Prickett's "Words and The Word" (1986) and Coleridge

Stephen Prickett's Words and "The Word": Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (1986) is about more than Coleridge; far more than I can touch on here. But I wanted, in a slight departure for this blog, to review what he does say about Coleridge. It's a pretty famous work, of course; at least among those who explore the intersections between scripture and literature, although it probably gets cited more often by theologians than literary critics.

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Words and The Word is an unusually wide-ranging work of literary and theological scholarship, very dense (or, if you prefer, rich) and as such it really does resist easy summary. In a nutshell, Prickett goes back to the eighteenth-century to trace the intricate lines of thought that sought to establish how we should read the Bible, and by extension what mode is the best one in which to approach the divine. He argues that nowadays there is a wall (a 'glacial moraine', he calls it, following Hermann Usener: gletscherwall) separating biblical studies and the study of literature. He traces this back to the influence of Germany had on the establishment of universities in the later 19th-century, but notes that, for a short time, things looked different in England:

The work of Robert Lowth had made possible a new aesthetic appreciation of biblical poetry, and the fact that the first generation of English Romantic poets, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, so far from rejecting Christianity like Humboldt were devout Christians of one kind or another, helped them to find in the Bible far more powerful sources of inspiration than their German contemporaries or their immediate predecessors of the Enlightenment. [1-2]

Nonetheless, Prickett thinks, by the end of the 19th-century, and for various reasons, 'the same wall that divided German scholarship had been successfully transplanted into English institutions and thought'. The consequence of this, he argues, has been a prolonged crisis not just in biblical hermeneutics, but literature as well ('in particular, poetry') which he thinks 'has also suffered a crisis of meaning in the twentieth century' [2]. The book as a whole is a superbly fine-grained, sometimes rather labyrinthine, discussion of the best way of apprehending the biblical 'word': science, hermeneutics, cultural contextualisation, 'the religious and the poetic', paradox, prophesy and metaphor.

According to Prickett Robert Lowth plays a key role in this larger story, on account of his 1754 treatise Praelectiones Academicae de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum, later translated into English by George Gregory as Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1787), and very often reprinted. 'Epoch making', Prickett calls this volume [41]. Now, one of the things Lowth argues is that a prose translation of the Hebrew songs can capture perfectly well many of the poetic qualities of the original. Prickett thinks this directly informed Wordsworth’s thesis, so important in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, that poetry and prose are not opposites, and that more than mere metrical regularity defines the former—dignity, passion, authenticity and so on. Coleridge discusses precisely this in the Biographia, including some of his own prose-poetic Biblical translations. It’s a cliché to note (though that doesn’t stop it being true) that Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ was one of the modern era's single most influential interventions into poetics; and for Prickett this has implications for how we read the Bible as much as it has for how poetry gets written. So for example, in his discussion of Manley Hopkins, Prickett notes that ‘for Hopkins the rediscovery of the Bible as “poetry” did not mean the progressive rediscovery of formal distinctions between verse and prose so much as a rediscovery of the meaning behind the traditional constructs.’ [Prickett, 119]. For Lowth, the calm and rational mind expresses itself in a way we might nowadays call 'scientific'—'the language of reason is cool, temperate, rather humble than elevated, well-arranged and perspicuous'—where where the passionate and agitated mind falls naturally into poetry:

The language of the passions is totally different:—the conceptions burst out in a turbid stream, expressive in a manner of the internal conflict; the more vehement break out in hasty confusion; they catch (without search or study) whatever is impetuous, vivid, or energetic. In a word, reason speaks literally, the passions poetically. The mind, with whatever passion it be agitated, remains fixed upon the object that excited it; and while it is earnest to display it, is not satisfied with a plain and exact description; but adopts one agreeable to its own sensations, splendid or gloomy, jocund or unpleasant. For the passions are naturally inclined to amplification; they wonderfully magnify and exaggerate whatever dwells upon the mind, and labour to express it in animated, bold, and magnificent terms. This they commonly effect by two different methods; partly by illustrating the subject with splendid imagery, and partly by employing new and extraordinary forms of expression, which are indeed possessed of great force and efficacy. [Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, 140]

One idea that runs through the work of many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers is that 'poetry is the natural language of religion', and that 'the Bible was to be treated as belonging to a higher, more sublime order of discourse than prose', which latter was 'an inferior and late medium fit only for describing the mundane and practical world of everyday affairs' [Prickett, 40]. The business of translating Hebrew and Greek into English becomes more than a series of practical textual difficulties; it stands for a chasm between divine revelation and mundane existence that is, in a strict sense of the term, sublime. Samuel Tongue summarises:

However, as Prickett claims, ‘…the idea of a language of primal of original participation in this sense is only possible to an age that no longer possesses it.’ A sense of the ‘original text’ in an ‘original language’ becomes a major project of discovery and animating absence for both types of Bible. The historical critics attempt an archaeology of biblical linguistics to excavate the authority of the ‘original’; poets and writers go on to attempt a new sense of the ‘originality; of religious-poetic genius in the sublime aesthetic authority of the poetic Bible. [Samuel Tongue, Between Biblical Criticism and Poetic Rewriting: Interpretative Struggles over Genesis 32:22-32 (Leiden: Brill 2014), 41; quoting Prickett, 86]

'Animating absence' is a well-chosen phrase. This necessary belatedness, this (Prickett doesn't use this term, but there was a lot of this sort of stuff about in 1986) aporia, is in an important sense constitutive of Christianity. Words and The Word doesn't discuss the Qu'ran—if Prickett wrote the book nowadays, I wonder if he would have done this—but the contrast is a fascinating one. Muslims are required to apprehend their holy book in its original Arabic, a feature of the core Islamic belief in the Qu'ran's 'inimitability' or I'jaz. There's really nothing like this in contemporary Christianity. Even self-professed literalists in as-it-might-be the US Bible Belt rest their claims that scripture must be interpreted literally on translations of scripture, rather than on the original Hebrew or Greek, languages very few of them are inclined to acquire. Islam is not like this; and one of the things I take Prickett to be arguing (in his roundabout way) is that in a sense it is this very non-inimitability that has proved constitutive of the modern development of Christianity. Not in the sense that Romantics like Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey felt licensed to disregard the 'original' in their poetic recreations (on the contrary, Prickett is clear that 'the most noticeable feature of the English "poetic" theological tradition leading from Lowth to the Romantics is its essential conservatism' [124]); but in the sense that a poetic apprehension of religion opens up rather than closes down 'meaning', that it is about animating absences, or opacities, as much as semantic presences.

Indeed, when considering this question Prickett can get very, well, prickly. He has a particular dislike for both the New English Bible and the Good News Bible, both of which he considers not only manifestly inferior to the King James Version, but based on a fundamental misunderstanding, viz. that it is possible to 'write out the meaning plainly' of the Bible.

