The Ancient Malletter

 

David Mallet’s The Excursion (1728) was one of those early 18th-century pseudo-epics, enormously popular in its day, entirely unknown now. Its first half ranges around terrestrial locations; but in the second Mallet leaps into space as his ‘excursive traveller’ moves from planets to stars. The verse is mostly humdrum, although sometimes it lifts itself. And, in particular, I found myself wondering about this description of the polar ice-cap:

Now beneath the North,
Alone with Winter in his Frost-bound Realm!
Where, a white Waste of Ice, the Polar Sea
Casts cold a cheerless Light: where Hills of Snow,
Pil’d up from eldest Ages, Hill on Hill,
In blue, bleak Precipices rise to Heaven.
Yet here, even here in this unjoyous World,
Adventrous Mortals, urg’d by Thirst of Gain,
Thro’ floating Isles of Ice and fighting Storms,
Roam the wild Waves, in Search of doubtful Shores,
By West or East, a Path yet unexplor’d. [28]

Could Coleridge have read this, rather vivid polar poetry, and (consciously or subconsciously) have transferred the north to south, the blue ice to green, and given the Adventrous Mortal the identity of his Ancient Mariner? The only positive connection I can find is that Coleridge quotes Mallet's edition of Bacon; but Judson Stanley Lyon [The Excursion: a Study (Yale Univ. Press 1950), 32] argues that certain passages of Wordsworth's like-titled poem manifest influence from Mallett, and Sharon M. Setzer [‘Excursions into the Wilderness: Wordsworth's Visionary Kingdoms and the Typography of Miltonic Revision’, Studies in Romanticism, 30:3 (1991), 367-389] thinks Wordworth's ‘City of clouds’ passage in Excursion 2 owes something to a similar description in Mallett's work. So if William was reading Mallett, maybe Coleridge was too.  

‘St Stephen's Chapel: a satirical poem’ by Horatius (1807)

St Stephen's Chapel (1807) by Horace Twiss (1787-1849), under the not-really-a-pseudonum Horatius, is a pro-Fox, anti-Pitt satirical portrait of the then-current crop of British politicians (the title refers to the chapel in the original Palace of Westminster, served as the chamber of the House of Commons, until it was destroyed in the fire of 1834 and a new dedicated chamber was built). The poem opens with a dig at ‘poets’ who are also ‘prosers’, writers of contemporary journalism, who have changed their political allegience, from, as it were, red to blue. Coleridge is not named, but presumably he is whom Twiss is targeting.

Twiss laments the passing of ‘great Fox’, who had died September the previous year, and attacks Pitt as ‘the Quixote of the State’. One other oblique reference to Coleridge comes in a footnote on p.26: ‘By way of deprecating Lord H-nry P-tty we have heard wretched puns and wretched rhymes, comparing his to Master Betty, the theatrical Tom Thumb. But the only reason for attaching ridicule to the name of Master Betty … is that he has never attempted any for which he was not fit. On the contrary he has done more for us … than has been affected since the organization fo the Sinking Fund.’ This can only refer to Coleridge's anti-Petty political squib ‘The Taste of the Times’, printed in the Morning Chronicle 25th February 1807, about which I have previously written on this blog.

Lowell's Coleridge

 

Lowell's History (1973) collects 366 sonnets, arranged chronologically by subject, from prehistory, King David, Solomon, Achilles, Clytemnestra, Sappho through Roman figures, Vikings, Dante, Tudors, French Revolution and on to the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries. Two of these sonnets are about Coleridge. Here's one:

Jeremy Reed notes that, unlike his earlier work, in History ‘Lowell's seizure upon the moment often leads to startlingly disordered juxtapositions. This is part of the book's strength as well as its confusions.’ He cites this sonnet:

Coleridge enters the poet's meditation in the April rain over New York in a manner so oblique and contradictory that one senses Lowell's ignition of cross-currents. New York: the rain shucks its liquid peas on the skylight, a scent of renewal that evokes for the poet how paradoxically “A newer younger generation faces/the firing squad” before Coleridge is fleshed out on the substance of the poem. [Reed, Madness: the Price of Poetry (Peter Owen 1989), 95]

