Luther's Guitar: 'The Eolian Harp' (1796)

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Later augmented and reissued under the title by which it is best known, Coleridge published the first version of this in Poems on Various Subjects (1796), as 'Effusion XXXV Composed August 20th 1795, at Clevedon, Somersetshire'. That date pegs the writing to just before Coleridge's marriage to Sara Fricker (on October 4th that year), which in turn positions it as a courtship rather than a honeymoon poem. This in turn connects with the sense I've always had that there's something just off about it, as a love poem. Coleridge himself didn't think so. He often spoke of it as his most accomplished piece, the poem with which he was most pleased (when he wrote to John Thelwall in December 1796 he called it ‘my favourite of my poems’ [Collected Letters, 1:295]). Still: for a poem that is built around the conceit of linking the embrace of two young lovers to a breeze shaking music out of an eolian harp, it is as stiffly chaste and unerotic as anything Coleridge wrote. We probably don't want to be too dirty-minded in the way we read this symbol; although, we do have to concede that it is a poem about a beguiling aperture into which Coleridge is keen to insert his probing imagination and which he specifically links with his wife-to-be. Not that the poem suggests Coleridge is going to get lucky with his Sara any time soon. That's evident, really, from the get-go, and the coy artificiality of the opening lines:

My pensive Sara! thy soft cheek reclined
Thus on mine arm, most soothing sweet it is
To sit beside our cot, our cot o'ergrown
With white-flower'd Jasmin, and the broad-leav'd Myrtle,
(Meet emblems they of Innocence and Love!)
And watch the clouds, that late were rich with light,
Slow saddening round, and mark the star of eve
Serenely brilliant (such should Wisdom be)
Shine opposite!  [1-9]

This is all sibilant 's's and clotting 'c's. If the former are there to onomatopoeize the soft breeze, then I have to say I think they evoke less a pleasant shushing and more a goosey hissing, which in turn connects with the scolding tone with which Sara's voice ends the poem. And the introduction of the harp itself leads Coleridge into a territory which (to do him justice) he very rarely entered as a writer: outright tweeness.

          And now, its strings
Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes
Over delicious surges sink and rise,
Such a soft floating witchery of sound
As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve
Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land,
Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers,
Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,
Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untamed wing! [17-25]

I think the ghastly 'cootchie-coo' quality of this would clang less catastrophically if it weren't set-up with pretentious latinisms like 'sequacious'. Still, I don't mean to sneer; baby names and fairy gooey-ness of course are part of courtship for many, and it would be ill-mannered to mock all that (even that tough-guy Paul Weller really likes it when his lover speaks like a child). Nonetheless, something happens to the poem—it lifts off the ground and really flies—when it leaves this courtship specificity behind for the 'one life' passage. You can feel it first of all in the prosody: the slightly squeeze-box regularity of the iambs up to this point get a kinetic flourish of deftly clustering unstressed syllables:

O the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where—
Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so filled;
Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air
Is Music slumbering on her instrument. [26-33]

It's not a coincidence that this passage isn't in the 'Effusion XXXV' first version of this poem; Coleridge added it much later for the 1817 'Eolian Harp' version, and I think you can tell. It stands out from the rest of the poem in terms of depth of expression and command of versification. In the original, though, we go straight to:

And thus, my love! as on the midway slope
Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon,
Whilst through my half-closed eye-lids I behold
The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main,
And tranquil muse upon tranquillity;
Full many a thought uncalled and undetained,
And many idle flitting phantasies,
Traverse my indolent and passive brain,
As wild and various as the random gales
That swell and flutter on this subject lute! [34-43]

We get ahead of ourselves, I suppose, if we argue this introduces a physical correlative to the emotional and erotic estrangement growing between the lovers. Although we do all know how Samuel and Sara's marriage turned out. They were not well-matched, and did not make one another happy, and much of that presumably had to do with their sexual incompatibility. The impression Coleridge gives in his notebooks where his wife is concerned is one of sexual frigidity (of course, we're only getting his side of the picture): in one Notebook entry he laments that when the two of them get naked together 'all [is] as cold & calm as a deep Frost' adding that she 'is uncommonly cold in her feelings of animal Love' [Notebooks 1:979]. As 'The Eolian Harp' is being written this is all yet to transpire, of course; but the poem more or less knows it anyway. Poetry and prophesy are connected terms in Coleridge's aesthetic, after all. From resting her head on his arm, Sara is now on the other side of the valley from Coleridge, and he's lying on the hillside entertaining 'flitting phantasies'. Like what? Well (the poem says) like this:

And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all? [44-48]

We might think this inoffensive-enough as speculation goes. But something about it really annoys Sara Fricker, in one of those sudden manifestations of anger that (Freud might say) are indices of some latent passion unconnected with the ostensible, manifest provocation.

But thy more serious eye a mild reproof
Darts, O belovéd woman! nor such thoughts
Dim and unhallowed dost thou not reject,
And biddest me walk humbly with my God.
Meek Daughter in the family of Christ!
Well hast thou said and holily dispraised
These shapings of the unregenerate mind;
Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break
On vain Philosophy's aye-babbling spring.
For never guiltless may I speak of him,
The Incomprehensible ! save when with awe
I praise him, and with Faith that inly feels;
Who with his saving mercies healéd me,
A sinful and most miserable man,
Wildered and dark, and gave me to possess
Peace, and this cot, and thee, heart-honour'd Maid! [49-64]

The swerve at the very end, in a short line-and-a-half, from misery to the placid happiness of the poem's opening, has never convinced me. To recap: the speaker of this poem has gone in forty-five lines from intimacy and happiness with the woman he is about to marry, via an interlude lying by himself on a hillside, to a character tormented by a self-doubt so intense ('unregenerate', 'never guiltless', 'a sinful and most miserable man/Wildered and dark') as to amount to self-loathing. This latter state has been provoked, the logic of the poem seems to say, by a specific rebuke from his beloved. This strikes me as located upon the very antipodes of the sort of psychologically and spiritually healthy and reciprocal partnership of equals that provides the bedrock for a long and happy marriage. The progression goes something like this:

HE: I'm so happy that we're getting married, darling!
SHE: So you should be! Lucky to have me, big slobbery daydreamer that you are. And you harbour all manner of pantheist degenerate ideas where God is concerned, too! You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
HE: Oh! You're surely right, my darling, I'm ... I'm [bursting into tears] I'm a miserable slob and doubtless a heretic too and you deserve so much better, so very much better, which [looking up hopefully] only makes me all the more grateful that you've agreed to marry me.

