Water, Water Everywhere ...

 

Could these be Coleridge's most famous lines?

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink. [Ancient Mariner (1834 version), lines 119-122]

Where did they come from? Out of Coleridge's pure imagination, perhaps. Still: ‘it is scarcely practicable for a man,’ as he once noted, ‘to write in the ornamented style on any subject without finding his poem, against his will and without his previous consciousness, a cento of lines that had pre-existed in other works’ [Griggs (ed), Coleridge: Collected Letters (1956-71), 3:469-70].

We know that Coleridge read Angelo Poliziano, or Politian (1454-94). He talks about him in Church and State [CC 10:64] and variously in the Marginalia and Notebooks [374, 1673, 2670]. And in the Biographia he mocks George Canning for plagiarising some Poliziano in his university prize-winning poem Iter ad Meccam, ‘The Pilgrimage to Mecca’:

‘In the Nutricia of Politian, there occurs this line:

“Pura coloratos interstrepit unda lapillos.”

Casting my eye on a University prize poem, I met this line:

“Lactea purpureos interstrepit unda lapillos.”

Now look out in the Gradus for purus, and you find, as the first synonyme, lacteus; for coloratus, and the first synonyme is purpureas. I mention this by way of elucidating one of the most ordinary processes in the ferrumination of these centos.’ [Biographia, ch 1]

Centos again. Coleridge's mind was running on questions of plagiary, advertent or inadvertent. The first line of Latin quoted there (it's from Poliziano’s Rustica rather than his Nutricia, but who's counting) means: ‘the pure stream goes murmuring over little coloured pebbles’. The plagiarised line means: ‘the milk-white stream goes murmuring over the little purple pebbles.’ Canning capped his time as a student at Oxford by winning the poetry prize in 1789. He went on, of course, to become Prime Minister. Here Coleridge pays back the ridicule Canning had subjected him to in his reactionary newspaper The Anti-Jacobin, by accusing the eminent statement of plagiary (‘ferrumination’ seals the joke: the Latin ferrumino means ‘to cement, solder, join’, and ‘soldering’ is, of course, the principle strategy involved in canning, a process patented in 1810). 

What does all this have to do with the Ancient Mariner? Well, here's one of Poliziano's more famous short poems, ‘In Amicam’ [Epigrammata, 64]:

Allicis, expellis, sequeris, fugis, es pia, et es trux;
   me vis, me non vis, me crucias, et amas.
promittis, promissa negas, spem mi eripis, et das.
   iam iam ego vel sortem Tantale malo tuam.
durum ferre sitim circum salientibus undis,
   durius in medio nectare ferre sitim.

P.'s ‘amica’ is the woman he loves, and her treatment of him is not consistent. Tricky to capture the compression of the Latin in English, mind. Here's a fairly slack version:

You lure me, you banish me; you follow, you flee; you're kind and are cruel;
   you want me, you don't want me; you torment me, you're in love.
You promise then deny your promise, you snatch away my hope and offer it.
   Right now I feel like Tantalus in wanting you:
how hard my thirst, surrounded by salty waves,
   how hard my thirst in the midst of such nectar!

Here's another version:

You tease, reject; follow, flee; are kind, cruel;
   want me, don't want; torment me, are loving.
You vow, break your vow, crush hope and give it.
   Right now I'm Tantalus in wanting you:
hard thirst surrounded by salty waves,
   hard in the midst of such nectar to thirst

That's probably a bit elliptical. At any rate, it strikes me that Coleridge's potent image of desperate thirst in the midst of salt water has an antecedent in Poliziano's little love poem. Then again, I'm not accusing him of Canning-like plagiary. These things register, sinking into the mulch of the creative imagination, and are reworked. By excerpting the image from Poliziano's mannered itinerary of erotic contrasts Coleridge frees it from its rather starchy wit and re-somatizes it as something universal, something indeed existential. Immature poets, as Eliot said, imitate, mature poets steal and good poets make what they take into something better.

Kubla Khan Continued 2

Kubla Khan Continued 1 is here.

[This is part 2 of an occasional, and I'm perfectly aware pointless, series, in which I body-forth a possible completion of Coleridge's famous ‘Kubla Khan’. You know the story: out walking in the Somerset countryside, STC stopped off at a local farm (Adam Nicolson thinks it was Withycombe Farm in the village of Culbone, near Porlock) troubled with an attack of ‘dysentery’. He took a slug of opium to deal with his diarrhoea, blissed out for a while, and returned to consciousness with, so he claimed, ‘Kubla Khan’ fully formed in his head. Straightaway he began writing the poem out, only to be interrupted ‘by a person on business from Porlock’ who ‘detained by him above an hour’, such that ‘on his return to his room [he] found to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purpose of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast’. There is some reason to doubt the absolute verisimilitude of this account. And indeed, if we're honest, there are two ways, and not a third, of apprehending ‘Kubla Khan’ as a poem. One is to say, with Harold Bloom, that it's not only not a fragment, it's actually one of the most perfectly finished and perfect poems in English. The other is to take a more, let's say, Thomas McFarland approach and say: yes, it is a fragment, but its fragmentariness is integral to its effectiveness, and the urge to ‘complete’ it does a kind of violence to the text's evocative distinctiveness. Both possibilities exclude the notional third, that it's a fragment worth continuing. Still, here we are. Unable to offer any kind of defence of my actions at this point, in this place (although I do have a nascent Notes Towards a Theory of Aesthetic Defragmentation brewing) I shall step discretely back into the shadows, pausing only to note that I take my cue as to the possible direction Coleridge would have taken this poem, had he completed it, from this old post.]

PART II

The Khan’s Armada jostled in the bay
Barge, Warship, Doww,
Each keel, each prow
And chiming hollow hull
Clanging flank to flank
Innumerable in rank:
Whilst the tide strains full
Red marks the grisly sky at break of day
And gongs make signal to speed the boats away
Cutting sea as earth is cut by plough.

Depart! Depart!
For the far Nipponian shore
            And war!
Anchors upstart!
In long procession, more and more.
The last boat lingers on the breaking tide.
Three soul-expanding shouts the skies divide;
Three wild, responsive cheers re-echo wide.
All sweet vibration 
Tremble in the ear
As if in holy fear
Approaching the human mind

In humblest prostration.
The last delightful sounds they'll ever hear!

Still the white signal, fading, strains the eyes,
Still the lorn lover with his hand replies:
Till melting into air—the object lost
And duty sternly calling to his post,
Twixt him and joy th'eternal curtain's drawn,
No more of bliss to know returning dawn. 

