‘Leaping and lingering’: Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads

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In the following essay, Parrish examines Coleridge's understanding of the ballad form, both as seen through his collaboration with Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads and through his notion of the supernatural.
SOURCE: Parrish, Stephen. “‘Leaping and lingering’: Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads.” In Coleridge's Imagination: Essays in Memory of Pete Laver, edited by Richard Gravil, Lucy Newlyn, and Nicholas Roe, pp. 102-16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

I

One of the most colourful volumes of literary scholarship ever given to the world is a study of the working of Coleridge's imagination, ‘an absorbing adventure along the ways which the imagination follows in dealing with its multifarious materials—an adventure like a passage through the mazes of a labyrinth, to come out at last upon a wide and open sky’. Now more than half a century old, The Road to Xanadu was composed in a style that has rather fallen out of fashion. Hardly any smart critics today write even like G. Wilson Knight, and post-structuralism has cultivated its own arcane splendours of language to overshadow the rococo magnificence of Xanadu's mesmerizing rhetoric. Celebrated for a generation at Harvard with a Gilbertian tribute—

My name is John Livingston Lowes;
I'm a dealer in magical prose—

Lowes offered accounts of the poet's imagination of such spellbinding authority that we listen like a three-year's child while the critic has his will:

The ‘deep well of unconscious cerebration’ underlies your consciousness and mine, but in the case of genius its waters are possessed of a peculiar potency. Images and impressions converge and blend even in the sleepy drench of our forgetful pools. But the inscrutable energy genius which we call creative owes its secret virtue at least in part to the enhanced and almost incredible facility with which in the wonder-working depths of the unconscious the fragments which sink incessantly below the surface fuse and assimilate and coalesce.1

This image of the well serves throughout the book to emblemize the mind of the poet, sometimes as ‘a reservoir of memory’, sometimes as the lodging place of denizens of the unconscious who stir about in its murky depths. I cannot refuse myself the gratification (as Wordsworth said when he took aim at The Ancient Mariner) of presenting one more fluent specimen (page 278) of Lowes's sparkling water-imagery:

the poem is not the confluence of unconsciously merging images, as a pool of water forms from the coalescence of scattered drops; nor is the poet a somnambulist in a subliminal world. Neither the conscious impressions nor their unconscious interpenetrations constitute the poem. They are inseparable from it, but it is an entity which they do not create. On the contrary, every impression, every new creature rising from the potent waters of the Well, is what it now is through its participation in a whole, foreseen as a whole in each integral part—a whole which is the working out of a controlling imaginative design. …

If metaphor is the key to understanding an abstraction like the conscious or subconscious mind, or the imagination, this metaphor of the well unlocks Lowes's understanding of Coleridge and remains available to us as an implement. We might be more tempted to make use of it if Lowes had used it with more control. It is a little startling to learn (on page 189) that when Coleridge seems to associate the iridescent colours of water snakes (in his poem) with the glistening colours of hoar-frost on snow in the sunlight (in his notebooks), ‘the Spirit of the Well is once more dealing the cards for the shaping Spirit, with unerring art, to play’. This soggy underwater game has no place for players from a bewildering series of incompatible metaphors, both organic and mechanical, to which Lowes (understandably and forgiveably) has intermittent recourse. In his effort to portray what is in the end unportrayable, he speaks of Coleridge's mind as a loom with ‘flying shuttles’, as a stream with tributary rivulets, as a ‘womb of creative energy’, as the shaping spirit that moulds potter's clay, as a place where ‘hooked atoms’ work in tension, or where iron filings are drawn to a magnet, where ‘tentacles of association’ reach and cling, where a sort of ‘alchemy’ can blend and fuse and transmute.

It would be well to remind ourselves that these are Lowes's metaphors, not Coleridge's, and that they inevitably project Lowes's understandings of the working of his own imagination. The other great contemporary interpreter of Coleridge's mind, I. A. Richards (uncelebrated in song or ballad, I think, at least in his Harvard years), more prudent, more laconic, resorted sparingly to metaphor, and his knotted prose is, likewise no doubt, a reflection of his own complex, ingenious imagination.2 Coleridge's imagination remains elusive and shadowy in The Road to Xanadu, lying perhaps just beyond the reach of metaphor, for another reason: Lowes never really believed that he was talking about the imagination as Coleridge discriminatingly defined it. His study of Coleridge, he confessed early on (page 95), convinced him ‘that Fancy and Imagination are not two powers at all, but one. The valid distinction which exists between them lies, not in the materials with which they operate, but in the degree of intensity of the operant power itself.’

