Io. Genesii Sepuluedae

I've been following-up a rather obscure strand of Coleridgean reading, which I'll probably blog about in a day or two (to get it off my chest). But I wanted to stop for a moment to note how pretty this title page is. Don't you think?

It's something STC read (though not in this 1526 first edition; he read a later 4-vol collected ed from 1780), by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494-1573), famous Spanish Renaissance humanist, theologian and translator of Aristotle into Latin. The ‘Io. Genesii Sepuluedae’ is the Latinization of Sepúlveda's name, ‘Cordubensis artem et theologiae doctoris’ means that he's a Doctor of Arts and Theology of the University of Córdoba in Andalusia, and finally we get to  the title of the volume: De Fato et Libero Arbitrio Libri Tres, ‘On Fate and Free-Will, in Three Books’. It's Sepúlveda's attempt to refute Luther's opinions on fate and Christian theology, part of the broader discourse of the Counter Reformation. That Coleridge read it at all is fairly interesting, and it was something concerning which he has Thoughts, but for now I only note how lovely the design is, here.

Coleridge's Claudian Marginalium

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Coleridge owned an edition of Claudian's poems, and it may have been the one pictured above. Which is to say: it was either that 1677 edition, or an earlier 1650 one, both texts edited by Nicolaas Heinsius. We can't be sure, because Coleridge's actual copy has been lost, but Mrs J H Green who saw the book when compiling her Handlist of Coleridge's Books (1863) says it was the 1677 edition. Then again, Thomas Arnold (son of the famous headmaster, father of Mrs Humphrey Ward and grandfather of Aldous Huxley) actually owned the copy for a time, and he says this:

I have in my possession a very interesting memorial of the intimacy between Coleridge & Southey. It is an Elzevir edition 1650 of Claudianus having on the front fly leaf in schoolboy hand ‘E. Libris R Southey / Regiae Scholae Westminest. / AD 1788’ and below this ‘S.T.Coleridge / from Robert Southey / June 10. 1810’ in Southey's handwriting. [Letter to Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 12 December 1884]

The text of the 1650 edition is the same as that of the 1677; but I dilate upon this seemingly trivial point because the frontispieces were different. The 1677 has the bare-buttocked, racy image above, where the 1650 has this much worthier, duller illustration:

There is a point in all this pettifogging, and I'll come back to it in a minute. But first, the meat of my post.

:2:

So: the rest of Arnold's letter explains that ‘the book was purchased some years ago at a booksellers in London’ and that it contains a handwritten comment by Coleridge ‘at the end’ (so, presumably, on the back flyleaf)—‘I have verified the handwriting at the M.S. room in British Museum’, he says. Arnold then copies out Coleridge's comment:

She sate as square and solemn as an empty chair when you look at it in a half dreamy Mood—. On the reproach of shedding tears, for a Lady in Pain? Loss of Fortune? Any other cause respecting myself principally? Immediate peril of death? No! never—but treachery unkindness unmerited & implying want of believed goodness, in an instantaneous impression of [?others/those/their] sufferings which my imagination could not limit [?to] a noble act...a Sunset &c &c &c

This is quoted from George Whalley's edition of Coleridge's Marginalia [2:45]. I haven't seen the actual letter (it's at the University of Texas), but Whalley notes that ‘the writing of the original is somewhat difficult to decipher’.

Whalley thinks this is a personal expression of Coleridgean anguish. He notes that STC, in his more despairing moods, accused Sara Hutchinson of ‘unkindness unmerited’ and general ‘unresponsiveness’, and speculates that this might be another little iteration of his hopeless love for Asra. Why, you ask, would he scribble such a thing in the back of the copy of Claudian his friend Southey had given him? The answer is: there's no reason why he would, except that he did sometimes jot odd and unrelated things in books he had to hand (though it should be said, the vast majority of his marginalia relates to the specific works in which they are written). At any rate, Whalley tentatively flexes the metaphorical muscles of his idea.

‘She’ may recall the letter ש‬ (shin) the initial letter of C's anagram of ‘Hutchinson’, which he sometimes used alone as her name ... ‘She’ could be a disguise for Coleridge himself. Yet it is also possible that this agitated note does not record any actual or personal incident, but may rather be a sketch for a poem, or for a dramatic episode. [Whalley, Coleridge Marginalia (Routledge/Princeton U P 1984), 2:45]

I'm going to bump Whalley's ‘yet it is also possible that’ to ‘it is much more likely that’, and indulge in a little speculation of my own. Of course we cannot be sure what the marginalium means, but I wonder if this is Coleridge starting to tinker with the notion of a poem inspired by, or perhaps even a continuation of, Claudian's most famous work, the unfinished epic de raptu Proserpinae, ‘The Rape of Prosperpine’ (AD 395-97).