Sailing a stilly sea, the fleet as one

Turns backward stern upon the setting sun.

How beautiful this ocean night!
Dewy stars supply the light,
No mist obscures, no little cloud
Breaks the whole serene of sky.
In full-swarmed glory starlights now
Flit firefly-like about the prow
As Kubla’s fleet skim silvery by:
Close hugging every warlike ark
The ocean’s bosom girdled with the dark.
How beautiful is night!

But, eye, descend, O descend!
To where the depths of water end
Bitumen-black bed of ocean's ground
Unlit, unseen, opaque to sound:
                         Descend!
Leave far above the never ceasing roar
Of titan-waves whose grip will break the shore
From rock to boulder and so to sand.
Descend to where air, sky and land
And merely phantasmic dreams:
To where all drowning bodies tend
To where hot seabed chasms rend
In utter silence and dark
                          Descend!
Blackening in ultimate deep
To where a timeless oozeing swells
To where ebon Atar, spirit, dwells
Compressed of ancient malice, half-asleep
Half-dreaming of all ruin’s creep
That spreads a boneless tentic arm
And wills man’s harm.

Ancestral spirits, they that drave
And urged proud Kublai on to war
Appearing flitting-wise in dreams
That sank, as all sinks, through ocean’s streams
Down to the monster in its cave
Within his dreaming dire and huge
With magick power of subterfuge
And mingling with the roar
Of the portentous tides
That under upper waters pour
Water slides and aye backslides.
Atar half-woke to half-declaim
In abysmal growl a spell infame:
He pronounced the deep unholy name.
Pronounced it thrice, pronounced it dire
To stir a whirlpool in that mire
That rose to where the waves aspire.

Whence enmity arose between
Th’ancestral powers of Xanadu
And this far-sunken power marine
None can tell the story true.
We only know Atar stands gainst
The Chinee empire pressing east:
And makes their coast impermious fence
Barring imperial ambition hence
Vowing they never be released.

Summoned by deep art, storms appear
Swift from the breezy north's assertive gales:
A raging hurl of tidal atmosphere
T’impel the course and swell the yielding sails
A rush the trembling craft past power to steer.

Before the sightless breeze the vessels fly
Clambers the mountain sea, t’approach the sky
And plunge again into the wave-trough nigh.
That now the refluent fleet evades the sight,
High-briny peaks and plunging water vales

Or thund'ring down the depths that foam below,
Ploughs up the surging brine with dashing prow.
The rattling cordage whirls, the sail-yards strain,
The winding pipe re-echoes o'er the main:

Firm in their stations ply the obedient crew,
To trim the lines, and strain the rudder
Haul on the beating sheets with sinew'd force,
Wrestling the vast machine’s unsteady course
Whist wind and magic make the beams shudder
               And darkness palls
               As wind heaps walls
Of water side on side to block all view.

A mast is rent
A keel is cracked
And down is sent
Ruined and racked
Warship and barge, small and large.
As gales crash in and fierce rebound
Ship after ship staggers and is drowned


*******

Far round the globe
Th’Abyssin mantissa rolls to white her eyes
And moans a magnifying chant.
She seats herself upon the earth,
Bows her head, tucks tight her robe
While hairgirt dwarfs their queen attend
Keeping holy distance til the trance doth end.* 

Phantoms of sublimity flit
Death and rebirth
A vision of a mighty fo'csle split
And crashed into the ocean
Reverberating through the depths
She sees how the winds bursting through
From ev'ry point are whirl'd, and still renew
Their circuit: rapid torrents gushing spray
In rivers that their tribute to the Ocean pay,
Whose vast will never overswell its shores.
For strait, in vapours, by the Sun exhaled
Or through Earth's secret caverns, it restores
All back again in misty cloudhead veiled.
So does the maiden’s hymn
Encircle back into its source
Web'd mystic beauties brim
Paths intricately retrouse.
The circled dome, the whirlpool’s grip!
Lamenting each engulféd ship.

He who crossed the waters
For rich Nippon’s land
With his many Sons and Daughters
And Armies to command.
Found them all the Children
Of one great Lord of Love
Whose Mercy from a thunderhead
Strikes scorpion-lightning in a spread

White antlers from above.
What the meed of her Song?
That the ceaseless on-flow
And myriad Echo
Which from the welcoming Hearts of the Pure
Repeats and works ever to prolong
Each difference Tone all meanings Just
Until in still-harmonious notes all crumbles into dust.

----------

* ‘In the middle of Abyssinia there are men called Pyganmies, who speak the same language as the other inhabitants of the country. They are very short, the tallest being only two cubits in height, most of them only one and a half. Their hair is very long, going down to the knees and even lower, and their beards are larger than those of any other men. When their beards are full grown they leave off wearing clothes and let the hair of their head fall down behind far below the knees, while their beard trails down to the feet in front. When their body is thus entirely covered with hair they fasten it round them with a girdle, so that it serves them for clothes. Their sheep are no bigger than lambs, their oxen, asses, horses, mules, and other beasts of burden about the size of rams. 3000 of them attend on the monarch of Abyssinia.’ Ctesius INDIKA

Kubla Khan Continued 1

:1:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
           Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.


:2:

Tis Taindu's golden square and street
And Xandu's spacious vales and trees
Where many pilgrim travellers meet
All chanting for an end to peace.
           “To war!” they cry
           “All glory ay!
Where shields ring and arrows fly!”

Proud Kublai on a throne of jet
Beneath a canopy of gold
            Nods one
            Nod all
And ever and far off still grinds the sound
Of that unseen and mighty river
Whose deep sublime full fall
Passing far beneath the ground
Where rock and darkness aye dissever
To drive with force along its course
And gush unseen into unknown abysses
Home to forgetfulnesses of human wishes
Kubla himself approaches
Astride a Mongol steed
And eighty wooden coaches
Follow his imperial lead.

Who taught thee thus to venture down th' abyss
And ope the regions of primeval bliss?
            A song, a song
            Is borne along!
With melody as fine as its through-pulse is strong!
Whether thy Chinee orgies I behold,
Or Arimaspian rich with conquer'd gold;
Hymalian heights whereon delusive sprites
Of bitter frost and vagrant tempest play
Spout smoaks of snow through the day
And lead the wandering to their doom by night
             Where'er
             This air
             Will travel there
And thrill my mind's true ear and lift me past despair!

