Coleridge: Darker Reflections. Richard Holmes
Such figures exemplify many truths revealed in the Bible. We pursue them until, from the imperfection of our faculties, we are lost in impenetrable night.”73
At the time he recalled only the blessed cool of the Benedictine monastery at Nicolsai as they returned, and the next day the sun on Etna rising “behind Calabria out of the midst of the Sea…deep crimson…skies coloured with yellow a sort of Dandelion”.74 On the way down he copied a Latin inscription from the monastery gardens. “Here under Black Earth, Ashes of Holy Monks lie Hid. Marvel not. Sterile sand of Sacred Bones, everywhere becomes Fruit, And loads the fruit-Tree Branches…Go on your road, All things will be well.”75
At the ancient port of Syracuse, made famous by Thucydides’s account of the Greek Expedition and its catastrophic defeat, Coleridge was given rooms by Leckie in his idyllic villa on the site of the Timoleon antiquities overlooking the bay. For two months it was his base for a series of rambles round the island, with Leckie often acting as his guide. Leckie was a formidable figure. A classical scholar and adventurer, he had farmed in India, knocked about the Mediterranean, and finally settled with a beautiful wife in Sicily, where his money and fluency in Italian and French set him on equal terms with the local aristocracy. His hospitality, his pungent views, and the flirtatiousness of his glamorous wife, made the Villa Timoleon a popular port of call among numerous English travellers and naval officers, and he remained in regular contact with Sir Alexander. Coleridge’s admiration of Mrs Leckie was expressed in a subtle appreciation of her jewellery: “Mrs Leckie’s opal surrounded with small brilliants: grey blue & the wandering fire that moves about it; and often usurps the whole.”76
The air of voluptuous enchantment which descended over this Sicilian sojourn was oddly disturbing to Coleridge. As he walked and rode between the classical ruins, he was haunted by the discovery that the fields were full of poppies cultivated for opium. Leckie described to him the process in expert detail. “The white poppy seed, sown in the months of October & November, the plants weeded to 8 inches distance, & well watered till the plants are about 1/2 a foot high, when a compost of dung, without Earth, & Ashes is spread over the beds – a little before the flowers appear, again watered profusely, till the capsules are half-grown, at which time the opium is collected.”77
Leckie showed him how each pod was incised with a knife, and Coleridge pulled out the grains with his thumb. Later he learnt that Indian hemp was also grown extensively, and that the whole island was a paradise of narcotics. Leckie, an experienced farmer, reckoned the opium crop was worth over £50 a square foot. The place where Coleridge had once dreamed of settling with Asra and the Wordsworths in an ideal Mediterranean Pantisocracy, was in reality for him one of the most dangerous places on earth.
Sicily held other temptations. On 26 September the opera season opened at Syracuse, and Coleridge first saw the young Italian prima donna Anna-Cecilia Bertozzi.78 He was immediately captivated by her singing of Metastasio’s aria, “Amo Te Solo” (“I love none but Thee”). He was swept by “a phantom of memory”, and experienced the “meeting soul” of music, for Cecilia (named after the patron saint of music) fatally reminded him of a younger version of Asra.79
By 11 October he had met her backstage, and had made the first of a series of secret assignations, though “the voice of Conscience whispered to me, concerning myself & my intent of visiting la P[rima] D[onna] tomorrow”.80 These assignations continued through October and early November, becoming a source of both guilt and delight, so that the green lane with its long line of softly swaying trees up to the Opera House began to haunt him with its “aromatic Smell of Poplars”. His “cruelly unlike Thoughts” would come upon him at each return, with gathered force: “What recollections, if I were worthy of indulging them.”81
Cecilia’s singing could be heard outside in the Opera House yard and the street, and the “ragged boys & girls” would learn her songs after a couple of performances, so that even during the day the back-alleys of Syracuse rang with the sound of urchins mimicking her “with wonderful accuracy & agility of Voice”.82 He also saw Cecilia dancing at the public balls, and perhaps danced with her, at least in imagination: “Dancing, when poor human Nature lets itself loose from bondage & circumstances of anxious selfish care: it is Madness.”83
He was invited to her dressing-rooms, and on at least one occasion to her bedroom. A single tiny fragment of verse about Cecilia survives in his Notebooks, though almost obliterated by a later hand: “…the Breeze, And let me float & think on Asra/Thee, And…Body…myself in suffering…applied spiritually.”84 Perhaps he was also thinking of Cecilia when he described the quintet singing at the Syracuse Opera, with voices that “leave, seek, pursue, oppose…and embrace each other again”, as the sweet image of “wayward yet fond lovers” who quarrel and make up and achieve “the total melting union”.85
It would not be surprising if, after five months alone in the Mediterranean, cut off from those he loved, immersed in the wine and languors of the South, and looking for hope and “regeneration”, the 32-year-old Coleridge had embarked on an affair with the enticing Cecilia. One might even hope that he did, if only to release him from the ghost of Asra. During a violent autumnal thunderstorm at the Villa Timoleon, which broke like “an explosion of artillery” and set the dogs barking throughout Syracuse, Coleridge suddenly recalled another femme fatale he had created: “Vivid flashes in mid day, the terror without the beauty. A ghost by day time: Geraldine.”86
But the evidence of the Notebooks is very thin at the time, and Cecilia herself remains a mystery. She was evidently young, probably in her early twenties, for her first recorded performances were at Rome in 1798–9.87 She was also talented, because she became the prima donna at Palermo by 1809. Coleridge’s later recollections also suggest that she was beautiful, naive and vivacious, and fully prepared to take him to bed. In these recollections of 1808 Coleridge admitted how much he longed for Cecilia during those dreamy weeks: “the outworks of my nature [were] already carried by the sweetness of her Temper, the child-like Simplicity of her Smiles, and the very great relief to my Depression and deathly Weighing-down of my heart (and the Bladder) from her Singing & Playing, so that I began to crave after her society.” There was sexual attraction, he felt, on her side too. “Neither her Beauty, with all her power of employing it, neither her heavenly Song, were as dangerous as her sincere vehemence of attachment to me…it was not mere Passion, & yet Heaven forbid that I should call it Love.”
But paradoxically it was the directness of Cecilia’s feelings, her sunny Italian spontaneity, that seemed to frighten him. It was too simple, too sexual, for Coleridge’s anxious sense of self and religious conscience to accept. He craved, but he could not give way. When it actually came to the point, he could not deliver himself up into the arms of the warm South. “Remorse and the total loss of Self-Esteem would have been among the Knots of the Cords by which I should have been held.” What was offered to him as a joyful release, came to seem like a terrible trap, a bondage. That is why, it seems, Coleridge finally refused Cecilia.
Coleridge explained this to himself as Asra’s triumph, a triumph of his better nature. He was saved by a vision of Asra which came to him even in Cecilia’s bedroom. “When I call to mind the heavenly Vision of her Face, which came to me as the guardian Angel of my Innocence and Peace of Mind, at Syracuse, at the