Claudian's poem a retelling of the myth of Pluto's abduction of the beautiful Proserpina, the Roman version of the Greek myth in which Hades abducts Persephone. Book 1 is set in the underworld, Pluto raging that he has been left wifeless for so long. He demands that Jove provide one, and Jove chooses Prosperina, daughter of Ceres (the goddess of agriculture, fertility and motherhood), instructing Venus to tempt the girl away from her house so that Pluto can nab her. Book 2 starts with Venus, and the two virgin goddesses Diana and Pallas, leading Prosperina into sunny meads to gather flowers. A huge cleft (‘hiatus immensus’ [2:187]) opens abruptly in the earth, Pluto rides through in his chariot, snatches Proserpina and hurtles away. The two virgin goddesses were not expecting this, and try to stop it—Pallas bangs Pluto's chariot with her shield—but there's nothing they can do. Proserpina is understandably distraught.

Interea volucri fertur Proserpina curru
caesariem diffusa Noto planctuque lacertos
verberat et questus ad nubila tendit inanes:
... ‘o fortunatas alii quascumque tulere
raptores ! saltem communi sole fruuntur.
sed mihi virginitas pariter caelumque negatur,
eripitur cum luce pudor, terrisque relictis
servitum Stygio ducor captiva tyranno.’ [2:247-64]

Proserpine is carried off away in the flying chariot, her hair blown back by the wind, beating her arms in grief and calling in vain remonstrance to the clouds: ... ‘How fortunate are those girls seized by other rapists; for they at least can still enjoy the broad light of day, while I, together with my virginity, relinquish the very air of heaven; both innocence and daylight are stolen from me. I have no choice but to leave this world behind me and be carried a captive bride to serve the tyrant of Stygius.’

Pluto is moved to tears by her lament, and wipes his eyes with his ‘rusty cloak’ (‘ferrugineus amictus’ [2:275]). Not that he lets her go, mind. No: the chariot rides on into Tartarus, where Pluto marries the poor girl. Book 2 closes with them in their bridal chamber together.

In Book 3 Ceres dreams of her daughter, miserable and rebuking her for her abandonment, and wakes in terror. She hurries to Prosperina's house and discovers it empty, spiders'-webs covering her daughter's loom.

Ut domus excubiis incustodita remotis
et resupinati neglecto cardine postes
flebilis et tacitae species adparuit aulae ...,
haeserunt lacrimae; nec vox aut spiritus oris
redditur, atque imis vibrat tremor ossa medullis;
succidui titubant gressus; foribusque reclusis,
dum vacuas sedes et desolata pererravit
atria. [3:146-55]

When she she saw the unguarded house, its gatekeepers gone, the rusted hinges, the doorposts knocked flat, and the sad state of the silent halls ... she could not weep, nor speak, nor even breathe; a trembling shook the very marrow of her bones; her faltering steps stumbled. She threw open the doors and wandered through the empty rooms and deserted halls.

That description makes me think not just that Tennyson knew this poem (he'd studied Claudian at school, and translated portions of his verse before he was fourteen), but that he was specifically alluding to it in ‘Mariana’ (1830). But I don't want to get distracted. In the poem: Ceres finds an old nurse who relates what happened to Proserpina, and then, like a Hyrcan tiger [3:263], goes raging along the flanks of Mount Olympus demanding that her daughter be restored to her. That's where the poem ends.

:3:

Clearly, Claudian planned a longer work: presumably a six-book epic (maybe a twelve-book epic, although it might have been a stretch filling out so many hexameters with what remains to be told). The rest of the story is well-known: Ceres, heartbroken, refuses to let cereal crops grow, and the people starve, until Jove resolves to restore her daughter to her. Pluto reluctantly gives his bride up, but tricks her by giving her twelve pomegranate seeds to eat. Having eaten the food of the Underworld Proserpina is compelled to return there, but because she only eats six of the seeds she only returns for half the year. None of that is in Claudian's unfinished poem.

So let's return to Coleridge's Claudian marginalium.

