Richard Holmes - Coleridge - Darker Reflections

He summed it up in an extraordinary, domestic image of food: of a child’s comfort-food, sticky and enticing, but which is also red and bleeding like a wound. “All this interwoven with its minor consequences, that fill up the interspaces – the cherry juice running in between the cherries in a cherry pie: procrastination in the dread of this – & something else in consequence of that procrastination etc.” The entry ends with a desperate thought of Asra, how he had “concentred” his soul on a woman “almost as feeble in Hope as myself”. 121Self-pity and self-knowledge were finely balanced in these reflections, and the sinister percolating cherry juice gleams dark red like laudanum splashing into a wine glass and running down his throat.

But on other nights in January and February, Coleridge was also making superb, lucid entries on subjects as diverse as aesthetics, politics, theology or philosophy. Notes on Ball’s talk of Mediterranean strategy mix with discussion of the Platonic fathers, etymology, astronomy versus astrology, Roman Catholic superstitions, Captain Decatur’s naval adventures, the symbolism of wood-fires, the spring flora of Malta, or the attempt to assassinate the Bey of Tunis. Many of these topics would later appear in Coleridge’s books and lectures, so that this whole period of reading and self-immersion served a purpose not immediately evident to Coleridge and yet vital to his intellectual expansion and development.

Coleridge’s power to draw analogies and cross-references is continually astonishing. Reading Samuel Horsey’s critique of the Greek philosopher Athenagoras on the subject of childbirth (in A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of St Albans, 1783 , a book he had picked up on the secondhand stalls of Queen’s Square in Valletta), Coleridge emerges with the concept of “organic form” which was to shape years of lecturing back in London. “Wherein then would Generation differ from Fabrication, or a child from a Statue or a Picture? It is surely the inducement of a Form on pre-existing material in consequence of the transmission of a Life…The difference therefore between Fabrication and Generation becomes clearly inducible: the Form of the latter is ab intra , evolved; the other ab extra , impressed.” 122From this distinction, as from his earlier observations on sailing-ships, a whole theory of imaginative “generation” would come.

One of his most persistent night-themes is the huge Mediterranean moon viewed from his garret window across Valletta harbour. To Coleridge it was still the magic moon of the “Ancient Mariner”, but now he turned to it with a new intensity, as a witness to his own sufferings. One midnight it was “blue at one edge from the deep utter Blue of the Sky, a mass of pearl-white Cloud below, distant and travelling to the Horizon.” He found himself praying to it, as to a divinity. “Consciously I stretched forth my arms to embrace the Sky and in a trance I had worshipped God in the Moon: the Spirit not the Form. I felt in how innocent a feeling Sabeism might have begun: O not only the Moon, but the depth of the Sky!” He recognized in this a profoundly religious instinct that was to grow with ever-greater force in the coming years: that he was not spiritually self-sufficient, and that he had a primitive, almost pagan, need for an external power. “O yes! – Me miserable! O yes! – Have Mercy on me, O something out of me! For there is no power (and if that can be, less strength) in aught within me! Mercy! Mercy!’ 123

On another, calmer night the same feeling emerged more philosophically. Now the moon presaged a whole theory of poetic language, which would take its authority from the same recognition of transcendent human need deep within the spirit. Now it was language itself – the divine logos – which impelled Coleridge from a pagan Pantheism to the rebirth of a fundamental Christianity. The moon at Malta provided Coleridge with a religious revelation about divine power radiating through the natural universe. It was for him, with his fundamental and never-abandoned identity as a poet, essentially an articulating power, an expressive fiat as in the opening of the Book of Genesis.

In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering thro’ the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking , a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing any thing new. Even when the latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling as if that new phenomenon were the dim Awaking of a forgotten or hidden Truth of my inner Nature. It is still interesting as a Word, a Symbol! It is LOGOS, the Creator! and the Evolver! 124

All this time Coleridge continued his daylight work as Public Secretary. In February he was inspecting the hospital, every wall covered with grotesque crucifixes, and in the ward for venereal diseases a child of twelve in the same bed as an old man of seventy. 125In March he was sailing round the harbour to inspect the defences with Lieutenant Pasley. Spain had now declared war against Britain, and the French fleet had broken out of Toulon. The convoy system was in shambles, and Nelson was making a sweep to the Azores. Communications were disrupted, and there was no sign of Mr Chapman (Coleridge’s replacement) who was somewhere in the Black Sea. The plague, which had carried off Major Adye at Gibraltar, now threatened Valletta and beach landings were expected imminently in Sicily or southern Italy.

Back in England the Wordsworths were deeply worried. They had planned to leave Grasmere in 1805, and settle wherever they could persuade Coleridge to join them on his return, which they expected in the spring. But they had had no news for three months, “no tidings of poor Coleridge, for Heaven’s sake”, and feared the worst from war or pestilence. 126Daniel Stuart had gazetted Coleridge’s appointment as Public Secretary in the Courier , but waited in vain for further dispatches from him.

But the disaster that struck came from a wholly unexpected quarter. At one o’clock on 31 March 1805 Coleridge was summoned from the Treasury by Sir Alexander to attend a diplomatic reception. As he entered the packed drawing-room, Lady Ball turned to him and asked if he knew Captain John Wordsworth. “Is he not a Brother of Mr Wordsworth, you so often talk of?” John Wordsworth’s ship, the Abergavenny , had been wrecked in a storm off Weymouth, with the loss of all cargo, three hundred men and the captain himself. Lady Ball faltered, as she saw Coleridge go pale. “Yes, it is his brother,” he replied, and staggered from the room. He walked back to his garret, supported by the Sergeant-at-Arms and pursued by Sir Alexander. As he got to his door, he collapsed. Later he would say that the shock was so great that he “fell down on the ground in a convulsive fit” in front of fifty people in the “great Saloon of the Palace” itself. 127

It was an expressive exaggeration. He was ill for a fortnight, and shaken in a way that only the Wordsworths could have understood. William wrote to Sir George Beaumont: “We have had no tidings of Coleridge. I tremble for the moment when he is to hear of my brother’s death; it will distress him to the heart, – and his poor body cannot bear sorrow. He loved my brother, and he knows how we at Grasmere loved him.” 128For the Wordsworths, who had also invested heavily in John’s ship, his death was to change all their plans for the future and tighten the little Grasmere circle, “the Concern”, in ways that subtly affected their commitment to Coleridge.

For Coleridge himself it was news that haunted and terrified him, with intimations of failure, loss and physical horror. “O dear John: and so ended thy dreams of Tarns & mountain Becks, & obscure vales in the breasts and necks of Mountains. So thy dream of living with or among thy Brother and his. – O heavens! Dying in all its Shapes, shrieks; and confusion; and mad Hope; and Drowning more deliberate than Suicide; – these, these were the Dorothy, the Mary, the Sara Hutchinson, to kiss the cold drops from thy Brow, & to close thy Eyes! – Never yet has any Loss gone so far into the Life of Hope, with me. I now only fear.” 129