One word that all that: no. If there's anything less psychologically healthy than a relationship that starts (starts, mind you!) with one party so cross and controlling, it's one in which the other party makes a public show of obeisance to their partner's anger whilst actually, passive-aggressively, flouting them. Because to take seriously Sara's 'well-said' reproof and holy dispraise of these shapings of the unregenerate mind would be to stuff said shapings in a drawer somewhere: not to publish them for the world to see. The gap between Sara's sense—specifically recorded in the poem!—that all this stuff is reprehensible, ungodly bubbles from vain Philosophy’s aye-babbling spring that ought to be suppressed, and Coleridge's sense (recorded in his letters and marginalia) that 'this I think is [is] the most perfect Poem I ever wrote', is a wide one.

To return to the point I made at the beginning of this post, one way of framing that gap would be to see the poem as articulating clash between erotic and religious devotion. The poem starts, fairly unambiguously, by stating the former; it ends up prioritizing the latter. To those religious believers who insist that there is no necessary contradiction between sexual love for one's spouse and spiritual love of God I would say: I believe you! This poem, however, doesn't.

Maybe my characterising of the Eolian harp as a kind of aperture, into which Coleridge yearns to insert his shaping plastic imagination, but which his wife-to-be firmly closes off, strikes you as too crudely Freudian-symbolic. And maybe it is. By way of respecting such reservations I shall hold off from pointing to the various scatological references with which the poem is supplied, from the masculine ejaculatory 'bubbles' of Coleridge's 'effusion' (the Latin here is scatō or scateō, 'to bubble up', 'to gush out or spring forth', and one of Latin's many words for male orgasm), to the various indications of female organs of generation in the poem, including the thrice-invoked 'cot' (a variant of 'cut' or 'cunt'), the several references to 'Venus' (in lines 4 and 7 for instance) which word is itself a euphemism for this part of the body—cf 'venereal'—to the fact that the Ancient Greek for vagina is itself a 'sara' word: σάραβος. Instead of adverting to any of that, I will only note that, in Greek mythology, Aeolus is famous for being fantastically randy and having sired more children than all the other gods put together (in the Aeneid, Juno wins him over and gets him to release his winds and batter Aeneas' fleet by offering him one of her nymphs, Deiopea, described in the poem as praestanti corpore, which is to say, having a really sexy body). These legends associated with Aeolus connect with the old Greek ideas about promiscuity of the wind as such: they used to believe for instance that if mares stood with their hind-quarters to the prevailing wind they would become pregnant. But it has a consequence for the way we read Coleridge's poem, I think.

So far from being a tender love poem, 'The Eolian Harp' strikes me as a poem of buried erotic frustration and anguish. But I'm going to argue that what it's buried under, as it were, is the real focus of this poem.

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First, a statement of the obvious: Eolian harps make music. Coleridge's poem is therefore a poem about music. Eolian harps still exist, of course, although nowadays the equivalent referent might be 'wind chimes'. I know from teaching the poem that students often have something wind-chimey in mind as they try and visualize what Coleridge is talking about here. But where wind chimes strike a pleasant, tinkly or harmoniously resonant sound, Eolian Harps make a softer, eerier sort of humming noise. Thomas Warton's 1785 edition of John Milton's Poems contains a variety of different kinds of annotation, including this one on line 62 of 'Il Penseroso', 'most musical, most melancholy':



Pausing only to note what an odd thing that is to put into the notes of an edition of Milton's Poems, I offer it as evidence that the kind of music Coleridge is talking about in this poem marks a mood of sadness. (Indeed, since Coleridge owned Warton's edition of Milton, and since the poem he wrote immediately before 'Eolian Harp', Sept 1795's 'To A Nightingale' actually quotes Milton's 'most musical, most melancholy' line, it's possible that seeing this very footnote put the idea in Coleridge's head to write about the instrument). As far as the actual harp is concerned, there are a couple of designs, but the most common eighteenth-century one looks like this:

The lid goes on top, to create a sort of horizontal chimney that encourages the wind to move more rapidly and so agitate the strings. The best places for these devices are by windows opened just wide enough to enhance that same effect.

But if it is sad music that God plays upon our Eolian-Harp-esque souls as conciousness, spirit, love and art, then what does that say about us? Or about God? Less Pslam 98 (you know it: Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth: break forth and sing for joy), more sunt lachrimae rerum.

The classical allusion is not a mere throwaway. If we trace the line of influence behind this poem back far enough, I think we end up with Vergil's fifth Eclogue, where Menalcus promises the in-no-way-a-Beatrix-Potter-character Mopsus beautiful music, to be played by Damoetas and Lyctian Aegon before four altars, two of which are dedicated to Daphne and two to Phoebus ('ecce duas tibi, Daphni, duas altaria Phoebo' Eclogue 5:65). Mopsus is excited at the prospect, because such a song will far surpass the ugly music Nature produces on its own:

MOPSUS. Quae tibi, quae tali reddam pro carmine dona?
nam neque me tantum venientis sibilus Austri
nec percussa iuvant fluctu tam litora nec quae
saxosas inter decurrunt flumina valles. [Eclogue 5:81-4]

['What could I ever give to you in return for such a gift? There is nothing like such beauty to be found in the rustling of the south wind, or the drumming of the surge upon the beach, or streams clattering down over rocky glens.']

Nature's music, Vergil says, is mere cacophony; it takes a human musician to bring beauty to the sound. Coleridge's 'Eolian Harp' inverts that almost to the point where Coleridge is writing a sort of anti-Eclogue 5. In the 1796 poem the human contribution, Coleridge's own, is vapid, bubbling, blasphemous and crass. It is Nature itself that provides the beauty. Not to go too far down this rabbit hole, but I'll add one more thing: in reply to Mopsus, Menalcas compliments him on his long fluffy ears gives him a pipe on which to blow and so make this beautiful music. The word Vergil uses here is cicuta ('Hac te nos fragili donabimus ante cicuta'; 'here, first let me give you this fragile pipe'). Now cicuta certainly does have the secondary meaning of 'a musical pipe or flute', but the word's primary meaning is: hemlock; which is to say, poison; which is to say the means by which the state executed people (the musical meaning comes about because flutes were often made from the stalks or stems of the hemlock, which seems like a rather dangerous practice to me, but what do I know). There are other Latin words for pipe, and other reeds from which flutes and recorders and so on can be made; but Vergil goes with the poisonous one. What this means, I think, is that Eclogue 5 ends on one of those moments of uniquely Vergilian mellow irony: the music of the natural world is harsh but vital: all those clashing streams, all that drum-beating surf. The music of man, played in sacred spaces, is more harmonious, but also, by implication, deathly. That's not such a paradox, when you think about it.