Not altogether the substance of the poem, I would say: the sonnet falls into two halves, the first about Lowell on a New York fire-escape in April, thinking of Coleridge, being interrupted by a sudden shower and hurrying inside and downstairs. The rain smells sweetly, of youth, of life, which leads him by an associative inversion to think of youth and death, the young protesting the Vietnam war, and being shot down, as at Kent State. That ends line 7: the remaining seven lines characterise Coleridge in unflattering terms, but even here New York intrudes, when the portly, unstable Englishman is figured in terms of American tenpin bowling. Lowell's opener ‘Coleridge stands’ inhabits Coleridge's own self-styling: he often invoked the cross-linguistic whimsy by which his initials ‘S.T.C.’ actualised the Greek, ἐστηση, which means ‘he has stood’: he would sign his work or his letters Esteesee, or ἐστηση. He flames for his ‘one friend’—Wordsworth, we presume, although by interrupting the poem almost as soon as it has begun and inserting himself into it, Lowell is perhaps suggesting that he himself might be the friend, the heir of the earlier poet's genius. 

The Coleridge with whom Lowell empathizes is—who? A schizoid satellite of the poet's mind, the synthesis of the moment that Lowell called a blazing out, or a character of fiction? Of his concern with the unreal or the fictitious that memory and language combine to create within the given moment, Lowell justifies his method by his belief that the poet's approximation to truth is the closest we get to reality. “Unrealism can degenerate into meaningless clinical hallucinations or rhetorical machinery, but the true unreal is about something, and eats from the abundance of reality.” The subject of poetry is the “true unreal”, by which one means that area of consciousness in which inner and outer worlds find a congruity, and are heightened in their interdependency.

As Reed here suggests, we can take this sonnet not just as a poem about Lowell and Coleridge, but about Lowell as Coleridge: Lowelleridge, flaming into poetry, but under a paralysis of will, the in-voluntary imposter, characterised by his addiction (laudanum and brandy, Lowell's alcoholism and mental health issues) considered as diseases of the will. Soft-bodied, pudgy, powerful but strengthless, Esteesee has stood, but only as a tenpin stands, ready to be knocked down again. The 1820s and the 1970s, England and America—where Coleridge never came, although he planned to, his Pantisocratic scheme failing to actualise itself. The ‘alderman's stroll to positive negation’ combines a knock at Coleridge's bourgeois plumpness, his actual gait, with, as destination, the climactic phrase of his late poem ‘Limbo’ (1811, 1834). The poet describes the ‘strange place’ that is ‘not a place’ that is Limbo: in which a blind man stares sightlessly at the sightless moon. The last eight lines of this 28-line poem:

No such sweet sights doth Limbo Den immure,
Wall'd round, and made a Spirit-jail secure,
By the mere Horror of blank Naught-at-all,
Whose circumambience doth these Ghosts enthral.
A lurid thought is growthless, dull Privation,
Yet that is but a Purgatory curse;
Hell knows a fear far worse,
A fear—a future fate.—'Tis positive Negation!

In this post I suggest the blind man figures Homer, and that Coleridge is working through the Odyssey and Dante to arrive at a place of passivity, enthralment, the positive negation of the will.

The disease of the will, something Coleridge self-diagnosed and wrote about in his Notebooks, is also at the heart of ‘Coleridge and Richard II’:

His powerful imagination is tethered to ‘his dwindling will to act’. This Lowell characterises in gendered terms: ‘feminine friendism’ is quoted from Coleridge's Lectures on Shakespeare, commenting upon Richard II, Act 2 scene 2:

Queen: To please the king I did; to please myself
I cannot do it; yet I know no cause
Why I should welcome such a guest as grief,
Save bidding farewell to so sweet a guest
As my sweet Richard: yet again, methinks,
Some unborn sorrow, ripe in sorrow's womb,
Is coming toward me; and my inward soul
With nothing trembles: at something it grieves,
More than with parting from my lord the king.

