Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  On the night before their final departure for Livorno, he wrote a hymn to death, sitting in the window of the inn and watching the bolts of lightning crash down over the river Arno. “Sunday, June 22nd 1806. Globe, Pisa…Repeatedly during this night’s storm have I desired that I might be taken off, not knowing when or where. But a few moments past a vivid flash passed across me, my nerves thrilled, and I earnestly wished, so help me God! like a Love-longing, that it would pass through me!”188

  Yet this Coleridgean death was no ordinary extinction. It was more like a transfiguration, a complete transformation of the terms of his existence. It would “take him off” to some other dimension. It was: “Death without deformity, or assassin-like self-disorganization; Death, in which the mind by its own wish might seem to have caused its own purpose to be performed, as instantaneously and by an instrument almost as spiritual, as the Wish itself!” It was Death which seemed almost like re-birth, Death which seemed like an act of love, preparing for something new, blowing away the old self:

  Come, come, thou bleak December wind,

  And blow the dry Leaves from the Tree!

  Flash, like a love-thought, thro’ me, Death!

  And take a life, that wearies me.189

  The imagery of winter, with its dead leaves, still promised the possibility of some other springtime, with the buds and blossoms of another life.

  It would be easy to misjudge Coleridge’s mood of temporary despair on departing from Italy. Years later he would remember the “heavenly” valley of the Arno with affection, and put it into his poetry. He would write and lecture on Italian art, and recall the work of Michelangelo and Giotto as “deeply interesting to me…having a life of its own in the spirit of that revolution of which Christianity was effect, means and symbol”. He would fix on Italy as an ideal place of retreat, and an image of spiritual resurrection from the dead. “Were I forced into exile…I should wish to pass my summers at Zurich, and the remaining eight months alternately at Rome and in Florence, so to join as much as I could German depth, Swiss ingenuity, and the ideal genius of Italy; that, at least, which we cannot help thinking, almost feeling, to be still there, be it but as the spirit of one departed hovering over his own tomb, the haunting breeze of his own august, desolate mausoleum.”190

  As he and Russell rattled along in the coach to Livorno, he looked tenderly on a group of “beggar children” running alongside and calling to them with a strange “shudder-whistle” of farewell. The Gosport set sail for England on 23 June 1806.

  18

  The passage took fifty-five days – almost twice the outward voyage – and lived up to Coleridge’s worst expectations. He spent much of his time in his cabin, sick and constipated, and for once kept no journal at all of his impressions. They were boarded by a Spanish privateer, but Captain Derkheim talked them free, after throwing official papers (including some of Coleridge’s Malta notes) into the sea. Coleridge submitted to twelve enemas, “my dread of and antipathy increased every time”, each administered by Derkheim in conditions of pain and humiliation. The sense of violation and punishment horrified him, as he later admitted to Southey. “Tho’ the Captain was the strongest man on board – it used to take all the force of his arm, & bring the blood up in his face before he could finish. Once I brought off more than a pint of blood – & three times he clearly saved my Life.”191

  Both Derkheim and Russell continued to behave with “every possible Tenderness”, though their own feelings can only be imagined. For the rest it was a battering, claustrophobic voyage: “working up against head winds, rotting and sweating in calms, or running under hard gales, with the dead lights secured”. Russell later wrote home of their grim experience, saying that Coleridge had nearly died. Coleridge himself wrote that “no motive on earth” would make him venture on another sea-voyage of more than three days: “I would rather starve in a hovel”.

  Confined in his quarters, he grew fat and pallid, and his Mediterranean tan faded away. Gazing out through the closed porthole, he thought distractedly of Asra at Grasmere. It was perhaps now that the first images of his fine, bleak meditative poem on their love, “Constancy to an Ideal Object” began to coalesce.

  …Home and Thou are one.