The woodsman stands beneath the arch
Of drooping birch or feathery larch,
Or mountain-ash, that o'er it bends,
And sees some streamlet as it wends;
Some brook whose tune its course betrays,
As it is drawn to feed the hidden ways
Of mighty Alph the hidden.
The woodsman has his new command
To fell the trees that dot the land
To hew the timbers into mighty strips
That best can fit a navy's ships.
To planks of oak and planks of pine;
And water gives itself to brine.
All as the Khan has bidden.

To trace the rivers where they flow,
Serenely brawling, fiercely slow
Down to the sea where all streams go.
Streams that over summits leap,
Or in rock-scooped basins sleep;
Pools that deeper are than deep.
Bursting foam in bright cascade,
Thronged with lotus in the shade
Freighted with vessels timber-made.

Till earth and sky themselves grow mute,
The maiden's floating songs salute
The Khan's great armys route:
Such the flow and such the dance
Where soldiers strut and horses prance
Astrologer and Necromance
Provisioner and Royal Scribe
Forsworn and tied to Kublai's tribe
Advance! Advance!

A million men! A million men!
Dance stately out and through the glen
And pass beyond the homeland's ken.

Ten thousand ships! Ten thousand craft!
From galleon-yacht to simple raft,
With Kublai's horde as cargo draught!

***

Wouldst thou know the true most truly,
More than middling mortals find?
Drink close fragrance from the lily
Than faint odour on the wind?
Wouldst thou know why sunlight pauses
To cast its shadows on the mind?
Know of what the moon discourses
Looking down on humankind?
Then strike the cithar and the timbrel!
Pound at drums and shake the cymbal
Cast thy voice o'er the restless sea
Of aye-surging infinity!
Grief shall ope the founts of truth,
And heaven sing the truth to thee.
We knew this at our earliest birth
And will again when we quit this earth
And if, between, our memory
Cannot quite grasp such mystery
We need but patience, patience now
Await aye still th' immortan How.
Patience child of grief
The weary unrelief
Patience who is strong
From grief that is lifelong.
Grief in darkling manner freeing.
Wouldst thou yet unriddle of Being
Further than others can?
Sorrow shall give thine eyes new lustre
Sorrow's trumpet is thy muster
That Providence and Mars thus toy with man
To end what it began.

To Love and Sorrow all Nature draws;
If the riddle be read,
The code behind eternal laws
And each divergent thread
Of its mazy texture, and discover:
Whence the ravel spread.

Beside the summer sea I stand,
Where slow billows swelling shine.
How beautiful this pearly sand!
That waves, and winds, and years refine!
Be this delicious quiet mine—
The joy of youth, so sweet before,
When I could thus my frame recline,
And watch th’ entangled weeds ashore!

[Part 2 of this continuation is here.]

Adam Nicolson, "The Making of Poetry" (2019)

Subtitle: ‘Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels.’ Capitalisations, sic.

I don't often review books on this blog (here's one exception to that rule), but Nicolson is a writer I like, and I've been reading his latest: an account of 1797-98 in the life of STC, Dorothy and William Wordsworth. Turns out this book is three things: 1, a detailed, elegantly-written account of Wordsworth and Coleridge's friendship over this year and the epochal poetry it produced (with sidebars on Dorothy); 2, interspersed autobiographical ruminations by Nicolson walking around the west country seeking out remnants of Wordsworth-Coleridge Country in the modern world, and 3, twenty-eight woodcuts by artist Tom Hammick. De gustibus famously not admitting of disputation, you may love these. I can't say I did. Some are pretty enough:

Others, though, seemed to me, in their clonking primitivism, wholly to miss the more nuanced resonances and often oblique sublimity of the poems they notionally illustrate. As, for example, this visualisation of ‘Kubla Khan’s woman wailing for her demon lover:

Teen whining at being served brocoli. I don't mean to descend to merely cheap shots, but, come on: that's a flatly lassitudinous and crayon-doodled image to stand for one of Coleridge's most extraordinary images of the erotic sublime, surely. Other images hang on the gallery wall of the same wheelhouse:

An image, there, illustrating Wordsworth's ‘The Bald Man On The Five-Legged Horse’.

... and this from Coleridge's ‘The Selfie-Stick’. I'm snarking. I'll stop. The images are always bright and bold, and if I found them too nursery-colour-scheme and scrawly, you may find more merit in them. And either way they aren't particularly integral to what Nicolson is doing in the meat, that is the prose, of his book.

And what he is doing is good. I have some issues with some of The Making of Poetry, but the bottom-line is: I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, very often thought-provoking and vivid work. Much of it treads pretty familiar ground, and I was already aware of most of what Nicolson quotes, but the book has an energy of commitment to its topic and an, as it were, writerly charm that carried me easily all the way through it.

In a sense saying so touches on a larger issue with respect to my bailiwick, academic literary criticism. I have read and continue to read a lot of this, as you'd expect (I write quite a lot of it too) and I have to say, by bulk, the vast majority of it is balefully badly written. The badness comes in two main flavours: the energy-vampire boring kind and the rebarbatively difficult kind. Where the first of these flavours is concerned, there is simply no excuse. The deplorable truth is that many professional academics, including actual colleagues and friends of mine, just aren't interested in writing as a craft. The second flavour is trickier to account for, I think—you know what I'm talking about: that brand of lit-crit in which the prose is turgidly baroque and thorny with neologisms. Two rationales for this style are sometimes floated. One is: ‘it's just a professional jargon; you wouldn't expect to pick up a work of advanced mathematics or science or whanot and expect to be able to read it easily, now, would you?’ The other is slightly more seductive, along the lines of: ‘the critical-theoretical concepts with which I am wrestling are inherently tangled and complex and it would misrepresent them to talk about them with simplicity and clarity of style.’ The first of these justifications has never convinced me, I'll be honest. Literary critics are in the business of elucidating and contextualising great literature, and some of this literature is baffling (in which case it behooves us to de-baffle it somewhat) where most of it is eloquent and penetrating (in which case it certainly behooves us not to insert bafflement of our own). Besides, the ‘this is how they write science!’ defence won't wash. Origin of Species is beautifully written, every sentence clear as the song of a rimrubbed wineglass, and it's one of the most influential works of science ever published.

It's taken me longer to come to terms with my dislike of the second justification, the Derridean or Jamesonian one. The truth is that, though I've flirted with it in the past, nowadays it strikes me as simply a mode of intellectual narcissism. There are tens of thousands of salaried literary critics in the world whose job entails teaching students, doing admin and communicating with readers about literature. Cultural historians looking back on the history of lit-crit over the last forty years or so will surely scratch their heads as to why so many of us manifested such a precipitous retreat from this last charge, scampering away into thickets of obscurity and onano-referentiality. Still here we are.