She sate as square and solemn as an empty chair when you look at it in a half dreamy Mood—. On the reproach of shedding tears, for a Lady in Pain? Loss of Fortune? Any other cause respecting myself principally? Immediate peril of death? No! never—but treachery unkindness unmerited & implying want of believed goodness, in an instantaneous impression of [?others/those/their] sufferings which my imagination could not limit [?to] a noble act...a Sunset &c &c &c

Let's imagine that these are the first, very tentative thoughts for a continuation of De Raptu Proserpinae. ‘She’, here, would be Ceres, hollowed out with grief by the loss of her daughter. The empty chair would be the one mentioned in Claudian's poem, unoccupied before Proserpina's loom. We might even take an extra step of imagining that Coleridge is doodling a little verse-doggerel, much as he did with a couple of lines of the Iliad. That would give us:

She sate as square
And solemn as
An empty chair
When you look at
In a half dreamy Mood—

...which is the kind of thing easy to spin-on:

She sate as square
And solemn as
An empty chair
Look'd all on as
In half dreamy Mood
Bereft of her brood
Virginal and fair
All stol'n chicks
Beyond the Styx
Voided by her despairs
As empty chairs ...

and so on. But this isn't the direction in which Coleridge goes.

Instead (to continue my speculation) the thought of Ceres cast-down and weeping leads Coleridge to ponder a tearful woman as a topic for a poem. He jots down a possible title: ‘On the Reproach of Shedding Tears, for a Lady in Pain’. From that title we'd imagine a poem repudiating reproach. But why is the woman in this poem crying? Has she been threatened with death? But STC refuses to believe a true lady would ever weep for such a selfish reason (‘No! never’), so instead he tabulates a few of the things that might make the lady cry: the treachery of others; unmerited unkindness; an undeserved loss of reputation (‘implying want of believed goodness’). The first of these might be carrying on the Proserpina/Ceres story, as might the second, although less pointedly (though the third moves us in a different direction). Then there's a slightly obscure fourth reason for possible grief: ‘an instantaneous impression of those sufferings which [my] imagination could not limit to a noble act’—something to do with empathy with the sufferings of others (let's say: her daughter), which is a perfectly good reason to cry, although I'm not sure to what the noble act might refer.

But it's actually the final open-ended reference to ‘...a Sunset &c &c &c’ that seals the deal for me. Because at the unfinished end of De Raptu Proserpina, Ceres demands to know why she is weeping, and promises to roam the world broadcasting her grief:

Largis tunc imbribus ora madescunt.
‘quid ? tantum dignum fieri dignumque taceri?
hei mihi, discedunt omnes. quid vana moraris
ulterius? non bella palam caelestia sentis?
quin potius natam pelago terrisque requiris? ...
non Rheni glacies, non me Riphaea tenebunt
frigora; non dubio Syrtis cunctabitur aestu.
stat finem penetrare Noti Boreaeque nivalem
vestigare domum; primo calcabitur Atlas
occasu facibusque meis lucebit Hydaspes.’ [3:311-25]

Copious tears then fell like rain down her cheeks. ‘Why these tears?’ [she asked herself], ‘why this silence? Woe is me; everyone else has abandoned me. Why do you stay here to no purpose? Can't you see it is open war between you and heaven now? Wouldn't it be better to search sea and land for your daughter? ... Neither the glacier-clogged Rhine nor Alpine frosts shall prevent me; the dubious tides of Syrtes shall not hold me back. I am determined to penetrate the fastnesses of the South, and to explore the snowy home of Boreas, the North Wind. I will climb Mount Atlas on the brink of sunset and illuminate Hydaspes’ stream with my torches.

That's Ceres saying: I shall go to the extreme south and the extreme north, to the extreme west (the sunset on Atlas) and the extreme east (The Hydaspes river was where Alexander the Great enjoyed his last victory, annexing the Punjab to his empire) to search for my daughter. I'm speculating that Coleridge reading these lines, began to think about continuing them, or writing something inspired by them: tears—Sunset—&c &c &c

Which brings me back to the pettifogging note on which I opened this blogpost. Does it matter which edition Coleridge owned? Of course not, except that the 1650 edition presents a dully respectable face to the world, where the 1677 dramatically and indeed rather lubriciously represents the moment of Proserpina's abduction, the trauma that leads to the empty chair, the grief of the mother and the resolution to search as far as the sunset to recover her. Might it not have been a prompt to Coleridge's imagination, howsoever abbreviated?