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Which brings me to the specific religious context out of which Coleridge wrote this poem. I'm particularly interested in the religious context, here, because so much of the criticism of the poem looks exclusively at the biographical context of Coleridge's wooing of Sara. But the poem is patently as much about Coleridge's faith as about his love for his fiancé. If we trust the compositional date (and there's no reason not to), then Coleridge wrote the poem in the immediate aftermath of his series of 'Six Lectures on Revealed Religion' delivered in the Assembly Coffeehouse, Bristol Quay, May-June 1795 (collected in this volume). One major life-event interposed between the delivery of those lectures and the composition of 'The Eolian Harp', and that was the quarrel between Coleridge and Southey that attended the final abandonment of the Pantisocratic scheme. That's quite a breach, I know.

It's conventional to describe the 1790s as the decade when Coleridge moved away from the Anglicanism into which he had been born towards a more radical Unitarianism, even a Pantheism. The truth is both more complex (in the sense that Coleridge's theological struggles mill very fine indeed, intellectually and emotionally) and rather simpler than that—simpler, because Coleridge never really gave up being an Anglican. It's true he was friendly with, and strongly influenced by, some of the country's most prominent Unitarians during this period. Nonetheless, to read the 'Revealed Religion' lectures is to be struck by how wholly that influence fed into Coleridge's politics, and how little into his (for want of a better word) metaphysics. He certainly wasn't a 'Trinitarian', and the lectures include several sharp criticisms of prominent trinitarian theologians, like John Hey. But although it doesn't exactly misrepresent STC to call him a Unitarian at this time, it also oversimplifies his position. In a letter of 1800, written to his friend the Rev. John Prior Estlin, Coleridge says that his 'confessio fidei ... as far as regards the Doctrine of the Trinity' was one of 'negative Unitarianism, a non liquet concerning the nature & being of Christ'. There was never a time in the whole of Coleridge's evolving religious life when he considered Christ to be nothing more than a particularly moral and excellent man and teacher, as Unitarians tend to. Coleridge never let go of his sense that, in some mysterious way, Christ was indeed God.

My point here is not to dilate upon Coleridge's religious beliefs in the round, but to dig down into the intersection between religion and music. So: there are lots of different kinds of musical instrument in the Bible, but for 'harps' (our present concern) we need to distinguish between two, the ψαλτήριον ‎(psaltḗrion, “stringed instrument, psaltery, harp”) and the κιθάρα ‎(kithára, which means 'harp, lyre, lute, guitar'). It seems that the main difference between them is that the former was plucked or struck, and made therefore a more percussive, staccato noise, where the latter was bowed, stroked or perhaps even made of pipes and blown, and therefore made a softer sort of music. Here's what McClintock and Strong's nineteenth-century Biblical Cyclopedia has to say:

Harp is the rendering in the Authorised Version of the following terms in the original: usually כַּנּוֹר, kinnor' (whence the Greek κινύρα), the lyre or cythara (invariably rendered "harp"), N. Test. κιθάρα (1 Co 14:7; Re 5:8; Re 14:2; Re 15:2), whence the verb κιθαρίζω (1 Co 14:7; Re 14:2), and the compound noun κιθαεῳδός ("harper," Re 14:2; Re 18:22) ... The "harp" was David's favorite instrument, on which he was a proficient. Gesenius (Thes. Heb. p. 215) considers cithara as the same with harp; but Luther translates κιθάραις by mit Pfeifen, "with pipes."

The key thing, in other words, is not the strings, but the quality of sound produced. Indeed, Luther's mit Pfeifen is a pretty handy description not only of pipe-organs but of human beings too. And so we return to Coleridge's 'organic Harps diversly fram'd'.

Coleridge's deeper engagement with Luther would not really happen until he went to Germany two years later; but it may be relevant to consider this poem, Coleridge's Cithara Aeoli, in the context of the following widely-reprinted edition of Lutheran hymns: 1571's Cithara Lutheri:

'Cithara' is etymologically close-behind our modern word 'guitar'; and that means this collection of the Psalms of David really is called Luther's Guitar. Which I think is rather wonderful.

I'm suggesting, then, that Coleridge's Cithara Aeoli has a pedigree that goes back through the Cithara Lutheri to the Cithara Davidi, and that this context casts light on the rather conflicted articulation of the musical theology of the poem. The danger, from this point on, is in flattening and over-simplifying a tremendously complex issue (oh but look how long his post has already grown!). Still, to speak broadly, the question of what musical instruments are appropriate when it comes to the worship of God has been one of the ways believers have marked themselves out as different to those who have come before. Early Christians repudiated musical instruments as too pagan (Saint Augustine, a lover of music in other contexts, insisted that 'the pipe, tabret, and harp here associate so intimately with the sensual heathen cults, as well as with the wild revelries and shameless performances of the degenerate theater and circus')—or else as too Jewish: Aquinas declared that worship should avoid the use of 'harps and psalteries' when praising God, 'lest our Church should seem to Judaize.' Later, Protestants tended to use music as a stick to beat Catholicism: organs, harps, lyres, pipes and so on became seen as Popish and sensual and to be repudiated. For many nonconformists, then as now, plainsong alone was appropriate when it came to worship; and, then as now, one index of how 'High' any given Anglican communion may be judged is the type of musical accompaniment it permits (interestingly, the 20th-century evangelical movement, in some senses an offshoot of this nonconformist tradition, has generally embraced all sorts of musical instruments, organs and electrical guitars and drum-kits and so on; but that's a different story).

Johnathan Willis' Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England: Discourses, Sites and Identities (Routledge 2010) gives a good sense of how complex the discourse of music was in the cultures of Reformation and post-Reformation Europe. The problem was that music was both a sanctioned mode of worship and mode of apprehending the divine, and a recognised vector of sensuality and wickedness in the world. Willis quotes Philip Stubbes' 1583 diatribe The Anatomie of Abuses, which describes music as both ‘very il’ and ‘very laudable’, ‘a cup of poyson’ and ‘a good gift of GOD’ which both ‘stireth up filthie lust, womannisheth the minde … enflameth concupisence, and bringeth in uncleannes’ but also ‘reviveth the spirits, comforteth the hart, and maketh it redyer to serve GOD’. As Willis notes, Stubbes' intention to write how music ‘allureth to vanitie’ is undermined by the degree to which 'his rhetoric was confused and contradictory, heaping praise upon his subject matter in equal degree to opprobrium' [Willis, 11]. Music, it seems, is holy, except when it is very very unholy indeed. Luther himself, the man whose name adorned the many thousand copies of that widely used hymnal Luther's Cithara, described the use of musical instrumentation in church services as 'the insignia of Baal ... The Roman Catholics borrowed it from the Jews'.