I mention this only to note that it is possible to write literary history and literary criticsm well—elegantly, clearly, resonantly; and this book, vividly and clearly written throughout, is a case in point. Whatever issues I have with Nicolson's critical-theoretical approach, I can't argue with his elegance of expression.

The Making of Poetry is at its best as an account of the social and topographical contexts out of which the Lyrical Ballads volume was produced.  Nicolson is particularly excellent on the poverty of that war-drained and starving decade. He knows how to select telling details to bring it home to his readers (that, say, people would creep into farmers' fields in the dead of night and surreptitiously milk the cows there, so starving they were). He's also good on how the landscapes of this corner of Somerset are variegated according to a verticalising logic: how quickly a path will plunge into a humidly overgrown valley, or rise to a barer eminence from which the sea is gloriously visible. And he knows his onions when it comes to the exigences of day-to-day life of his subjects:

You could buy opium in all kinds of preparations: mixed with honey, as an electuary, meaning “something to be licked up”; powdered with chalk; sugared as an opiate confection; mixed with soap; in a liquorice lozenge or troche; in vinegar or wine; as a suppository or enema; as a plaster or embrocation; or, most popularly of all, dissolved in alcohol as laudanum, a name given it in the sixteenth century and meaning “the thing to be praised” because it was so effective at relieving pain and distress. Infants were often given Godfrey's Coridal (also called The Mother's Friend), a mixture of opium, water and treacle, to keep them quiet. In some places opium was added to the beer. [144]

A nation of heroin users! This, you can probably guess, is Nicolson setting the scene for Coleridge writing ‘Kubla Khan’, a section of his book that I especially enjoyed. At some point in the autumn, ‘perhaps early in October’, Coleridge left wife and kids at home and went walking: ‘it was for a few days, heading west, out past Williton and down into Watchet, into the thick drooping, wooded, coastal hills on the borders with Devon’ [139]. But Coleridge's perambulations were interrupted by a dose of ‘dysentery’, and he holed up somewhere in the tiny village of Culbone, where he took a slug of opium to deal with his diarrhoea, blissed out for a while, and returned to consciousness with (as he so famously claimed) ‘Kubla Khan’ fully formed in his head.

Nicolson retraces these steps. ‘Upstream from [Culbone] church,’ he tells us, ‘three or four farms claim to be the place’ where ‘Kubla Khan was written’:

Most think it might have been Ash Farm, perhaps only because it seems to look as such a place might look. Some think Parsonage Farm—but would the parson have taken him in? Few claim Silcombe Farm. Mr R J Richards, who is the fourth generation of Richardses to farm there, and all of whose ancestors are buried in Culbone's tiny streamside churchyard, thinks Coleridge wouldn't have come so far. ‘If he was ill he would have gone to the nearest and the most likely spot, to my mind,’ he told me over the farm wall. ‘That's a place that is no longer there. Withycombe. There is a pond there. Every house has a pond.’

Half a mile along the lane from Silcombe, the little valley of Withycombe itself is a steep cut into the shore-facing hill. Just down from the gate off the lane is a flattened spot which is, I guess, where the house once stood. Ground ivy now covers the grass there. ... The water of the Withycombe stream still bubbles through that abandoned place. The stone dam across the stream, built to make the pond, is still there, but broken, so that the stream now runs over the flat and nettly bed of what was once the pond. On its edge, an enormous oak, undoubtedly growing when Coleridge was here, is now encrusted and burdened with ivy. Limbs of fallen ashes now block the paths so that Withycombe now is buried in space as much as time, occupied on this late autumn afternoon only by two old ewes. Bumblebees drift down on the wind. [143]

‘This is where Coleridge in his illness had written the great fragment,’ Nicolson says. I've quoted, here, at some length to give a flavour of the book's style. Much of it is like this: rich and evocative if a little fruitily-written.

Still, if Nicolson is expert at staging his scenes, his literary critical skills are thinner. It is perhaps inevitable, give his larger approach, that Nicolson's accounts of the poems themselves will revert to a kind of biographical criticism. It's a rather reductive way of reading texts, I feel, but there you go. The take-away from The Making of Poetry is its subjects' ‘intuitive genius’ and ‘supreme awareness’: Coleridge's ‘subtilising mind, inescapable complexity and genius’ [170] and Wordsworth's ‘grandeur’, ‘great and lonely soul’ [230] and ‘poetic gift’ [262]. Wimsatt and Beardsley eat your hearts out. These kinds of judgment get iterated and reiterated throughout (with his ‘subtilising mind’ Coleridge ‘was not a simple man’ [270]; Wordsworth ‘is above the world of flux ... the whole of being, the giant self-fertilising’ [312-6]) and whilst this certainly indexes Nicolson's enthusiasm and love for his topic, it also blunts specificity, drags attention from text back to (Barthesian) dead authors. To an extent it even creates a flattening, even cartoony sense of the two men: Wordsworth deep, Coleride complex; Wordsworth profound, Coleridge restless, and so on. At one point, 21st-century Nicolson, shadowing the routes taken by his subjects two centuries earlier, starts literally to somaticise their physical symptoms like some kind of spirit medium. Reading the drafts in Wordsworth's notebooks and ‘the fugutive thoughts, moments of vision and impossible schemes in Coleridge's’

... my body, to my surprise, also started to fill with those pains, in my back and legs, tightening across my chest, numbing one arm or another, and sometimes so severe that after an hour or so I could not stand up from the chair and desk at which I had been sitting. [181]

‘It was,’ he helpfully adds, ‘psychosomatic’ (‘once I had stood up and left the house in Adscombe, it could be cured by walking’). But it figures in the book, really, as something spookier than that, a kind of daemonic possession whereby Wordsworthian poetry about

                          the obstinate pains
an uneasy spirit, [that] with a force
Inexorable would from hour to hour
For ever summon my exhausted mind

glides down the centuries and sheathes its claws in Nicolson's own muscles. I don't doubt the simple veracity of his account, of course. But as a reading of Wordsworth and Coleridge it muddies aesthetic analysis with a kind of psycho-superstition that seems to me, in the end, more belittling than anything. Perhaps that's inevitable in this mode of celebrity historicising. I don't know.