This belief that religious experience, and the historic record of mankind's deepest questionings and insights can only be adequately described today in the slack, verbose and cliché-ridden language of international communication would be disconcerting if it were not ... so evidently self-defeating. How far is it possible, in the words of the Good News Bible's Preface, 'to use language that is natural, clear, simple and unambiguous', when the Bible is not about things that are natural, clear, simple and unambiguous? or for the linguistically-enfeebled modern theologians struggling on the New English Bible to 'write out the meaning plainly' of what to the taut and concise translators of the seventeenth-century was essentially ambiguous and obscure? [Prickett, 10]

Ouch. This is a little unfair, I think: neither the NEB nor the GNB present themselves as the only works capable of 'adequately' describing the Bible; and the belief that the bible is intrinsically complex, elusive and opaque, whilst flattering the kind of person (like me, I confess; like Prickett, I assume) who tends to valorise difficulty and density, surely doesn't really describe the bible as such, many portions of which are perfectly clear and intelligible. There's clearly merit in making scripture more accessible to the sort of people who would be turned away by the difficulty of the KJV. But you take his point, and there's something rather stirring in his desire to realign the Bible and poetry, or more modestly the Bible and literary criticism, in order ‘to restore a wholeness of approach that has been disastrously fragmented over the past hundred and fifty years’ [197].

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What, in this larger context, does Prickett have to say about Coleridge? Words and The Word returns to my man several times, and could have done a lot more with him. He doesn't, for instance, discuss STC's close friendship with Hyman Hurwitz, the preeminent Hebraicist of his era in Britain, a friendship that included Coleridge editing and correcting the English of Hurwitz's Vindiciae Hebraicae, being a Defence of the Hebrew Scriptures as a Vehicle of Revealed Religion (1820) and translating Hurwitz's lengthy Hebrew lament 'On the Death of the Princess Charlotte' (1817). But Prickett does note how Coleridge located a wholeness of expressive poetic symbolicism in scripture, and quotes the famous passage from The Statesman's Manual to the effect that

the histories and political economy of the present and preceding century partake in the general contagion of its mechanic philosophy, and are the product of an unenlivened generalizing understanding. In the Scriptures they are the living educts of the imagination; of that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense, and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors. [LS, 29]

Prickett discusses this passage, but I think misses a nuance. In his own copy of The Statesman's Manual, Coleridge scratched out 'educts' and wrote-in 'Produce', and then added this marginalium: 'Or perhaps these μóρφωματα of the mechanic Understanding as distinguished from the 'ποίησεις' of the imaginative Reason might be named Products in antithesis to Produce—or Growths.' The distinction between the two Greek terms, also developed in the Biographia, is elaborated in the headnote to this blog.

I take it that Coleridge sees no functional difference between an educt, or a force that draws something out of us, and a ποίησεις or 'making', a force that 'produces' something in us. Coming out and going in are, he thinks, the same in this case. Or to be more precise, where the sacred 'myths' (in a non-judgmental sense of the word) of scripture are concerned these actions are indistinguishable. Prickett doesn't go into any of that, and when he says 'Biblical narrative ... lives as extensions from the creative or "poetic" imagination' [44] he's only sort-of right: I think Coleridge has in mind a more reciprocal arrangement than is implied by 'extension'. But Prickett is surely right that Coleridge sees the poetic symbol as essentially 'bi-focal', 'always partaking' (to quote The Statesman's Manual again) 'of the Reality which it renders intelligible' and 'abid[ing] itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative'.

A symbol is thus the opposite of a generalization. The latter is a kind of lowest common denominator, deduced by the understanding from outward events according to the dead arrangement of a mechanical philosophy. In contrast, to describe a symbol, he uses the metaphor of a lens: it is 'translucent'—focusing the universal generality through the concreteness of a particular example. [Prickett, 44]

'There is more [in it] that finds me,' was how Coleridge described the Bible 'than in all other books put together.' This is a beautifully reciprocal way of putting it: you go into your Bible, and your Bible goes into you. You look for things in the Bible; the Bible finds things in you.

In the 'Book of Nature' chapter Prickett brings Coleridge back in. There's a good account of his reading of Horne Tooke's linguistic system: 'Tooke believed that he had shown the stable and unchangeable nature of words. Coleridge fell delight upon his "proof" and rapidly deduced the opposite: the flux and constant change of language. Hartley had assumed a fixed relationship between words and ideas; in attempting to prune back all words to their roots, Tooke had shown Coleridge the astonishing diversity and luxury of the undergrowth that had sprung up' [Prickett, 136-37]. Prickett quotes one of STC's letters:

Are not words etc parts and germinations of the plant? And what is the Law of the Growth?—In something of this order I would endeavour to destroy the old antithesis of Words and Things, elevating, as it were, words into Things, and living Things too.

This is another iteration of Coleridge attachment to the word-made-flesh Logos as the cornerstone of his religious and literary life. There's some stuff on desynonymy, from the 1819 'Philosophical Lectures' (which concept Paul Hamilton, in Coleridge's Poetics (1983) applies as the key to unlock the whole of Coleridge's thought, although not entirely convincingly), but just as things get going we read this:

One could say much more about Coleridge's theories of language. It is a fascinating subject and one that has by no means been fully explored. [138]

And off we go elsewhere. A shame! Instead Prickett argues that most of Coleridge's attempts at desynonymising have failed to catch on. They 'proved over-subtle and too complex to have passed into the language':

His distinction between 'types' and 'symbols' has not survived; his attempt to anglicize the Kantian polarity of 'Reason' and 'understanding' survives only in relation to Idealist philosophy rather than in standard usage; and the carefully elaborated bnaries of Church and State such as 'opposite' and 'contrary' have not passed even into the technical vocabulary of dialectics whose terms are more often from Germany and France. [Prickett, 141]

This is broadly right I think (although 'opposite' and 'contrary' do figure as distinctions in the Greimas square; and that's proved quite influential. Fredric Jameson seems to build all his books around them, for instance. Greimas, as a literature specialist, presumably knew about Coleridge). Aha, you're thinking: what about the distinction between 'imagination' and 'fancy', one of Coleridge's most influential ideas? Surely that piece of desynonymising has passed into popular currency? But Prickett's not having that:

This distinction has suffered a curious and possibly unique fate in the history of semantic separations. On the one hand it has become famous—every student of literature in the English-speaking world finds himself supposed to have heard of it; on the other, it is scarcely ever used, and never in common speech. [Prickett, 141]

I'm not sure that's correct, actually; but it's hard to know how the assertion could be proved, one way or the other. Prickett thinks the imagination/fancy distinction actually folds three separate concepts into its dyad, which is correct (I think); and makes the case that the fusing of the two modes of imagination is actually what Coleridge intended (which I'm not so sure about). Prickett ties his discussion together with the logos ('the subordinate logos of nature is a repetition in the finite human mind of God's eternal act of creation' is how he puts it, which is tricky), and quotes The Statesman's Manual one last time:

The great book of Nature has been the music of gentle and pious minds in all ages, it is the poetry of all human nature.

This leads into a kind of Prickettian peroration:

We are here very close to what Abrams has designtaed 'apocalypse by cognition'. Behind the continual Romantic reiteration of the 'poetic' as a metaphor for religious experience lies what we have seen is the very ancient association of poetry with divinity, but here the 'peculiar language of heaven' has been translated into a typology of psychological and spiritual states. As in Dante, poetry is a kind of imaginative psychopomp leading the soul towards a mystical and otherwise inexpressible bliss, or 'apocalypse', in which the partaker is caught up in the divine vision. But just as Schiller's 'third kingdom' of aesthetic liberation ... is not merely an internal state, but also a social one, so Coleridge's poetic 'apocalypse' is at once individual and communal. The difference is that Coleridge's mature theory of language and his later Trinitarian Anglicanism (as always in his thought, all elements are connected) no longer involves seeing this transformation as part of a future ideal state, but, in true New Testament style, proclaims that it is already here. [Prickett, 144]

In other news: 'Imaginative Psychopomp of Bliss' is the name of my next band.