Something of this contradiction informs the rather tangled theological content of Coleridge's poem. I've a hunch, which I can't prove, that one of the specific impulses to his writing of 'The Eolian Harp' was old goldenmouth himself, Chrysostom. This is what he wrote:

‘Here there is no need for the cithara, nor taut strings, nor the plectrum and technique, nor any sort of instrument; but, if you wish, make of yourself a cithara, by mortifying the limbs of the flesh and creating full harmony between body and soul. For when the flesh does not lust against the spirit, but yields to its commands, and perseveres along the path that is noble and admirable, you thus produce a spiritual melody.’ [Chrysostom In psalmum xli 2; PG LV, 158; in James W. McKinnon (ed), Music in Early Christian Literature (CUP 1987), 81]

This brings me back to the question of the melancholy tone of Coleridge's Eolian Harp. Say he has turned himself into a cithara, as Chrysostom commanded. What kind of music is he making? Does he pipe a tune as clean and wide and beautiful as the sunlit sea? Or something moved by filthie lust and uncleannes? It is one of the great puzzles of Coleridge's life that, having agreed to marry Southey's sister-in-law Sara Fricker in order to facilitate the great Pantisocratic adventure, Coleridge still went through with the marriage even after that adventure had fallen apart, and despite the fact that—as he wrote repeatedly to Southey—he knew he didn't love her. He had an intense experience of spiritual and physical attraction to Mary Evans, when meeting her again (though she was by now engaged to Fryer Todd, and married him in October 1795), so he knew what was missing in his relationship with Sara. And after the quarrel with Southey it was clear to him that he wasn't going pantisocratizing any time soon, and therefore had no pressing need for a wife. He still married Sara, though. It may be worth considering whether he did so precisely because he knew there was no sexual spark between them, as a kind of (I would have to say, profoundly misguided) atonement.

So what sort of music did Coleridge consider himself capable of? Well, he was capable of the flatulent kind, as we all are. His comical, or comico-serious, 'Essay on Fasts' (in the second issue of The Watchman, published the same year 'Eolian Harp' came out) takes as its text Isaiah 'Wherefore my Bowles shall sound like a Harp'. Richard Holmes notes that this essay 'caused much offence among his more conservative readers' [Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions, 111]. But STC tended to regard himself in less amused mode. When he wrote to William Godwin [Jan 22nd 1802], he described himself as follows:

Partly from ill-health, & partly from an unhealthy & reverie-like vividness of Thoughts, & (pardon the pedantry of the phrase) a diminished Impressibility from Things, my ideas, wishes, & feelings are to a diseased degree disconnected from motion & action. In plain & natural English, I am a dreaming & therefore an indolent man——. I am a Starling self-incaged, & always in the Moult, & my whole Note is, Tomorrow, & tomorrow, & tomorrow. The same causes, that have robbed me to so great a degree of the self-impelling self-directing Principle, have deprived me too of the due powers of Resistances to Impulses from without. If I might so say, I am, as an acting man, a creature of mere Impact. 'I will' & 'I will not' are phrases, both of them equally, of rare occurrence in my dictionary.—This is the Truth—I regret it, & in the consciousness of this Truth I lose a larger portion of Self-estimation than those, who know me imperfectly, would easily believe—/ I evade the sentence of my own Conscience by no quibbles of self-adulation; I ask for Mercy indeed on the score of my ill-health; but I confess, that this very ill-health is as much an effect as a cause of this want of steadiness & self-command; and it is for mercy that I ask, not for justice.—To apply all this to the present case. [Letters, 1:781-2]

What interests me here is the extent to which that chirping bird, the starling self-incaged, reduced to tweeting Macbeth's heartbreaking soliloquy is invoked in the midst of an account of how far Coleridge's problems proceed from a fatal passivity. But of course, what is the vision of 'all of animated nature' as 'organic Harps' trembling into thought as some divine Jimmy Hendrix sweeps his powerful hand over our strings, except a kind of apotheosis of the ultimate and divinely sanctioned passivity of all life?

There's a lot more to say about music and Coleridge, although I think this post has bloated far enough. But, by way of a coda: I was struck by something Jeremy Denk said in his review of Paul Elie's Reinventing Bach (2012) for the New Republic: 'the only two things missing in Bach’s music are randomness and sex. And yet in our era—so consumed with both—Bach has not lost his appeal.' It is, of course, true that modern popular music is much more expressive of sex, and in some of its iterations of randomness, than Johann Sebastian ever was; but it also speaks to this poem. A warm summer's day, your lover in your arms, a breeze coming through the casement window; it could so easily be sexy. And music made by the passage of that breeze over a harp designed to express it would, to most people, be the very epitome of randomness, however pleasant. But for Coleridge it is very particularly not random, and for reasons connected with that fact the situation in which he finds himself, with his 'pensive Sara' is not erotic (pensive really isn't a very sexy word). The result is a poem more Bach-like than is often the case with Coleridge, even in 'Conversation Poem' mode; and perhaps that's why he himself considered it among his most perfect. But Bach-like perfection is not what we go to Coleridge for. He's really not such a well-tempered clavier, and that's why he is so remarkable and so important a poet.

'And words, mast-high, came floating by ...'

I'll be returning to this blog in a day or two with a piece on 'The Eolian Harp' (1796); but in the meantime, I was struck by this rather lovely little artefact of the Google Books scanning process. It's from an online version of Douglas Kneale's Romantic Aversions: Aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge (1999). For myself, I think more academic monographs should be enlivened with random elongations of font-size.

An Untraced Allusion in Coleridge's 'Allegoric Vision' (1795/1811/1817)

Coleridge's 'Allegoric Vision' is an odd piece: four and a half pages of prose telling how the narrator meets a pilgrim on his travels, and whilst sheltering from a storm with him in a cave hears him relate an allegorical dream-vision about the 'valley of life', wherein is a luxurious building seeming to contain 'MYSTERIES' but actually containing 'SENSUALITY', 'BLASPHEMY' and 'a monster bi-form and Janus-headed', called 'SUPERSTITION'. Coleridge originally included it as part of a lecture delivered at Bristol in 1795, where (in the words of J. C. C. Mays) 'it contributes to his aim of upholding the golden mean of Unitarian orthodoxy against the superstition and materialism of the Church of England' [Mays, Poems 1:197]. He later printed a revised version in The Courier in 1811, and a third (again revised) version in his second Lay Sermon (1817). It was reprinted yet again in his Poetical Works (1829). This is how it begins:

A feeling of sadness, a peculiar melancholy, is wont to take possession of me alike in Spring and in Autumn. But in Spring it is the melancholy of Hope: in Autumn it is the melancholy of Resignation. As I was journeying on foot through the Appennine, I fell in with a pilgrim in whom the Spring and the Autumn and the Melancholy of both seemed to have combined. In his discourse there were the freshness and the colors of April:

Qual ramicel a ramo
Tal da pensier pensiero
In lui germogliava.

