SOURCE: Eilenberg, Susan. “‘Michael,’ ‘Christabel,’ and the Poetry of Possession.” Criticism XXX, no. 2 (1988): 205-224.

[In the following essay, Eilenberg examines the substitution of Wordsworth's “Michael” in place of Coleridge's “Christabel” as the last poem in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads. The author then evaluates the interrelationship between “Michael” and “Christabel,” as well as that of their authors.]

Literary history suggests a significant intertextual relation between two poems not ordinarily read together, Wordsworth's “Michael” and Coleridge's “Christabel.” “Michael” was written during the autumn of 1800 in order to provide a conclusion to the second volume of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads after Coleridge's “Christabel,” earlier intended for that position of honor, was expelled from the volume. “[I]f Coleridge had been able to finish ‘Christabel’ Wordsworth would never have written ‘Michael,’” Stephen Parrish remarks,¹ and indeed there would have been no reason for the hasty composition of “Michael” had not the removal of the perhaps unfinishable “Christabel” left such a hole in the volume. “Michael” is a poetic stopgap, a literary placeholder. It acts simultaneously to suppress and to supplant, to revise and to memorialize Coleridge's poem, thematizing the displacement in which it participates and reflecting upon its relationship to the text it replaces. Coleridge's poem about demonic possession gave way to Wordsworth's poem about financial and familial dispossession; a poem whose loss of place may have prevented its author from completing it gave way to a poem about unfinished work. “Michael” acts, then, as a commentary upon “Christabel.” But the authority of “Michael,” like its pastoral serenity, is precarious, as if it were haunted by what it displaced. For “Christabel” is more than the unsuccessful predecessor of “Michael”; it is also its prophet. “Christabel” seems to predict its own fate, in which “Michael” plays such an important part.

1.

Intending to suppress a tale of the preternatural, Wordsworth made it come true. But whose doing is this? The substitution of Wordsworth's poem for Coleridge's, Wordsworth's appropriation of Coleridge's literary place, can be interpreted as one of “Michael”'s meanings—and also one of “Christabel”'s. “Michael” and “Christabel” connive at the realization of the same fantasy. The relations between the rival poems form part of the text of the greater collaborative work that the two individual poems frame.²

The circumstances surrounding the lapse of “Christabel” from acceptability are mysterious. Although critics tend to assume it was withheld from publication because it was not ready, its completion was not yet, during the autumn of 1800, despaired of. And according to Dorothy Wordsworth's laconic journal entries, the only record of its reception in the Wordsworth household, Wordsworth does not seem to have disliked the poem. From late August to early October of 1800 she notes the poem's progress and the pleasure it gave her and her brother to hear Coleridge read it. But suddenly on October 6 she writes, “Determined not to print ‘Christabel’ with the L. B.”³ Who determined this and why, she does not say. A few days later Wordsworth began work on “Michael,” which was finished in December of that year and printed as the last poem in the second volume of the Lyrical Ballads.

A letter Wordsworth wrote to Longman throws a little light on the decision to remove Coleridge's as yet unfinished poem from the Lyrical Ballads: “A Poem of Mr Coleridge's was to have concluded the Volumes; but upon mature deliberation, I found that the Style of this Poem was so discordant from my own that it could not be printed along with my poems with any propriety.”⁴ In appealing to the concept of “propriety,” Wordsworth may well have had in mind not so much what belongs to the context as what belongs to the proprietor, “propriety” in the sense of “property.” The ambiguity of the concept served Wordsworth's ambivalence; the polite sense could mask a selfish one. Wordsworth seems to have felt uneasy about the presence of another man's poems, in another man's style, within a collection that, in spite of its original anonymity, was increasingly being recognized as his. Dorothy of course had always spoken of the Lyrical Ballads as “William's poems”; his were the ones she was concerned about. Coleridge too deemed his an alien voice in this work, on whose title page, it had recently been decided, Wordsworth's name alone would appear. Like Dorothy, he spoke of the volumes as Wordsworth's,⁵ and, years later, after he had finally published “Christabel,” he judged that among the mass of Wordsworth's contributions to the Lyrical Ballads, “my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter.”⁶

Coleridge's poems simply did not belong there. Had he chosen to write about sheep or distressed villagers, his contributions might have fared better. But his subjects—demonic possession, ventriloquism, and loss of identity—drew attention to the difficulties that his poems' inclusion in a volume of Wordsworth's would have produced. His poems made intolerably explicit the threat they posed. If readers expected Wordsworth's poetic voice, then the voice of “Christabel,” eerily incantatory in a way no poem of Wordsworth's in the volume is, would have shocked them much as Geraldine's hisses, coming out of Christabel's mouth, shocked the Baron.

