Unlike Donne, whose persona jauntily resolves to make the best of it, Coleridge regards his quest as a pursuit of "nothing," like a woodman's pursuit of the Brocken specter. In lines 2224 his life becomes that of his own earlier creation:
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 | | a becalmed bark,
Whose Helmsman on an ocean waste and wide
Sits mute and pale his mouldering helm beside.
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Yet the same poem provides Coleridge with a more positive allusion when, in the short verse epitaph he wrote for himself in 1833, the poet expresses his faith in a life to come: "That he who many a year with toil of breath / Found death in life, may here find life in death!" Such interplay with earlier poems reminds us of the richness and variety of Coleridge's poetic career.
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No discussion of Coleridge as a poet should omit his lifelong engagement with the sounds of words in prosodic experiments. Sometimes, as in in the mnemonic "Metrical Feet: Lesson for a Boy," this takes a completely external form. In a poem like the "Hexameters," addressed to William and Dorothy Wordsworth, the rhythmic pattern seems to be the motive for a virtuosic display: "All my hexameters fly, like stags, pursued by the stag-hounds, / Breathless and panting, and ready to drop, yet flying still onwards . . ." In "Christabel" the experiment is an integral part of Coleridge's imaginative creation.
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| | Is the night chilly and dark?
The night is chilly, but not dark.
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The lines of "Christabel" ordinarily have four stresses among seven to twelve syllables, a method that anticipates the sprung rhythm of Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the technique of his verse, as in so many other aspects of his work, Coleridge was both a great traditionalist and a prophetic experimenter.
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| | Textual Note: At the time of writing, there is no modern scholarly edition of Coleridge's complete poems. (Two are in preparation: one by J. C. C. Mays for the
Collected Coleridge
, another by Fran Carlock Stephens for Oxford University Press). Most of the quotations are taken from
The Poetical Works of S. T. Coleridge
, 3 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1829). Quotations of poems not in that collection are taken from
The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
, ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), and quotations from the "Letter to Sara Hutchinson" (not in the 1829 or 1912 editions) are taken from the Everyman's Library
Poems
, ed. John Beer (London: E. P. Dutton, 1991).
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