But as I gazed on his whole form and figure, I bethought me of the not unlovely decays, both of age and of the late season, in the stalely e!m, after the clusters have been plucked from its entwining vines and the vines are as bands of dried withies around its trunk and branches.

The Italian means 'As a twig buds off from a branch, so in him thought budded from thought'. No Coleridge editors have hitherto traced the source of this quotation. But fear not: I'm here to tell you it's from Canzone XXXII ‘Alla Beatissia Vergine nel Presepio’ (1685), a poem by the Tuscan poet Vincenzo da Filicaja (1642-1707).







You can see the quoted lines at the bottom of the second page, there. 'Alla Beatissima Vergine nel Presepio' means 'To the Blessed Virgin Mary at the Nativity'. The poem begins: 'How fortunate the sight!/Here we are, my Love,/You whom my feet follow, Love, companion and guide,/Yours was the blind air,/You tarry here with me.'. The larger passage from which Coleridge has quoted his lines is:

Qual ramicel a ramo
Tal da pensier pensiero
In lui germogliava; e tra se forse or dice:
Oh quant’io debbo, Adamo,
Al tuo non so s’ I’ chiamo
Fallo , o pur mio destin!

Which means:

As branchlet from branch
So thought from thought
Burgeoned in him; and perhaps he says to himself:
Oh how much I owe to you, Adam,
Though neither you nor I can say it,
Or do it, or ever guess my destiny!

Vincenzo da Filicaja was a nobleman from a very ancient Florentine family. He married for love, and when his wife died he refused thereafter to write love poems. He did, however, write poems urging the unification of Italy as well as odes celebrating military triumph (for example the deliverance of Vienna from the Turks in 1683) and, as here, religious poetry.

John Wilson, 'The Magic Mirror' (1812)

For a time, John Wilson (also known as 'Christopher North', 1785-1854) lived at Ellera, his estate on Windermerein 1807. He soon befriended his neighbours Coleridge and Wordsworth. A few years later he published 'The Magic Mirror' in the Edinburgh Annual Register [3 (1812), 107-117: it's dated 'for 1810' but was actually published 1812]. That's the first page of the poem up there, and here, with its interesting footnote, is the second page:

Inevitably we wonder: which unpublished poem? J C C Mays [Poetical Works (2 vols Princeton 2001), 1:526] thinks the reference is to a fragment Coleridge wrote in his notebook, perhaps in 1798:

The silence of the City—How awful at midnight—
Mute as the battlements & crags & towers
That fancy makes in the clouds—yea, as mute
As the moonlight that sleeps on the steady Vanes,—
The cell of a departed Anchoret,
His skeleton & flitting ghost are there,
Sole tenants—
And all the City, silent as the moon
That steeps in quiet light the steady Vanes
Of her huge temples—

I don't see this, myself: the specifics here surely don't match Wilson's poem. More, when Wilson collected 'The Magic Mirror' in his Miscellaneous Poems (1825), the wording of the footnote was changed:

To me, this suggests that whichever Coleridge poem Wilson was drawing on was an unpublished MS piece in 1812, but had been published by 1825 (the lines Mays instances were not published in Coleridge's lifetime). I wonder if Wilson didn't have in mind some lines from Coleridge's 'Destiny of Nations', written 1795 but not published under Coleridge's name until 1817. War coming like a mighty wind:

... War and all its dread vicissitudes
Pleasingly agitate their stagnant hearts;...
A vapour sailed, as when a cloud, exhaled
From Egypt's fields that steam hot pestilence,
Travels the sky for many a trackless league,
Till o'er some death-doomed land, distant in vain,
It broods incumbent. Forthwith from the plain,
Facing the Isle, a brighter cloud arose,
And steered its course which way the vapour went.’

Coleridge's "Wanderings of Cain" Versified

In the 1828 preface to the prose Wanderings of Cain (composed 1797), Coleridge notes that 'years afterward ...' (he means at some point between 1805 and 1815) ' ... I determined on commencing anew, and composing the whole in stanzas'. He claims to have made 'some progress in realizing this intention' but to have given up ('adverse gales drove my bark off the "Fortunate Isles" of the Muses' is how he puts it). Afterward, he says, he was able to remember only one stanza:

Encinctured with a twine of leaves,
That leafy twine his only dress!
A lovely Boy was plucking fruits,
By moonlight, in a wilderness.
The morn was bright, the air was free,
And fruits and flowers together grew
On many a shrub and many a tree:
And all put on a gentle hue,
Hanging in the shadowy air
Like a picture rich and rare.
It was a climate where, they say,
The night is more belov'd than day.
But who that beauteous Boy beguil'd,
That beauteous Boy to linger here?
Alone, by night, a little child,
In place so silent and so wild—
Has he no friend, no loving Mother near?

It's not possible to be sure how serious Coleridge was about this project of versifying the prose Wanderings of Cain, or to know whether he ever drafted more than this solitary stanza (he included it in a letter to Byron in 1815). Personally, I doubt it went any further. But if it had gone further, then I think the form would not have been a string of 17-line stanzas rhyming abcbdedeffgghihhi, all cloned from this one; but would rather have been stanzas of varying length rhyming variously, after the manner of Christabel. I do think, though, that he would have kept one formal feature from this sample throughout: that the each stanza would have topped off its run of tetrameter lines with a final pentameter.

There's a rather delicious pointlessness in trying to replicate Coleridge's declared project in this case; one I find hard to resist. I suppose there would be some point in finding out how easily, or otherwise, the original prose goes into rhymed tetrameters; but that's a pretty thin justification, really.  You can find that original prose, by the way, here.

Canto 2

"A little further, father dear,
And yet a little further on,
Until we come to where the clear
And silver moonlight shineth down."
Their road lay thwart a fir-tree wood;
And at its entrance tall trees stood
At distances from one another:
The path was broad within that cover,
In moonlight as the travellers viewed,
And moonlit shadows lying free
And silent there, appeared to be
Inhabitants of solitude.
The path then winded, and too soon
Grew narrow: where the sun at noon
Might speckle but could ne'er illume:
Grew dark and dark as any cavern's gloom.