"Non Sphinx sed Sphincter"

In April-May 1802 was Coleridge revolving, among other things, a Miltonic something. In late April he jotted in his notebook an idea for a new poem: ‘Milton, a Monody in the metres of Samson's Choruses—only with more rhymes/—poetical influences—political—moral—Dr Johnson/’ [Notebooks 1:1155]. This particular poem never got itself written, but a few days later a grumpy, or perhaps wryly scatological, Coleridge jotted down the following:

Unintelligible? As well as call a Fart unintelligible / it tells you at once what it is—it is nonsense—enigmata quia non Sphinx sed Sphincter anus. [Notebooks 1:1184]

Kathleen Coburn translates the Latin (‘riddles not from the Sphinx but the sphincter’ is her version, omitting the entry's terminal word) but doesn't realise it's a quotation, and so speculates about his point: ‘abuse need not be intelligible in itself; it requires only to be recognized as abuse.’

In fact the Latin is taken from Milton's sixth Prolusion ¶ 3, where an individual is ridiculed for uttering ‘aenigmata quaedam nolens effutiat sua non Sphinx sed sphincter anus, quae medicis interpretanda non Oedipo’, ‘riddles merely farted out, issuing not from the Sphinx but the anal sphincter, more fitting for doctors to interpret than Oedipus’. This wasn't exactly typical Miltonic Latin, although, as Anna Beer points out, neither was it wholly uncharacterstic. Beer notes that in Milton’s day ‘performing in Latin was a cornerstone of the Cambridge experience’ and that whilst most of Milton’s surviving Latin speeches are ‘dull’ (for instance: ‘Prolusion 1’ on the question of whether day or night is better, or ‘Prolusion 2’ on the music of the spheres) Prolusion 6 is considerably saucier.

In May 1628 Milton ‘was approached to be “Father” during a “salting”, a traditional feast of misrule, which focused on the initiation of young men into the college.’ Initiates might find themselves having to drink salted ale, but in addition to literal salt, there was metaphorical salt: ‘the occasion was full of sales, salty, sexual wit, redolent of licenced indecorum … Milton’s role in the Cambridge salting was as master of ceremonies. He was “Father” for the day, elevated above his “brothers” in this licensed folly.’ He started things off with a speech full of rudery (in Latin of course). Beer notes how tempting was the ‘opportunity for humour, particularly for a chaste figure like the nineteen-year-old John’. [Anna Beer, Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot (London: Bloomsbury 2011), 75]. The Latin was first published in Joannis Miltonii Angli, Epistolarum familiarium liber unus quibus accesserunt, ejusdem, jam olim in collegio adolescentis, prolusiones quaedam Oratoriae (1674).

It's quite cool to be able to track this allusion down, actually, not least because it suggests Coleridge wasn't necessarily jotting something down out of pique because he had been called ‘unintelligible’ (and indeed it's a little hard to make sense of the entry on those terms). Rather he's using the apparent dignity of Miltonic Latin to suggest that everything means, even if it only ‘means’ on the level of performing itself as non-meaning. And given that whatever prompted this notebook entry put STC in mind of this particular Miltonic prolusion, conceivably he was thinking about laughter as such: a sort of utterance that is, on the level of semantic content, merely unintelligble noises, but which nonetheless signifies, richly.

Xanadu du du/Push pineapple/Shake the Tree

This post is basically some source-hunting for Coleridge's great poem. Yes, I have read John Livingstone Lowes's The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (1927) thank you very much. This is stuff that's not in there, capacious though Lowes's book is.

So, Coleridge's poem describes the layout of Kubla's palace as follows:

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. (lines 6–11)

The so-called 'Crewe Manuscript' contains slightly different measurements:

So twice six miles of fertile ground
With Walls and Towers were compass'd round.

Purchas His Pilgrimes says:

In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be moved from place to place

Sixteen miles, not 'twice five' or 'twice six'. Why did Coleridge not write 'twice eight'?  Impossible to know for sure, but it makes me wonder if reading Purchas happened between the writing of the poem and the writing of the preface, and the proximate inspiration for the poem wasn't a completely different book? Or maybe if Coleridge was reading other accounts of Xanadu at the same time? It seems unlikely I know: not only because the rhythm of 'In Xamdu did Cublai Can [build] a stately ...' seems so directly to inform the first line of Coleridge's poem, but also because of the use of the word 'fertile'. But bear with me. In Peter Heylyn's Cosmographie (1657) we read

the Great Chan's residence ... Xaindu the Royal Palace of the Emperour, of a foursquare figure, every side extending eight miles in length: within this Quadrant is another, whose sides are six miles long, and within that another of four miles square, which is the Palace it self, between those several Walls are Walks, Gardens, Orchards, Fish-ponds, places for all manner of exercise, and Parks, Forests, and Chases for all manner of Game ... and Careansu, near which there groweth an herb called Chiny-Cathay, of admirable effect against many Diseases; and so esteemed of by the Natives, that they value an ounce of this at a sack of Rhubarb. [Heylyn, Cosmographie (1657), 174]

'Six miles' is one of the measurements in there, at any rate. Of course it's likely Heylyn derived this account from Purchas, and moreover that he mistakenly transcribed the latter's sixteen square mile plain as a square meauring eight miles along each side (which would be sixty-four square miles in total). But this account does have what Purchas doesn't: incense bearing trees. More, Purchas describes the Khan's palace as a kind of tent ('which may be moved from place to place'), where Heylyn appears to be describing a much more substantial and fixed structure, more akin to Coleridge's mighty dome. We do know that Coleridge read Heylyn (though he had a low opinion of him as a Christian: 'I scarcely know a more unamiable Churchman, as a writer, than, Dr. Heylin'), though I can't find specific evidence that he read this particular work. It was a famous and popular book, though, often reprinted.

I also don't know if Coleridge ever came across Giovanni Botero's Politia Regia (1620), and can't find any evidence that he did. At any rate, Botero himself is quite a famous figure, and his book includes the following:

et cum Cublai Cham ex illis cognovisset, illam civitatem rebellem futuram, curavit adificari aliam, cui nomen est Taindu, illi vicinam, qua in ambitu 24. miliaria continet, praeter suburbia: quodque in Palatio, quod in Xaindu habet, multi Astrologi & Nicromantici sint. [Giovanni Botero, Politia Regia: in qua totus imperiorum mundus eorum admiranda, census, aeraria, opes, vires, regimina et fundata stabilitataque (1718), 106. This is the later Latin edition of Botero's Della ragion di Stato, which he had completed in 1589. It is likely that Purchas derived his material on Xanadu from this book.]

The Latin means: 'When Cublai Cham realised that the city planned, in the future, to rebel against him, he built another city, called Taindu, enclosing 24 miles within its circuit, including the suburbs, and in this palace, which is in Xaindu, are a great many astrologers and necromancers'. This suggests that Xaindu or Xanadu is the name of the province (Heylyn thinks it the name of the city; Purchas and Coleridge are ambiguous on the matter). According to Botero the name of the city itself is Taindu. That's quite interesting. Also, it seems the city is full of wizards. That could come in handy, in any future war Kubla Khan himself is planning ...