As it was, the eventual publication of “Christabel” in a volume exclusively Coleridge's disturbed readers. Contemporary reaction (the squeamish flinched at the poem's “mstiff bitch”; the cynical spread rumors that Geraldine was a transvestite) suggested that the poem's perceived impropriety was rather a matter of content than of context. But that the problem was simple vulgarity or obscenity is doubtful.⁷ The difficulty of speaking properly in or about “Christabel” seems essential rather than accidental. Literary propriety, conformity with the rules governing what is fit for a particular speaker to say about a particular subject, depends upon the security of the speaker's identity and the stability of the subject's meaning. Neither this security nor this stability is available in “Christabel,” where mimickry undermines identity and nothing is quite what it seems. There can be no coincidence of things and their meanings when the things hardly coincide even with themselves; there can be no language proper to an undefinable subject.

“Michael,” on the other hand, seems the very model of poetic propriety, a poem whose subject and whose function both are the preservation of respectable family tradition. Unlike “Christabel,” “Michael” is well grounded in the real world. Its meaning inheres in objects whose durability is legendary. Tradition and frugality alike ensure that the lamp by which Michael and Isabel work in the evenings will not be replaced by a newer one; sheep may die but will never cease being sheep; and although the land suffers slight changes over time, the landscape endures. Such a world Wordsworth had in mind when he wrote, in the “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” about the origins of true poetic language in the contemplation of the permanent forms of nature. The beginning of “Michael,” at least, allows both poet and reader the comfortable belief that natural objects speak their own significance. The “upright path” (3)⁸ that the reader must climb to reach the sheepfold, for example, is steep both literally and figuratively, and the man whose feet struggle with it must be both physically and morally sturdy.

An almost organic relationship between objects and their meanings characterizes even the difficult composition of the poem. Thus Dorothy Wordsworth remarks in her journal on the progress of “Michael” in terms that suggest the equivalence of words and things. October 11: “After dinner we walked up Greenhead Gill in search of a sheepfold. … The Sheepfold is falling away. It is built nearly in the form of a heart unequally divided.” October 21: “Wm. had been unsuccessful in the morning at the sheepfold.” November 9: “W. [?] burnt the sheepfold.” And November 11: “William had been working at the sheep-fold. They were salving sheep.”⁹ Her entries make no distinction between the structure of stone and the structure of words, composition and hard physical labor. It sounds as if the poem were made out of the same stuff as the landscape.

The link between the two, poem and landscape, is property. Natural in substance, human in significance, property is what Wordsworth wishes his poetry to resemble, as he makes clear at the beginning of the poem. The economic model works to ground the incredible in the indubitable; but it also undermines the perfect propriety of which property appeared at first to be the natural expression. What seemed timeless and inevitable is revealed to be artificial, contingent, and of recent date. Revealing the price of what seemed given, the poem neutralizes its own naturalness.

2.

More than any other poem in the Lyrical Ballads, a work dominated by the theme of property, “Michael” epitomizes Wordsworth's attitudes towards the relationship between property and passion. He describes the poem as “a picture of a man, of strong mind and lively sensibility, agitated by two of the most powerful affections of the human heart; the parental affection, and the love of property, landed property, including the feelings of inheritance, home, and personal and family independence.”¹⁰ In addition to having social and moral value, property in Wordsworth's eyes is associated with writing; it figures a kind of textuality. Describing the “small independent proprietors of land here called statesmen,” Wordsworth writes: “Their little tract of land serves as a kind of permanent rallying point for their domestic feelings, as a tablet upon which they are written which makes them objects of memory in a thousand instances when they would otherwise be forgotten.”¹¹ Marked with the graves of ancestors and perhaps of children as well, land serves as history, reminding its inhabitants of those from whom they inherited it, those whom their labor upon it supported, and those who will in their turn inherit it. Property is mnemonic. In Wordsworth's words, it is a “tract,” a “tablet” upon which family history and social feelings are written—though by whom they are written is not clear. If Wordsworth's maneuvers to gain control over and credit for his published poems suggest that texts are a form of property, his remarks on statesmen suggest that, conversely, property is a form of textuality.

The two concepts, property and textuality, share a common dependence upon the idea of handing down or tradition. Michael values his land not for its price in the marketplace and not for the minimal wealth it enables him to accumulate but for its power to symbolize and strengthen family bonds. He received it from his ancestors, and he intends to pass it on to his son. It sustains the continuity of a way of life, binding generation to generation, an index not of its owner's autonomy so much as of his connection with other people. In this it resembles a story, which is valued not as it is hoarded but as it is shared. In order to mean anything, to be worth anything, a story must be told, listened to, and—the teller hopes—told again. Its value, created in the handing down, lies in its ability to become significant to others.

In talking about the landscape, a lost property that was for Michael “like a book” (70),¹² Wordsworth is led almost immediately to talk of his own place in the poetic economy. The story, he says, was the first to teach him to appropriate “passions that were not my own” (31),¹³ to feel the human sympathy one needs in order to understand “the heart of man and human life” (33). It taught him, in other words, about emotional property. Thus the poet presents himself as Michael's emotional or literary heir.¹⁴ A substitute for the son who failed his father, Wordsworth receives Michael's story as a literary property that he intends to hand on in his turn to “youthful Poets, who among these Hills / Will be my second self when I am gone” (38-9). The landscape with which the poem opens is apparently empty of any rival claimant: “No habitation there is seen …” (9). Wordsworth takes for his own a poetic territory that would otherwise, he suggests, go uncultivated. But would it? Has Luke, the natural heir, really forfeited his claim to the poet who displaces him?