Coleridge Blog Reanimation

Last year was a period of latency for this blog, pretty much. After a number of years of fairly intensive mining of the Cole Ridge, I spent 2017 working on other things. But there are glimmers of life in the blog again now. You see, having put a couple of other projects to bed, I'm revving up to work on a funded research project to do with Coleridge's Latin. That means I'm going to start blogging here again, testing ideas, jotting things down, writing posts. If the archive of material on this blog constitutes a string of often heroically abstruse and reader-unfriendly lucubrations, I can promise that what's going to follow will be considerably more abstruse and rebarbative. Few people are interested in Coleridge nowadays; many fewer have any interest in neo-Latin culture (especially this late in the day—I mean, the day of neo-Latin culture: the nineteenth-century was the last gasp of any serious European Latinity). And the crossover between those two groups is minuscule. And that's the target audience I'm going for with these posts. Onward!

Cameron's Christabel (1866)

This is Julia Margaret Cameron's famous photograph (more precisely: it's an albumen silver print from a glass negative) of Coleridge's 'Christabel'. The model is Cameron's own niece, May Prinsep, who quite a bit later became Alfred Tennyson's son Hallam's second wife. The image is from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has, rather sportingly, made 325,000 of its artworks and images available online free of copyright, for anybody to download, reproduce, remix and share. The Met reckons the image is supposed to show Christabel before her 'corruption' by Geraldine. I have my doubts about that. Eye of the beholder, I suppose.

Things I like about this image include: its straightforwardness, the blankness of Prinsep's expression, the aesthetic balance of its lit top-left and shadowy bottom-right, the way this pulls into sharper focus the triangular shape formed by the hair, framing the face. It is a reticent image, which suits its source text, since whatever else it is, 'Christabel' is a poem that refuses to disclose the secret in its heart, and has managed to keep that secret for two centuries now. Cameron's photo makes a rather refreshing change from the more outré images that latter day sensibilities have tended to supply when illustrating what people like to call 'the Prototypical Lesbian Vampire Story'. I mean this sort of thing:

I don't mean to hate-on that image, but it seems to me to misunderstand something crucial about sexual allure—to miss, that is, the way desire tends to fasten on what is withheld rather than what is conspicuously proffered. The way desire is always, to an extent, perverse, in the sense that it grounds itself in the hidden and taboo and strange. This 21st-century image, we might say, understands that desire is perverse, but wears the semiotics of its transgression all on the surface, almost as if it wants to placate perversity, to get it out of the way, so that we can get on with the clean healthy fucking. Coleridge's poem doesn't present desire that way.

Prinsep, in Cameron's photo, looks young because she was young: she had just turned thirteen when the image was taken. And if her expression is, shall we say, unforthcoming then that is part of the logic of (to use an anachronistic term) teenagerdom. But it works beautifully for this image. I'm not denying that 'Christabel' is a poem about awakening sexuality and same-sex desire and transgression and all that; and I have no problem with Queer appropriation of the text as a ground for the uninhibited performance and display of gay identity. But the poem itself is much more ambiguous than this, and not only because it is unfinished. It is a work that says: sex, especially when we first become aware of it as a force in our lives, is as much a secret inwardness as a mode of outward being-in-the-world. Sex is something structurally 'about' connecting with other people, of course, but it comes into our adolescent existence in the first case as something that seals us away from other people (something, through embarassment and convention, we hide from family and others), something difficult, balanced between thrilling and alarming, a mode of possibility that is also a mode of guilty frustration. Sexual desire, at the beginning, is a mode of truancy from family and society.

Coleridge's poem dramatises that through Christabel's secrecy and its flavours of shame, deceit and disguise: creeping around outside after dark, bringing Geraldine back to her bed without her father knowing and so on. Cameron's photo, I think, internalises that drama (for many adolescents, because sex starts as fantasy unanchored to experience, such fantasy tends to veer into unrealistic directions, more melodramatic and wild and Goth than 'real life'), and Prinsep's expression, her lack of affective engagement with the camera, neatly captures a sense of something occluded. Compare, for example, this image from 1870, again by Cameron. Here Prinsep is seventeen, but she is now inhabiting her sense of own physical allure, and it generates a completely different vibe.

Or, from four years later, 'Elaine the Lily maid of Astolat' (from Tennyson's Idylls, of course), where a killing wistfulness and posed conventionalised longing has entered the composition:

Better by far is the cool blankness of the thirteen-year-old Prinsep's gaze. That gets at something really crucial in Coleridge's text.

Lyrical Ballads: Reunion Tour

A pendant to yesterday's post from the pen of the mighty @keatsandchapman, reproduced here by kind permission. It may be the greatest work of art of the modern age. I particularly like the expression on Sam's face. And the 'Eddie' T-shirt is a masterstroke. On the constitution of ROCK! and ROLL! according to the idea of each.