It is clear that Shakspeare never meant to represent Richard as a vulgar debauchee, but a man with a wantonness of spirit in external show, a feminine friendism, an intensity of woman-like love of those immediately about him, and a mistaking of the delight of being loved by him for a love of him. And mark in this scene Shakspeare's gentleness in touching the tender superstitions, the ‘terræ incognitæ’ of presentiments, in the human mind; and how sharp a line of distinction he commonly draws between these obscure forecastings of general experience in each individual, and the vulgar errors of mere tradition. Indeed, it may be taken once for all as the truth, that Shakspeare, in the absolute universality of his genius, always reverences whatever arises out of our moral nature; he never profanes his muse with a contemptuous reasoning away of the genuine and general, however unaccountable, feelings of mankind.

This is one of those occasions, as Lowell intuits, when Coleridge is talking about himself as well as describing a Shakespearean character: famously, his account of Hamlet is a kind of autobiography. But we can also see Lowell clocking himself in the mirror, here: the king, the father-figure, and what Ian Gregson calls Lowell's ‘insinuation that his own father was not as masculine as he should have been.’ The biological father, the poetic father. Lowell styles the king looking in the mirror and seeing not himself but a shipwreck, sunk like the Titanic by ‘the white glittering inertia of the iceberg.’ I can't place Lowell's assertion that Coleridge believed ‘only blacks would cherish slavery for two thousand years’. STC was a lifelong abolitionist, who campaigned against slavery in verse and prose: for him, the history of the slave trade was “the history of one great calamity—one long continuous crime, involving every possible definition of evil; for it combined the wildest physical suffering with the most atrocious moral depravity’. [Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments (1995) 1:217]. He nowhere suggests that enslaved Africans or their descendents cherished their state. Perhaps the ‘two thousand years’ is a, somewhat obscure, reference to his belief that freedom for all slaves had to be accompanied by conversion to Christianity: Slavery constitutes ‘a body of Death into which Religion alone can awake the spirit of life,’ as he put it in a letter. Missionary work, and full conversion of the entire population of Africa to Christianity, would be the precondition of liberation: ‘The Africans are more versatile, more easily modified than perhaps any other known race. A few years of strict honest and humane attention to their interests, affections and prejudices would abolish the memory of the past, or cause it to be remembered only as a fair contrast.’ But this seems like a stretch.

Louis Simond meets Southey and Coleridge, 1810

This is from Louis Simond, Journal of a tour and residence in Great Britain: during the years 1810 and 1811 (2 vols 1815-17), 1:350-4

We had the pleasure of seeing several times the celebrated Mr Southey, a distinguished favourite of the English muses. Mr Coleridge, whose talents are equally known, although less fruitful, was at Mr S.'s, with whom he has some family connection. Both of these gentlemen, and, I believe, Mr Wordsworth, another of the poets of the lakes, had, in the warmth of their youthful days, some fifteen years ago, taken the spirited resolution of traversing the Atlantic, in order to breathe the pure air of liberty in the United States. Some accident delayed the execution of this laudable project, and gave them time to cool. At present, these gentlemen seem to think that there is no need of going so far for liberty, and that there is a reasonable allowance of it at home. Their democracy is come down to Whiggism, and may not even stop there. Mr S. has resided in Spain, and is well acquainted with the literature of that country, and its people. He thinks the Spaniards are well aware of the defects of their government, and that a thorough reformation of them, and in fact a revolution, would have united the whole people against the invaders, and have rendered them invincible. He and his friend are enthusiastic in the Spanish cause. This sentiment is, in them, I am persuaded, quite sincere, and founded on just and honourable principles. But it is remarkable, that this same Spanish cause is one of the watch-words of party, to which I have alluded before. By a strange perversion of the human mind, those liberal and independent opinions in matters of government, which one of the parties professes, are generally found associated with a certain toleration of usurpation and tyranny in certain situations; which is, on the contrary, held in utter abhorrence by the other party, although accused of being, otherwise, less nice on those points than its adversary. This might well raise uncharitable suspicions of the candour and sincerity of both.

