[In the following essay, Fairbanks disputes the widely-held belief that Bowles's “To the River Itchin” inspired Coleridge's “To the River Otter,” and cites a sonnet of Thomas Warton's as the source of both.]

William Lisle Bowles's sonnet “To the River Itchin” has recently achieved some reknown because, in its similarity to Coleridge's “Sonnet: To the River Otter,” it has proved the most convenient example for illustrating the indebtedness to Bowles that Coleridge professes so fervently in the Biographia Literaria.¹ In the third edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, M. H. Abrams reprints both sonnets and asserts in a footnote to Coleridge's that his “model was W. L. Bowles's “To the River Itchin”” (II, 287n.). Likewise, the Oxford Anthology of English Literature (1973) says of “The River Itchin,” “This and similar sonnets by Bowles provided the model for Coleridge's early ‘Sonnet: To the River Otter’” (II, 562). Earlier, Abrams had quoted Bowles's poem in “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” noting that it “so impressed Coleridge that he emulated it in his sonnet ‘To the River Otter’” (From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom [1965], p. 541).

Since a point worth making so often is worth making accurately, it should be pointed out that while Coleridge indisputably had one eye on Bowles's sonnet, he had the other on a sonnet “To the River Lodon” by Thomas Warton, the Younger. In fact, the influence of this poem on Coleridge's sonnet is two-fold: not only did it supply Coleridge directly with a few thoughts and phrases, but also it served as the model for Bowles's sonnet as well. Bowles had long-standing ties with the Wartons. In his “Monody on the Death of Dr. Warton,” he credits Joseph Warton, his old schoolmaster at Winchester, with the principal role in developing his literary tastes and talents. His main reason for choosing Trinity College, Oxford, as the site for his further education was the presence there of Joseph's brother, Thomas.² Comparison of the three sonnets in question will show both that Bowles's debt to Thomas Warton is at least as great as Coleridge's to Bowles and that Coleridge adopts details of Warton's sonnet that have no counterpart in Bowles's:³

TO THE RIVER LODON

Ah! what a weary race my feet have run,
                    Since first I trod thy banks with alders crown'd,
                    And thought my way was all through fairy
                              ground,
                    Beneath thy azure sky, and golden sun:
Where first my muse to lisp her notes begun!
                    While pensive memory traces back the round,
                    Which fills the varied interval between;
                    Much pleasure, more of sorrow, marks the scene.
Sweet native stream! those skies and suns so pure
No more return, to chear my evening road!
                    Yet still one joy remains, that not obscure,
Nor useless, all my vacant days have flow'd,
                    From youth's gay dawn to manhood's prime
                              mature;
                    Nor with the Muse's laurel unbestow'd.

Thomas Warton, the Younger (pub. 1777)

TO THE RIVER ITCHIN, NEAR WINTON

Itchin, when I behold thy banks again,
                    Thy crumbling margin, and thy silver breast,
                    On which the self-same tints still seem to rest,
Why feels my heart the shiv'ring sense of pain?
                    Is it—that many a summer's day has past
Since, in life's morn, I carol'd on thy side?
Is it—that oft, since then, my heart has sigh'd,
                    As Youth, and Hope's delusive gleams, flew fast?
Is it—that those, who circled on thy shore,
Companions of my youth, now meet no more?
                    Whate'er the cause, upon thy banks I bend
Sorrowing, yet feel such solace at my heart,
                    As at the meeting of some long-lost friend,
                    From whom, in happier hours, we wept to part.

William Lisle Bowles (pub. 1789)

TO THE RIVER OTTER

Dear native Brook! wild Streamlet of the West!
                    How many various-fated years have past,
                    What happy and what mournful hours, since last
I skimm'd the smooth thin stone along thy breast,
Numbering its light leaps! yet so deep imprest
Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes
                    I never shut amid the sunny ray,
But straight with all their tints thy waters rise,
                    Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows grey,
And bedded sand that vein'd with various dyes
Gleam'd through thy bright transparence! On my way,
                    Visions of Childhood! oft have ye beguil'd
Lone manhood's cares, yet waking fondest sighs:
                    Ah! that once more I were a careless Child!

S. T. Coleridge (pub. 1796)

Most of the striking similarities between Coleridge's sonnet and Warton's should, in the light of the Biographia Literaria, be attributed to the intermediary influence of Bowles. Since all three of the poems express a mixture of sorrow and joy (or solace, at least) in revisiting a river known in childhood, certain similarities in phrasing are inevitable; for example, that Coleridge and Warton both use the word “manhood” in their penultimate lines is neither surprising nor, in itself, proof of direct influence. But Coleridge, in his first three lines, adapts a cluster of phrases similarly clustered in lines 7-9 of Warton's sonnet. Warton's “Sweet native stream” becomes Coleridge's “Dear native Brook! wild Streamlet …”; “the varied interval” becomes “various-fated years”; and “Much pleasure, more of sorrow” becomes “What happy and what mournful hours.” In the absence of counterparts in Bowles's sonnet, these echoes, juxtaposed as they are, can hardly be coincidental.

Coleridge knew Warton's sonnets, for in the introduction to his Selection of Sonnets of 1796, where he first published “To the River Otter” in its entirety, he wrote, “The greater part of Warton's Sonnets are severe and masterly likenesses of the style of the Greek επιγραμματα” (PW [The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge], II, 1139). Coleridge's context makes it clear that this remark, while it praises Warton's poems as epigrams, was intended to disparage them as sonnets because, for the most part, they lack that “lonely feeling” that Coleridge at the time considered essential to the form; but “To the River Lodon,” anticipatory as it is of Bowles's prevailing method and mood, was probably among the poems that prompted Coleridge to employ the qualifying phrase, “the greater part.” The poem must have had some impact on him, for years later, in the Biographia Literaria, he quoted the last line (with a variation) when he spoke of “young men of ardent minds, liberal education, and not / ‘With academic laurels unbestowed’” (Shawcross, I, 55). Neither Shawcross nor George Watson, in his Everyman edition of the Biographia, identifies the source of Coleridge's quotation.

Notes

1. Norman Fruman is an exception. In Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel (1971), pp. 222-33, he points out that Coleridge's borrowings from Bowles are more extensive and sometimes more direct than earlier scholars has suggested through excessive reliance on the river sonnets. However, like other scholars, he accepts Bowles's river sonnet as the sole model for Coleridge's.

2. George Gilfillan, editorial “Memoir,” The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles (Edinburgh, 1855), II, xiii. See also Bowles's “Monody on the Death of Dr. Warton,” I, 135-41.

3. The texts of the three sonnets are based on the following editions: Thomas Warton, Poems: A New Edition (London, 1777), p. 83; William Lisle Bowles, Sonnets, Written Chiefly on Picturesque Spots, During a Tour, 2nd ed. (Bath, 1789), p. 19; and The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge (1912), I, 48, cited as PW.