"It is an Ancient Mariner/And he ROCK!-eth one of three ..."

At over thirteen minutes this was, until recently, the longest song in Iron Maiden's repertoire. I'll confess I was never as big a Maiden fan as some of my schoolfriends (Powerslave was released in 1984 man! nineteen eighty four! nearly forty years ago!), but there was no escaping them during my adolescence. And on this track they do the proper Sam 'Metal' Coleridge thing.

It's splendid, in its way:—I mean, as an example of its type. I can hardly say that without it sounding condescending, but I don't mean it like that. There are, of course, very evident differences between Coleridge's poem and this song, and not just in the trivial sense that 'the rock song' is a different mode to 'the poem'. Some rock songs capture the sense of a given poem pretty well, after all. This one, though, mismatches Coleridge's original almost completely. It is rapid (it is long, but it is still rapid), urgent, kinetic, driven. Like all Maiden's music it aspires to the condition of violence: noisy, punchy, thrashy, always plunging into the fray. Coleridge's poem is none of these things, with the possible exception of 'violent', and where that is concerned its mode of violence is radically different to Steve Harris's aesthetic understanding of the term. Coleridge is more interested in the obstacles to the mariner than in the mariner's progress; Maiden are more interested in the full-tilt hurtling on-and-on-and-on than in anything that might try to get in its way. Even the song's second section, its tempo slowed almost to languidness, is underlaid by an insistent march of guitar arpeggio triplets. We could put it this way: Iron Maiden, like all rock bands, work to the beat of the hammer on the anvil; Coleridge's poem works like the pull and draw of the oar in the water.

I'm not suggesting the Maiden version is prosodically simple. Actually, it's not. For one thing, this song is in four sections each marked by a different time signature: 4/4, 12/8, 16/8 and 2/4 (the song also varies markedly in tempo from section to section). And the time signature is only half the story. Take, for instance, the opening lines. Coleridge's original is an essentially iambic ballad meter modified with occasional extra unstressed syllables, for that 'Percy's Reliques' authentic roughness:

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
'By thy long beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?' [1-4]

The doubled-unstressed ending to 'mariner' in line 1 makes for an effective dying fall; where the doubled-unstressed 'and he' starting the next line is like somebody inserting an extra step in their stride to catch-up a more rapidly walking companion. Both together neatly, and understatedly, generate a sense of marine ebb and swell, something perfectly matching the larger logic of the poem. These oaring iambs run steadily through the whole poem, such that when Coleridge varies them, for instance by swapping out iambs for trochees ...

Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship,
Yet she sail'd softly too:
Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze—
On me alone it blew. [461-4]

... he reverts directly back to a standard iambic trimeter in the alternating lines (twice, here) to anchor the divergence from the norm. Coleridge's metrical variations, in other words, are there not only to create the ambiance of an old English ballad, but also to generate a vibe of prosodic flow and eddy.

Iron Maiden's version of the same story is much more prosodically programmatic, driven by Nicko McBrain's bang-CRASH!-bang-CRASH! drumming. I notate the first section 4/4, but it could equally well be notated 2/4: a long string of short, rapid, repeated rhythmic elements aggregating into a solid piece of musical momentum. What's interesting is the way the melody and the lead guitar work against the grain of this base-four rhythm with a series of triplet guitar fills and a vocal line that re-casts Coleridge's original text into anapests:

Hear the rime of the ancient mariner
See his eye as he stops one of three
Mesmerises one of the wedding guests
Stay here and listen to the nightmares of the sea.

And the music plays on, as the bride passes by
Caught by his spell and the mariner tells his tale.

Driven south to the land of the snow and ice
To a place where nobody's been ...

and so on. It's a teachable moment, actually, prosodically-speaking. That first line, for instance, swaps out a spondee for one of its anapests, after the venerable Classical rules that permit such exchanges: 'Hĕar thĕ ríme // ŏf thĕ án // ciént má // ĭnĕr [X] // Sĕe hĭs éye // ăs hĕ stóps // ŏne ŏf thrée ...'  Looking at it written down, we might expect the first word, 'Hear', to be a stressed syllable; but when you listen you realise that's not the way Dickinson actually sings it. All this is underscored by the duh-duh-DUM-duh-duh-DUM galloping-anapestic rhythm laid down by Adrian Smith's Jackson Dinky.