“The Spot of Time is Eternity”: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Nicholas of Cusa

 

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From the earliest iterations of The Prelude, Wordsworth built his poem around various ‘Spots of Time’: each one a remembered moment, vividly recreated in Wordsworthian blank verse, of intense experience or apperception he had had in his life. These spots possess not just in-the-moment intensity, transcendent acuteness and borderline-inexpressible concentration of affect — they also have the capacity to stay with the individual, to be recalled later in life. Examples include: walking the streets of London and noticing a blind beggar, or young Wordsworth waiting, in blustery weather, for the horses to take him home for Christmas at the end of the school term — or in one of the most famous examples, even younger Wordsworth riding a pony through the lake district on a windy day and seeing a girl carrying a pitcher of water. 

Wordsworth's account of this latter incident begins with a brief definition of the term:

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen. [Prelude, 12:210–221]

The talk of psychological or, if we prefer, spiritual nourishment and repair sells this experience hard as a ‘virtue’; but the actual spots of time themselves are neither happy nor sad in the moment, in the conventional senses of those words. In this example: Wordsworth recalls the day he went for a trip across country. He was a young child, barely old enough to hold a pony’s bridle, and his ride across the moors was to be accompanied by ‘an ancient servant of my father’s house’. But the child and his guide get separated, and young Wordsworth rides alone down into a valley where in older times there had stood a gibbet upon which a murderer had been executed and his body left to rot. The frame and bones are long gone, ‘but on the turf,/Hard by … some unknown hand had carved the murderer’s name.’ Alarmed by this grim memorial, young Wordsworth rides up out of the valley up to the higher ground:

Then, reascending the bare common, saw
A naked pool that lay beneath the hills,
The beacon on the summit, and, more near,
A girl, who bore a pitcher on her head,
And seemed with difficult steps to force her way
Against the blowing wind. It was, in truth,
An ordinary sight; but I should need
Colours and words that are unknown to man,
To paint the visionary dreariness
Which, while I looked all round for my lost guide,
Invested moorland waste, and naked pool,
The beacon crowning the lone eminence,
The female and her garments vexed and tossed
By the strong wind. [Prelude, 12:253–265]

And that’s the moment. The phrase, ‘visionary dreariness’, there, is the nub of the matter: ‘it was, in truth,/An ordinary sight’ says the poet, as if he himself is as surprised as we are that something so trivial could affect him so hugely, and moreover that it continues to affect him: ‘I should need/Colours and words that are unknown to man,/To paint the visionary dreariness’. Markus Poetzsch excellent monograph Visionary Dreariness (Routledge 2006), frames the experience as a kind of Sublimity (his monograph’s subtitle is: Readings in Romanticism’s Quotidian Sublime). And of course the Sublime is, for both Burke and Kant, at root a glimpse of God, something towering over mundanity (though Burke is insistent the Sublime can inhere in small things as well as great, in scorpions as well as Mont Blanc and the night sky).

In another celebrated spot of time from the poem — my favourite in the whole Prelude, actually — young Wordsworth the schoolboy is waiting at term’s end for the horses that will take him home from school for the holidays. The spot-of-time here inheres in a drystone wall, a single sheep, a ‘blasted hawthorne tree’ and strong wind, all of which the boy stares-at from his waiting place. Now: we later learn that this particular Christmas holiday was the time Wordsworth’s father died, which in a way associates the spot-of-time with death; but it is not that death, or Wordsworth’s reaction to it, that the poem itself recalls: it is very particularly the dreariness of the long wait, bored and anxious and constantly checking up the road to see if the horses are coming, staring at the sheep and the tree. The scene is ‘a dreary time’, yet afterwards —

… afterwards, the wind and sleety rain,
And all the business of the elements,
The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
And the bleak music from that old stone wall,
The noise of wood and water, and the mist
That on the line of each of those two roads
Advanced in such indisputable shapes;
All these were kindred spectacles and sounds
To which I oft repaired, and thence would drink,
As at a fountain [Prelude 12:321f]

Michael O’Neill makes what is, really, a rather obvious, yet often ignored, point about the spots of time. He notes that The Prelude is subtitled ‘the growth of a poet’s mind’, and often reverts to the primacy of mind (‘the mind’ we are told ‘is lord and master, and that outward sense/Is but the obedient servant of her will, Prelude, 11: 271–3). But, as O’Neill says,

the spots of time proper precede and outstrip the analysing that would keep pace with them, and complicate Wordsworth’s moral, if by ‘the mind’ is meant the faculty that allows comprehension …. Enigma attaches to the ‘visionary dreariness’ experienced by the poet in the aftermath of and possible reaction against the experiences of disorientation in stumbling upon a place where ‘a Murderer had been hung in iron chains’. Enigma also pervades the bewildered, charged location of all that coheres in memory as powerful in the Waiting for the Horses passage. [O’Neill, ‘Poetic Education: Wordsworth, Yeats, Coleridge and Shelley’, The Wordsworth Circle, 46:2 (2015), 82]

‘These moments are still among the most arresting and haunting in English poetry,’ says O’Neill, ‘because they refuse to obey any evident pattern of conceptualization.’ He goes on, rightly I think:

They educate the poet in the fact that the ‘mind of man’ needs to confront greater mysteries than have been dreamt of in previous philosophies. Signposts such as ‘sublimity’ or ‘the numinous’ neutralize the shock of Wordsworth’s writing. Recollection confers barely graspable significance. Intimations of uniqueness embody themselves in a near monosyllabic bareness: ‘The single sheep, and the one blasted tree.’

This gets at something important about the spot of time: it is localised and specific, but yet general; it happened at a particular moment in time and yet suffuses the whole of Wordsworth's life; it is both unique and universal. But though it is the Sublime, which is to say God, it doesn't entirely apprehend Wordsworth's actual poetry merely to peg it to that term.

:2:

I'm now going to ask a very elementary question about this key Wordsworthian trope, something I'm uninhibited from doing because it seems to me nobody else has asked or attempted to answer it: why spot of time? Why that particular phrase? What does it mean, exactly, and from where did Wordsworth get it? As to the last part of the query, perhaps he simply made it up, although I'm going to hypothesise that he drew it from a particular source: from, in fact, Nicholas of Cusa. But before we get to that, I'll say a few more things.

The first thing is that spot, here, means location (locus), not, as it might be, stain or disfiguring mark (macula). You might want to argue, and I might even want to join you, that Wordsworth is playing with the ambiguity between these two English meanings of ‘spot’; but the most obvious thing about the phrase is that Wordsworth has coined it as an analogue for ‘spot of delight’, locus amoenus. This is of course a poetic trope of very long standing: Ernst Robert Curtius's discussion of it in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953) encompasses fully twenty pages (pp.183-202). Curtius calls the locus amoenus ‘the Pleasance’, which has a nice archaic ring-to-it in English, and says that ‘from the [Roman] Empire to the sixteenth-century it forms the principal motif of all nature description’. Its ‘minimum ingredients’ are, Curtius notes: ‘a tree (or several trees), a meadow, and a spring or brook. Birdsong and flowers may be added’ [Curtius, 195]. We can see how Wordsworth reconfigures the Pleasance into something more bracing, with the emphasis not on sensual enjoyment so much as spiritual stimulation, without sacrificing the conventions Curtius lists: most of his spots of time entail landscape, water, a tree (in the waiting for the horses episode quoted above, it's a single blasted hawthorne tree; in the girl with the pitcher episode, the gibbet) and song, even if it is only the sound of wind whistling in an old stone wall.

