Richard Holmes - Coleridge - Darker Reflections

On 5 July he wrote triumphantly to Sotheby, “I have hitherto lived with Dr Stoddart, but tomorrow shall take up residence at the Palace, in a suite of delightfully cool & commanding Rooms which Sir Alexander was so kind as not merely to offer me but to make me feel that he wished me to accept the Offer…Sir A.B. is a very extraordinary man – indeed a great man. And he is really the abstract Idea of a wise & good Governor.” 63

As Coleridge got into the new routine of his work, his health improved and his spirits soared. He breakfasted, dined and took evening coffee with the Governor, meeting foreign diplomats and navy staff, and making contact with leading Maltese figures like Vittorio Barsoni, the influential editor of the Malta Gazette. “I have altered my whole system,” he wrote to his wife in July: he was getting up to swim before sun-rise, eating regular meals, spending a few shillings on summer clothes and ice-creams, and filling his Notebooks with Italian lessons and Ball’s table-talk.

With ceaseless, extrovert activity he was able to keep opium at bay, avoid depression, and even stop longing so obsessively for Asra to be with him – a shift of feeling he hoped to put into “a poem in 2 parts”. 64He found “Salvation in never suffering myself to be idle ten minutes together; but either to be actually composing , or walking, or in Company. – For the moment I begin to think, my feelings drive me almost to agony and madness; and then comes on the dreadful Smothering on my chest etc.” 65

To Stuart he wrote, that “after being near death, I hope I shall return in Spirit a regenerated Creature”; and also with his finances much improved. He started sending confidential copies of the “position papers” for the Courier to publish anonymously (a rather daring form of unofficial “leaks”): “some Sibylline Leaves, which I wrote for Sir A.B. who sent them to the Ministry – they will give you my Ideas on the importance of the Island…you will of course take them – only not in the same words.” If he survived, he would become “a perfect man of business”, and already he considered himself “a sort of diplomatic Understrapper hid in Sir Alexander’s Palace”. In the rocky, sun-beaten island (“86 in the Shade”), he was starting to flourish again.

In mid-July 1804 Sir Alexander moved his family and staff four miles inland, to the summer residence at San Antonio, with its high cool rooms, exotic gardens, and magnificent panoramas over Citta Vecchia (Medina) and the eastern approaches. The diplomatic understrapper went with them, now admitted to real intimacy, and was given a fine room immediately under the tower from where he could turn his telescope over much of the island. 66

There was a holiday atmosphere, and in the early mornings he wandered for hours in the high stony pastures, never out of the sound of “Steeple Clock and Churchbells”, chewing the pods of locust trees “full of an austere dulcacid Juice, that reminds me of a harsh Pear”. He was continually amazed by the gorgeous variety of trees and shrubs in the San Antonio garden, a sort of oasis among the rocky landscape, where he sat making notes. He listed pomegranate, prickly pear, pepper tree, oleander, date (“with its Wheel of Plumage”), myrtle, butterfly-flower, walnut, mulberry, orange and lemon. 67He wished he had a copy of Linnaeus to look them all up in.

Coleridge was happier at San Antonio in the summer of 1804 than he had been for many months. He had “manifest strength and spirits”. 68Beside the work for Sir Alexander, he wrote the long-promised letter to Wordsworth laying out the philosophical structure for “The Recluse”, completed a travel journal of the Malta voyage for the Beaumonts (which he later intended to publish), and laid his plans for an autumn expedition to Sicily and Naples.

His Notebooks contain exquisite observations on wildlife, such as his description of the brilliantly coloured green lizards with their bright gold spots and “darting and angular” movements. Some of these approach the condition of prose-poems, meditations on the relations between man and animal, which foreshadow the poems of D. H. Lawrence. The lizard’s attentive posture, “the Life of the threddy Toes…his head & innocent eye sidelong towards me, his side above the forepaw throbbing with a visible pulse”, becomes an emblem of Nature’s mysterious and fragile beauty. One “pretty fellow” lying frozen under Coleridge’s gaze in a network of sun and shade, seems to summon up a protective power to save him from all human interference: “…then turned his Head to me, depressed it, & looked up half-watching, half-imploring; at length taking advantage of a brisk breeze that made all the Network dance & toss, & darted off as if an Angel of Nature had spoken in the breeze: – Off! I’ll take care, he shall not hurt you.” 69

On 10 August Coleridge set sail for Sicily, in the company of Major Adye who had now arrived from Gibraltar. Sir Alexander Ball generously retained him on his Private Secretary’s salary of £25 per month, and supplied him with a letter of introduction to the honorary consul at Syracuse, G. F. Leckie. But first Coleridge and Adye struck out for Catania along the coast, and made a strenuous ascent of Mount Etna, with local guides. They camped at one of the casina or shelters just above the tree-line, where the ground “scorched” their feet, and dined off meat barbecued over an open fire and drank the local wine, chatting in bad Italian to some beautiful local peasant girls: “voices shrill but melodious, especially the 21 years old wheedler & talker, who could not reconcile to herself that I did not understand her: yet in how short a time a man living so would understand a language”. 70Around them stretched the desolate lava field, purple in the shadows, with a “smoke-white Bloom upon it”. 71

Coleridge seems to have made two ascents to the crater itself, though curiously there is no description in his Notebooks of the bleak, ashy lip or of his impressions from the top. Yet he seems to have reached it, for ten years later the image came surging back to him in the time of his worst opium struggles when his religious faith was threatened by a dark pit of despair. 72“I recollect when I stood on the summit of Etna, and darted my gaze down the crater; the immediate vicinity was discernible, till lower down, obscurity gradually terminated in total darkness. 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”. 74On 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