We had better turn away at this point from distracting visions of high-energy pumps, roiling the water in the well of memory, to seek for Coleridge's own metaphors of mind. A writer's metaphors of mind can, we have to suppose, betray unconscious as well as conscious notions. It is not clear whether Freud ever recognized at the conscious level of his thinking that the two persistent images of mind that run through his writings—the one of a landscape, with marshland and dry ground, the other of a structure like a house—were both, by his own classification, female symbols. Nor is it clear how serious Coleridge consciously intended to be in his occasional evocations of the mind (containing the memory and the faculties of Fancy and Imagination) in metaphor. Wordsworth offers us abundant images of the mind, both the mind of man and the great universal mind, throughout his poem on the growth of his own mind. Coleridge could fashion summary definitions that still hold us transfixed:

The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. …

(BL [Biographia Literaria], i, p. 304)

And he could toy with metaphor, as in a chapter of ‘Philosophical definitions’ in the Biographia (ii, p. 18):

Good Sense is the Body of poetic genius, Fancy its Drapery, Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is every where, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.

To finish off his catalogue of the ‘Beauties’ of Wordsworth's poetry in the Biographia he drew on a rich nature description from one of his favourite travel books:

in reading Bartram's Travels I could not help transcribing the following lines as a sort of allegory, or connected simile and metaphor of Wordsworth's intellect and genius.—‘The soil is a deep, rich, dark mould, on a deep stratum of tenacious clay; and that on a foundation of rocks, which often break through both strata, lifting their back above the surface. The trees which chiefly grow here are the gigantic, black oak; magnolia magniflora; fraxinus excelsior; platane; and a few stately tulip trees.’

(BL, ii, p. 155)

In representing his own imagination Coleridge was less playful. As Stephen Prickett has pointed out,3 he deploys such symbols as the spring, the cloud-covered mountain, and the Brocken-spectre, and even seems to validate, in ‘a long and bitterly self-analytical note’ of 1805, Lowes's master image, as he unhappily thinks back, while in Malta, to ‘the beautiful Fountain or natural Well at Upper Stowey’:

The images of the weeds which hung down from its sides, appeared as plants growing up, straight and upright, among the water weeds that really grew from the bottom / & so vivid was the Image, that for some moments & not until after I had disturbed the waters, did I perceive that their roots were not neighbours, & they side-by-side companions. So—even then I said—so are the happy man's Thoughts and Things

But perhaps the most explicit, and certainly the most poignant, image of his own imagination to be found in Coleridge's writing records his melancholy awareness that its shaping spirit has been suspended by affliction. Writing to Godwin in March, 1801, to announce that as a result of Wordsworth's having ‘descended’ on him as from Heaven, ‘the poet is dead in me’, he explains:

My imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been imaginative) lies, like a cold Snuff on the circular rim of a Brass Candle-stick, without even a stink of Tallow to remind you that it was once cloathed & mitred with flame.

(CL [The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge], ii, p. 714)

Exactly three years had passed since the marvellous winter in which The Ancient Mariner had been composed—or forged, or fused, or coalesced—from what Lowes called ‘the raw stuff of poetry’, ladled up, we suppose, from the potent waters of the well. Whatever metaphor we favour—dried up, emptied, burnt out—we are faced with a startling discrepancy between Lowes's persuasive, rhapsodic account of the working of creative genius (in 1797 and 1798) and Coleridge's own sombre announcement of his imaginative extinction in 1801.

II

As we look back over these three years, it is hard to set aside suspicion that Wordsworth's descent upon Coleridge may actually date from the earliest days of their friendship. Wordsworth was the older, the more worldly, the stronger-minded, the dominant partner. ‘I feel myself a little man by his side’, Coleridge testified (CL, i, p. 325) with the enthusiasm of a convert. Wordsworth was nourished and fortified by just the sort of adulation that Coleridge lavished on his gifted friends (Humphry Davy was another such), and there is genuinely nostalgic warmth in the affectionate recall in the 1805 Prelude (xiii, l. 407) of those happy days when the friends first ‘Together wanton'd in wild Poesy’. What Wordsworth did for Coleridge is less clear. Critics have observed that images of nature can be found in Coleridge's verse only after 1797, but the superb blankverse conversation poems, written in what W. J. Bate has called ‘a late Augustan reflective mode’, date from 1795, and Bate goes on to declare that by the end of the annus mirabilis Coleridge came to realize that ‘he could do nothing with this particular kind of poetry that the “Giant Wordsworth,” as he called him, could not do better’.4