At any rate, as a literary critic, a couple of Nicolson's readings perhaps knock their heads against the ceiling of credulity a little: as when he suggests, as a key to unlocking ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, that ‘the friendship and brotherhood between Coleridge and Wordsworth find its reflection in the friendship and brotherhood of mariner and albatross’ [165]. Other judgments inhabit a mode of sometimes vatic tautological-ness. Of Coleridge's ‘Eolian Harp’ we're told ‘the wavering wind-songs of the Aeolian Harp could soothe and seduce the mind’ [85], a line whose nice alliteration compensates a little for its analytic emptiness. ‘Tintern Abbey’, Nicolson tells us, is a ‘triumph’ and ‘represent[s] one of the great moments of human consciousness’ [316] which is fine and lovely and not even necessarily wrong, but doesn't do much to actually unpack the poem.

But The Making of Poetry, despite its title, isn't really a work of literary criticism. If we read the title as implying a question (‘how is it that poetry gets made?’) Nicolson's answer is, nutshell-wise: ‘a couple of great poetic masters really inhabit a particular landscape’. A magnificent nature-writing blankness repels any more analytic interrogation of the wellsprings of creativity. Indeed, there are moments in this book when I found my brow wrinkling at Nicolson's implied model of poetic creativity. One example: ‘for poetry to surface [for Wordsworth] it had first to pass through the great digestive organ of his mind’ [183]. I find the notion of Wordsworthian mental lower-bowel a little ... uhm.

For all that, I liked this book a lot. Quite apart from anything, there's a commendable chutzpah in the enthusiasm with which Nicolson's jogs alongside his subjects, both physically and writerishly. The Making of Poetry quotes generously from the poetry and prose of Coleridge and Wordsworth, plus chunks of Dorothy. To read Nicolson's anthology is to be struck again and again just how extraordinarily good these geezers were at the writing lark, and so to align oneself with Nicolson's ubiquitous praise. And here, Nicolson offers his own:

Walking westward is a walk towards wildness. As you move into the woods and up on to the rough brown open-weave spaces of Exmoor, the Quantocks start to seem smaller and more ordinary by comparison, a gentler younger brother of this big moory expanse on the fringes of Devon, On this path now, high on the broken cliffs, the scale changes. Islands of shadow breeze across the brown and turgid sea. The Bristol Channel looks as earthy as a ploughed field. The path plunges on, up over the rounded thighs of each valley, slipping into the declivities, down into the ferny damp of the streams running off Exmoor, up again to the sound of the sea that rises from the surf breaking miles away in a constant single outbreath from below. [141]

This isn't bad writing, by any means. Indeed it's very nice, evocative and a pleasure to read. And rather like Nicolson finding himself mystically channelling Wordsworth's sore back and Coleridge's various neuralgic twinges, he is here, wittingly or otherwise, blocking out rough-edged blank verse:

On this path now, high on the broken cliffs,
The scale changes. Islands of shadow breeze
Across the brown and turgid sea of life.
The Bristol Channel looks as earthy as
A well-ploughed field. The path plunges on, up.
Over the rounded thighs of each valley
Down into the ferny damp of the streams
Running off Exmoor, and up again to (the)
Sound of the sea that rises from the surf
Breaking miles away ...

... and so on. Credit to Nicolson for the courage in going for it at all. It makes his book stand splendidly out, brightly coloured in an ocean of prose-grey.

And to finish on a note of praise, Nicolson's account of the actual product of this ‘great year’ (‘product’ is too instrumentalising a term, but you know what I mean): the Lyrical Ballads volume itself, is very good, and particularly good on Wordsworth's contributions. It is still a boggling set of poems, really: not so much the fantastical or metaphysical Gothicism of ‘Ancient Mariner’, or the more elevated philosophic versifying of ‘Tintern Abbey’, but those characteristically crudified ballads of the poor and dispossessed, the elderly and broken-down, the mothers with their idiot children and murdered babies. Nicolson thinks of them as some of the greatest achievements in poetry not despite but because of their crudity, or say rather because of their bold, expressive, affectively complex simplifications (if that doesn't look too contradictory).

This aspect of Wordsworth has been very often dismissed, of course; and has even been actively mocked and parodied. Bravely Nicolson spends a long time on, and makes the case for the greatness of, ‘The Thorn’. The occasion for this long ballad is an actual thorn tree, old and twisted, that Wordsworth and Dorothy often passed. The story goes that a young woman, Martha Ray, was once seduced and abandoned by her lover Stephen Hill; that she gave birth to a child, murdered it and buried its corpse by this tree, which place she afterwards returned to over and over in guilt and despair. Indeed, says the story, the ghost of this child can be seen by those capable of seeing it. As Nicolson notes, it is ‘the archetypal lyrical ballad, fringing at its edges into the beautiful and the troubling, but also into the ridiculous, repetitive and loquacious.’ This is the poem in which are to be found Wordsworth's most notorious lines, a couplet of such bathetic badness it is given pride of place in The Stuffed Owl.

Not five yards from the mountain-path,
This thorn you on your left espy;
And to the left, three yards beyond,
You see a little muddy pond
Of water, never dry;
I’ve measured it from side to side:
’Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.

‘His most infamous lines,’ laments Nicolson of that last couplet. Not just bad but hilariously so. Can they be defended? ‘I have spent so long with Wordsworth,’ Nicolson says, ‘that I have come to think of him as a friend who makes mistakes, and for whom things have a way of coming out wrong, but whom I trust and admire for his other qualities.’ He adds: ‘I want to maintain that this childlike simplification of his language, for all its ridiculousness, opens a door into the heart of the poem.’

“But what’s the thorn? and what’s the pond?
“And what’s the hill of moss to her?
“And what’s the creeping breeze that comes
“The little pond to stir?”
I cannot tell; but some will say
She hanged her baby on the tree,
Some say she drowned it in the pond,
Which is a little step beyond,
But all and each agree,
The little babe was buried there,
Beneath that hill of moss so fair.

This simplicity is by turns, and sometimes at once, beautifully penetrating and ridiculously clumsy, and that, Nicolson powerfully argues, is the point.