Wordsworth's poem exhibits a guilty anxiety on the subject of the heir. The object of his father's deepest love and the instrument of family disaster, Luke is nevertheless oddly obscured as a human subject. In the nearly five hundred lines of the poem, Luke speaks not a single intelligible word. We are told that as a baby he utters “without words a natural tune” and that as a youth he shouts at the sheep, but when the crisis comes and his father says goodbye to him, he can only sob aloud. Inarticulate to the last, he is sent away from home for reasons that, despite their urgency, remain vague and unpersuasive. Once he is out of sight, the poet disposes of him summarily.¹⁵ His catastrophe occurs in the space of six lines that are as solemn as they are uninformative:

                    Meantime Luke began
To slacken in his duty, and at length
He in the dissolute city gave himself
To evil courses: ignominy and shame
Fell upon him, so that he was driven at last
To seek a hiding-place beyond the seas.

(451-56)

The particulars of Luke's behavior¹⁶ seem to matter less than the opportunity they give the narrator to have done with him. The important thing is that the heir is now gone—out of England, out of our moral class, out of the poem. His place is now vacant.

The abrupt treatment of Luke is typical of the poem's narrative style, which seems frequently uneasy about the events it has to relate and determined to get away with telling as little and as late as possible. It was part of Wordsworth's program in the Lyrical Ballads to avoid sensational narrative. But where “Michael” differs from the other poems in the volume is in the embarrassment with which it tries, unsuccessfully, to dodge its narrative obligation. The poet stalls repeatedly before revealing the news that causes Michael to decide to send his son away, and when he does finally tell us what the matter is, we may be nearly as incredulous as Michael himself.

                                        Long before the time
Of which I speak, the Shepherd had been bound
In surety for his Brother's Son, a man
Of an industrious life, and ample means,
But unforeseen misfortunes suddenly
Had press'd upon him, and old Michael now
Was summon'd to discharge the forfeiture,
A grievous penalty, but little less
Than half his substance. This un-look'd for claim
At the first hearing, for a moment took
More hope out of his life than he supposed
That any old man ever could have lost.

(219-30)

It is not the story we expected. The bad news, the story behind the story, seems alien and unassimilable, challenging not only Michael's control over his life but the poet's control over the propriety of his poem. The news of distant financial failure portending Michael's ruin drops us out of pastoral and into melodrama. The disaster is distinctly unWordsworthian: not a case of simple financial reverse, the result of a war-damaged economy or the enclosure of a commons, this has to do, apparently, with credit, a concept one would have thought alien to Wordsworth's poetic economy. It becomes real only as it imposes on our belief in Michael's natural propriety as a landowner. Too late we learn that Michael has not always owned his land:

These fields were burthen'd when they came to me;
'Till I was forty years of age, not more
Than half of my inheritance was mine.
I toil'd and toil'd; God bless'd me in my work,
And 'till these three weeks past the land was free

(384-88)

The effect is like that of reading a palimpsest: a suppressed writing begins to disturb what is written over it. A repressed past begins to shape the present in its own image. The most homely and domestic of Wordsworth's poems becomes, at this instant, uncanny.

The hero, like the poet, tries hard to resist the newly apparent threat to his authority, and, like the poet, he fails. The sheepfold Michael proposes to build as the sign of his covenant with Luke—the pile of stones rather, since it never succeeds in becoming a sheepfold—represents, despite Michael's intentions, confusion. Michael wants the stones to signify the continuity of generations. But in the western tradition any heap of stones associated with a covenant inevitably refers also to the altar on which Abraham would have sacrificed the son of his old age, Isaac, had not God allowed a ram to be substituted at the last minute.¹⁷ Stones set up to commemorate the absence of a beloved relative and affirm belief in an eventual reunion will naturally put one in mind of tombstones as well as altars. Michael intends to inscribe the spot with one set of meanings, but it is already inscribed with a contrary set: the stones signify interruption, substitution, and death before they signify continuity, fidelity, or reunion. So Michael's inscription of the landscape, like the poet's tale, attempts an erasure of an older text which neither poet nor hero wants to acknowledge. Both poem and sheepfold are attempted displacements of original meanings. By this point, symbols no longer seem natural; meaning is no longer self-evident. Something has come between the natural world and its human significance. The poem's original poetic propriety has broken down.