This leaves the supernatural poetry, the genre that flared with such brilliance in a single year, then sputtered out in the exinction of the poet in Coleridge. Whatever its long-run effects, the intimacy with Wordsworth somehow brought into being two or three of the most original, and most distinguished, pieces of verse in what we now recognize as the Romantic revolution. Yet events of the annus mirabilis and after show that this verse rose not so much out of harmonious collaboration as out of deep and unresolved conflicts of critical opinion. It is, in fact, important to recognize a central irony in the English Romantic revolution in poetry: the partners in the revolution held, from the beginning, fundamentally differing notions of the genre under which their revolutionary poems, along with their manifestos, were gathered.

Wordsworth's notions of the ballad can be pieced together with some confidence from his specimens of the form and from his extended critical remarks. I have tried elsewhere to sum this notion up:5 the ballad, for Wordsworth, was a version of pastoral, and a ‘lyrical’ ballad was lyrical in two respects—its passion (‘all poetry is passion’, Wordsworth declared) arose, as in any lyric, from the mind of the speaker or the dramatic narrator of a ballad tale, and it was heightened by the employment of ‘lyrical’ or rapid metre so as to convey this passion to readers unaccustomed to responding to the common language of men in common life.

Coleridge's theoretical notions of the ballad never got fully elaborated. When he spoke in Biographia Literaria (ii, pp. 5-7) of ‘the two cardinal points of poetry’ that he and Wordsworth had talked about in 1797, he named one as ‘the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination’, and described his share in Lyrical Ballads in the eloquent language that gives special radiance to his best critical pronouncements:

it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

But as he implied, the “Preface” of 1800—‘half a child of my own Brain’ he had once claimed (CL, ii, p. 830)—spoke only of Wordsworth's kind of poetry. Since Coleridge never produced the essay he promised Byron in 1815 (CL, iv, p. 561), ‘a Particular Preface to the Ancient Mariner and the Ballads, on the employment of the Supernatural in Poetry and the Laws which regulate it’, we frequently have to piece together his principles by inference—by noting the unstated but implied positions that Wordsworth intermittently seems at pains to controvert. Coleridge's most extended analyses of Wordsworth's ballads (in late chapters of the Biographia) take the form of refutation, as do his lengthy remarks, in earlier chapters, on the subject of metre and diction with reference not to the ballad but to ‘Poetry’ or ‘a Poem’. As for other central elements of Wordsworth's theory of the ballad, Coleridge pointed to ‘the choice of his characters’ as the ‘great point of controversy’ between Wordsworth and his detractors, dismissed Wordsworth's dramatic technique as ‘ventriloquism’, and left us to suppose, without saying much, that he shared Johnsonian opinions of pastoral.

Yet, inexplicably, the partnership commenced in a shared enthusiasm for the ballad, a genre which certainly attracted the two poets for different reasons (Coleridge would have been excited by the music, the magic, the marvellous, and possibilities of allegory; Wordsworth by the common language, the dramatic frames, the closeness to simple life). Stimulated by their discovery of Bürger, whose ballads (in William Taylor's translation and in Scott's) appeared in 1796, and by their reading in Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Wordsworth and Coleridge embarked in 1797 on a curious sort of collaboration. They appear to have followed a pattern that Coleridge had established in partnership with Southey and Robert Lovell. “Cain,” Coleridge later testified,6 was to have been started by Wordsworth, and Coleridge was to add a second canto; the third canto was to be written by ‘which ever had done first’. This pattern almost certainly accounts for the segments we have of “The Three Graves”: Wordsworth wrote the first two parts and handed them over to Coleridge, who added Parts iii and iv; the last two parts remained unwritten.

“The Three Graves,” made up as it is of extended pieces of writing by both partners, ought to be more revealing of their differences than it has proven to be. A few comparative observations can be made. When he presented his portion of the poem in “The Friend” in 1809, Coleridge described it as a psychological study, a study of the working of the imagination. He had been drawn to the story, he explained, ‘from finding in it a striking proof of the possible effect on the imagination, from an idea suddenly and violently impressed on it’; having been reading about witchcraft, he wanted to show ‘the mode in which the mind is affected in these cases’. (“Friend,” ii, p. 89). By this time Coleridge would have been acutely aware of Wordsworth's comparable claim for certain of his own ballads, as set down in the “Preface” of 1800 and elsewhere: they were psychological studies, studies of the way the imagination works, tracings of the fluxes and refluxes of the mind. But a central difference is evident at once: the imagination whose behaviour is studied in Coleridge's poem belongs to a person in the story; the imagination whose workings Wordsworth traced belongs, characteristically, to the narrator of the story. In his portion of “The Three Graves” Coleridge did preserve the fiction of a narrator, but his poem never approaches the dramatic monologue form in which Wordsworth's most experimental ballads (like the parallel poem of “The Thorn”) were cast.