Ludicrous or tragic, beautiful or absurd, perceptive or superstitious, ‘The Thorn’ is a transcription of the kind of suffering that was everywhere in the England of the late 1790s, and of the frame of mind that attempts or fails to understand that suffering. The poem is an act of empathy. The people of the village are muttering about Martha, as they did of Wordsworth and his family. Their gossip is a means of exclusion. Wordsworth has renounced his membership of that gossiping world, dropped all pretence at decorum and left behind the assumptions of privilege. He now inhabits the voice of the woman for whom he is demanding understanding from his readers. That is the act of courage represented by ‘The Thorn’: the daring to be absurd because the absurd is close to the bereft. And, in that, the poem makes one giant claim: the point of poetry is not beauty but truth, and if truth is awkward and uncertain then poetry should be like that too. [Nicolson, Making of Poetry, 263-4]

This is superbly well-put, I think; and whatever reservations I may have about some of the other bits of Nicolson's critical engagement, he is simply brilliant in his account of the sheer strangeness of these seemingly simple poems: the magazines of the time were, he says, ‘full of poems about the poor, the abused and the deranged, suffering the battery of life itself, but none had been as linguistically radical as what Wordsworth would now write.’ As he notes, poem after poem provides the reader with ‘no destination, but a kind of retraction from reliability’:

Extraordinarily, these poems remain as strange now as when they were written: intractable, uncomfortable, indefinable, unsettling and uncertain, repeatedly motivated by the double negative that lay somewhere near the centre of Wordsworth's own mind. Are the stories they tell true or untrue? Or not untrue? They often seem impossible, but are they not also not unimpossible? Do they matter? Are they about anything at all? Are the tellers of the tales trustworthy, or maybe simply not untrustworthy? Where are the truths they seem to orbit around?

Nicolson is quite right, I think, about how even today these poems retain their power of sheer unsettling oddness of eloquence. Powerful stuff.  

"The Poet's Eye In His Tipsy Hour" (1800)

Notebook entry 791 (August 1800) records a ‘tipsy’ (that is, likely opium-dosed) Coleridge admiring the view from his Keswick home. He writes retrospectively about the shifting beauties of the lake during the day, jotting down his entry at 11pm that night with one eye on the ‘conical Volcano of coal, half an inch high, ejaculating its inverted cone of smoke’ in his fireplace. It's windy outside. He makes a start on the first draft of a poem:

The poet's eye in his tipsy hour
Hath a magnifying power
Or rather he diverts his eyes/his soul emancipates his eyes
Of the accidents of size/
In unctuous cones of kindling Coal
Or smoke from his Pipe's bole
His eyes can see
Phantoms of sublimity.

An hour later, having gone to investigate some tapping at his window, STC returns and writes a little more in his notebook:

Nick! Nick! This is very nice writing. Magnifying in line 2 might make us think of microscopes and such, but I'd suggest Coleridge has in mind the Latin root of our word: not just ‘make bigger’, but also make more magnificus (‘great, noble, distinguished, eminent, august’). Sublimifying, in a word. The lovely chocky k-alliteration in line 5's ‘unctuous cones of kindling Coal’ (unctuous is a really nicely-chosen word), overlapping with the mouth-circling oh-assonances of lines 5 and 6 (‘cones’, ‘coal’, smoke’, ‘bole’) work together to imply a finely sensuous evocation of the scene. These two sound-patterns, the ck and the oh (the clinking of hot coals, the expanding oh-shapes of the smoke) get picked up in the midnight PS, which moves from nick! nick! to poa(cher). Sublime indeed.

Decades later, Coleridge published an article in Blackwood's Magazine (January 1822) under the title ‘The Historic and Gests of Maxilian’. This is a curious piece of prose, not really like anything else Coleridge wrote: a lumbering exercise in rather donnish comedy. STC had written to the Blackwood's editor, William Blackwood, sending him the text of ‘Maxilian’ and promising more: ‘Within ten days you will receive a second packet consisting of 1. The ideal of a Magazine—2. the first article on the history and theory of Witchcraft &c. 3. The world without and the world within—a tale of Truth from Faery Land-Book I.—4. The Life of Hölty, with specimens of his poems, translated into English Verse.—’

‘Some traces of these projects remain among Coleridge's papers,’ H L Jackson notes ‘but they were evidently not submitted to Blackwood's ... “Maxilian” appeared in January and was hailed by the editor, under the familiar pseudonym of Christopher North, as “a fragment indeed, but such a fragment as we are sure nobody but Mr. Coleridge could have written!” Coleridge's friends were pleased with the piece, and Coleridge was encouraged: “Mr Gillman & Mr Green both liked the Maxilian much—& it will improve. But small interruptions in my state of Health are not small—”.’ [H. J. Jackson, ‘Coleridge's “Maxilian”’ Comparative Literature 33:1 (1981), 38-39]

The essay itself is most odd; its first half a drawn-out, facetious, heavy-handed satire of the modern age; its second a verbose adaptation of E. T. A. Hoffmann's short story Der goldne Topf. But as part of the piece Coleridge retrieved and reworked his nascent 1800 poem, above. This is how the poem finally appears in print, in Blackwoods, 1822:

The poet in his lone yet genial hour
Gives to his eyes a magnifying power:
Or rather he emancipates his eyes
From the black shapeless accidents of size—
In unctuous cones of kindling coal,
Or smoke upwreathing from the pipe's trim bole,
His gifted ken can see
Phantoms of sublimity.

Unreprinted in Coleridge's life, this version was eventually published by his grandson Ernest Hartley Coleridge, in his 1912 Coleridge's Poetical Works, under the title ‘Apologia pro vita sua’.

In the earlier version we need, obviously, to continue back the strike-through to eliminate ‘Or rather’ from line 3 and so preserve the tetrameter. It's how J C C Mays prints the poem in his standard Princeton Coleridge: Poetical Works:

The poet's eye in his tipsy hour
Hath a magnifying power
His soul emancipates his eyes
From the accidents of size.
In unctuous cones of kindling Coal
Or smoke from his Pipe's bole
His eyes can see
Phantoms of sublimity.

This earlier metre seems to me preferable to the padded-out pentameter of the Blackwood's version: ‘lone yet’; ‘Give to his eyes’ in place of ‘hath a’; ‘black shapeless’; ‘upwreathing’; ‘trim’ ... these are all make-weights and add little. But the final line, in both versions, has excited Coleridge scholars. Michael Johnduff, in his review of Coleridge, Language, and the Sublime: From Transcendence to Finitude (Palgrave, 2011), calls this little poem ‘the most sublime of Coleridge’s fragments’ and adds: ‘Phantoms of sublimity? What is that? Indeed, something so sublime that even phantoms, wispy traces of it are sublime; and yet how sublime could a mere phantom of sublimity be? If we try to see what the poet’s gifted ken can see, this experience that is supposed to be transcendent here comes not to carry us off into the beyond, but to make us fall back upon ourselves, doubt whether what we just felt was real, and begin asking whether what we have grasped was indeed an experience of the sublime.’