The poem's narrative evasions and redoublings, like Michael's attempt to evade the meaning of the stones he gathers and impose on them a new significance, suggest a struggle with material alien to the poet's design, sensational story that, both tempting and threatening, resists expulsion and domestication alike. At the heart of a pastoral lies a melodrama, a form for the city, not for the fields. According to the poem itself, its sensational story comes from afar, where the unreliable nephew lives, and it moves rapidly away again, first to London and then overseas, where the poet cannot follow. Geographical foreignness tropes literary foreignness; the story of the danger posed by the foreign has itself a foreign origin—an origin in an imagination other than Wordsworth's. The way “Michael” handles the Luke episode—the unassimilable center of the poem—reflects Wordsworth's handling of another story about the threat of the foreign, the poem whose alien presence in the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth found intolerable.

3.

Reading the self-thwarting narrative structure as evidence of Wordsworth's real uneasiness with what he has done, I have tried to portray “Michael” as a work of usurpation. Whether that usurpation was conscious or not remains uncertain. For there is no direct evidence that Wordsworth intended his poem as a reworking of his friend's. No letters or notebook entries provide any hint that there is more to the relationship between the poems than the accident that both were written for the closing pages of the Lyrical Ballads. Five humorous ballad stanzas discovered some years ago in the notebook containing the earliest version of “Christabel” suggest the possibility, however, of a verifiable link between Coleridge and the figure of Michael. There has been some controversy over whether these stanzas represent an early draft of “Michael,” a humorous frame for “Michael,” or perhaps simply a parody both of the poem that was proving itself troublesome and of Wordsworth and Coleridge as poets:¹⁸

Two shepeherds we have the two wits of the dale
Renown'd for song satire epistle & tale
Rhymes pleasant to sing or to say
To this sheepfold they went & a doggrel strain
They carved on a stone in the wall to explain
The cause of old Michaels decay.(19)

The “doggrel” they write tells of a man critics have associated with the subject of Wordsworth's “A Character in the antithetical Manner,”²⁰ who may be Coleridge, a man named Robert Jones, or perhaps a figure compounded of them both.²¹ That “A Character” may be a sketch of Coleridge does not mean that Michael must be Coleridge. Indeed, that the vulnerable, talkative, neurotically dependent poet should be portrayed as a rugged, taciturn, self-reliant shepherd seems improbable. But the circumstances suggest a connection in Wordsworth's mind between Coleridge and the half-absurd, half-pathetic subject of this one version of the “Michael” story who “thinks and does nothing at all.”

“Michael” is about Coleridge, but it is also about “Christabel” and about Wordsworth's relationship to them both. In the story of Michael and Luke, Wordsworth represents the obscure offense against property that the defense of “propriety” mentioned in the letter to Longman has led him to commit. “Michael” dispossesses “Christabel” in part by imitating that poem; it not only takes its place but also assumes some of its moral, thematic, and structural features. “Michael” incorporates such details of Coleridge's work as the oak tree, faithful dog, troubling dream, and morally emblematic lamp of “Christabel.” It also contends with the thematic implications of the earlier poem's failure of voice. The fragmentary state of “Christabel,” its mistrust of representation, and its fear of the foreign become problems for Wordsworth's poem, which must struggle with itself in order to speak.

First the more obvious parallels. The families in both poems are destroyed by pleas for help from the children of brothers.²² Sir Leoline is snared through his regret for having quarrelled with an old friend whose daughter Geraldine says she is; Michael is drawn into catastrophe through a bond of surety to his brother's son. Both poems end with the natural children alienated from the parents whose pity or, in Michael's case, irritable sense of duty towards other men's children led them to hurt their own.

In both poems, the evil associated with the old friend's or kinsman's child corrupts the son or daughter whose immediate welfare is sacrificed to the old tie. The rival child displaces the true child from his secure place in the family, and the true child, abandoned, takes on the characteristics of the rival. Luke ends up no better than the nephew whom Michael suspects has been “false to us”; Christabel assumes through “forced unconscious sympathy” the viperish “look of dull and treacherous hate” she sees in Geraldine's eyes, and she begins to hiss, expressing the evil that is—we assume—properly Geraldine's. Christabel's passive imitation of her guest is the most dramatic instance of the confusion of the two characters, who have switched and shared roles from the beginning.²³ Inviting Geraldine to spend the night with her, Christabel speaks as if she were the suppliant guest asking her hostess for a place to sleep: “‘I beseech your courtesy, / This night, to share your couch with me’” (121-22). It is Geraldine who seems horror-stricken by her own deformity, shuddering as she bares her withered bosom and dreading to enter Christabel's bed; Christabel herself says nothing and, as far as the reader knows, feels nothing either. But in the morning the technically innocent girl, whose blackest sin seems to have been her readiness to be duped, murmurs, “Sure I have sinn'd!” (381).

Both poems struggle against their own narrative. In “Michael” what barely resists suppression is the story of Luke and his fall; in “Christabel” it is the story of what happens to Christabel after Geraldine comes to bed.²⁴ Geraldine herself, the subject of the story that cannot be told, is the apparent threat to speech in Coleridge's poem. Her enchantment seems to hold not only Christabel but Coleridge too in thrall. Incapable of analyzing the force of censorship, he falls victim to it as hopelessly as his heroine.