But a spot of time is not the same thing as a spot of pleasance. And this is where I bring in Cusa, for the relevant Latin equivalent to locus amoenus would be locus temporis, and, so far as I can discern Cusa was the only Latin writer who used that phrase (indeed, it's a rather self-contradictory phrase in Latin, mixing up time and space in a muddling way).

The problem is: I can find no evidence that Wordsworth read Nicholas of Cusa, and it doesn't strike me as terribly likely that he would have done so. Which brings me to Coleridge, the topic of this blog more generally: because here the likelihood turns about. It's certainly possible that Coleridge read Cusa; for he is exactly the kind of writer and thinker Coleridge found congenial. That means that it's possible Wordsworth picked up the idea of the locus temporis from his friend. Then again, I can't find any direct evidence Coleridge actually read Cusa either, which is a little irksome. 

What there is in Coleridgean criticism is a conviction, amongst certain writers, that Cusa is the sort of writer and thinker that Coleridge would have found fascinating, and that he might have read him. Philosopher and Inkling Owen Barfield, who certainly did read Cusa, spends quite a lot of What Coleridge Thought (1971) speculating on the ‘dynamical’ relationship between Cusa's thought and Coleridge's, without ever producing evidence that the latter read the former. In a ‘non-static interpretation’ of the two thinkers, he proposes Cusa's argument ‘that relation between the whole and the part, by virtue of which the whole is present in each part, and ultimately the infinite is present in the finite’, Cusa's coincidentia oppositorum, radically informs Coleridge's own thinking on these matters [Barfield, 189]. We can agree that it certainly looks very Coleridgean.

But did STC actually read the echt Cusa? We know he had a strong interest in the German mystics (Protestant mystics; but Cusa in many ways anticipates those figures). Moreover there was a seventeenth-century tradition of reading Cusa as a kind of Neoplatonist. Chance Woods [‘Infinite Horizons: Nicholas of Cusa and Seventeenth-Century Cambridge Platonism’, American Cusanus Society Newsletter 35 (2008), 14-23] shows how much Henry More and Ralph Cudworth owed to Cusa, and Coleridge was certainly a great reader of both those Divines. But, lacking a smoking gun (as it might be: an edition of Cusa's Excitationum ex sermonibus or De docta ignorantia annotated by Coleridge in the 1790s) Coleridgeans are reduced to pointing out the parallels: ‘Both Coleridge and Cusa,’ says Douglas Hedley, ‘are metaphysicians of unity and their theological speculations concerning the Trinity belong within a Pythagorean-Parmenidean-Platonic framework [which] Coleridge inherited from seventeenth-century Divines’ [Hedley, ‘Coleridge and Theology’, in Frederick Burwick (ed), The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (OUP 2009), 482]   

I don't mean to make heavy weather of this. Let's go back to Wordsworth. Imagine him getting ready to write The Prelude in 1798, in close consultation with Coleridge (who, of course, was the initial impetus for the project, urging his friend ‘to compose a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society’). Early in the process, it even looked for a time as though the poem might be co-authored, although of course in the end it was written by Wordsworth alone. In conversation, as Wordsworth tries to pin-down the enigmatic yet vital experiences that have punctuated his life, the retelling of which will be key to his project—universalising experiences of time that are nonetheless tied to specific incidents and moments and above all specific places—Coleridge suggests that this sounds like a concept out of Nicholas de Cusa, the locus temporis. Wordsworth agrees to thumbnail the experience with the English translation of that phrase: the spot of time.

Fanciful, alas; and certainly wholly unevidenced. Still, not only can I find nobody else who talks about the locus temporis in neo-Latin writing (theological or otherwise) other than Cusa, it strikes me that what Cusa says speaks directly to Wordsworth's conception.

Here for example is one of Nicholas de Cusa's sermons from the early 1450s: Ubi est qui natus est rex Iudæorum, ‘Where it is that the King of the Jews was born’. The answer to this titular question is, obviously, more than merely: ‘Bethlehem’. Cusa's point is that the identification of any particular location, and particular time, for the coming-into-being (the birth) of an infinite, atemporal God strikes a suggestive paradox. Here's the sermon:

In loco, omnia sunt in quiete: & extra locum suum, omnia sunt in inquiete, quia non sunt quo tendunt. Sicut Salomon vidit, omnia flumina reverti ad locum unde exeunt, sic omnia revertuntur ad locum unde exierunt. Omnia autem ut sunt, ab essentia sunt, sicut alba ab albedine, &bona à bonitate, & vera à veritate. Essen tia igiť, à qua omnia que sunt exiverunt, est locus ad que omnia tendût. Ex quo enim extra locum suum omnia sunt inquieta, & ad locum suum omnia tendunt & recurrunt, & in proprio loco tutantur, & tuta quiescunt universa: ideò Deus non inconvenienter potest dici locus, supra modum conceptus nostri infirmi. Sic loannes in Apocalypsi ait verbum dixisse: ego sum A & Ω, principium & finis: sed finis, requies, & bonum, sunt idem. Deus enim est locus animæ, ut Psalmista, & Augustinus, & alii fatentur. Sed quia Deus est, unde omnia recipiunt ut sint: ideò requietio omnium est. Quae enim non sunt, ad seuocat ut sint: esse autem, est ad quod omnia vocatur ut sint. Et extra esse: sunt inquieta: nam quae non sunt, non appetunt nisi ut sint, ubi quiescāt. Esse igitur quod est principium omnium quae sunt, est finis, locus, seu requies omnium: uti in omnibus, quae ab arteuel natura siunt, conspicimus, cum sunt, tunc in esse quiescunt. Locus temporis est æternitas, sive Nunc, sive præsentia: & locus motus, est quies: & locus numeri, est unitas. [Nicholas de Cusa, Excitationum ex sermonibus (1457) Book 7; ‘Ex sermoné: ubi est qui natus est rex Iudæorum’]

In their place, all things are at rest, and outside their place, all things are in restlessness, because they are not where they tend. As Solomon saw, all rivers return to the place from which they issue, so all things return to the place from which they issued. But all things, as they are, are from their essences, as white from whiteness, and good things from goodness, and truths from truthfulness. Being is such a place, from which all things that are came forth, and it is the place to which all things tend. For where all things are restless out of their place, and as all things tend and return to their location, and are secured in their proper place where all things rest secure: therefore it is not inappropriate to call God a place, beyond the scope of our feeble conception. Thus John says in the Apocalypse that He declared: I am ALPHA and OMEGA, the first and last: where the end, the rest-point, and the good are the same thing. For God is the place of the soul, as the Psalmist, Augustine, and others tell us. And because he is God, from whom all things receive their being therefore he is the place-of-rest of all. For things that are not, he calls them to be; and to be is that to which all things are called. And to be outside makes things restless: for things that are not only desire to be, where they rest. Being, therefore, which is the beginning of all things that are, and is also the end place, or rest of all things: as in all things that come from art or nature we see that when they are, then they rest in being. The location of time is eternity, or the Now, or the present: and the location of motion is rest: and the location of number is unity.