What this does is counterpoint a basically (and rapidly) triadic melodic and musical pattern against a basically foresquare underlying beat, which in turn makes for a wealth of interesting rhythmic creative tensions and localised moments. Add in the positively albatrossic soaring-swooping Dave Murray solo (it begins at 9:15), and the various charming-ungainly grace-notes, such as Dickinson pronouncing 'shrives' wrong ('And the hermit shreeves the mariner of his sins') and we have a winner:

And the wedding guest's a sad and wiser man
And the tale goes on and on and on.

And on, and on.

If there's a more serious point in amongst all this (and why can't we take rock and roll as serious, anyway?) it would be the larger contrast, something which points to two quite different aesthetics. We might put it this way: Coleridge's poetry, as poetry, is more death-drive, always looking for excuses to stop itself; Maiden's music, like all rock, is much more libido, always looking for excuses to keep thundering on. And on. And on.

'Nonsense' (1806?)

This six-line poem was written in one of Coleridge's notebooks from the 1806-07 period; that is, after his return from Malta, and during the renewal of his hopeless passion for 'Asra', Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth's unmarried sister-in-law. It's possible, though not provable, that the 'holy Place' mentioned in line 2 is Coleorton Hall and its beautiful grounds, where Coleridge stayed for a time. The owner of the hall, Sir George Beaumont, was a friend and patron of Wordsworth, and had invited the poet to live there (in fact Wordsworth, his wife Mary, sister Dorothy and Sara stayed at Coleorton Hall Farm, half a mile or so to the west of the house itself). Coleridge and his young son Hartley joined the party for Christmas and New Year, 1806-07. If that's when this little notebook-jotting was written, then it dates from the same period of the 'EPOCH' that shook Coleridge so profoundly, and about which you can read here (though presumably, given its content, this poem was written before the 'EPOCH' itself). Here's the poem:

O Sara! never rashly let me go
Beyond the precincts of this holy Place,
Where streams as pure as in Elysium flow
And flowrets view reflected Grace,
What tho in vain the melted Metals glow,
We die, and dying own a more than mortal love.

Richard Holmes is certain this poem is 'about his physical desire for Asra'. 'The image of pure "streams",' he says, rather bafflingly, 'contrasted with "melted Metals" has an evident sexual connotation'. [Holmes (ed) Coleridge: Selected Poetry (Penguin 1996), 323]. Is 'pure stream' really a sexual symbol? Is 'molten metal'? We might be on surer ground picking out the implied intimate embrace of 'never let me go' in line 1, or discoursing on the double-entendre of to die from line 6. Then again, STC did write in his notebook that, during the visit to Coleorton, his love for Asra was 'like a Volcano beneath a sea always burning, tho' in silence' [Notebooks 2:2984]. Striking image, that, and perhaps related.

We can certainly construe, with minimal effort, a more-or-less conventional love-poem out of all this: the speaker begs his lover never to permit him to leave this Eden, where flowers growing beside a crystal stream view her image reflected in it: Sara's face as she gazes at her own reflection: Grace itself. The 'melted metals' are a little harder to fit into this reading (something to do with the volcanic heat of the speaker's passion, maybe, a contaminant or scorching danger) which leads to the piety of the last line. Maybe.

Coleridge gave this little poem a title: 'Nonsense'. It was one of a series of several dozen notebook poems grouped together by Mays as 'metrical experiments', many of which are accompanied by the notebook by schemes of scansion and discussions of metres. So maybe a better way to read this poem is to concentrate less on its content and more on its wordplay and palindromic form. Take the first line: "O Sara! never rashly let me go" starts and ends with 'O'; 'Sara nev[a] Ras-' balances Sara's name forward and backward in a kind of sonic palindrome. The line could almost be written out as a rhyming poem in its own rhyming abbcca:

O
Sara
Never
Rashly
Let me
Go.

Word leads into word: 'flow' becomes 'flowrets'; the 'ret' element of the latter word expands into 'reflected'; 'melted' becomes its near-anagram 'metals'; 'die and' slips into 'dying', 'more than' leads to 'mortal'. In other words, this is a poem in which words melt into other words, sound flowing on and something, palindromically, flowing back. Hence: streams, reflections, 'melted metals'. Hence all the rhymes, both in their conventional places at the end of the lines but also all along the lines too. The neat thing about this is that the poem ends when the rhyme-patterning is broken for the first time, by that most freighted of words, 'love', which rhymes with nothing. Words and names melt and flow under the volcanic heat of unsatisfied desire. Sense, common and marital, melts and burns into the non-sense of this impossible love. And this reading, if I'm right about the place of composition, provides us a possible germ for the whole thing: Coleridge at Coleorton.