  The peacefull’st cot, the moon shall shine upon,

  Lulled by the thrush, and wakened by the lark,

  Without thee were but a becalméd bark,

  Whose Helmsman on an ocean waste and wide

  Sits mute and pale his mouldering helm beside.192

  But it would be many years before the verse were completed.

  The Gosport finally sighted Portsmouth in early August, where it was quarantined, and then allowed to continue eastwards into the Thames estuary. Here Coleridge took the earliest chance of disembarking at the little quayside and customs post of Stangate Creek, on the edge of the Medway. He “leaped on land” on the afternoon of 17 August 1806. Leaving his box of books and papers in Captain Derkheim’s care, to be taken on up to Wapping, he hurried to “a curious little Chapel” by the quayside at Lower Halstow, which still exists, overlooking the mournful expanse of the Kentish marshes towards Sheerness. He found it open and empty, and dropping to his knees “offered, I trust, as deep a prayer as ever without words or thoughts was sent up by a human Being”.

  Going outside again, he surveyed the lapping waters and the tide running up through the baked mud and yellowing bulrushes of his native land. “Almost immediately after landing Health seemed to flow in upon me, like the mountain waters upon the dry stones of a vale-stream after Rains.”193 The following morning he was in London, at the Bell Inn in the Strand, wondering if he had enough money for a “decent Hat” and a pair of shoes.

  TWO

  THE SENSE OF HOME

  1

  Now he had returned home after two and a half years of wandering, Coleridge suddenly felt that he had no real home to return to. He walked down the Strand in a dirty shirt, full of dismay, hearing everyone talk of the death of Pitt and the illness of Charles James Fox, the political era of his youth sliding into the past. Now the news was of blockades, war shortages, conscription, unrest in the country. Like all exiles, he felt he had come back to a changed world which had moved on without him. Should he stay in London, go north to Keswick and his wife, agree to meet the Wordsworths in Leicestershire, or even return to his old family haunts in the West Country?

  In the event he would try all these over the next twelve months. For the moment he needed work, money and advice. The one thing he could not face was an immediate confrontation with Sara Coleridge, and he did not write to her directly for a month. Instead he sent messages round to his old editor Daniel Stuart at the Courier offices, and to Charles Lamb at India House, and dashed off letters to Southey and Wordsworth announcing his return to England rather like a piece of flotsam washed up by a lucky tide.

  ‘I am now going to Lamb’s – Stuart is at Margate; all are out of town; I have no one to advise me – I am shirtless & almost penniless…My MSS are all – excepting two pocket-books – either in the Sea or…carried back to Malta.” He had not settled “any rational plan”, but he could write “more tranquilly” to them than to Mrs Coleridge (but they should pass on his news).1

  It was Stuart who replied immediately with a credit for £50, kind enquiries about his health, and a businesslike suggestion for articles about the careers of Pitt and Fox, the Mediterranean war, the Continental blockade, or anything else Coleridge liked to turn his hand to. He also invited him to Margate, simply to talk about his life and his future.

  2

  Stuart was not an intimate friend, but he was a man of the world, and a newspaperman who understood writers, even writers like Coleridge. They would talk of his marriage, of his career, of his prospects. Over the next two years, Coleridge would try to reestablish himself as a professional man of letters, with a steady determination that was often disguised by the lurid chaos of his emotional entanglements and the regular descents into opium. His struggle
s to separate from his wife, to look after his children, to resolve his relationship with Asra, and above all to find a way of living, or not living, within the overpowering sphere of Wordsworth’s magnetic influence, would consume much of his energies. Frequently they would appear to reduce him to a kind of passive despair, a mere hulk upon the stream of circumstance, “rudderless and hopeless” as he so often said himself, washed from one temporary harbour to the next. But in reality the struggle and the determination always continued. The record of it still bursts out of his Notebooks, letters and poetry.