I learned here, that there are good grounds to believe, that the valuable race of Spanish Merino sheep was originally introduced there from England (Gloucestershire,! think,). ... Mr S. has rectified the error I was in respecting the Spanish play from which Corneille drew his Cid. The old father, (Don Diego,) in the French Cid, seeking an avenger of his outraged honour, addresses his son in these words :—"Rodrigue, as-tu du coeur?" To which the young hero answers, "Tout autre que mon pere. l'eprouveroit sur l'heur!" I had been told that, in the Spanish play, the old father, calling his three sons in succession,, seizes the hand of the first, and, carrying it to his mouth, bites his thumb severely! This unexpected proceeding does not fail to occasion vehement outcries and struggles on the part of the son, who is, in consequence, dismissed with contempt. A second son undergoes the same trial, with no better result. At last comes the third, the young Cid, who bears the biting without emotion, and is immediately proclaimed the avenger. Instead of biting, I.now understand that the old father gives only a hard squeeze of the hand, which is certainly a less shocking violation of the French bienseances tragiques.

Mr S. has chosen a career in which he. does not meet at present with any competitor. He is eminently the poet of chimeras. Milton left a great model in this kind; and he has surpassed it in monstrous creations and events, so totally out of nature, as to exclude not only sympathy, but,, in a great degree, meaning itself.

Je 1'avouerai, j'aime toute aventure,
Qui tient de pres a l'humaine nature.

The coarse remark of Cardinal d'Este to Ariosto is well known: "Dove diavolo, Signor Ludovico, avete pigliate tante de coglionerie;" and most of the readers of Milton and of Mr S. might be inclined to repeat it;—in fact they have few readers, although they have many admirers. The modern poet understands piety and tenderness much better than his predecessor. The love and the theology of Paradise Lost are alike harsh and austere, coarse and material,—while Mr S. has tenderness and spirituality. The latter is as picturesque as Milton, who was a great landscape-painter, and, in the age of box parterres, dipt hedges, and jets-d'eau, respected the freedom, and loved the native graces of nature.

Mr S. is much esteemed by all those who are acquainted with him, and seems to have as much good sense and general knowledge as talents and genius. I was surprised to hear him censuring highly the doctrine of the Essay on Population, or rather not taking it in its true light. One of the dreams of the revolutionary philosophy was, the faculty of indefinite perfectibility in the human species; and one of its errors, or its artifices, was, to suppose that the great obstacles to this perfectibility came altogether from the social institutions. It is not to be wondered at, that the discovery of a still greater obstacle,—an insurmountable one, raised by nature itself,—which deprives that philosophy of a favourite dogma, should be very ill received by its followers, and excite their ill-humour. In consequence, the doctrine of population is one of the signals of party. It is often approved by the whigs; but I have not found any thorough reformer to whom it was not odious. These two parties having, however, many points of contact and natural sympathies, individuals slide easily and unconsciously from one to the other; and *when the metamorphosis takes place, it happens frequently that the new insect, fresh out of his old skin, drags still some fragments of it after him,—-just enough to indicate what he was before.

Here's Ira Grushaw on Simond:

Louis Simond (1767-1831) earned a permanent place in the footnotes of the literary history of England when he was entertained while touring the Lake Country by De Quincey, who characterized him as a "thorough, knowing man of the world, keen, sharp as a razor, and valuing nothing but the tangible and the ponderable." By birth a Frenchman, Simond emigrated before the Revolution in his native land to the United States, where he became a successful New York merchant. In 1810-11 he made a tour of Great Britain, where he encountered De Quincey, Wordsworth, and others, recording his impressions in a journal written originally in English and published anonymously by a "French traveler" in 1815. After Waterloo a French translation appeared, a second edition of which finally identified the author by name.

There's a fair bit in this volume about De Quincey; but I don't recall previously coming across this little snapshot of Southey and Coleridge at Keswick together.