But the problem with using the separate portions of “The Three Graves” to discriminate the poets' respective practises is, simply, that Coleridge here tried to bend his practise to correspond to Wordsworth's. If we were to follow the track of John Livingston Lowes, we would endeavour to make something of an image or two that might be traced, say, to the Gutch notebook. Could

The Sun-shine lies on the cottage-wall
Ashining thro' the snow—

perhaps have flowered into the opening lines of “The Three Graves” (Part iii)?

The Grapes upon the Vicar's wall
          Were ripe as ripe could be;
And yellow leaves in Sun and Wind
          Were falling from the tree.

But searching out possible transmutations of this order only evades the plain fact that this portion of “The Three Graves” is couched in a diction so plain, so simple, so Wordsworthian, as to seem, in Coleridge's voice, elaborately mannered, even a species of ventriloquism. How else could Coleridge have composed such a stanza as the following (from Part ii) except by straining to force his language into the cadences of (Wordsworthian) common speech:

He reach'd his home, and by his looks
          They saw his inward strife:
And they clung round him with their arms,
          Both Ellen and his wife.

Or this stanza from Part iv:

One evening he took up a book,
          And nothing in it read;
Then flung it down, and groaning cried,
          Oh! Heaven! that I were dead.

With specimens like this at hand, we might irreverently wonder why Wordsworth should have had to turn, in the 1800 “Preface,” to Dr Johnson for an example of ‘contemptible’ matter:

I put my hat upon my head
And walk'd into the Strand. …

Coleridge's contempt for his own strained efforts to bend to his partner's notion of poetic diction grew over the years. When he reprinted his portion of “The Three Graves” in “Sibylline Leaves” (1817) he prefixed to it a most extraordinary disclaimer that touched on two central points in Wordsworth's manifesto of 1800, and signalled Coleridge's total dissent:

the language [of ‘the following humble fragment’] was intended to be dramatic; that is, suited to the narrator; and the metre corresponds to the homeliness of the diction. It is therefore presented as the fragment, not of a Poem, but of a common Ballad-tale. Whether this is sufficient to justify the adoption of such a style, in any metrical composition not professedly ludicrous, the Author is in some doubt. At all events, it is not presented as Poetry, and it is in no way connected with the Author's judgement concerning Poetic diction.

No readers appear to have taken up this astonishingly open invitation to look upon the ballad as ludicrous, though the piece has not drawn much praise, either. Swinburne, to be sure, thought it magnificent, though his lyrical tribute reads almost like parody. Comparing Coleridge's common Ballad-tale to Wordsworth's dramatic (that is, ‘lyrical’) ballad, “The Thorn,” Swinburne proclaimed that

Coleridge, in his otherwise Wordsworthian poem of “The Three Graves,” has shown how a subject of homely horror, a tale of humble and simple wickedness, of simple and humble suffering, may be treated with poetic propriety and with tragic exactitude.7

Wordsworth, in his later years, had taken precisely the opposite view. Recognizing in Coleridge the sort of ‘personal and domestic discontent’ that made it difficult for him to portray suffering with sympathy, Wordsworth charged that Coleridge made “The Three Graves” ‘too shocking and painful, and not sufficiently sweetened by any healing views’. He then went on, speaking to Barron Field after Coleridge's death, to utter a casual, trenchant, almost certainly wrong-headed remark that takes us back to the annus mirabilis and invites thoughtful examination: ‘Not being able to dwell on or sanctify natural woes, he took to the supernatural, and hence his Ancient Mariner and “Christabel.”’8

III

As a matter of chronological fact, Coleridge took to the supernatural before his ‘personal and domestic discontent’ had risen to uncomfortable levels. He was attracted to Bürger's poems as early as 1796, and we can tell what he liked in Bürger from the Bürgeresque features he incorporated in The Ancient Mariner. These included not only the magical haunting air of miracle and terror that supernatural events evoke, as in the ‘ghostlie crew’ that whirled and danced in air, but what the Monthly Magazine (in March 1796) called the ‘hurrying vigour’ of Bürger's ‘impetuous diction’, as in such lines as these:

To and fro they are hurried about;
And to and fro, and in and out
          The stars dance on between.