  He was living out what many people experience, in the dark disorder of their hidden lives, but living it on the surface and with astonishing, even alarming candour that many of his friends found unendurable or simply ludicrous. Moreover he continued to write about it, to witness it, in a way that makes him irreplaceable among the great Romantic visionaries. His greatness lies in the understanding of these struggles, not (like Wordsworth perhaps) in their solution. So it was, talking to Stuart in these first weeks back in England (as he later recalled), that he first glimpsed the crisis that would close round him in these middle years. With his peculiar mixture of comedy and pathos, he projected out of his private chaos an universal dilemma. He was only thirty-four that October, but he felt that somewhere in the Mediterranean he had imperceptibly crossed a shadowline into darker waters.

  Stuart had made the “important remark” that there was a middle period in a man’s life, “varying in various men, from 35 to 45”, when for no evident reason he began to feel the “vanity of his pursuits” and to ask “what is all this for?”. Coleridge felt this sudden undermining of the self, this panicky self-questioning of the grounds of life, was especially acute in lonely men – in bachelors, widowers or “Unhappy Husbands”. Such a man “becomes half-melancholy, gives in to wild dissipation, or self-regardless Drinking” and might even deliberately destroy himself. He would leave his “ingenious female, or female-minded friends, to fish out some motive for an act which…would have acted even without a motive even as the Terror in Nightmairs”.2

  Such a crisis would burst upon a man from whatever casual cause, as surely as “gunpowder in a Smithy” would eventually be ignited by some chance spark or other. “I had felt this Truth; but never saw it before so clearly; it came upon me at Malta, under the melancholy dreadful feeling of finding myself to be a Man, by a distinct division from Boyhood, Youth, and ‘Young Man’ – Dreadful was the feeling – before that Life had flown on so that I had always been a Boy, as it were – and this sensation had blended in all my conduct…” If men survived this period, “they commonly become cheerful again – that is a comfort – for mankind – not for me!”3 It was this sense of crisis, the entry into Dante’s “dark wood” of middle age, that haunted Coleridge quite as much as opium in these restless years.

  3

  Some practical prospects slowly took shape in London during September. The Royal Institution proposed a series of Lectures on the Fine Arts for the autumn. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Howick, agreed to an interview about a possible civil service post, in response to Sir Alexander Ball’s recommendations to Downing Street. Charles and Mary Lamb fed him with meat and porter and puns, and discussed his marriage. He and Charles tried smoking “segars”. Very gradually things fell into place. He even grappled with the opium problem, making an analytic list of the repeated pattern of his relapses. “1. Uncomfortable [feelings]. 2. Opium + Brandy. 3. Increased N.E. [Nervous Energy]. 4. Positive body pain. 5. Remorse & Despondency…Try little by little…”4

  He sketched a beautiful, haunting new stanza for the Mariner, a sort of nightmare souvenir of his time on the Gosport:

  …And stifled words & groans of pain

  Mix’d on each murmuring lip,

  We look’d round & we look’d up

  And Fear at our hearts as at a Cup

  The Life-blood seem’d to sip.

  The Sky was dull & dark the Night

  The Helmsman’s face by his lamp gleam’d bright,

  From the Sails the Dews did drip –

  Till clomb above the eastern bar

  The horned Moon, with one bright Star

  Within its nether tip.’5

  So these early weeks of autumn 1806 became a time of stocktaking and confidences about his life. Ostensibly Coleridge was delayed by an absurd series of confusions about his book box, which was lost at Wapping, with its precious cargo of books, papers, old shirts, Roman pearls and attar of roses perfume. Coleridge suspected Captain Derkheim of purloining the latter (the Captain had suddenly married and even more suddenly returned to sea, an object-lesson in American promptitude) and he spent days frantically combing the warehouses around Tower Hill in the rain.6 It was not till October that everything was found safely packed away in a box labelled “Thomas Russell”. Similar confusion attended his attempts to wait on Lord Howick, who finally dismissed him in the best bureaucratic manner, with a non-committal message left with the doorman. But by this time another government posting was far from Coleridge’s mind.7

