping.

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.