"How dark it is, O father!" laught
The boyish Enos, "but the path
Beneath our feet is soft, and soon,
We shall emerge to the light of the moon."

"Lead on, my child!" said Cain: "as guide,
And stay thou ever by my side!"
In innocence the little child
Clasped a finger of the hand
Which in sin and anger wild
Had murdered righteous Abel, and
Did guide his father through that place.
"The fir branch drips upon thee, son."
"Tis pleasant father, for I've run
Most fast and eagerly to take
To thee the pitcher and the cake:
These droplets cool my body down.
How happy are the squirrels here
That feed upon these trees of fir!
They leap from bough to bough, they play
The old ones and their young together
Their nest a home that none dissever.
Noon yesterday I clomb a tree
O father, that I might but play
With them, but they all leapt away
And fled their branches and from me,
E'en to the slender twigs they leaped,
And in an instant I could see
Them sporting on another tree.
As thou treatst me, my thoughts were kind:
Why then, O father, did they flee?
Why, father, played they not with me?
They left my promised good behind.
I cried to them e'en as you weep
Whene'er thou givest food to me,
And when thou cover'st me at sleep,
And oft as I stand at thy knee
And thine eyes brimming look with grief at me?"

Cain ceased, his stifling groans low dropped
To earth, beneath the moonlight mild;
Beside him in the night his child
Fair Enos, likewise stood and stopped.

Cain lifted up his voice and cried
Most bitterly, and said, "Great Might!
He persecuteth me this side
And that, both on the left and right:
He doth pursue my soul like wind,
And like the sand-blast blows me through;
He is around me e'en as air!
O could I thrust my life behind!
My one desire is death's adieu,
When I look on the things that ne'er
Had life, nor move upon the earth—
Behold! they seem dear to mine eyes.
That man may live though lacking breath!
O to be one who never dies!
I might abide in darkness so,
And blackness, and an empty space!
Yea, I'd lie down, and nothing know,
No movement would my limbs e'er trace
Until I changed unto the rock
Within the lion's den that steepeth
On which the young lion's head does rest
Nightlong repose the while he sleepeth.
The torrent and the water shock
That roareth far off hath a voice;
And clouds in heaven look on me
With terror in their grim estate
The Mighty One against me moves
In winds within the cedar groves
And speaks; to leave me bare of joys
That suffering and silence be my fate."

Then Enos to his father spake:
"Arise my father, yet arise:
The place wherein I found the cake
And pitcher hereby closely lies."

And when Cain ask'd, "How knowest thou?"
The child replied—"Regard thou where
The large rocks lift their summit bare
A few strides distant from the grove;
And while e'en now thy spirit strove
To lift thy voice, I list, and heard echo."

Then child took hold of father's hand,
As he would raise him to his feet:
And Cain tho most too faint to stand
Rose slowly on his knees and pressed
Himself against the trunk of a fir,
And stood upon his feet, and followed on.

The path they walked was darkling ere
Three short strides of reaching there
And sudden turned where arch and frieze
Was formed by intwined blackest trees.
The moonlight for a moment gleamed
And like a dazzling portal seemed.
Enos ran and stood clear in air;
Til Cain, his father, came to sight
Emerged from the darkness into light,
The child affrighted was: for lo!
Cain's mighty limbs were wasted quite
As if by fire; his hair thick whorl
Like Bison's forehead's matted curl,
His fierce and sullen eye below
So glared as to engender fright;
And twined black locks on either side,
A rank and tangled mass provide
All stained and scorched, as though the grasp
Of burning iron had sought to rasp
And rend them; and his countenance
Exprest in language strange and trance
An unimagined agony
That had been, was, and yet still was to be.

All desolate the scene around;
As far as sight and eye could cover
The stark bare rocks faced one another,
Leaving between a long, broad strand
An interval of fine white sand.
No sign of seasons could be found
No matter where you wanderéd,
How close you peeped the land was dead.
It could no spring, no summer know,
Nor autumn: and the winter's snow,
That would have made a lovely sight
Fell not upon these scorching rocks
Or on these blasted sands of white.
No morning larks or fleeting hawks
E'er poised themselves above this blight
But the huge serpent savage hissed
Beneath the vulture's talons sharp,
The screaming vulture's wings did close
Upon the serpent's coiling twist.
The pointed shattered summits' scarp
And rocky ridge made mimicry
Of man's concerns, and seemed to scry
Mute prophecy of things not yet;
Steeples, and battlements, and ships
With mainmasts near a mile high.
As far from wood as a boy might set
A pebble thrown with slingshot strips
There was one rock stood by itself
Some distance from the main rock shelf.
Perhaps precipitated there
By that great groan of Earth's despair
Let out when our first father fell.
Before approach, it seemed to lie
Flat on the ground, twas hard to tell:
Its base lay slanted from its peak,
Where leaning rock met sands thereby
A tall man might stand upright there.
And in that place so stark and drear
Had Enos found the jug and cake,
And to this place he led his sire.
But ere they reached the rock they saw
A human shape; a prospect dire;
Its back towards them, hiddenly
And they advancing unperceived
Could hear him smite his breast, aggrieved
And cry aloud, "Wo, wo is me!
That I must never die again,
And yet I perish sore in pain
Of thirsting and of hunger. Wo is me!"

As pallid, as reflection bright
Of sheeted lightning on the cloud
Heavy-sailing through the night
Became the face of Cain; but tight
The child Enos held the shaggy pelt
Of his Sire's robe, and looking long
Whisperéd: "Ere that I could speak,
I know, O father, that I heard
That voice. Have not I often felt,
Recalled a voice sweet and strong?
O father! this in voice and word!"
And Cain exceeding trembled, weak:
The voice was sweet indeed, but thin
And querulous like of a slave
Who's pent in misery within,
Despairing even to the grave
And can not in himself refrain
From making lamentation drear.
Behold! Young Enos glid again,
And creeping softly round the base
Of rock, met stranger face to face
And looked upon him maugre fear.
The Shape shrieked loud, and turned around,
And Cain beheld him, saw his limbs
And face were of his brother ABEL
Whom he had killed! And Cain stood swouned
Like one who struggles in his sleep
Possessed by terrors in his dreams
Creatures of all fear and fable
Relinquish not the pull of the night's deep

Thus as he stood in silent waste
And awful darkness of his Soul,
The SHAPE fell at his feet, embraced
His knees, and cried out with cry
A bitter sound to terrify.
And words then uttered out of dole:
"Thou eldest born of Adam, whom
Eve my mother brought forth first
Cease thou my torment! Spare my doom!
That day of all my days most curst
When, feeding flocks in pastures green
By side of quiet rivers clean
Thou killedst me; and now the worst
I still live on: I am in and am misery."