That's as may be, but it's worth pointing out that ‘phantoms of sublimity’ is actually Coleridge quoting, or if we wish to be less charitable, plagiarising, Mark Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination (1744). The poet in that work is surveying a sublime landscape, just as Coleridge has been:

                                          Mark the sable woods
That shade sublime yon mountain's nodding brow;
With what religious awe the solemn scene
Commands your steps! ...
                                       Behold th' expanse
Of yon gay landscape, where the silver clouds
Flit o'er the heav'ns before the sprightly breeze:
Now their grey cincture skirts the doubtful sun;
Now streams of splendor, thro' their opening veil
Effulgent. [Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination, 3:286-97]

This leads him into a meditation on sublimity as such:

If human thought could reach, or words unfold,
By what mysterious fabric of the mind,
The deep-felt joys and harmony of sound
Result from airy motion; and from shape
The lovely phantoms of sublime and fair. [3:457-61]

This is, I think, another example of what Harriet Devine Jump has called ‘Coleridge's Unacknowledged Debt to Akenside’ [the title of her article in Studies in Romanticism, 28:2 (1989), pp. 207-224]. Because Akenside is forgotten now we tend to overlook how much Coleridge drew from him: Coleridge wrote to John Thelwall in December 1796 ‘I have room enough in my brain to admire, aye & almost equally, the head and fancy of Akenside, and the heart and fancy of Bowles, the solemn Lordliness of Milton, & the divine Chit chat of Cowper’.

The opening of this short 1800 notebook poem, ‘the poet's eye’, is a Shakespearean tag; but it is one already associated with Akenside, whose fascinations both with vision and the imaginative augmentation of what the eye sees was the ground of his celebrity as a poet, back when his poetry was celebrated. Here, for instance, is a passage from Anna Letitia Barbauld's prefatory essay on The Pleasures of the Imagination, which Coleridge certainly knew:

Why, he asks, does the deep shade of a thick wood strike us with religious awe? Why does the lightsomeness and variety of a more airy landscape suggest to us the idea of gaiety and social mirth? Is there really any resemblance, or is it owing to early and frequent associations? He decides for the latter, and beautifully illustrates that great law on which the power of memory entirely depends. This leads him to consider the powers of Imagination as residing in the human mind, when, after being stored by means of memory, with ideas of all that is great and beautiful in nature, the child of fancy combines and varies them in a new creation of its own, from whence the origin of Music, Painting, Poetry, and all those arts which give rise to the secondary or reflex pleasures, referred to in the latter part of his definition. This is accompanied by a glowing and animated description of the process of composition, written evidently with the pleasure a person of genius must have felt, when reflecting with conscious triumph that he is exercising the powers he so well describes. He had probably likewise in his eye the well-known lines of Shakespear,

The Poet's eye in a fine phrenzy rolling.

[The Pleasures of the Imagination. By Mark Akenside, M.D. To Which is Prefixed a Critical Essay on the Poem, by Mrs. Barbauld (London: Printed for T. Cadell, Junior and W. Davies, in the Strand, by R. Noble, in the Old Bailey, 1794), 26-27]

(That last is quoted from Midsummer Night's Dream.) I'd hazard that Coleridge, warm by his fireside in 1800, might even have been reading Pleasures of the Imagination, and had his own poetic imagination jogged by Akenside's Phantoms of Sublime.

"Poems on Various Subjects": Coleridge's Errata Slip

Click to embiggen. Poems on Various Subjects was STC's first collection of poetry, published by his friend Cottle (Bristol, 1796) and including those of his early poems of which Coleridge was proudest (there are also four sonnets by Charles Lamb, marking his first appearance in print). I have to say, though, I'd not seen this errata slip before. James Cummins, a US rare book dealer, has it on his website and notes that it is very rare to find a first edition including it. You can buy said first edition, errata slip and all, for a trifling $6000 if you want it. For me, it's enough to enjoy this slightly pompous but inadvertently charming page on its own. It's like a poem in its own right. For Antic huge read antic small, indeed!

William Case Jr

Robert Southey edited two volumes of his Annual Anthology (1799, 1800). Here were first published of a good number of poems by Southey himself, and by Coleridge too (not to mention Charles Lamb, George Dyer, Joseph Cottle, Sir Humphry Davy and others), including some very famous pieces: Coleridge's ‘Lewti’ and ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’ and Southey's ‘Battle of Blenheim’, as well as his ‘The Old Man's Comforts’, so famously parodied by Lewis Carroll as ‘You Are Old, Father William’. Southey planned a third annual, but in the event it didn't happen. Many of the poems in the Anthology are attributed to their authors either by direct name, or transparent pseudonym (several of Coleridge's are signed ‘Esteesi’ for instance). Others are not attributed, but scholars have tracked down authorship, using Southey and Coleridge's own annotated copies of the volumes, later collected editions of poets and so on.

Four of the Annual Anthology poems are signed ‘William Case Jr’, all in vol 2: ‘Gorthmund’, ‘Sonnet VIII’, ‘Sonnet IX: to a Friend on presenting him with a Volume of M.S.S. Poems’ (at the head of this post) and ‘A Winter Sketch’. Nobody knows anything about this geezer; not who he was, nor how he knew Southey or Coleridge (if he knew Southey: maybe he offered his submissions out of the blue). ‘Not otherwise identified,’ says Kenneth Curry, adding: ‘no books of Case are in the British Museum or Bodleian.’ [Kenneth Curry, ‘The Contributors to The Annual Anthology’ The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 42:1 (1948), 61]. He's not a very good poet, I think; but I was curious about him, so I had a rummage around.

I didn't find much, but I found  a couple of things. So: Case published a fair few poems, as fugitives, in various places 1800-1806 (the latest that I found). Here's one from The Poetical Register, and Repository of Fugitive Poetry (1802), another poetical annual:

Following up that footnote tells us that the friend was another young man and poet manqué called ‘W[illiam?] Evans’. Other poems intimate that Case came from Norfolk:

... the River Yare flowing, of course, through Norwich and into the North Sea.

Case published two volumes of verse. The first, The Minstrel Youth; a Lyrical Romance, with other Poems (Conder 1801), was reviewed in the Monthly Review for 1801:

A very promising specimen of the young author's poetical taste and talents: we suppose him to be young; and if he perseveres in paying his devoirs to the muses, he may probably obtain a considerable degree of their regard and encouragement. The pieces here submitted to the judgment of the public are various, moral, and not destitute of harmony and pathos. The poem, in three parts, intitled The Minstrel Youth, is the most considerable performance, and evinces the the writer's proficiency in the Romantic lore which so strongly marks the ages of chivalry, and many of the manly old English Ballads.