John Beer has observed9 that these features can be found in Scott's translation, as well as William Taylor's, and quotes two sufficiently suggestive stanzas:

Tramp! tramp! along the land they rode;
          Splash! splash! along the sea;
The steed is wight, the spur is bright,
          The flashing pebbles flee.
The furious Barb snorts fire and foam;
          And with a fearful bound
Dissolves at once in empty air,
          And leaves him on the ground.

Although Wordsworth paid Bürger the tribute of parody in “The Idiot Boy,” he hung back short of admiration, as an exchange of letters with Coleridge in 1799 reveals. Pronouncing Bürger to be a ‘poet of the animal spirits’, he complained stiffly that Bürger communicated ‘no delicate or minute feelings’, and more pointedly, that he failed to create character, other than his own. ‘It seems to me, that in poems descriptive of human nature, however short they be, character is absolutely necessary … incidents are among the lowest allurements of poetry.’10 Coleridge seems to have defended Bürger against these charges, ineffectually, and he had to report good-humouredly to Taylor that the argument broke up in ‘metaphysical disquisitions on the nature of character’, fortunately now lost.

But it is important to note that Wordsworth himself, by his own account, contributed two particularly striking supernatural incidents to The Ancient Mariner (besides suggesting the apparition of the skeleton ship with figures on it). These were the navigation of the mariner's vessel by his dead crew-mates, and the vengeance enacted for the albatross's death by tutelary spirits of the polar region (WPW [The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth], i, p. 361). It is not known when Wordsworth made these suggestions, but one fact of the poem's history may offer a clue. On 18 February 1798, Coleridge announced to Cottle that he had ‘finished’ his ballad in 340 lines (CL, i, p. 387). It was again (or still) ‘finished’ on 23 March, as Dorothy recorded in her journal. But by the time it went to the printer it had swollen out to 658 lines. It is teasing to speculate what sort of poem the earlier finished version was, though speculation might be fruitless were it not for Wordsworth's account of his contributions. As it stood in the 1798 volume the poem had seven parts as follows:

Part i 80 lines
Part ii 58 lines
Part iii 77 lines
Part iv 68 lines
Part v 131 lines
Part vi 132 lines
Part vii 112 lines

At the close of Part iv, 284 lines into the ballad, the Mariner feels a ‘spring of love’ gush from his heart, as he leans over the rail looking down into the shadow of the ship, and he blesses the water snakes ‘unaware’, with no more conscious premeditation than he had brought to the shooting of the albatross at the close of Part i. After this point the ballad seems to loop and wallow a bit, as though it were being stretched out, and it is not hard to imagine an original closing section of, perhaps, 56 lines (340 minus 284) which brought the mariner expeditiously home and completed his punishment, or his expiation. Could Wordsworth, we might wonder, having seen the first ‘finished’ version of 340 lines, have made his suggestions at this stage and prompted Coleridge to make insertions? The navigation of the vessel by the dead men falls in Part v of the 1798 text, and the vengeance exacted by tutelary spirits falls in Parts v and vi. (Readers may decide for themselves whether, if this speculation seem plausible, Wordsworth would have made The Ancient Mariner a better poem than he found it.)

Whatever the case, Wordsworth could hardly at any of these stages have disapproved openly of the supernatural, or attributed Coleridge's adoption of it to any sort of discontent. What is more likely is that he looked upon it as having nothing to do with the revolution in poetic taste he was committed to bringing about. The earliest manifesto of the revolution was not the 1800 “Preface,” but the 1798 “Advertisement,” and there Wordsworth had nothing to say about the supernatural, or indeed about two kinds of poetry: he speaks only of ‘the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society’ and the ‘natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents’. These remarks made necessary some sort of apology for the odd, archaic language of The Ancient Mariner, and Wordsworth explained that the poem ‘was professedly written in imitation of the style, as well as the spirit of the elder poets; but with a few exceptions, the Author believes that the language adopted in it has been equally intelligible for these last three centuries’.