Cain closed his eyes, and not to see
He hid them with his hands; and sighed
Again he op'd his eyes, and queyled,
And said to Enos at his side,
"What seest thou? Didst hear a voice
My son?" "Yes, father, I beheld
A man in garments unclean clad
And he in sweet voice, fully sad
And rich in lamentation, cried."
Then Cain raised up the Shape that seemed
Like unto Abel, thought he dreamed,
And said: "Our father's Maker had
Respect both unto thee and thine
Thy offspring and thy cleanly kine:
Wherefore hath He forsaken thee?"
Then shrieked the Shape a second time,
And rent the garment that him clad
His naked skin was like the sheet
Of white sands underneath their feet;
And for a third time he did shriek,
And threw himself on his face
Upon the sand beneath the peak,
Rock's shadow black upon the place.
And Cain and Enos sate beside
And hearkened to him as he cried
The child upon his right hand, and
Upon the left sat Cain, unmanned,
And all three there beneath the rock,
Within the shadow of that stony block.

The Shape of Abel rouséd up,
And spake unto the child; "I know
The food whereof I may not sup
Cold waters where I may not go
And drink: so wherefore didst thou take
Away my pitcher?" Cain replied,
"Didst thou not favour find with God?
Within His holy sight, and by His side?"

The Shape replied, "The Lord is God
But of the living only, him they laud:
The dead possess another God."
Then Enos lifted up his eyes
And did a child's prayer impart
But Cain rejoicéd darkling wise
Full secretly within his heart.

"Most wretched shall they be the days.
Of all their mortal life," exclaimed
The Shape, "who sacrifice with praise
Acceptable and aye acclaimed
Offered unto the God of the dead;
But after death their labour stoppeth.
Yet onto me the woe aye droppeth,
For I was well beloved by He
The God of the living, he none other:
And cruel wert thou, O my brother,
Who didst snatch me away from all
His power, his dominion close."
He spake and sudden he arose
And swift across the sands did flee;
And Cain said in his heart, "The curse
Of GOD the Lord of Hosts is me;
But who is the God of the dead?"
As he pursued the Shape traverse
The sands, the Shape with shrieking fled
The sands behind the steps of Cain
Rose like white mists against the black
But Abel's passage held not back
His feet disturbéd not the sands
And swift outrun Cain overland,
Til turning short, he wheeléd round,
And reached again the rocky crop
Beneath which they had come to stop
Where Enos still stood; and the child
Reached out his arm and fingers mild
Caught hold his garment as he passed
And fell he to the ground at last.
But Cain beheld him not, and cried,
"He has passed into the dark woods,"
And so walked slowly to the side;
Of those stark rocks, where his own child
His Enoch waited, spake him words
That he had caught hold of his pelt
As he passed by, and that the man
Had sprawled upon the ground a span
And Cain once more beside him knelt,
And said, "O Abel brother mine
Would that I could lament for thee,
But that the words within me pine,
My spirit withered and unfree
And burnt with agony extreme.
Now, now, I pray thee, by thy team
Of herding flocks, and by thy pasture,
And by the quiet rivers where
Thou lovedst to watch the stream flow faster,
I pray thee tell me all thou knowst.
Who is the God of the dead? And where
Doth he make of his dwelling place?
What sacrifices doth he find
Acceptable before his face?
For I have offered, but have not
Received an answer; I have prayed,
And not been heard; I am forgot
Can more affliction e'er be laid
Upon me, sole of humankind?
Where is Death's god? To him I goest."
The Shape arose and answered,
"O that thou once hadst had on me
Such pity as I have on thee.
Come, Son of Adam!" thus he said
"And bring with thee Enos, thy faithful child!"

They three passed through the desert wild
Between the rocks across white sands
Silent as the shadows in silent lands.

So there you have it. As you can see, if you compare this with Coleridge's original prose (and really, can you be bothered? I'm amazed you've read as far as this, to be honest) this cleaves really pretty closely to the original in terms of expression, specific images and particular expression. I've added one or two small things here and there, but mostly this is very close to the original, all the way through. I might add, I found this easier to do (howsoever rough and patchy the finished result) than I thought it might be. The conclusion I draw is that Coleridge sketched out his initial prose with a rough tetrameter pattern lurking in the back of his mind, or perhaps it would be less reckless to say: that the ponderous sub-Biblical cadences of his prose, replete with repetition and portentous elevation, was leavened by something of the rhythmic and balladic genius he was about to put into The Ancient Mariner.

The Wanderings of Cain (1797)

I've never been entirely sure what to make of Coleridge's 'The Wanderings of Cain'. It's a 2000-word piece of prose written November 1797 (a few other fragmentary bits and pieces were written at later dates) that styles itself 'Canto 2' of an unfinished three canto work on the subject of Cain's exile after he murdered his brother Abel. At some point in the 1800s Coleridge tinkered with the notion of adapting his prose into verse, but this came to nothing. He finally published it in 1828 as 'a fragment'. The best place to read the original chunk and all the other related bits is this useful 'Romantic Circles' set of pages on The Wanderings of Cain.

To the 1828 version Coleridge added a preface in which he explained that the work was originally to have been a collaboration with Wordsworth.

The title and subject were suggested by myself, who likewise drew out the scheme and the contents for each of the three books or cantos, of which the work was to consist, and which, the reader is to be informed, was to have been finished in one night! My partner [Wordsworth] undertook the first canto; I the second: and which ever had done first, was to set about the third. Almost thirty years have passed by; yet at this moment I cannot without something more than a smile moot the question which of the two things was the more impracticable, for a mind so eminently original to compose another man's thoughts and fancies, or for a taste so austerely pure and simple to imitate the Death of Abel?

Coleridge wrote his piece, but Wordsworth drew a blank, and at that point the two were overcome by a 'sense of the exceeding ridiculousness of the whole scheme—which broke up in a laugh: and the Ancient Mariner was written instead.' The reference to 'imitating the Death of Abel' makes the germ of the idea clear: Coleridge had read the English translation of Salomon Gessner's extremely, indeed bafflingly popular Der Tod Abels (1758), a lengthy sort-of prose-poem that, despite its grim title (and as well as expatiating fruitily on questions of morality, piety, family and religion) spends most of its time lushly describing the delightful scenery of the post-Edenic world in an access of pastoral delight.

1797 is before Coleridge learned German, so he must have read the English translation by Mary Collyer (1761).

