The Columbia History of British Poetry (82 page)

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Mellor, Anne K.
Blake's Human Form Divine
. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
Paley, Morton D.
The Continuing City: William Blake's "Jerusalem."
Oxford: Clarendon, 1983.
Textual Note: Blake's writings are quoted from
The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake
, rev. ed., ed. by David V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1988). The texts of lyrics are referred to by line number, of longer poems by plate or page number followed by a colon and then the line number(s). Prose is cited by page number.
 
Page 341
Coleridge
Morton D. Paley
Coleridge once divided his poems into those written chiefly from the age of seventeen to twenty-five, those written from twenty-five to thirty-three, and those written afterwards. Coleridge was twenty-five in 1797, the year in which the second edition of his
Poems on Various Subjects
was published, and in that same year he became involved with William Wordsworth in the great experiment of the
Lyrical Ballads
. Most of the material from the two editions of
Poems
he later classified as as "Juvenile Poems," while he regarded his
Lyrical Ballads
contributions as poems of his maturity. The three great poems of the marvelous, by which Coleridge is known to almost every reader of English literature, were composed from 1797 to 1800; the three mature "conversation poems" in 17971798; and "Dejection: An Ode," in which Coleridge declared the failure of his creative powers, in 1802. Seldom has a great poet's best work been produced in so short a period, even if we include (as we should) "To William Wordsworth,'' written in the winter of Coleridge's thirty-third year. Most of the poetry that he produced after that was deliberately in a minor key, though some of it is of great interest, as are some of the very early works.
If we consider the
Poems
of 1796 and 1797, together with the work later entitled "The Destiny of Nations," which was intended for the 1797 volume but not published until 1817, we seem to be considering a young poet, strongly influenced by the blank verse of Milton and the odes of Thomas Gray, preparing for a career as a writer of religious and political works. "Religious Musings," upon which Coleridge was then prepared to stake his reputation, is the most ambitious of these. Look-
 
Page 342
ing upon the state of society from a cosmic perspective, "Religious Musings" presents the French Revolution as an apocalypse to be followed by the millennium of a just society and the descent of the throne of God. When he began this poem in December 1794, Coleridge had already written the greater part of "The Destiny of Nations" as a contribution to Southey's epic
Joan of Arc
(1796), projecting allegorical visions of the American and French Revolutions as proleptic of universal peace. In shorter poems Coleridge expressed his responses to events in Revolutionary France and in his own country. "To a Young Lady with a Poem on the French Revolution" presents the poet as imaginatively participating in the bloody defense of the Revolution but, significantly, closes with his turning to domestic life.
The "Ode on the Departing Year" views the events of 1796 as a series of nightmare visions of war and empire, prophesizes the imminent destruction of Albion, and concludes with the isolated poet, "unpartaking of the evil thing," in religious contemplation. Sonnets lament the apostasy of Edmund Burke from the cause of Freedom, sympathize with Joseph Priestley as driven to America by the Birmingham mob, and praise libertarian figures like Erskine, Sheridan, Koskiusko, and LaFayette. Although there are also some poems of personal sentiment like the beautiful "Lines Written at Shurton Bars," the emphasis is on the public realm.
Coleridge did not immediately abandon this subject matter after 1797, but as he self-critically put it, he "pruned" his style and "used my best efforts to tame the swell and glitter of both thought and diction." In "France: An Ode," originally published as "The Recantation," Coleridge reviewed his past Revolutionary sympathies from the perspective of 1798 and faced the collapse of his former millennial hopes. Now he declared that Liberty could be found only among clouds, sea, and woods, ''The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves!" In "Fears in Solitude," that same year, he voiced his feelings of anxiety and isolation at the prospect of a French invasion, yet blamed his countrymen for having offended God by their cupidity and corruption. It would no doubt have been difficult to go on writing meditative political poetry without finding a center of value somewhere, but satire was still possible. In "Fire, Famine, and Slaughter," Coleridge excoriated William Pitt for the blood shed in the Vendée and in Ireland; and in "The Devil's Thoughts," written in collaboration with Southey, the institutions of British society are inspected by the Devil to provide a
 