You can read the collection's title poem here if you like, and see for yourself. Case's second collection was Pictures of British Female Poesy (Crosby 1803), concerning which The British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review said:

The author, whose name is Case, and an inhabitant of Lynn, in Norfolk, celebrates, in various poetical metres, the more distinguished females of the present day; Seward, Charlotte Smith, Barbauld, Radcliffe, Yearsley, Hannah More, West, &c. The performance deserves a specimen to be given of it; and we select the following spirited apostrophe to Helen Maria Williams.

“But when she thus essays a wreath to weave
Of flowers, as rich as fancy e'er could paint,
Some meet her eye, that, like the nightshade, leave
In beauty's brightest gloss a baleful taint.
Say, fair Enthusiast, from thy natal land,
What scepric system lur'd thy heart away,
When late amidst an innovating band,
At Peace high altar flow'd the gratulating lay?*
Why give to France supremacy of fame,
Is all the victory, all the glory hers?
No: Britain owns a yet superior claim,
Thy Britain dearer ties on thee prefers.
Helen! the Muse regrets, thy talents shine
In light, that but the moral sense depraves;
Freedom she loves, yet not, oh France! not thine,
Hers is her birthright, thine the liberty of slaves.”

[*Alluding to her Ode on the late Peace, written in France]

No fan of France then, Mr Case. Did he live in Lynn, or was he merely from Lynn? William Case was Mayor of Lynn in 1790, and again in 1798 (he died in 1809). Presumably William Case Jr was his son. Junior published no more volumes after 1803, and no more poems at all after 1806, so far as I can see. Why not?

Could this William Case be the same man as Lieutenant, later Captain William Case of the Royal Navy?

WILLIAM CASE entered the Navy, 15 Jan. 1790, as Fst.-cl. Vol., on board the HEBE 38, Capt. Alex. Hood, and, in March, 1792, was transferred to the JUNO 32, Capt. Sam. Hood, both stationed in the Channel. From May, 1793, to April, 1796, he again served in the HEBE, as Midshipman, under Capts. A. Hood, Paul Minchin, and Mat. Henry Scott, in the West Indies, where we find him, after a short attachment to the MAJESTIC 74, flag-ship of Sir John Laforey, promoted, 3 Oct. 1797, to a Lieutenancy in LA VICTORIEUSE 14, Capts. Edw. Stirling Dickson and Richardson. While in the latter vessel he cut out a Spanish schooner from under the fire of a privateer and two batteries at Port España, Trinidad—took part, 7 May, 1798, in a very creditable action with two French privateers, the smaller of whom, a sloop of 6 guns and 50 men, was captured, and the other, a schooner of 12 guns and 80 men, put to flight—and, in Dec. following, witnessed the surrender of two forts near the river Caribe, besides valiantly contributing, in joint command of a party of 70 seamen, to the capture and destruction, at Gurupano, of two others, defended by at least 300 men, and of the Couleurre, of 6 guns and 80 men.” Lieut. Case's next appointments were, 27 Aug. 1801, 20 April, 1804, and 21 Dec. 1805, to the BEAVER sloop, Capt. Christopher Basset Jones, MAGDALENE, Capt. Joseph Lamb Popham, and AGINCOURT 64, Capts. Thos. Briggs and Henry Hill, on the Home station; after which he served, from Jan. 1806 to June, 1812, under Sir Sam. Hood, on board the CENTAUR 74, HIBERNIA 110, TIGRE 74, OWEN GLENDOWER 36, and ILLUSTRIOUS 74, off the Western Islands, and in the Mediterranean, Baltic, and East Indies. During the period of his attachment to the CENTAUR, Mr. Case, as First Lieutenant, was meritoriously present, 25 Sept. 1806, at the capture, in company with the MARS and MONARCH 74's, of four heavy French frigates from Rochefort, on which occasion Sir S. Hood lost his arm. He also attended, in Aug. and Sept. 1807, the expedition to Copenhagen—beheld, in Dec. of the same year, the surrender of Madeira—ably assisted, in conjunction with the IMPLACABLE 74, at the taking, 26 Aug. 1808, in sight of the whole Russian fleet, near Rogerswick, of the 74-gun ship Sewolod, after a close and furious conflict, in which the CENTAUR lost 3 killed and 27 wounded, and the enemy 180 killed and wounded:—and, in Aug. 1809, was engaged, under Capt. Wm. Henry Webley, in the attack upon Walcheren. After holding for two months the appointment of Lieutenant-Governor of Madras Hospital, he was promoted, 7 Aug. 1812, to the command of the HECATE sloop; and, on 15 of the same month, he joined the SAMARANG, of 16 guns, of which he appears to have retained command, in New South W. until 24 March, 1814. He has since been on half-pay. His acceptance of the rank he now holds took place 14 May, 1846. Capt. Case, in the early part of his career, also assisted at the reduction of Ste. Lucie and Trinidad. He married, 15 Sept. 1829, a daughter of Henry Hallett, Esq., of Chidcock, Devon. [William R O'Bryan, A Naval Biographical Dictionary: Comprising the Life and Services of Every Living Officer in Her Majesty's Navy (1849), 178]

(I think the numbers after the HMS names are the number of guns each sloop carries). No mention of any youthful poetic ambitions there, but then you wouldn't expect such notice in a Naval Biographical Dictionary. The dates fit, otherwise. And if this is the man, he was very often stationed in the Channel or ‘on the Home station’ up to 1806 (convenient for submitting poems to British journals), whereupon his naval career took off and he was stationed all around the world, 1806-1812 on the CENTAUR in the Med, the Baltic, and East Indies; and after that all the way to New South Wales. This would have made it harder for him to publish his poems, and might have crowded-out his time for poetry altogether. Or perhaps he came to look on it as a youthful extravagance no longer consonant with his position. Case's friend Evans, who died in St Vincent in 1801 of ‘contagion’ could have been stationed there as a naval officer: it was one of the key naval battlegrounds of the Napoleonic Wars after all.

This is all speculative of course, and could be quite, quite wrong. Maybe Case was just a bourgeois-of-leisure in Lynn the whole time and Lieutenant Case quite another person. But there's certainly a quantity of sea-verse in Case's oeuvre. Here, for instance, are stanzas 2 and 3 from the ‘Descriptive Sketch’ whose opening I quoted above:

(The Garien is another name for the river Yare). ‘To thee, vast deep! this moral truth I owe’ the poem ends: ‘That as thy calm now smiles, thy storms now blow,/Each object, e’en most dear, so fluctuates here below.’ Sound like a sailor to you?