Not just any engravings, mark you: superb engravings. The Death of Abel, flowery in several senses, was one of the bestsellers of its age, as Gabrielle Bersier notes:

[Collyer's version] became an immediate and enduring bestseller on a par with Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe. The sheer numbers are stunning: 40 editions and reprints between 1762 and 1800 reaching a total of 70 editions and reprints through to 1830 in Britain and North America, a success much to the dismay of the critics. The recipients of Gessner's biblical elegy belonged to a poorer and less educated public. While sophisticated readers on the Continent found delight in the Arcadian pantheism of the idyll, the poorer masses of England and North America were attracted to the epic's mixture of sentimental and pious feelings, hymnal pathos and cultural criticism, all of which was intensified in Mary Collyer's translation. [Bersier, 'Arcadia Revitalized: The International Appeal of Gessner's Idylls in the 18th Century', in Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (ed), From the Greeks to the Greens: Images of the Simple Life (Wisconsin Univ. Press 1989), 37-8]

Presumably Coleridge hoped to enjoy something like that commercial success. I also like this idiosyncratic use of the past tense in Collyer's translator's preface:



'Is wrote', indeed. At any rate, reading Collyer's Gessner is a good way to prime us for reading Coleridge's rather over-ripe prose.



108 pages of that kind of thing. Coleridge's version overlaps with the end of Gessner's, plot-wise, and is a little more elevated and stiff in tone than Collyer's. This is how it starts:

"A little further, O my father, yet a little further, and we shall come into the open moonlight:" Their road was through a forest of fir-trees; at its entrance the trees stood at distances from each other, and the path was broad, and the moonlight, and the moonlight shadows reposed upon it, and appeared quietly to inhabit that solitude. But soon the path winded and became narrow; the sun at high noon sometimes speckled, but never illumined it, and now it was dark as a cavern.

"It is dark, O my father!" said Enos, "but the path under our feet is smooth and soft, and we shall soon come out into the open moonlight."

...

And Cain lifted up his voice and cried bitterly, and said, "The Mighty One that persecuteth me is on this side and on that; he pursueth my soul like the wind, like the sand-blast he passeth through me; he is around me even as the air! O that I might be utterly no more! I desire to die—yea, the things that never had life, neither move they upon the earth—behold! they seem precious to mine eyes. O that a man might live without the breath of his nostrils. So I might abide in darkness, and blackness, and an empty space! Yea, I would lie down, I would not rise, neither would I stir my limbs till I became as the rock in the den of the lion, on which the young lion resteth his head whilst he sleepeth. For the torrent that roareth far off hath a voice; and the clouds in heaven look terribly on me; the mighty one who is against me speaketh in the wind of the cedar grove; and in silence am I dried up." Then Enos spake to his father, "Arise my father, arise, we are but a little way from the place where I found the cake and the pitcher." And Cain said, "How knowest thou?" and the child answered—"Behold the bare rocks are a few of thy strides distant from the forest; and while even now thou wert lifting up thy voice, I heard the echo." Then the child took hold of his father, as if he would raise him: and Cain being faint and feeble rose slowly on his knees and pressed himself against the trunk of a fir, and stood upright and followed the child.

Cain's son, Enos, is sad that the squirrels won't play with him: 'How happy the squirrels are that feed on these fir trees! ... I clomb a tree yesterday at noon, O my father, that I might play with them, but they leapt away from the branches, even to the slender twigs did they leap, and in a moment I beheld them on another tree. Why, O my father, would they not play with me?' Since neither squirrels nor fir trees are native to the Holy Land, we have to assume that Cain's wanderings have taken him far from his home; indeed much of the scenery in the piece comes (according to Hazlitt) from Coleridge's own wanderings in the 'valley of the rocks' near Lynton in Dorset. Cain himself is so physically broken-down as to scare his son ('the child was affrighted'):

The mighty limbs of Cain were wasted as by fire; his hair was as the matted curls on the Bison's forehead, and so glared his fierce and sullen eye beneath: and the black abundant locks on either side, a rank and tangled mass, were stained and scorched, as though the grasp of a burning iron hand had striven to rend them; and his countenance told in a strange and terrible language of agonies that had been, and were, and were still to continue to be.

Bison, eh? Maybe Cain has wandered all the way to the States, which would indeed be some wander. The poem describes them travelling across a desolate land: 'hot rocks and scorching sands. Never morning lark had poised himself over this desert; but the huge serpent often hissed there beneath the talons of the vulture, and the vulture screamed, his wings imprisoned within the coils of the serpent.' They walk to a giant rock, and there Cain encounters the ghost, or 'Shape', of his murdered brother.

Thus as he stood in silence and darkness of Soul, the SHAPE fell at his feet, and embraced his knees, and cried out with a bitter outcry, "Thou eldest born of Adam, whom Eve, my mother, brought forth, cease to torment me! I was feeding my flocks in green pastures by the side of quiet rivers, and thou killedst me; and now I am in misery." Then Cain closed his eyes, and hid them with his hands; and again he opened his eyes, and looked around him, and said to Enos, "What beholdest thou? Didst thou hear a voice my son?" "Yes, my father, I beheld a man in unclean garments, and he uttered a sweet voice, full of lamentation." Then Cain raised up the Shape that was like Abel, and said. "The Creator of our father, who had respect unto thee, and unto thy offering, wherefore hath he forsaken thee?" Then the Shape shrieked a second time, and rent his garment, and his naked skin was like the white sands beneath their feet; and he shrieked yet a third time, and threw himself on his face upon the sand that was black with the shadow of the rock, and Cain and Enos sate beside him; the child by his right hand, and Cain by his left. They were all three under the rock, and within the shadow.

The canto ends with Cain miserably asking to be taken to the 'god of death':

"Abel, my brother, I would lament for thee, but that the spirit within me is withered, and burnt up with extreme agony. Now, I pray thee, by thy flocks, and by thy pastures, and by the quiet rivers which thou lovedst, that thou tell me all that thou knowest. Who is the God of the dead? where doth he make his dwelling? what sacrifices are acceptable unto him? for I have offered, but have not been received; I have prayed, and have not been heard; and how can I be afflicted more than I already am?"

Abel's ghost promises to show him, and the canto ends: 'And they three passed over the white sands between the rocks, silent as the shadows.' Boom.

There are scattered bits and pieces, some more convincingly related to this project than others, that can be quarried out of the Notebooks; but I think the key is right there, in plain sight. This reference to 'the god of death' ought to make us think, as it surely would have been in Coleridge's mind, of Romans 14:9, 'For to this end Christ both died, and rose, and revived, that he might be Lord both of the dead and living'. Canto 2 is the pre-redeemed Cain; but the third canto would surely bring him to a true understanding of the nature of this 'god of the dead'.

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.