Coleridge on Cholera

 I believe this to be a previously unnoticed record of Coleridge's speaking. It's from an article by ‘L.M.C.’ called ‘Thoughts on the Poet Coleridge’ [The Metropolitan Magazine 11:42 (Oct 1834), 142-6]. Much of the piece is general praise of Coleridge's talents (‘As a great poet, and a still greater philosopher, the world has hardly yet done justice to the genius of Coleridge’ and so on), but there are some personal reminiscences too:

The last time I ever saw him, was at the period when the cholera was beginning to shed its baneful influence over this country. Coleridge was walking in the grove at Highgate, his frequent promenade, and opposite to the church where his ashes now repose. We stopped to salute him, and he held us some time in discourse. He entered upon the then all-engrossing subject of that fearful scourge, not with the partiality or prejudice, or narrow views of the mere physician, anxious only to establish his own theory, and to subvert every other, but with the candour and the comprehensiveness of the great philosopher, anxious only to elicit truth. He mentioned several interesting circumstances connected with the plague, which had fallen under his own observation, while he was resident at Malta; and, amongst others, that while the pestilence was raging, the common flies were found lying dead about the houses, and the small fly, called the blue fly of pestilence, appeared in their stead. The important question, as to whether the cholera was infectious, or merely contagious, he discussed with luminous eloquence; and showed the great probability that it might in fact be both. He explained how one form of the disease might, under certain circumstances, tend to produce the other; and again, with fearful and destructive energy, reproduce and multiply itself. I merely state the substance of his remarks; for I cannot venture to put words into the mouth of that sublime colloquist: yet I have a vivid recollection of his tone and manner, when, comparing the pestilence to the ‘destroying angel,’ he lifted up his hands and eyes to the blue summer sky, that shed its full sunlight upon his inspired face. At that moment, who that saw him, but must have been struck with the wonderful mastery of mind over matter? for the bent figure, the tremulous motion of the head, and the silver tresses, that indicated a premature old age, seemed in a moment to vanish, and the divine spirit was alone present and perceptible to sense.

Well, he was wrong about cholera: it's contagious, but not infectious. (In Frederick Burwick's Oxford Companion to Coleridge [(Oxford 2009), 299], Paul Cheshire reminds us of ‘a [Notebook] entry where Coleridge claimed that the cholera epidemic was the result of savage races neglecting to cultivate their higher functions.’ So I guess there are worse ways to be wrong about this particular disease). There's also this rather non-specific reminiscence of STC reading poetry, and opining on Shakespeare, which I'm afraid adds little the canon of Coleridgeana:

I remember Coleridge reading some passages from the old poets, with such a look and tone of enjoyment, that his whole soul seemed poured out in the flood of melody that fell from his lips. Nor was it surprising to find one of his most original turn giving the palm to those early writers, who, as he justly observed, were the parent streams of all those channels of thought, that diffuse themselves through modern poetry; which has chiefly the merit of dressing up old ideas in a new and more elegant costume, or, in other words, re-setting the jewels of antiquity in the filigree of the day. Talking of Shakspeare, he gave it as his opinion that both Titus Andronicus, and Troilus and Cressida, were the works of that mighty Archimage, and bore the impress of his genius too strongly, (despite their faults,) to give sanction to the idea entertained by some critics, that they were the compositions of an inferior hand.

Coleridge, George Buchanan and the Tribade Riddle

 

A follow-up to this post, which Blogger in its wisdom has placed behind a content-warning: on Coleridge's ‘Tribade Riddle’. I've been reading a bit of George Buchanan lately, and came across this quatrain of his. It's one of a series addressed to a woman called Leonora, roasting her for her indiscriminate promiscuity. She has sex, it seems, with all manner of monks, and cooks (the Latin, coquus, includes a double-entendre with ‘cock’ that is almost, but not quite, true of the English word), taking her pleasure with the ‘members of young men’ (nervi juvenum) as well as with the poet. This enrages and saddens him, though he can't break away from her. Here is ‘In Leonorum’:

Vive male, monachique, tui lixaeque coquique
Mater edax, illex filia, nigra tribas.
Ne tamen interea, vestri immemor arguar esse,
vos penes hoc nostri pignus amoris erit.