  He wrote to Stuart a measured reflection on his Mediterranean adventures. “Though no emolument could ever force me again to the business, intrigue, form and pomp of a public situation, yet beyond all doubt I have acquired a great variety of useful knowledge, quickness in discovering men’s characters, and adroitness in dealing with them. I have learnt the inside character of many eminent living men…In short, if I recover a steady tho’ imperfect Health, I perhaps should have no reason to regret my long Absence, not even my perilous detention in Italy.” He thought that his friendship with Allston and other “Artists of acknowledged highest reputation” had done more for his insight into the fine arts, in three months in Rome, than had twenty years in England.8

  He also wrote, in less measured tones, about his marriage. Stuart later destroyed most of this confession, marking the gap grimly “Coleridge 1806 wife”. What has remained is a memorable passage of special pleading, heightened by the vivid imagery of his “Dejection” ode to Sara Hutchinson. Coleridge claimed that his unhappy marriage was the source of all his difficulties. “This, this perpetual Struggle, and endless heart-wasting, was at the bottom of all my irresolution, procrastination, languor, and former detestable habit of poison-taking –: this turned me away so long from political and moral disquisition, poetry, and all the flowers & herbs that grow in the Light and Sunshine, to be meanwhile a Delver in the unwholesome quick-silver mines of abstruse Metaphysics…”9

  He had said it before, and he would say it again, endlessly, and with great poetic conviction. Certainly he believed now that his marriage had always been ill-destined, and it had long been beyond his powers to save it. Every divorce lawyer is familiar with such retrospective statements. Yet the strangest claim was not that his “former” opium habit was the product of his marriage; or that his wife had “turned him away” from a literary career. Even their mutual friends (even Southey) saw that they had long been unable to live on productive, or even tranquil terms. It was the claim that metaphysics, which in reality he loved passionately and to which he would dedicate so much of his later life, was somehow shameful and “unwholesome”. For these “quick-silver mines” were also his magic caverns “measureless to man”, the dimension that gave his poetry and all his writing its unique resonance. Why should he deny these to Stuart, unless they were inextricably associated in his mind with the guilt and deception of his opium underworld?

  While Coleridge lurked in London, anxious messages beamed out from Grasmere. Dorothy wrote to Mary Lamb, and Wordsworth to Sir George Beaumont. The planned autumn move to Beaumont’s estate at Coleorton was in suspense, until Coleridge had decided on his “settled rational plan” and this seemed less and less forthcoming. A single sonnet appeared in the pages of the Courier of 27 September, like a distant distress flare. It was entitled “Farewell to Love”, a beautiful adaptation of a piece by Fulke Greville. But to whom was it addressed – to which Sara? To Asra or to Mrs Col
eridge? (And did it contain a reproach to Wordsworth in its seventh line?)

  Farewell, sweet Love! Yet blame you not my truth;

  More fondly ne’er did mother eye her child

  Than I your form: yours were my hopes of youth,

  And as you shaped my thoughts I sighed or smiled.

  While most were wooing wealth, or gaily swerving

  To pleasure’s secret haunts, and some apart

  Stood strong in pride, self-conscious of deserving,

  To you I gave my whole weak wishing heart.

  And when I met the maid that realised

  Your fair creations, and had won her kindness,

  Say, but for her if aught on earth I prized!

  Your dreams alone I dreamt, and caught your blindness.

  O grief! – but farewell, Love! I will go play me

  With thoughts that please me less, and less betray me.10

  Wordsworth wrote impatiently to Beaumont: “What shall I say of Coleridge?…he dare not go home, he recoils so much from the thought of domesticating with Mrs Coleridge…he is so miserable that he dare not encounter it. What a deplorable thing! I have written to him to say that if he does not come down immediately I must insist on seeing him somewhere. If he appoints London, I shall go.”11