For Wordsworth's indifference to the supernatural in 1798 there is another explanation: he had simply outgrown it. If we look back over what is now available of his juvenilia—his school-boy and Cambridge verse—we find much of it luridly Gothic, peopled with ghastly skeletal forms, spectres in ‘clanking chains’, the ‘druid sons’ of Superstition, moving or shrieking in a landscape of ruined castles and sable mountains ‘array'd / In gloomy blank impervious shade’.11 Wordsworth is not likely to have been pleased to recognize, as he might well have done, echoes of this juvenile verse in The Ancient Mariner. Norman Fruman has pointed to one possible example.12 Lines 330, 337-9 of the de Selincourt text of The Vale of Esthwaite

His bones look'd sable through his skin …
But from his trembling shadow broke
Faint murmuring—sad and hollow moans
As if the wind sigh'd through his bones—

may perhaps glimmer through lines 181, 195-6 of The Ancient Mariner:

His bones were black with many a crack …
A gust of wind starte up behind
And whistled thro' his bones.

It is tempting to generalize a little from these particulars, and to think of Coleridge's supernatural as equivalent to, perhaps a development from, Wordsworth's Gothic. The supernatural and the Gothic did not serve the same poetic function, but they could have arisen from the same psychological origins—a fascination with terror, with the marvellous, with a realm of sensibility beyond the real. The fact that Coleridge came to his realm with an explorer's fresh delight just as Wordsworth, wearied, turned away from it, may help to account for some of the differences that divided the partners in Lyrical Ballads almost from the start.

IV

Soon after his return from Germany in the spring of 1799 Wordsworth began to voice uneasiness about the possible ‘injury’ The Ancient Mariner had done to Lyrical Ballads. Fearful that ‘the old words and the strangeness of it have deterred readers from going on’, he proposed to his publisher to ‘put in its place some little things which would be more likely to suit the common taste’ (EY, p. 264). This uneasiness would have hung like a cloud over the conversations that accompanied renewed work on Lyrical Ballads. On 6 April 1800, Coleridge arrived in Grasmere, and upon his arrival Wordsworth made known his intention of putting together a second edition, as Coleridge reported to Southey on 10 April. When he left on 4 May Coleridge took some of the new poems with him to deliver to Davy in Bristol (who was to read proofs), but steady partnership did not resume until the end of June, when Coleridge returned to the North to settle in with his family. About two weeks after their arrival, in mid-July, the first of the series of folio sheets copied out by Coleridge with some help from Dorothy (but little from William) went off to the printer, and dispatch of these sheets, containing new poems and revisions of old poems, ran on at intervals up into December.

During this period of shared labour and ongoing disputation Wordsworth composed the “Preface,” which like the “Advertisement” of 1798 concentrated on his own poems and developed his own theoretical position on the issues that divided him from Coleridge. The omission of any mention of the supernatural was what must have prompted Coleridge to project, rather wistfully a few months later, the writing of one or two essays of his own—on the ‘Marvellous’ in poetry, and on the ‘Preternatural’ (CL, ii, pp. 707, 716). In between sessions of copying out Wordsworth's poems for the printer Coleridge undertook some spotty revisions of The Ancient Mariner, which was dislodged from the opening of Volume I and buried in the next-to-last position, just ahead of “Tintern Abbey.” There was not much he could do to meet Wordsworth's complaint, shortly to be spelled out, that the mariner had ‘no distinct character’, but he did remove some of the ‘strangeness’ that Wordsworth had worried about. A good deal of archaic language was modernized, and some of the most vivid stanzas in the poem were simply dropped. These look like reasonably good specimens of Wordsworthian Gothic, but with a clinical intensity that makes them seem rather like the naturalized supernatural:

The moonlight bay was white all o'er,
          Till rising from the same,
Full many shapes, that shadows were,
          Like as of torches came.
A little distance from the prow
          Those dark-red shadows were;
But soon I saw that my own flesh
          Was red as in a glare.
I turn'd my head in fear and dread,
          And by the holy rood,
The bodies had advanc'd, and now
          Before the mast they stood.
They lifted up their stiff right arms,
          They held them strait and tight;
And each right-arm burnt like a torch,
          A torch that's borne upright.
Their stony eye-balls glitter'd on
          In the red and smoky light.
I pray'd and turn'd my head away
          Forth looking as before.
There was no breeze upon the bay,
          No wave against the shore.

Whether Coleridge made these excisions and revisions at his partner's direction cannot be known, nor can we know (though we can guess) who decided on the reductive sub-title “A Poet's Reverie”. (Lamb found the sub-title as comical as ‘Bottom the Weaver's declaration that he is not a Lion, but only the scenical representation of a Lion’.)13 But the revisions are less revealing of the critical dialogues going on in Grasmere and Keswick than the extraordinary note to the poem which Wordsworth composed and sent off on 2 October (after Coleridge had gone, briefly, to visit his family). It is hard to think of a comparable gesture—a contemptuous apology for the ‘defects’ in a poem which is supposedly being printed against the desire of its author! Even the tone and the manner of the note betray the strength of feeling that must have animated the two poets' dialogues:

I cannot refuse myself the gratification [it begins] of informing such Readers as may have been pleased with this Poem, or with any part of it, that they owe their pleasure in some sort to me; as the Author was himself very desirous that it should be suppressed. The wish had arisen from a consciousness of the defects of the Poem and from a knowledge that many persons had been much displeased with it.