The phrase that my slightly halting translation renders, in that final sentence, as ‘the location of time’ is locus temporis, and could just as easily be Englished as spot of time. And this whole passage glosses The Prelude with remarkable metaphysical penetration, I think: Wordsworth's autobiography is not a narration of the events of a dead past, but on the contrary a vivifying account of how the past remains vitally alive in the present; it is not a list of particulars but an account of how particularity of lived experience touches the universal and transcendent. The spot of time, the Prelude is saying, is eternity, or the Now, or the present: and the place of motion is rest: and the location of all the many numbers is unity.

A Little Cottle

Cottle was Coleridge's friend and publisher; but also a poet in his own right. I've been reading his 1795 collection of Poems, off and on, to get a sense of what he was about. And I don't mean only to snark; some of his lines are quite good. But some are not. Today's examples are from his long poem in heroic couplets 'John the Baptist':

'The God of Abraham tun'd his mental ear'. No. I can't visualise a 'mental ear' either.

What's a 'latchet'? No matter. Have you ever wondered how it is birds are able to fly? If you guessed: invisible hands, holding them up from underneath then congratulations, you win our star prize!

'Plumy tribes' is particularly wincing.

On Westminster Bridge (1743, 1803)

 

Something a little different on this blog today: Wordsworth rather than Coleridge. But interesting, I think.

There, at the head of the post, is Canaletto's splendid painting ‘London: Westminster Bridge from the North on Lord Mayor's Day’ (1747). 

There were several projects to build a bridge across the river at Westminster in the late 17th- and early 18th-centuries, all stymied by the Corporation of London, who wanted to preserve the rights and income of the barge- and ferrymen who worked the crossing. But eventually, in 1736, an Act of Parliament approved the project. Privately financed (including by a lottery), construction started in 1739 under the supervision of Swiss engineer Charles Labelye, who had invented a new technology, ‘caissons’ (sealed underwater structures supplied with air from above in which workman could dig the foundations for the bridge's piers into the riverbed). The bridge opened on 18 November 1750. 

It was on this structure that Wordsworth stood, early in the morning of September 3rd 1803. From that vantage he wrote this very famous sonnet:

Earth has not any thing to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

The date of composition is in the title of the poem. 

There's a nice piece of wordplay, a mode actually of irony, here. The poem is ‘On Westminster Bridge’, and the poet is actually standing, physically, on Westminster bridge. This doubled sense of on as meaning ‘positioned physically upon’ and ‘concerning, about’ reverts on (!) the poem itself which, famously, doesn't talk about the bridge at all: it's all the houses and temples of London, and the river passing through, gliding at its own sweet will—it is, really, ‘From Westminster Bridge’, not on it at all. Although by the same token, Wordsworth could hardly write the poem without the bridge supporting him. And, as we read the sonnet, we can hardly avoid being struck by its poised tensions of contradictions: the city, an urban space, described entirely in pastoral terms, as if it were a natural phenomenon. The city is somehow both clothed in a ‘garment’ and naked, ‘bare’: its ‘majesty’ is low-key touching, hardly the affective response usually provoked by the awe-inspiring sublime force of majesty. And that final image of a heart lying perfectly still takes calmness too far into death.

To be clear: I am not accusing the poem of being incoherent, or more precisely I am not pegging these incoherences as a failing or a problem. Rather they exist, as do the engineering forces that hold the arches of a bridge in place and support the road overhead, in a mode of creative tension. This is an affecting, beautiful poem: a description of transcendent calm that is also an evocation of such calm, and poem very particularly placed in place (this specific London bridge) and time (September 3rd 1803) that is also placeless and timeless, the city Zion, the time paradise's eternal sunrise. Heart means we're at the centre of the city, which, being London, is in turn at the centre of the world. Which is to say, this poem, which critics discuss as if it never so much as mentions the bridge, ends with a reference to it: ‘lying’ over the river, the vantage-point from which everything is written. It's all on the bridge, after all.

Anyway: lately I have been reading some of the neo-Latin poetry of Englishman Vincent Bourne (1695-1747). (Here is a different blog I wrote about one of Vinny's poems). The later eighteenth-century and Romantic poets read him and thought highly of him. In a letter to the Reverend John Newton (10 May 1781) William Cowper declared ‘I love the memory of Vinny Bourne. I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in his way except Ovid, and not at all inferior to him.’ Coleridge owned a copy of The Poetical Works of Vincent Bourne and Charles Lamb translated eight of Bourne’s Latin poems into English, recommending him to Wordsworth: ‘since I saw you,’ Lamb wrote to WW in 1815, ‘I have had a treat in the reading way, which comes not every day — the Latin poems of Vincent Bourne, which were quite new to me. What a heart that man had, all laid out upon town-scenes, a proper counterpart to some people’s extravagancies … what a sweet, unpretending, pretty-mannered, matterfull creature! Sucking from every flower, making a flower of everything. His diction all Latin, and his thoughts all English. Bless him!’ [Ainger (ed) The Letters of Charles Lamb (1904), 1:341].

With that in mind, it's likely Wordsworth, writing his poem ‘on’ Westminster Bridge, was aware of this Bourne poem from Poematia (1743), ‘Pons Westmonasteriensis’:

Tamisi, regales qui praeterlaberis arces,
quam se magnificum, suspice, tollit opus!
quanto cum saxis coalescunt pondere saxa!
quo nexu incumbens sustinet arcus onus!
ardua quam iusto pendet libramine moles      [5]
qua partes haerent partibus harmonia!
quos, cerne, ad numeros, ab utrovis litore sensim
sunt supra acclives alterutrinque viae!
pontis aperturae quam distant legibus aequis,
exterior quae vis interiore minor!                   [10]
hunc artis splendorem inter nihil impedit undas
quove minus placidus vel taciturnus eas.
nil tibi descensum accelerat; non vorticis ullus
impetus in praeceps unde ferantur aquae,
fluxu idem, refluxu idem, lenissimus amnis     [15]
incolumem subtus sternis, ut ante, viam:
seris indicium saec'lis quo principe tanta
haec tibi surrexit gloria, liber eris.

Westminster Bridge

O Thames, as you flow past regal citadels,
see what a fine structure has raised itself here!
With what heft does stone connect with stone!
How well the curving arch sustains its weight!
With perfect balance the tall structure hangs,   [5]
its parts assembled with such harmony!
And see how, ranked upon either shore,
the rising paths each balance either side!
How equidistant are this bridge's arches,
the outer smaller than the inner ones!               [10]
Through this wondrous art the unimpeded
river glideth calmly, silent onwards.
Nothing hurries your motion; no inrushing
whirlpool tangles the headlong current:
It flows the same, reflows the same, gently      [15]
passing safely underneath the paved road.
Later generations will admire the prince
who erected so great a glory: you'll be free.

This looks, on its face, like a very different poem to Wordsworth's, concerned solidly with the bridge itself from start to finish. Bourne does not describe the view from the bridge: understandably, since the bridge wasn't opened until 1750, seven years in the future as the poem is composed (and, in the event, after Bourne himself died). The only lines that, perhaps, Wordsworth Englishes in his Westminster Bridge poem are 11-16, describing the calmly gliding unimpeded flow of the river (Wordsworth's line 12 perhaps owes something to this).