Yet despite the foregoing list of parallels, the poems do not seem much alike. It is unlikely that even the most strenuous efforts to keep in mind the points of similarity will enable a reader to feel that “Michael” is derivative of “Christabel.” To the contrary; if either poem looks derivative, it is “Christabel.” That this should be so suggests perhaps the thoroughness and power of Wordsworth's revision of Coleridge's materials and structure. So successfully²⁵ has Wordsworth's poem renaturalized the other's supernaturalism and reappropriated its concerns that “Michael” seems more original—closer to nature, less aesthetically sophisticated—than “Christabel.”

It will not do to turn “Christabel” into “Michael”'s victim. “Christabel” did not merely suffer exploitation; it is not in any simple sense a source of Wordsworth's poem. “Christabel,” like its heroine, is too good a victim to be quite innocent. The poem, like the girl, seems to court destruction. Critics frequently observe that Geraldine is on some level a creature of Christabel's unconscious, a figure empowered to enact the fantasies of a girl intent upon preserving her purity. “Christabel” allegorizes the failure of an independent voice in the presence of a greater power and dramatizes its own dispossession. In taking possession of Coleridge's materials, “Michael” does no more than enact the story “Christabel” tells, revealing Coleridge's poem to have been an accurate prediction of its own fate.

The prose apology that accompanied the publication of “Christabel” sixteen years after the appearance of “Michael” is the clearest possible evidence of Coleridge's uneasy awareness that something about the poem made it vulnerable, liable to be mistaken for an imitation. Although written ostensibly for the purpose of convincing sceptical readers of the poem's originality, the preface's assertions of chronological priority are strangely self-thwarting, raising more doubts about the poem's relationship to originality and imitation than they allay. In fact, the preface introduces a consideration of the perverse imitation that constitutes the subject of the poem itself.

But the problem of the poem's chronology is a genuine concern. Before Coleridge published his poem, he allowed it to circulate in manuscript among his friends, many of whom admired it, some of whom tried to reproduce its effects. Sir Walter Scott incorporated elements of “Christabel” into his “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” and an anonymous poet published a “Gothic Tale” entitled “Christobell” which offered a completed version of the Christabel story. By the time “Christabel” itself finally appeared, aspects of the story were already familiar to the public, and there was some danger that the poem would appear to be one of its own imitations. Scott would cheerfully acknowledge Coleridge's originality and his indebtedness. Nevertheless, it was a worried Coleridge who informed his readers that he had begun the poem in 1797 and added to it in 1800: “It is probable that if the poem had been finished at either of the former periods, or even if the first and second part had been published in the year 1800, the impression of its originality would have been much greater than I dare at present expect. But for this I have only my own indolence to blame. The dates are mentioned for the exclusive purpose of excluding charges of plagiarism or servile imitation from myself.”²⁶

The words are those of a guilty man whom we know to be innocent. As is so often the case with Coleridge, anxiety exceeds its occasion. Perhaps by the time he finally published “Christabel” pangs of conscience had become habitual and the disclaimer of literary wrongdoing a tic. Whatever the reason, Coleridge behaves as if he expects the judgment to go against him. He protects himself by so phrasing the imagined charge that, if he is convicted, he will be found guilty of victimizing only himself. His image of self-robbery implies an identification or confusion of derivative and source. Thus in the process of defending his originality Coleridge undermines it.²⁷ And, indeed, as the preface continues, this implication becomes overt, as though he could articulate it only in the denial. Not just the originality of this one poem is in question but the possibility of originality in any poem: “For there is amongst us a set of critics, who seem to hold, that every possible thought and image is traditional; who have no notion that there are such things as fountains in the world, small as well as great; and who would therefore charitably derive every rill they behold flowing, from a perforation made in some other man's tank” (Coleridge, Poetical Works, pp. 214-15). His gestures of appeasement look like further evidence of a bad conscience:

'Tis mine and it is likewise yours;
But an if this will not do;
Let is be mine, good friend! for I
Am the poorer of the two.

(Poetical Works, p. 215)

He concedes the weakness of a strong case, begging equal credit as a charity rather than as a right. His citation of dates seems to have been inadequate even for the purpose of self-reassurance.

Why this uneasiness? Coleridge could not clear up the problem of the origins of “Christabel” because the confusion of the poem's chronology was no accident. Dates prove nothing; the poem's lateness, its publication after long silence, is part of its meaning as a performance.

The opening lines, written two decades earlier, gloss the poet's anxiety about indeterminate beginnings. The poem opens upon a scene of anachronism. As the castle clock strikes midnight a rooster, awakened by owls, begins to crow as if it were dawn:

'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
And the owls have awakened the crowing cock;
Tu—whit—Tu—whoo!
And hark, again! the crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.