As he went on to spell out the defects in the ‘Poem of my friend’, Wordsworth focussed, as he did in a paired note to “The Thorn,” on the central issues that discriminated his understanding of a lyrical ballad from his partner's: the issues of the choice of a speaking character, of dramatic propriety, and of poetic language.14

However stung he may have been, Coleridge deferred his response until 1817, when he was able in his turn to itemize some defects in Wordsworth's poetry. In 1800 and 1801 he spoke nothing but admiration, singling out in letters to friends “Michael,” “Ruth,” and “The Brothers” as the finest new poems in the collection. Only “Ruth” can be thought of as a ballad, and the centre of the controversy between the partners is once again revealed by Coleridge's puzzled complaint, two years later, to Southey about Wordsworth's alterations in “Ruth” for the edition of 1802 (which put into a speaker's mouth observations that were earlier heard in the poet's). These, together with some of Wordsworth's recent ballad poems, forced Coleridge at long last to recognize ‘a radical Difference in our theoretical opinions respecting Poetry’ (CL, ii, p. 830).

“Christabel” raised other problems between the partners. The history of Coleridge's struggle to finish it is too well known to need rehearsal. His failure doubtless sharpened Wordsworth's exasperation, for it obliged him first to cancel a portion of the “Preface” (which he later restored) then to compose a long poem to fill up the gap in the volume (to Coleridge's failure we owe “Michael”). The old theoretical issues appear to have arisen exactly as they had with The Ancient Mariner: covering his failure Coleridge explained gracefully to Davy in October that “Christabel” was ‘so much admired by Wordsworth, that he thought it indelicate to print two Volumes with his name in which so much of another man's was included—& which was of more consequence—the poem was in direct opposition to the very purpose for which the Lyrical Ballads were published’ (CL, i, p. 631). It is not hard to judge which of these conflicting explanations was the true one.

More important, however, than theoretical disagreements were the humiliation and the sense of defeat which Coleridge had to endure, and which, joined with his other multiple afflictions, brought him to an end as a poet. His letter to Godwin of 25 March 1801, in which appears the terrible image of his own imagination as a burnt-out candle, looked back over a period of nine months—April to December 1800—and it is possible to think of these nine months as the critical turning-point in Coleridge's life. They cover his move to the north of England, the birth of his third child, his realization that his marriage was finally hopeless, prolonged illness, and his irrevocable commitment to life-long dependency on laudanum—a sufficient catalogue of ‘personal and domestic distress’. Heightening the distress was his persistent veneration for ‘the giant Wordsworth’, whose industry and genius seemed more and more to mock Coleridge's numb incapacities. Pathetic tokens of these incapacities lie scattered through Coleridge's letters and notebooks, some agonizingly candid, some muted. Towards the end of the nine-month period of gathering despair (30 October 1800), Coleridge jotted down a little dramatic meditation which we can now perceive to be one of the saddest entries in the whole range of his marvellous notebooks: ‘He knew not what to do—something, he felt, must be done—he rose, drew his writing-desk before him—sate down, took the pen—& found that he knew not what to do’ (CN, i, 834).

V

While the main outlines of Coleridge's theoretical notion of the ballad emerge from the story of the controversies that stretched over the years of his partnership with Wordsworth, our final understanding of it has to rest upon our interpretation of the brilliant ballads he wrote. It should be clear to any reader of The Ancient Mariner that what principally separates Coleridge from Wordsworth is not his theory of diction, or metre, or the management of narrative, but the allegorical bent of his imagination. It was the sort of imagination that could transmute the mist and snow, the sun the moon and the stars, into symbol clusters, and could lift a ‘common Faery Tale’ (his own phrase for “Christabel”) to the level of myth (BL, ii, p. 238). The working of such an imagination remains a mystery, obliging us to grope for metaphors to render it comprehensible, and for that reason we should in the end be grateful to John Livingston Lowes for providing us such opulent variety to choose from. As a gesture of gratitude, it seems appropriate to let Lowes have the final word (page 67):