But I'd suggest a different reading. Bourne's poem is about the fabric of the bridge, about the balance, the harmony and the tension of that structure: about what holds it up, maintains it. And that means it is about the structural qualities of poetry as well. Any poem is a balance between the interruptions to flow occasioned by the form and sturcture (metre and prosody, line-breaks, zeugmas and figures, sometimes rhyme) and the flow of the poem's musicality and sense. Bourne signed this poem Milliaria: that is, ‘columns’, ‘pillars’. He is thinking about the architectonics both of his subject and of his verse.

Look again at Bourne's piece: it addresses not the bridge but the river. Its focus is on the bridgework from the point of view of the river: how it interrupts, or doesn't, the flow of the Thames. We intuit a poet's point-of-view on the river (in a boat, perhaps). But Wordsworth, in his sonnet, is also on the river: which is to say, he is on a bridge on the river. We're on.

On the surface Bourne's poem looks like a panegyric to Westminster's bridge's solidity: its rock-fitted-against-rock heft and permanence. And the main rhetorical device is the counterpunctual μέν ... δέ on the one hand/on the other hand: ‘fluxu idem, refluxu idem’ [15] and so on—appropriate to a bridge, we could say, since a bridge links two banks in one span made up of linking arches. Estelle Haan notes the poem's anaphoric balance: ‘the symmetry that lies at the heart of the poem is replicated in its own syntax and structure, most noticeably in the seven successive rhetorical exclamations upon which the whole is balanced: quam (2), quanto (3), quo (4), quam (5), qua (6), quos (7), quam (9). Such exuberant anaphora is for the most part matched by respective line endings proclaiming individual aspects of the bridge's physical structure: its opus (2), saxa (3), onus (4), moles (5), harmonia (6)’ [Haan, ‘Classical Romantic: Identity in the Latin Poetry of Vincent Bourne’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 97:1 (2007)101]

But Bourne's poem includes some similar ironies to Wordsworth's: the bridge's arches are aequis, equal, and yet some are bigger than others [10-11]; the bridge does not impede the flow of the river, and generates no whirlpools, and yet the poem very specifically describes the flow as a flux-reflux eddy.  

Most of all, the poem praises as finished and solidly secure a structure that was, in 1743, neither. On the contrary, the construction of the bridge was beset with reverses and controversy as Labelye went over-budget and over-deadline, struggling to get his new caisson technology to work, losing in total five boats over the course of the building with horrifying casualties among the workmen, and sourcing his stone from great distances with inevitable associated delays in shipping (much of it came from Swanage, and supplies were repeatedly interrupted when the navy pressed the cargo boat sailors for this or that military emergency). 

Nor was the finished bridge especially robust. It lasted a century, plagued with subsidence and requiring repeated and expensive remedial maintainance. Eventually the city decided it couldn't put up with it any longer, and commissioned Thomas Page to design a new bridge. Opened in 1862, this is the bridge currently standing, the lovely seven-arch, cast-iron structure linking Lambeth and Westminster that we all know and love.   

The controversy over the bridge was a live one in the 1740s, when Bourne was writing his poem. Here is the pamphlet published by London architect and designer Batty Langley in 1748: you can see from its title that he is not a fan.

A Survey of Westminster Bridge As Tis Now Sinking Into Ruin: this is two years before the bridge is even opened! Already sinking into ruin? Golly. Langley blames the design: the foundations inadequate to the weight of the whole. He would have designed it differently, he says, and he includes a diagram in which Labelye is shown, strikingly, hanging from a gibbet in the background.

Batty Langley was a fairly eccentric individual, but the opposition to the bridge came from many quarters. The Westminster Journal (2nd Sept 1742) published ‘A Lucubration on the Sinking of Westminster Bridge’.

This makes me wonder if we shouldn't read Bourne's poem as an ironic exercise? Is he praising for its solidity a structure everybody knew wasn't particularly solid? Irony is exactly the kind of structural or semiotic tension that is embodied by the stress-and-tension logic of the arch. Perhaps the ironies of Wordsworth's ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’ are responding, in their way, to the ironies of Bourne's ‘Pons Westmonasteriensis’.

‘Work Without Hope’ (1827): What Work?

 The first publication of ‘Work Without Hope’, in The Bijou (1828). Click to enlarge. 

Let’s have a look at this poem:

Work Without Hope
Lines Composed 21st February 1827

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair;
The Bees are stirring—birds are on the wing;
And Winter slumb’ring in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I, the while, the sole unbusy Thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet well I ken the banks where Amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of Nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye Amaranths! bloom for whom ye may—
For Me ye bloom not! Glide, rich Streams! away!
With lips unbrighten’d, wreathless Brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the Spells, that drowse my soul?
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.

(This is the version of the poem printed in J.C.C. Mays' standard Poetical Works [Princeton 2001] 16:2, 1030).

One of Coleridge’s more famous later works, this: an inverted sonnet—the sestet coming first, hymning nature’s industriousness and lamenting the poet’s comparative non-productivity; then the octet, in which the poet confirms that he knows about a more-than-natural realm, where unfading flowers bloom and nectar flows, but that he is excluded from that place and its joy because he has no object upon which to fix his hopes, and without hope work is fruitless. It’s a fine poem, with a particularly well-turned final couplet. I have sometimes wondered if the image of ‘nectar in a sieve’ works through a kind of creative ambiguity: if the reference is to something like wine (often called ‘nectar’, especially in religious contexts) then the fluid will fall straight through the sieve as we try and scoop it. But I suppose most readers nowadays would think more botanically, of nectar as a honied syrup or thicker gloop, in which case the sieve will lose most but will retain some. I wonder if that makes the final image more poignant.

Anyway: there is an, as it were, standard reading of this poem, and I think that reading is wrong. I’ll explain why.

February 1827, the date specified by Coleridge’s subtitle, was a few weeks away from the end of ten years of him living with the Gillmans—James, a young doctor, and his wife Ann—in north London. The Gillmans took Coleridge into their home and family, looked after him (under James’s care STC was able to reduce, although never quite quit, his opium addiction) and hosted the many visitors who came to sit at the feet of, or dine with, the ‘sage of Highgate’. Coleridge even went on holiday with the family. He lived with the Gillmans from March 1816 right through to his death in July 1834. 

Now: it seems that Coleridge performed a sort-of chivalric amour, an I love you rigmarole, where Ann Gillman was concerned. Actual adultery was not on the table and we have to presume that both parties were aware of the effective fictionality of this romantic gubbins. Since separating from his wife two decades before, Coleridge had fallen for a number of women, an actress here, the wife of a friend there, a succession of inamoratas, some more and some less ‘in’ on the game of Coleridge's passion—the modern idiom “had a crush upon”, though anachronistic and a little infantilising, probably gets at the nature of old-man Coleridge’s moonings-after. Then again, there was an important sense, important for STC himself, in which these crushes were real love, intense and vital. 

Which brings us to this poem. Coleridge wrote it in his notebook, 21st February 1827—or to be more precise, he wrote a longer, 36-line poem, the first 14 lines of which were extracted and published, without Coleridge’s permission, in the illustrated annual The Bijou (1828). That first-published version is at the head of this post. I’ll come to the remaining section of the poem in a bit.