(1-5)

And although it is April by the calendar, “Spring comes [so] slowly up this way” (22) that “naught was green upon the oak / But moss and rarest misletoe” (33-34); indeed, “one red leaf, the last of its clan” (49), still remains on the tree from the previous fall. What we see and hear is at odds with what we know. The natural calendar does not correspond to the human one. When the poem begins, it is earlier, but also later, than it seems, an effect reinforced by the wobbling of the verb tenses throughout the poem. Shifting without apparent reason between present and past tenses, the poem renders uninterpretable the relationship between them and makes it impossible to distinguish between story time and reading time. We cannot always separate then from now.

The poem's tenuous hold on narrative temporality is severely strained by the coming of Geraldine, whose presence is signalled, appropriately enough, by an “It” without an antecedent:

The lady sprang up, suddenly,
The lovely lady, Christabel!
It moaned as near, as near can be,
But what it is she cannot tell.—
On the other side it seems to be,
Of the huge, broad-breasted, old oak tree.

(37-42)

The syntactical disturbance heralds a narrative disturbance. What should be first arrives second; subsequence must supply the lack of antecedent. The story Geraldine tells of the events preceding her appearance behind the oak anticipate the events about to befall the woman who saves her. Geraldine's past is Christabel's future.²⁸ Christabel, like Geraldine's storied self, will be rapt from her familiar world, will be forced to cross “the shade of night,” will lie “entranced,” and will have her cries “choked … with force and fright.” The possibility that the story Geraldine tells may be a fraud makes the foreshadowing all the more sinister: a fiction involving one character overtakes the audience innocent enough to believe its truth. Geraldine's story, like the antecedentless “It,” is merely a placeholder for something that has not yet come into existence. Like a Greek oracle, it refers to its own fulfillment through the efforts of its interpreters: Christabel, Sir Leoline, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and finally us.²⁹

Geraldine is a vampire of the semiotic variety. She steals not blood but likeness, for she has none of her own. She poses the dread threat of false representation, destroying by mimickry. In Bard Bracy's dream, a dove named Christabel lies fluttering on the ground. Stooping to see what the matter is, the Bard

                    saw a bright green snake
Coiled around its wings and neck.
Green as the herbs on which it couched,
Close by the dove's its head it crouched;
And with the dove it heaves and stirs,
Swelling its neck as she swelled hers!

(549-54)

Like the snake, Geraldine is a thief of identity and voice. She injures Christabel by imitating her so neatly as to make the girl herself seem inauthentic. The original, unable to compete with so wonderful an imitation, becomes derivative herself, suffering the apparent “plagiarism or servile imitation from [her]self” that Coleridge mentioned in connection with himself. But even more terrifying than Geraldine's imitation of Christabel is her subordination of the girl to the expression of her own evil.

Coleridge made the evidence against Geraldine impossible to read, going so far as to suppress the only direct evidence of what is the matter with her.³⁰ In the manuscript version of the poem, when Geraldine “unbound / The cincture from beneath her breast” and her silken robe fell to the floor, “Behold! her bosom and half her side / Are lean and old and foul of hue.” But it was “A sight to dream of, not to tell!”³¹ For when the poem was printed the clue given by the manuscript was deleted. Geraldine's evil is thus literally unspeakable; Coleridge can no more tell us about it than Christabel can after Geraldine enchants her. All we are left with is Geraldine's prohibition:

“In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell,
Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel!
Thou knowest to-night, and wilt know to-morrow,
This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow;
                    But vainly thou warrest,
                                        For this is alone in
                    Thy power to declare,
                                        That in the dim forest
                    Thou heard'st a low moaning,
And found'st a bright lady, surpassingly fair;
And didst bring her home with thee in love and charity,
To shield her and shelter her from the damp air.”

(266-78)

What her version of the story omits is what Coleridge's version omits; but Geraldine deletes the evidence of the deletion, too. She functions as a figure of censorship who cannot be described and who prohibits her story from being fully told.³² She censors both her deformity and the fact that she censors it.³³ Like “Michael”—and like “Christabel”—she seems too innocent to be true. Her evil manifests itself through its own invisibility. We find we suspect her because we have no reason to do so. We know she is bad because she does not look it, because the evidence against her is obviously missing, and because Christabel begins to misbehave. We hold her responsible for Christabel's derangement; we begin to read Christabel's apparent hypocrisy as if it were Geraldine's.

Although presumably Christabel is simply being framed, appearances are so very much against her that we must wonder whether we really can blame her bad behavior on her guest. But if Christabel's hissing and herpetoid faces refer to Geraldine's nature rather than a new corruption in her own, what do they signify? What is Geraldine's evil? Her evil seems to reside in her phenomenological duplicity, her failure to appear as she is. She is not merely hypocritical, however. She does not exactly misrepresent herself. She has, in fact, no independent identity to represent. Her constitution involves an infinite regress of meanings: she is not what she seems, and what she is is what she does not seem to be. She differs from herself perpetually.