Page 343
model for hell. These two apocalyptic-grotesque poems, first published anonymously in 1798 and 1799, were enormously popular, but by the time they were written Coleridge's poetic career was taking a much different course.
In a famous account in the
Biographia Literaria
Coleridge recalls the walks and talks with Wordsworth in the Quantock Hills that led to the genesis of
Lyrical Ballads
, and describes the division of labor that took place between Wordworth and himself. Wordworth's subjects "were to be drawn from ordinary life," while in Coleridge's share "the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real." The reader who expected "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" to be a poem of supernatural horror like Bürger's ''Lenore" would be at first gratified but finally disappointed, for the ultimate interest would be (in a word dear to Coleridge) psychological. Nor would the poem be morally satisfying in the end. In response to the criticism that it did not have enough moral, Coleridge declared: "It ought to have had no more moral than the
Arabian Nights
' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up and says he
must
kill aforesaid merchant
because
one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son." The "Rime" had its own logic, its own laws.
One aspect of those laws is the motive for the killing of the albatross. Deliberately left motiveless, this deed is a forerunner of the
acte gratuite
to be so prized by French existentialism. It demonstrates free will, and in the case of the Mariner, the debasement of the will. He then becomes Other, combining aspects of Cain and the Wandering Jew into a single figure who also anticipates the
poète maudit
of Rimbaud. Robert Penn Warren in "A Poem of Pure Imagination" equates the deed itself with the Crucifixion, and although not all readers will accept Warren's consistent bifurcation of Understanding and Imagination in the poem, his interpretation remains a powerful influence on many later ones. The sailors, by approving the deed once the fog lifts, put themselves in the place of the community acquiescing in the death of Christ.
The Mariner's weapon is a crossbow, and "cross" as verb and noun reinforces the identification of the albatross with Jesus; associated with the moon glimmering through fog, the bird is an example of
 
Page 344
Coleridge's characteristic imagery of the Imagination. It also displays the characteristic "translucence" of a symbol as Coleridge would memorably define it in
The Statesman's Manual
(1816)"a translucence of the special in the individual or of the universal in the general" and "above all . . . the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal." Although these words were written as late as 1816, we should remember that the nature of symbolism was a lifelong preoccupation of Coleridge'syears before
Lyrical Ballads
he wrote, in the poem that became "The Destiny of Nations,"
For all that meets the bodily sense I deem
Symbolical, one mighty alphabet
For infant minds . . .
As for the Mariner, he has gone through a regenerative experienceat the same time expressed in and resulting from his blessing of the water snakesrestoring the Coleridgean principle of "the one life within us and abroad" ("The Eolian Harp"). Yet his confession to the Hermit brings only a temporary catharsis, and he must continue to ten his story. In his desire to transfer his guilty self-awareness to others, he uses the power of his "glittering eye"a form of hypnotism known in the later eighteenth century as "animal magnetism." So the Wedding Guest never gets to participate in the communal joys of the bridal feast but goes home to rise ''sadder" (meaning more serious) and wiser, while the Mariner continues to pass like night from land to land with the "strange power of speech" that is poetry itself.
When Coleridge prepared the text of the poem for publication in
Sibylline Leaves
(1817), he made two major changes. He ruthlessly pruned the diction of the
Lyrical Ballads
version, sometimes eliminating single archaisms, sometimes whole passages of charnel-house verse. The scene remains medieval, with the Mariner's references to saints and to "Mary Queen," but it is no longer eighteenth-century Gothic. Coleridge also added the brilliant invention of the marginal gloss, introducing a learned, sometimes pedantic editorial persona, a commentator often not averse to stating the obvious, yet at times surprisingly eloquent"No twilight within the courts of the sun." The marginal gloss, somewhat archaic itself, makes the poem seem even more so, and contributes a perspective different from that of hypothetical author, narrator, or hypothetical reader. It is rightly in this later form that Coleridge's masterwork has become best known.

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