The notebook version of the poem comes with a lengthy prose introduction in which Coleridge reports he had imagined (‘a fancy—struck across the Eolian Harp of my Brain’) two mutually-reflecting mirrors: ‘two Looking-glasses fronting, each seeing the other in itself, and itself in the other.’ The note (you can read the whole of it below) ends by calling the poem a

Strain in the manner of G. HERBERT—: which might be entitled THE ALONE MOST DEAR: a Complaint of Jacob to Rachel as in the tenth year of his Service he saw in her or fancied he saw Symptoms of Alienation.

Then there is a deleted line: ‘N.B. The Thoughts and Images being modernized and turned into English’.

That's from J.C.C. Mays' Poetical Works [CC 16.2 606] and, as ever, you can click to embiggen and clarify.

In other words, Coleridge here refers the poem to the story of Jacob and Rachel in Genesis 29—Jacob having travelled to Haran, and seeing Laban’s beautiful daughter Rachel, agreed to work for Haran for seven years to be worthy of marrying her. Here, Coleridge is Jacob, Ann Gillman is Rachel, and the ‘ten years’ being the decade he had spent in Highgate in the Gillman’s house. In the Biblical story, as I’m sure you know, Jacob was tricked: after his seven years, Haran fobbed him off with Rachel’s less-comely older sister Leah, and Jacob had to work another seven years before he finally obtained Rachel.

So we have a biographical reading of the poem, one preferred by all the critics, so far as I can see: having yearned after Ann Gillman for ten years, like Jacob labouring for Rachel, Coleridge now sees, or thinks he sees, her going off him (‘symptoms of alienation’) and so he writes this despairing poem. He can’t work (write poetry) because his love is hopeless, and hopelessness vitiates his productivity. He signs the poem JACOB HODIERNUS, which means ‘The Modern-Day Jacob’, ‘Today’s Jacob’. It’s an inverted sonnet (sestet then octave) because regular sonnets sing of love’s consummation and this poem does the opposite.

One added twist: Ann Gillman, who read this notebook entry, annotated it in pencil: next to ‘in the tenth year of his Service he saw her or fancied he saw Symptoms of Alienation’ she wrote ‘It was fancy’. So it wasn’t true that she was going off him! He misread her mood. Shucks! Heartbreaking, really.

Then again, there is a paradox in all this: because the fact that he has written this poem (about how he can’t work, about how he never produces anything) proves that he can work, and has produced something. And although Coleridge’s preface to ‘Work Without Hope’ tags, via the Jacob and Rachel reference, himself and Ann Gillman, there is nothing fundamentally trustworthy about Coleridge’s preface-writing—think of the famous note before ‘Kubla Khan’ for one. Is that really what the poem is about?

One final jigsaw-piece: in the notebook, Coleridge added a footnote to the word ‘Amaranths’, omitted in the Bijou version of the poem, but restored by Mays in his Collected Poems: ‘*Amaranths—*Literally rendered is Flower Fadeless, or never fading—from the Greek—a not and marainō to wither.’

This is right. What I mean is, the word does indeed derive from Ancient Greek, ἀμάραντος (amárantos, “eternal, undying, unfading, unwilting; amaranth; everlasting flower”) from ᾰ̓- + μαραίνω (“to shrivel, wither”). Why did Coleridge add this note? The editor of the Bijou, clearly, could see no good reason for it, and cut it. But I think the amaranth reference is key, and more to the point I think makes a Biblical reference, one obvious enough that it surprises me no critics seem to have noticed it. (Kathleen Coburn, in her edition of the Notebooks, speculates this ‘may be a recollection of the use of [amaranth] by Plotinus’ and then quotes a passage in which Luther describes the flower as one that grows in August and ‘is more stalk than flower’. I don’t think either of these is the proper intertext here, I must say.)

Look again at the poem. The opening sestet riffs on Herbert, as Coleridge notes (and generations of critics have recorded)—here’s Herbert’s ‘Employment 1’ (1674): 

All things are busie; onely I
Neither bring hony with the bees,
Nor flowres to make that, nor the husbandrie
            To water these.

I am no link of thy great chain,
But all my companie is a weed.
Lord place me in thy consort; give one strain
           To my poore reed.

But I think generations of critics have misread the remaining eight lines of the poem. Who is the ‘thy’ addressed by Herbert, there? To what is the amaranth in Coleridge’s poem a reference?

It’s Biblical. Specifically, it refers to 1 Peter 5:4's καὶ φανερωθέντος τοῦ ἀρχιποίμενος κομιεῖσθε τὸν ἀμαράντινον τῆς δόξης στέφανον; ‘And when the chief Shepherd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away.’ ‘That faded not away’ is ἀμαράντινον, amaranthine. Another way of translating the Greek here would be: ‘ye shall receive a wreath of amaranths’. This is the one and only reference to amaranths in the Bible.

Nectar, here, is the drink of the gods (like amaranth, it means deathlessness: νέκταρ from Proto-Indo-European *neḱ- “to perish, disappear” + *-terh₂ “overcoming”; literally, “overcoming death”, and so called because it gave immortality.) Look again at the octave. The poet observing the fecundity of nature, laments that he cannot work. But he knows the bank where the immortal ‘Flower Fadeless’ grows, by which flow streams of immortal nectar (in the Septuagint, Moses’ “land flowing with milk and honey” flows with milk and νέκτᾰρ; and the same is true of Job 20:17’s heavenly ‘rivers, the floods, the brooks of honey and butter.’) The poet sees the Christian heaven, the wreaths of amaranth promised in 1 Peter, and yet he strolls on with ‘wreathless brow’

This is not a love poem, in the sense of sexual love. This is a poem about religious despair. The ‘work’ Coleridge is unable to do is not the poet’s work of writing poems, since he has here manifestly written a poem. It is the Christian’s laborare et [est] orare. Jacob is invoked not as the would-be lover of Rachel, but as the Jewish and therefore Christian patriarch. This is the man who wrestled with God: who, that is, struggled with his religious faith.

The remaining portion of the poem in its notebook form confirms this reading, I think:

I speak in figures, inward thoughts and woes
Interpreting by Shapes and Outward Shews:
Where daily nearer me with magic Ties,
What time and where, (wove close with magic Ties
Line over line, and thickning as they rise)
The World her spidery threads on all sides spun
Side answ’ring side with narrow interspace,
My Faith (say I; I and my Faith are one)
Hung, as a Mirror, there! And face to face
(For nothing else there was between or near)
One Sister Mirror hid the dreary Wall,
But that is broke! And with that bright compeer
I lost my object and my inmost all—
Faith in the Faith of THE ALONE MOST DEAR!

The alone most dear is God, not Anna Gillman—though we can imagine it was Anna, browsing STC’s notebooks, seeing this draft, and assuming it was about her, who had extracted the first fourteen lines (leaving this later passage behind) and sent it to The Bijou. In this second section, ‘Outward Shews’ is from Merchant of Venice 3:2:75 (‘So may the outward shews be least themselves’), but the doubled mirror is clearly the glass, through which STC peers darkly as per 1 Corinthians 13:12, and in which he sees not God as God, but himself reflected back infinitely in God’s glass.