Coleridge: Darker Reflections. Richard Holmes
and benevolence, now seemed blank and cruel:
No constellations alphabet the sky:
The Heavens one large Black Letter only shew,
And as a child beneath its master’s blow
Shrills out at once its task and its affright –
The groaning world now learns to read aright,
And with its Voice of Voices cries out, O!”108
The harsh, metaphysical nature of this poem (drawing its image from the old Black Letter Bible which Coleridge recalled from his own painful schooldays under Bowyer) set the tone for much confessional poetry to come. But another more tender piece, “Recollections of Love” also took Coleridge back to more soothing memories of the early Quantock days, now infused with thoughts of Asra which haunted him like half-heard music.
Eight springs have flown, since last I lay
On Quantock’s healthy hills,
Where quiet sounds from hidden rills
Float here and there, like things astray,
And high o’er head the sky-lark shrills.
No voice as yet had made the air
Be music with your name; yet why
That asking look? that yearning sigh?
That sense of promise every where?
Belovéd! flew your spirit by?109
The song-like beauty and simplicity of this poem also hides a complex metaphysical speculation about the nature of time in matters of the heart. It is entitled “Recollections”, but it is equally about anticipations of love. For Coleridge, Asra’s “spirit” already inhabited the hills and streams of the Quantocks in 1799. Emotional time stretched and flowed and doubled-back, fluid like a river, linking spots of happiness in a mysterious present-tense of place and season. “My Felicity”, Coleridge wrote in another Notebook fragment, was “Like Milk that…in its easy stream Flows ever…in the Babe’s murmuring Mouth”.110
In returning to his old rambles over the Quantocks, crossing and recrossing the familiar tracks and combs, he was almost physically re-weaving the network of his youthful happiness, like a spider re-making a web of sights, sounds and associations:
…Time drew out his subtle
Threads so quick, That the long
Summer’s Eve was one whole web,
A Space on which I lay commensurate –
For Memory & all undoubting Hope
Sang the same note & in the selfsame
Voice…111
The richness of the Quantocks’ earth at harvest-time made him grateful to “magna mater, Diana multimammalia” – the great Mother, Diana the many-breasted.112 Yet Time was still fleeting, a perilous river on which all human achievements of outward form were swept away. The counter-speculation, as old as Heraclitus, produced a series of “Kubla Khan”-like prose fragments which answered the lyric poetry in a grander, more openly philosophical manner. “Our mortal existence a stoppage in the blood of Life – a brief eddy in the everflowing Ocean of pure Activity…who beholds Pyramids, yea, Alps and Andes (giant Pyramids the work of Fire) raising monuments like a generous Victor, o’er its own conquests, tombstones of a world destroyed – yet, these too float adown the Sea of Time, & melt away, Mountains of floating ice.”113
Lying on his back in the Quantocks’ heather, gazing up at the English sky, Coleridge recalled his Malta meditations on the eternal blue of the Mediterranean, and reached towards some answering impulse in himself. “O I could annihilate in a deep moment all possibility of the needlepoint pinshead System of the Atomists by one submissive Gaze!…Thought formed not fixed, – the molten Being never cooled into a Thing, tho’ begotten into the vast adequate Thought.”114 All these meditations on Time and Form, Love and Perception, would gradually be brought to bear on the nature of the poet’s Imagination – “whose essence is passionate order” – which he would explore in the long-planned lectures of 1808.
If Poole thought Coleridge was not “exerting” himself this summer, one might ask how much hard work a writer may do lying on a hill in the sun.
1
Coleridge did not lie undisturbed for very long. At the end of August 1807, Poole received an urgent letter from Davy on the subject of the lectures in London. “The Managers of the Royal Institution are very anxious to engage him; and I think he might be of material service to the public, and of benefit to his own mind, to say nothing of the benefit his purse might receive. In the present condition of society, his opinions in matters of taste, literature, and metaphysics must have a healthy influence; and unless he soon becomes an actual member of the living world, he must expect to be brought to judgment ‘for hiding his light’…”1
This time there was no Wordsworth to dissuade him, and no Asra to distract him (though both had been the subject of painful Notebook entries at Stowey, one of them about the bedroom incident, ending “Awakened from a dream of Tears, & anguish of involuntary Jealousy, 1/2 past 2…”).2
Coleridge wrote back to Davy with surprising promptitude on 9 September, accepting the proposal on a revised plan. After helpful discussions with Poole, he had decided to abandon the visual art aspect of the lectures (his Mediterranean materials still lying marooned with Stoddart at Malta) and to concentrate purely on the literary side. His subject would be “the Principles of Poetry”. He would try to do something largely new in English criticism: to isolate and define the psychology of the creative imagination on systematic, philosophical grounds.
He would illustrate his theory with a grand sweep through the history of English literature: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Pope and the Moderns. Everything would be subordinated to his central concept, elaborated over many years, of the dynamic connection between the structure of poetry and the structure of the human mind. “In the course of these I shall have said, all I know, the whole result of many years’ continued reflection on the subjects of Taste, Imagination, Fancy, Passion, the source of our pleasures in the fine Arts in the antithetical balance-loving nature of man, & the connections with moral excellence.”3
At the heart of Coleridge’s thesis would emerge a concept of the poetic imagination which acted as a single unifying force within all creative acts. This idea, which was to become a defining doctrine of Romanticism, may well have been partly triggered by Davy’s own scientific theories about the nature of energy and matter, which he too was exploring that autumn at the Royal Society in a series of brilliant lectures and demonstrations. Coleridge wrote later that Davy’s “own great discovery, of the identity of electricity and chemical attraction”, had opened the way to a unified theory of energy in the universe. “Davy supposes that there is only one power in the world of the senses; which in particles acts as chemical attractions, in specific masses as electricity, & on matter in general, as planetary Gravitation…When this has been proved, it will then only remain to resolve this into some Law of vital Intellect – and