Coleridge: Darker Reflections. Richard Holmes
promised to repay his debts “by regular instalments” from the fees he happily assumed he would earn at Ottery. As a last quixotic throw (and no doubt encouraged by Wordsworth’s example) he contracted with Longman for 100 guineas on a two-volume collection of poems – “these are all ready, but two” – to be delivered in two months provided “death & sickness” did not intervene.
The continuing dream of finishing “Christabel”, and filling out the new volume with his Asra poems (dating right back to the “Dejection” ode) obviously inspired this idea. But it would involve a degree of literary self-exposure from which he shrank more than ever. Against this was the provoking fact that Walter Scott had achieved a resounding success with his “Lay of the Last Minstrel” (1805), which had now sold 15,000 copies, cleverly imitating the free syllabic metre of “Christabel”, copying its gothic themes, and openly plagiarizing some of its most memorable phrasing. Coleridge was aware of this though he would not refer to it in print for many years.74 In the event, the collection was not assembled for another decade, and Longman’s guineas never materialized at any time. How far Coleridge’s reputation would have altered, had he seriously tried to match Wordsworth’s two volumes in 1807, is a subject he himself bitterly thought about in later years.
Coleridge hung on in London till the first week in May, when he and Hartley saw Asra off on the stagecoach to the Clarksons’. There is no record of their parting. But the following day Coleridge nearly collapsed in a Bedford Street on the way to visit Sotheby, and fled back in a horse-cab to the Lambs. Mary Lamb, one of the shrewdest and kindest of Coleridge’s nurses, dosed him with brandy and strong broth, and stiffened his resolution for the next encounter with Mrs Coleridge.75 Father and son departed on the Bristol mail about 10 May 1807 – “No procrastination – no self-delusion”. Ahead of them lay an angry woman and an unpalatable letter, neither of which baleful objects should have been kept waiting in a well-ordered and rational universe.
Coleridge remained in the West Country for the next six months, and the Wordsworths did not hear from him again until November. But Asra secretly kept in touch from Bury St Edmund’s, though all her letters have been destroyed. The first indication of Coleridge’s arrival in Bristol – where he stayed with Josiah Wade in Queen’s Square, while Mrs Coleridge remained at her sister Martha’s – was the use of Greek cipher in his Notebooks.
An entry of 22 May, written in a curious pale red ink, which might be his “gout medicine” or even laudanum, suggests the marital rows over money and the children which now engulfed him. “As usual even the epoch of a pocket book must be marked with agitation…Mrs Coleridge this morning first planted in Hartley’s mind the pang of divided duty: & left me stormy & miserable – The same day received the second letter from Sara [Asra].”76
Other Greek entries mention anger and jealousy, the hope of “reconciliation”, and the continuing obsession of his unfulfilled love. “My love blazeth in presence: in absence it glows with a deep melancholy consuming flame. The walls, the window panes, the chair, the very air seems to sympathize with it!”77 These almost hallucinatory sensations would be later transmuted into a tender, Platonic poem, “Recollections of Love”.
But all the other work which he had so hopefully planned – the play, the collected poems, the Mediterranean travels – slid into oblivion. Even the letter from George remained unopened. As he wrote to another old Bristol friend, the publisher Joseph Cottle: “I will certainly give you the right hand of old-fellowship: but, alas! You will find me, rolling rudderless…Pain I have enough of, but that is indeed to me, a mere trifle, but the almost unceasing, overpowering sensations of wretchedness: aching in my limbs, with an indescribable restlessness, that makes action to any available purpose, almost impossible…”78 But this was surely the effect of opium, as much as Mrs Coleridge.
It was Tom Poole, still a great favourite of both husband and wife, who now came to Coleridge’s aid, inviting the whole family down to stay at Nether Stowey for the summer. They moved in early June. The children had the run of the large garden, the fun of haymaking, and the pungent fascination of the tanning yard. Mrs Coleridge had many old friends in the village, and Coleridge the hallowed retreat of Poole’s now famous bookroom (it had been used by Wordsworth, Davy, Hazlitt, and Lamb), with its discreet external staircase providing an escape into the orchard. Poole’s avuncular kindness and methodical efficiency were now directed briskly at Coleridge’s ill-health, taking him out on long walks, encouraging him to write to friends, and helping him analyse his own feelings.
On one evening Coleridge noted with simple pleasure: “Blue Sky through the glimmering interspaces of the dark Elms at Twilight rendered a lovely deep yellow green.”79 On another he recorded Poole’s characteristic and “affecting” remark, “How much the feelings of happy Childhood, when summer days appeared 20 times as long as now, may be produced by effective Industry – monuments of Time well spent.”80 Coleridge read agricultural textbooks, studies of astronomy (he had a brief fantasy of setting up his own observatory), and the poetry of the seventeenth-century religious mystic Richard Crashaw, whose Edenic images he compressed into tiny mottoes of hope: “Sunrise – As all the Trees of Paradise reblossoming in the East.”81
Poole also began the painful task, pursued throughout the summer, of substituting country ale for brandy, and trying to wean Coleridge off his high level of opium intake. Coleridge’s Notebooks become more and more explicit about actual physiological addiction – “all my Vitals are possessed by an unremitting Poison” – and now for the first time contain medically accurate descriptions of withdrawal symptoms. They produced pain in all his joints, especially the thighs and knees. But “the evil seems rather in the exceeding Unquiet, than in the pain – a cruel sweat on the brow, & on the chest – windy sickness at the Stomach – and in the mind a strong Temptation to…a reprobate Despair, that snatches at the known Poison…” He described the moment before succumbing to the next dose unforgettably, as “like the pause in the balancing of the Javelin”.82
Even the act of analytical introspection itself became destructive. “Meanwhile the habit of inward Brooding daily makes it harder to confess the Thing, I am, to any one – least of all to those, whom I most love & who most love me – & thereby introduces and fosters a habit of negative falsehood, & multiplies the Temptations to positive Insincerity.” Again for the first time, he acknowledged the need for professional help and made the first of innumerable resolutions to seek a medical cure, in this instance from his old friend Dr Beddoes of the Bristol Pneumatic Institute: “O God! let me bare my whole Heart to Dr B. or some other Medical Philosopher – if I could know there was no Relief; I might then resolve on something.”83
While Coleridge battled these mental coils, Poole brought him round to face other, practical duties. Coleridge’s patron Tom Wedgwood, upon whom half his annuity depended, had died during Coleridge’s absence in Malta. Tom’s brother, Josiah, had written asking for a memorial essay but Coleridge had simply failed to reply, leaving this letter too not merely unanswered but unopened for many weeks. Poole forced Coleridge to write a long, explanatory letter to Josiah from Stowey on 25 June, first smoothing the way with his own tactful missive.
“I admire and pity him more than ever,” he wrote to Josiah. “His information is much extended, the great qualities of his mind heightened and better disciplined; but alas: his health is weaker, and his great failing, procrastination, or the incapability of acting agreeably to his wish and will, much increased.”84 This was the nearest that the loyal Poole would get to opium.
Coleridge’s