Geraldine's evil lies, then, partly in her deformity, partly in her concealment of it, but mostly in her powers of displacement, which reveal her to be essentially linguistic in nature. A bit of language given a woman's name and dress, she behaves not according to any moral code but according to the rules that govern systems of signs. No more than a single phoneme can she be interpreted out of context. It would be a mistake to examine her in isolation from Christabel; neither can be represented, apparently, except in relation to the other. Once they are separated, the poem breaks off, as if it could represent them only through one another, as if language were rendered impossible by their parting. Geraldine is evil because she enforces the condition of allegory, turning those around her into signifiers of the identity she depends upon them to supply and depriving them of the power to make known the truth about themselves. She makes intolerably clear what representation implies: not self-evidence, as Wordsworth wanted to believe, the natural expression of one's own being, but the subversion of identity. This is what happens when Geraldine makes snakes' eyes at her victim:

The maid, alas! her thoughts are gone,
She nothing sees—no sight but one!
The maid, devoid of guile and sin,
I know not how, in fearful wise,
So deeply had she drunken in
That look, those shrunken serpent eyes,
That all her features were resigned
To this sole image in her mind:
And passively did imitate
That look of dull and treacherous hate!
And thus she stood, in dizzy trance,
Still picturing that look askance
With forced unconscious sympathy
Full before her father's view—
As far as such a look could be
In eyes so innocent and blue!

(597-612)

Experiencing a bizarre form of sympathy, Christabel becomes, at least for a moment, what she sees. She images what threatens her. For her, representation is equivalent to demonic possession.

4.

Certainly demons are not the same as fields, but possession is a common ground for both. If, as I have shown, property is analogous to textuality for Wordsworth and if, as “Christabel” makes evident, demonic possession is primarily figured by the disturbance of voice and referentiality, then “Michael”'s “property” can be said to be a conceptual pun on “Christabel”'s “possession.” What “Michael” holds to be the necessary condition for composition is “to feel / For passions that were not my own. … for the sake / Of youthful Poets, who among these Hills / Will be my second self when I am gone.” The basis of his narrative is sympathy, the ability to represent within himself the passions of others and to find or create images or representations of himself in those who will listen to his tale—only a less terrifying, less humiliating form of the possession that afflicts Coleridge's characters. This capacity for sympathy, for creating a “second self,” enables Wordsworth to inherit and to pass on his literary property. It is the basis of his power as a literary agent. It is also what enables him to take the ruin of Coleridge's poem and complete it with his own, domesticating its uncanniness, transforming a potential threat to identity into a force of social connection. But Wordsworth's poem can save the proprieties that “Christabel” menaces only through an act of literary violence that, paradoxically, mimicks the objectionable impropriety of its victim.

Who, then, is finally responsible, the imitator or the imitated? Whose story is it, anyway? Casting “Christabel” out of the Lyrical Ballads, substituting his poetic voice for another's, Wordsworth simultaneously silences and imitates the censorious, ventriloquistic Geraldine. “Michael” acts as both usurper and usurped, taking on—like Christabel—the features of what it undertakes to exorcise, its poetic purity corrupted by the object of its cathartic intentions. Who is to say whether Coleridge fell victim to Wordsworth's story or Wordsworth to Coleridge's? Who even will insist it is necessary to apportion blame? The two poems, each one a Geraldine to the other's Christabel, take mutual possession of one another, undermining the very notion of exclusive poetic property.

Notes

1. The Art of the Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), p. 149.

2. The importance and complexity of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's mutual influence is well known. Two of the best studies of the poets' collaboration are Thomas McFarland's “The Symbiosis of Coleridge and Wordsworth” in Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981) and Stephen Parrish's more specialized The Art of the Lyrical Ballads.

3. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (London: Macmillan, 1959), 1:64.

4. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956), 1:643, note #2. Hereafter this work will be cited as STCL.

5. See, for example, STCL, 1:627 and 631. For an excellent discussion of Coleridge's relations to literary property, see Jerome Christensen, Coleridge's Blessed Machine of Language (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), especially chapters 3 and 4.

6. Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), 2:8.

7. The critics did not know quite what to say about the poem. That in their attempts to locate the source of their uneasiness they fell into improprieties not unlike those from which “Christabel” itself suffers is therefore unsurprising. On this subject see Karan Swann, “Literary Gentlemen and Lovely Ladies: The Debate on the Character of Christabel,” ELH [Journal of English Literary History], 52 (1985), 397-418.

8. All citations of “Michael” are from Lyrical Ballads: The text of the 1798 edition with the additional 1800 poems and the Prefaces, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Methuen, 1963).

9. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, 1:65-9 passim, 72.

10. Letter #119, to Thomas Poole, 9 April 1801, in Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (1787-1805), ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), p. 266.

11. Letter #116, 14 January 1801, In Early Letters, p. 262.

12. Kurt Heinzelman remarks upon the equivalence between Michael's property and Wordsworth's in The Economics of the Imagination (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1980), p. 221.

13. As Don H. Bialostosky remarks, Wordsworth himself stresses the secondhand nature of his material, “completely excluding claims to direct personal experience. … He presents his telling of the ‘Tale’ of Michael as neither occasioned by a specific personal encounter with the ruined sheepfold nor validated by a personal sighting of or meeting with the hero but as told to him by others and confirmed by conversations with them” (Making Tales: The Poetics of Wordsworth's Narrative Experiments [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984], p. 99).

14. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), p. 266.

15. Peter J. Manning, who describes the poet's treatment of Luke as “affectless,” suggests that Wordsworth seems to be “determinedly deflecting attention from the remorse that his failure might well be thought to have caused in him.” Manning sees Luke as the object of the poet's anxieties for different reasons than I do. See “‘Michael,’ Luke, and Wordsworth,” Criticism, 19 (1977), 195-211.

16. I cannot agree with Heinzelman, who regards Luke's sin as having “relinquish[ed] his natural inheritance by seeking private gain” (p. 217). Marjorie Levinson returns the blame to Michael, who, having produced Luke and invested him with the value of his labor, “not only converts a use value to an exchange value, he involves his family in the mechanisms of the market he had thus far avoided” (Wordsworth's Great Period Poems [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986], p. 68).

17. See Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry, p. 265, and Manning, “‘Michael,’ Luke, and Wordsworth,” pp. 201-2.

18. See R. S. Woof, “John Stoddart, ‘Michael’ and Lyrical Ballads,” Ariel, 1, No. 2 (April, 1970), 7-22; “Mr. Woof's Reply to Mr. Wordsworth,” Ariel, 3, No. 2 (April, 1972), 72-79; Jonathan Wordsworth, “A Note on the Ballad Version of ‘Michael,’” Ariel, 2, No. 2 (April, 1971), 66-71; Mark Reed, “On the Development of Wordsworth ‘Michael,’” Ariel, 3, No. 2 (April, 1972), 70-79; and Stephen Parrish, “‘Michael,’ Mr. Woof and Mr. Wordsworth,” Ariel, 3, No. 2 (April, 1972), 80-83.

19. Quoted by Stephen Parrish, “Michael and the Pastoral Ballad,” in Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies in Memory of John Alban Finch, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970), p. 52.

20. Mark Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Early Years 1770-1799 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), p. 323.

21. Coleridge himself believed “A Character” described him, but Wordsworth told Isabella Fenwick that he wrote it about Jones. See “Mr. Woof's Reply to Mr. Wordsworth,” “On the Development of Wordsworth's ‘Michael,’” and “‘Michael,’ Mr. Woof and Mr. Wordsworth.”

22. Geraldine's putative father, Lord Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine, is Sir Leoline's “heart's best brother” (417).

23. For one interpretation of this doubling, see Paul Magnuson, Coleridge's Nightmare Poetry (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia), 1974, pp. 101-104.

24. Camille Paglia sees the damage as even more extensive. For her, “part 1 encompasses the totality of Coleridge's vision and … the second part written three years later, as well as the rough plan he projected for three more parts, was born of fear at what he had already created.” If Paglia is right, Part II is an attempt to muffle the implications of Part I. See “Christabel,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), p. 223.

25. Witness the critics' tendency to praise the poem almost as if Wordsworth had succeeded in breaking down the boundary between art and nature. James H. Averill's remark is not atypical: “to some degree, the attempt to present things-as-they-are absolves the poet of responsibility for his story. He can think of himself as a kind of historian, one who hardly invents his plot and therefore is morally bound to hold an honest mirror up to life” (Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1980], p. 233).

26. Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1912), pp. 213-214.

27. Anne K. Mellor, noting the oddity of Coleridge's self-justification, regards the preface as “a voice of conventional morality … set beside an imaginative vision that denies the very foundation of that morality (the assumption that right and wrong, good and evil, yours and mine, can be distinguished).” Unlike her, I find the implications of the preface as disquieting as those of the poem itself. Mellor's analysis can be found in English Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), p. 161.

28. Or, as Paglia notes, “The irony of Geraldine's tale of rape is that she is herself a rapist. What Christabel hears is what is to be done to her” (“Christabel,” p. 219).

29. As Richard Rand observes, Geraldine herself “is a kind of poem, and the story of Christabel is the story of one of her readers. In writing the poem, Coleridge tells about the process of reading, the process, indeed, of reading the poem known as Christabel” (“Geraldine,” Glyph, No. 3 [1978], 76).

30. His evasiveness about the particulars of her wickedness anticipates Wordsworth's reluctance to go into the details of Luke's corruption.

31. The clue will reappear for us through Christabel's visionary trance: “Again saw was that bosom old, / Again she felt that bosom cold …” (457-58). It comes through indirectly in the Baron's threat to “dislodge their reptile souls” from those who kidnapped Geraldine (442-43) and, of course, in the ladies' partial metamorphoses into snakes.

32. One might even say that Wordsworth, as final censor of the entire poem, acts merely as Geraldine's agent.

33. Rand calls the deformity a “seal,” “a hallmark or signature, but one that also ‘seals’ up or encrypts the fact of its own existence, of its meaning (if it has one), and of its history (which is never revealed). And this seal, by sight and by touch, also seals up Christabel, and so becomes her seal and signature as well” (“Geraldine,” p. 76).