Richard Holmes - Coleridge - Darker Reflections

Along with the crated ducks, three pigs, the melancholy sheep and a ship’s cat with kittens, Coleridge had two fellow passengers. They shared the cabin in increasingly pungent intimacy as the voyage progressed. One was a purple-faced lieutenant on half pay, who largely restricted his attentions to the ship’s claret; the other was a plump and garrulous merry widow, a Mrs Ireland, “who would have wanted elbow-room on Salisbury Plain”. 13Mrs Ireland’s conversation was confined to food, and she dwelt lovingly on the roast potatoes, pickles and apricot tart to be expected in Malta. 14

The cabin conditions were extremely cramped, and probably not improved by Coleridge’s tendency “in very gusty weather” to vomit up his food without warning. The process intrigued him, as it was never accompanied by seasickness: “it was an action as mechanical seemingly as that by which one’s glass or teacup is emptied by a thwart blow of the Sea”. 15Surprisingly, the merry “Mrs Carnosity” accepted this with good grace, and much worse which was to follow, after Gibraltar, when the mephitic stench from the bilge became overpowering.

Coleridge drew up a daily schedule for work in “a perseverant Spirit of industry”: it began with ginger tea and journal-writing, proceeded with a study of Wordsworth’s precious manuscript of the Prelude before dinner, and in the afternoon relaxed into Italian lessons and Dante; finally the night-watch was assigned to poetry and the completion of “Christabel”. But after the ginger tea and journal, Coleridge usually found that he flagged and spent his time up on deck, 16or dozing uneasily on his bunk under a pile of books. These included, besides Dante and a portable Italian dictionary, a technical work on mineralogy, the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and the complete works of Sir Thomas Browne, together with a mutinous crew of fresh lemons that he chewed to protect against scurvy.

He has much exercised by the bunk, which his large frame swaddled in double coats and double trousers, reduced to a precarious “mantel”. On inspection it measured five and a half feet long by twenty inches wide. It was fine for sitting, eating, drinking, writing, even shaving: “it fails only in its original purpose, that of lying & sleeping: like a great Genius apprenticed to a wrong Trade”. 17But above it was the brass porthole upon which he lavished all his ingenuity. Finding it edged with small iron rings he laced these with cords to form a net, and stacked the bottom half with books to make a flat shelf for his kit. Inside this seamanlike cupboard he carefully arranged his shaving things, teacup and soup plate, supply of lemons and portable inkstand, whose unmoving pool of black ink seemed a suggestive contrast to the ceaseless lurching of the ship. ‘By charm and talismanic privilege: one of those Smooth places in the Mediterranean, where the breakers foam in a circle around, yet send in no wrinkles upon the mirror-bright, mirror-smooth Lacus in mare. ”

Like the charmed pool of the imagination, the steady inkwell amidst the churning sea was “Imperium in Imperio”, a realm within a realm. 18This is what he hoped to become himself. To get all ship-shape, he also opened up the little escritoire that Lady Beaumont had given him, and found each drawer packed with comforts, which seized him “by a hundred Tentacula of Love and affection & pleasurable Remembrances”. 19

Up on deck, he chatted to the sailors he always admired – “a neat handed Fellow who could shave himself in a storm without drawing blood” 20– and recorded sextant readings, compass-bearings, cloud formations, star patterns and semaphore messages through the squadron. Above all he recorded the huge, beautiful complexity of the ship’s sails. They were constantly re-set throughout the fleet to form an endless series of visual harmonies. On Saturday, 14 April, he made no less than eleven pages of notes on these sail shapes. What interested him was their aesthetic values, their painterly suggestions of form and function, of energy transferred between curve and straight line. “The harmony of the Lines – the ellipses & semicircles of the bellying Sails of the Hull, with the variety of the one and the contingency of the other.”

He puzzled over their “obscure resemblance” to human shapes, to gestures of mental alertness, determination and attention. “The height of the naked mast above the sails, connected however with them by Pennant & Vane, associated I think, with the human form on a watch-tower: a general feeling – e.g. the Men on the tops of conical mountains…in Cumberland and Westmoreland.” 21This idea of the symbolic “watch-tower” haunted Coleridge. He later found that Nelson had described the navy in Malta as “the watch-tower of the Mediterranean”. Later still he used the image to describe Wordsworth’s dominance of the poetic horizon: “From the dread watch-tower of man’s absolute self”. 22Wordsworth indeed, as a man-o’-war, in full sail.

But Coleridge’s notes press further. “Every one of these sails is known by the Intellect to have a strict & necessary action & reaction on all the rest, and the whole is made up of parts…” This technical knowledge of the complementary function of the sails produces the sense of unity which we call beauty: “this phantom of complete visual wholeness in an object, which visually does not form a whole, by the influence ab intra of the sense of its perfect Intellectual Beauty or Wholeness”. 23This subtle aesthetic emerged on the deck of the Speedwell in the Bay of Biscay. From it Coleridge dashed into a bracket a formulation which would become central to his Biographia Literaria: “all Passion unifies as it were by natural Fusion”.

It is evident from such notes that Coleridge was recovering fast from the mood of helpless despondency that had beset him in past months. At night, down in the cabin, he still had his “Dreams of Terror & obscure forms”, 24and sometimes awoke screaming as in the old, bad times at Keswick. In low moments he still thought mournfully of Asra too: “Why ain’t you here? This for ever: I have no rooted thorough thro feeling – & never exist wholly present to any Sight, to any sound, to any Emotion…feeling of yearning, that at times passes into Sickness.” 25His poem to her, “Phantom”, dates from this part of the voyage.

All look and likeness caught from earth,

All accident of kin and birth,

Had pass’d away. There was no trace

Of aught on that illumined face,

Uprais’d beneath the rifted stone

But of one spirit all her own;

She, she herself, and only she,

Shone through her body visibly. 26

But his sense of excitement and stimulation was unmistakable. On 16 April the look-out “hailed the beautiful Coast of Portugal, & Oporto”, and Coleridge swarmed up on deck in his greatcoat, without bothering to put on his shoes. He began a long, enthusiastic letter to Robert Southey, sitting at his desk on the rudder case with the quacking ducks at his feet. He filled it with beautiful descriptions of the coastline and jokes about Mrs Carnosity. “We sail on at a wonderful rate, & considering we are in a Convoy, all have made a most lucky Voyage to Gibraltar if we are not becalmed, & taken in the Gut…” 27

His main complaint was his bunk at night, “Dejection & Discomfort”, and the wallowing motion of the following sea. “ This damned Rocking…is troublesome & impertinent…like the presence & gossip of an old Aunt.” 28But the magic of the ships made up for everything: “Oh with what envy I have gazed at our Commodore, the Leviathan of 74 guns, the majestic & beautiful creature: sailing right before us…upright, motionless, as a church with its Steeple – as tho it moved by its will, as tho its speed were spiritual…” 29