Live wickedly, with your monks, your groupies and cooks
you greedy mother, seductress girl, black frigger.
Meantime, in case I’m accused of forgetting you,
you’ll soon possess this token of our love.

‘Groupies’ is, in the original, lixae. A lixa is a camp-follower, somebody who traipses after the army, either as a sutler or prostitute. I've assumed the latter meaning extends beyond just military usage, to mean any kind of person who follows others for sexual reasons, although obviously there's more than a touch of anachronism in my translation. I'm more interested in tribas: a word often turned into English as ‘lesbian’, but which more precisely refers to any practitioner of sexual frottage (the word comes from the Ancient Greek τρίβω tríbō, “to rub”). Martial's poem about an aggressive lesbian called Philaenis (Martial 7:67; I'm here quoting Gillian Spraggs's salty translation) opens: ‘Philaenis the tribade buggers boys/And randier than any married man/she eats-out eleven girls a day.’ Martial, here, is mocking Philaenis; he finds it cruelly hilarious that her butch lesbian aspirations, her filling her life with such masculine activities as lifting weights at the gym and wrestling, are all undermined by the fact that what she really likes doing is performing cunnilingus on women. Why Buchanan specifies a black tribade (‘nigra’) in his poem, is a puzzle. He might mean the word in the sense of wicked, evil, or, like Shakespeare's Dark Lady, it might be that Leonora is black-skinned. At any rate I wonder if Coleridge knew this poem. We know he read George Buchanan: he borrowed Buchanan's Poemata quae extant (Leyden, 1628) from Jesus College library, and he was working through the 1790s on an, in the event, unrealised project to publish a collection of the best Neo-Latin verse with his own translations.

‘Alph, Quicksilver River’: Coleridge and Fracastoro

Coleridge doesn’t mention Girolamo Fracastoro in his Notebooks, and he’s not in the Marginalia, but we know he read him—or we know now, because I tracked down the source of this poem which, it may be, Coleridge tried to pass off as his own in a September 1802 letter to William Sotheby.

But it was always likely Coleridge read Fracastoro: he was one of the most celebrated and widely published of the Renaissance neo-Latin poets, and his mini-epic Syphilis sive morbus gallicus (‘Syphilis or The French Disease’; 1530) was highly regarded. It’s a strange work, in many ways: three books of Vergilian dactylic hexameters speculating on the origins and treatment of what was, in the early 1500s, a ‘new’ disease. We call this sickness ‘syphilis’ today because of Fracastoro’s poem. Its third book contains an inset-story, in Latin pastoral mode, in which a handsome shepherd called Syphilus angers the god of the Sun by refusing him sacrifices, and is punished with a terrible disease that gives him sores all over his body. From him the disease spreads through the land.

But that’s only a part of the whole, and Syphilus only one of several shepherds who are afflicted with the disease in Fracastoro's telling. Book One of the epic blames the coming of the disease on the French: for in 1494 Charles VIII of France had invaded northern Italy, and his army ravaged the country, sacking cities, killing and raping (the war went on until 1559). That a new disease happened to arrive at the same time led to the belief that the French had brought it with them. But although Fracastoro’s poem endorses this theory (as per its subtitle) it also knows that the theory isn’t true; that syphilis was just as unknown previously in France as it was in Italy. Book Two of the poem advances a different theory: that syphilis was brought back from the New World, after the first Europeans arrived there in the late 1400s. Opinion today is divided between those who think this is indeed where syphilis originated, and those who think the disease existed already in Europe, diagnosed as other illnesses (leprosy, elephantiasis, ‘saddle-nose’ and others) and that it mutated or increased in intensity around this time. I’m no expert, but it seems the problem with the latter theory is that untreated syphilis leaves its mark in the bones of those it kills, and although some pre-1500 European skeletons show these signs only very few do, where you’d expect (following its later epidemic spread) many more would do so. So perhaps it did come from America, as Fracastoro says.