Well, the subliminal ego doubtless deals the cards, as the throng of sleeping images, at this call or that, move toward the light. But the fall of the cards accepted, the shaping spirit of imagination conceives and masterfully carries out the strategy of the game. Grant all you will to the involuntary and automatic operations of the Well—its blendings and fusings, each into each, of animalcules, and rainbows, and luminous tracks across the sea, and all the other elements of chaos. There still remains the architectonic imagination, moving, sua sponte, among the scattered fragments, and discerning, latent in their confusion, the pattern of a whole. And the shadow of a sail in an old travel-book and the rude parallelism of a pair of sketches of porpoises and dolphins—themselves among the recollections tumbling over one another in the dark—may through an act of imaginative vision gather up the whole chaos into consciousness as a poised and symmetrical shape of light.

There is little need of further comment. …

Notes

  1. I cite the revised edition of 1930, reprinted Boston: page 55.

  2. I refer to Coleridge on Imagination (New York 1950).

  3. Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth (Cambridge 1970), pp. 84-85.

  4. Coleridge (New York and London, 1968), pp. 47-8.

  5. In The Art of the Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge, Mass., 1973).

  6. In his ‘Prefatory Note’ in the edition of 1828.

  7. Miscellanies (London 1886), p. 140.

  8. Field's ‘Memoirs’ were quoted by Ernest de Selincourt in The Early Wordsworth (n.p. The English Association 1936), p. 28n.

  9. Coleridge the Visionary (London, 1959), p. 147.

  10. Coleridge sums up and quotes Wordsworth's letters in writing to William Taylor (CL, I, pp. 564-6).

  11. Quotations are from The Vale of Esthwaite, the de Selincourt text in Volume I of The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth.

  12. Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel (New York 1971), p. 320.

  13. As he wrote to Wordsworth on January 30, 1801: The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Edwin Marrs (3 vols. 1975—) i 266.

  14. The two notes appeared at the back of Volume i of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads.

Abbreviations

BL: S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Engell and W. Jackson Bate, CC vii (2 vols., 1983)

BLS: S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (2 vols., Oxford, 1907)

BRH: Bulletin of Research in the Humanities

Bristol LB: George Whalley, ‘The Bristol Library Borrowings of Southey and Coleridge’, Library, iv (Sept. 1949) pp. 114-31

CC: The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series lxxv, (London and New York, 1969-)

CL: The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs (6 vols., Oxford, 1956-71)

CM: S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Whalley, CC xii (5 vols., London and Princeton, N.J., 1980—)

CN: The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. K. Coburn (6 vols., New York, 1957-73)

C& S: S. T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, According to the Idea of Each, ed. J. Colmer, CC x (1976)

DWJ: The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt (2 vols., Oxford, 1941)

EC: Essays in Criticism

ELH: English Literary History

EOT: S. T. Coleridge, Essays on his Times, ed. D. V. Erdman, CC iii (3 vols., 1978)

EY: The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2nd edn, The Early Years, 1787-1805, revised by C. L. Shaver (Oxford, 1967)

Friend: S. T. Coleridge, The Friend, ed. B. Rooke, CC iv (2 vols., 1969)

H Works: The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (21 vols., 1930-4)

Lects 1795: S. T. Coleridge, Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, ed. L. Patton and P. Mann, CC i (1971)

LL(M): The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. Marrs (3 vols., New York, 1975-8).

LS: S. T. Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White, CC vi (1972)

McFarland, ‘SI’: Thomas McFarland, ‘The Origin and Significance of Coleridge's Theory of Secondary Imagination’, New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (New York and London, 1972), pp. 195-246

Misc C: Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (Cambridge, Mass., 1936)

MLA: Modern Language Association of America

M Phil: Modern Philology

N&Q: Notes & Queries

Norton ‘Prelude’: William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, eds. J. Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, S. Gill (New York and London, 1979)

Oxford ‘Prelude’: William Wordsworth, The Prelude, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2nd edn, revised by H. Darbishire (Oxford, 1959)

P Lects: The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. K. Coburn (London and New York, 1949)

PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association (Baltimore, 1886-)

Prose Works: The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser (3 vols., Oxford, 1974)

PW: The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge (2 vols., Oxford, 1912)

Sh C: Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (2 vols., 1930)

SIR: Studies in Romanticism

SM: S. T. Coleridge, The Statesman's Manual, ed. R. J. White, CC vi (1972)

TLS: The Times Literary Supplement

TWC: The Wordsworth Circle

WPW: The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and H. Darbishire (5 vols., Oxford, 1940-9)

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