As a physician, Fracastoro proposes two treatments for the disease, neither of any actual therapeutic merit (until the invention of antibiotics, four centuries later, there was no effective treatment for syphilis). One was injecting the patient with mercury: ‘quicksilver’. The other was Oil of Guaiac, derived from the Palo Santo tree (Bulnesia sarmientoi) which grows in the New World. Fracastoro’s poem sees divine providence in this latter fact: just as this horrible illness came from this newly discovered place, so God has placed there the cure. I got the poison, I got the remedy, as another poet put it.

Anyway, I’ve been reading Fracastoro’s Syphilis, which is full of interesting things. And since we know Coleridge was reading Fracastoro in 1802, it’s not unlikely that he was reading him in the 1790s too. And here I come to the point of my post.

In Book Two, Lipara—one of the daughters of the Hesperides (the Gardens of the West: she is introduced into the poem because the far west is where the New World is)—takes Ilceus, a young shepherd, like Syphilus suffering from this new disease, into an antrum opacum, a ‘dark cave’:

Sic ait, et se antro gradiens praemittit opaco.
Ille subit, magnos terrae miratus hiatus,
squallentesque situ aeterno, et sine lumine vastas
speluncas, terramque meantia flumina subter.
Tum Lipare: “Hoc quodcunque patet, quam maxima terra est:
hunc totum sine luce globum, loca subdita nocti,
dii habitant: imas retinet Proserpina sedes,
flumina supremas, quae sacris concita ab antris
in mare per latas abeunt resonantia terras.”

She spoke, and stepped ahead of him into the dark cave.
He followed, marvelling at the great chasms inside the earth,
Eternal sites of waste, of vast and lightless
caverns, and the rivers meandering through the earth below.
Then Lipara said: “This huge expanse, as wide as the earth herself,
this huge lightless globe and these regions subject to night,
are where gods dwell: Proserpina holds the lowest realm,
while higher up are rivers, which flow through the sacred caves
into the sea, passing noisily through the broad lands.” [Syphilis 2:371-79]

They move on: to the left they see Vulcan’s smithy, roaring, hissing and clanging, and on the right a ‘sacred river’, a sacer fluvius [2:402] that flows into a subterranean sea of quicksilver. This sunless sea of mercury is the expedition’s destination— Lipara bathes Ilceus in it, washing him ‘three times with her virginal hands’ (Ilceus, we are told, ‘marvelled that his ugly sores were gone, his body now free of the malign disease’ 2:415-16) and then returns him to the sunlight.

But doesn’t this strike a familiar note, to the reader of ‘Kubla Khan’? Alph, the sacred river, which runs through the opening lines of that great poem, is not a detail mentioned in Purchas, His Pilgrimes (1619), which (of course) Coleridge was reading, immediately before ‘falling asleep’ (that is, sinking into an opium daze) and dreaming the poem:

In Xandu 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.

I wonder if Coleridge in 1797 was reading Fracastoro alongside Samuel Purchas. One of his projects (one of his many, unrealised projects) was an anthology of neo-Latin verse, and to that end he would definitely have read one of the most famous of all neo-Latin poets (‘As late as 1806 the Scottish poet and linguist John Black could say “Fracastoro and our Buchanan are generally supposed to dispute the sceptre of modern poetical latinity.”’ [James Gardner]. Coleridge knew Black, who edited the Morning Chronicle, a paper to which Coleridge contributed). Plus he was most definitely reading him in 1802, only five years later.

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.

Was Coleridge thinking of Fracastoro’s sacred river, that flows with argentum vivum [2:403] ‘living silver’/quicksilver, down to a sea that is dark (atra, 2:405], occupying one of the vast underworld's sunless sacred caverns (sacra antra sine lumine 2:378, 373)? I’m intrigued by the notion that ‘Alph the Sacred River’ might actually be a river of mercury.

One other detail: the cave into which the Hesperidean virgin leads Ilceus is located in the far east—in that place where ‘Dawn arises and ushers in the new day’ [2:344]. Somewhere near Xanadu, maybe?