Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  During the day he walked uneasily with Southey, and sank himself in the works of Fulke Greville, upon which he made copious notes. In the evenings he returned to the fray, and then made himself incoherent with opium. He felt exposed in all his “human weakness”, but convinced that his wife felt nothing for him and only feared the social scandal of a divorce. She was motivated by “mere selfish desire to have a rank in life”. He wrote bitterly to the Wordsworths of Sara’s “temper, and selfishness, her manifest dislike of me (as far as her nature is capable of a positive feeling) and her self-encouraged admiration of Southey as a vindictive feeling in which she delights herself as satirizing me etc. etc…”27

  There was much in this that exposed Coleridge’s own guilt and sense of inadequacy as a husband, especially with the ever-present example of his brother-in-law’s shining virtues. Southey’s literary career was driving ahead, a popular poet, a respected reviewer (soon to be thundering from the Quarterly Review), an acknowledged expert on Spain and Portugal who was embarking on his massive History of Brazil. Mrs Coleridge’s admiration for Southey went back to her early Bristol days: he was prompt, hard-working, self-disciplined and reliable, where Coleridge was merely brilliant, erratic and now increasingly self-destructive. Nothing seemed to be gained by the long Mediterranean absence. To be rejected by such a man, after those long months of holding his household together, must have seemed a terrible humiliation and betrayal. Little wonder that she fought him, made scenes, and appealed to Southey.

  Southey tried to appear the voice of reason. He upbraided Coleridge for his submission to the Wordsworths, yet he counselled Sara that a separation on proper terms was advisable. But underneath his moderation lay the old, self-righteous scorn that reduced Coleridge and all his difficulties to a mere monster of self-indulgence. Gossiping to his friend John Rickman of the affair, with cruel indiscretion, he seemed to take perverse delight in the whole, sad business. “The separation is a good thing – his habits are so murderous of all domestic comfort that I am only surprised Mrs C. is not rejoiced at being rid of him. He besots himself with opium, or with spirits, till his eyes look like a Turks who is half reduced to idiotcy by the practice – he calls up the servants at all hours of the night to prepare food for him – he does in short all things at all times except the proper time – does nothing that he ought to do, and everything which he ought not.

  “His present scheme is to live with Wordsworth – it is from idolatry of that family that this had begun – they have always humoured him in all his follies, listened to his complaints of his wife, and when he complained of his itch, helped him to scratch, instead of covering him with brimstone ointment, and shutting him up by himself.”28

  Despite everything that Southey implied, Coleridge in fact brought the situation round with remarkable swiftness. Within a fortnight he entered in his notebook: “Keswick, finally resolved, Wednesday 15 November 1806.”29 What almost certainly transformed the position was his fondness for the children, and his determination to care for them and Sara financially. The Wedgwood annuity of £150 would remain with her; he would contribute what he could to the boys’ education; Hartley would go with him to Coleorton, but Derwent and little Sara (“sweet Squirrel”) could stay at Greta Hall, until they all met up together again in the spring in London.

  This last provision caused Coleridge particular heart-searching as he wrote to the Wordsworths: “If I go away without them [Hartley and Derwent] I am a Bird who has struggled himself from off a Bird-lime twig, & then finds a string round his leg pulling him back…”30 But he acquiesced, and hoped for the best. In his study, he opened the sash window where his old Aeolian harp lay, and at once let in “music and sweet air” that seemed to purify and delight the whole room. At night he sat with his candle, watching how the “amber-edged” inner flame seemed to combine with the blue outer one, which made him think of his love for Asra.31

  Instead of preparing his Royal Institution lectures, Coleridge began teaching Hartley Greek. He started to compile a Greek grammar, dedicated to his son, on 4 November 1806, which eventually ran to ninety-three pages in a special leather-bound notebook. It ranged from simple, humorous mnemonics to a philosophical defence of grammar itself, as teaching “Habits of attention, and the power of self-control”.32 There are amusing notes on poetic metre, and some curious sequences of vocabulary for learning, including this list of fifth-declension nouns: “Rook – Dewdrop – Lyre – Lynx – Furrow – Flesh – Starling – Wife – Liver – Louse – Sky – Saviour – Heart – Witness – Water.”33 Later he turned the metrical notes into a poem, which he also sent to Derwent from Coleorton. It ended:

  Could you stand upon Skiddaw, you would not from its whole Ridge

  See a man who so loves you, as your fond S.T. Coleridge.34

  This could perhaps be described as a galloping anapaest, momentarily hobbled by a little spondee.

  He remained at Greta Hall for a further month, still coping with delayed-fuse explosions from his wife, and coming out in a sympathetic crop of boils. He was exhausted. But he still managed to leave with Hartley in time for Christmas at Coleorton. Hartley, now ten years old, would later recall this as the start of an “annus mirabilis” with his father.35

  7

  Coleridge and Hartley arrived at Coleorton on 22 December, where they were greeted with “an uproar of sincere Joy”. Hartley’s parting from his mother had passed off easily: “he behaved very well indeed”, but on the coach south he suddenly disappeared at the coaching inn outside Derby while the horses were being changed. He was finally found by his frantic father, standing by the margin of a nearby river, a small solitary figure looking down into the swiftly flowing waters. This piece of “field-truantry”, a disquieting echo of Coleridge’s own boyhood disappearance by the river Otter, was explained as his “hatred of confinement”.

  Coleridge found him “a very good, and sweet child”, yet also strange and fantastical. He had invented an entire imaginary world called “Ejuxria”, to which he flew on the back of a “great bird” borrowed from the Arabian Nights. Tiny for his age, brilliantly clever at his lessons, and mischievous at play, he caused chaos among the three Wordsworth children, with pixyish freaks and ingenious make-believe. Coleridge adored him, though he worried about his fibs and “sophisim”, his indiscipline, and his “logical false-dice in the game of Excuses”.

  But in trying to reassure his wife of how well Hartley was being looked after, Coleridge made an extravagantly tactless reference to Sara Hutchinson’s good influence. To Hartley’s mother it can only have appeared deliberately wounding. “All here love him most dearly: and your name sake takes upon her all the duties of his Mother & darling Friend, with all the Mother’s love and fondness. He is very fond of her.” If this was not vindictiveness, it was certainly wishful thinking: for Sara Hutchinson was the one member of the Wordsworth household whom Hartley never liked. Like his son, Coleridge could live in imaginary worlds.36

  The descent of Coleridge père et fils on the tranquil Coleorton household was magnificently disruptive. Hitherto the worst they had had to suffer was whooping cough among the children, and rain-storms cutting off the road to Ashby de la Zouche. The Beaumonts’ vast estate, perched on the edge of Charnwood Forest, was being rebuilt from the profits of the local coalmines which criss-crossed the villages to the south. Coleorton Hall itself, secluded on an eminence amidst trees, was being redesigned in the gothic style by the architect George Dance the Younger, with polygonal turrets and medieval fluted windows, like a stage-set for the unfinished “Christabel”. There was a family chapel, and extensive eighteenth-century grounds, part of which Wordsworth was helping to redesign as a winter garden on picturesque principles with cedar trees, holly-groves and bucolic monuments. (When the painters Haydon and Wilkie visited two years later, they found a cenotaph to Sir Joshua Reynolds at the end of one tree-lined alley, a bust of Wordsworth at another, and various stone seats and arbors carved with Wordsworthian couplets at each vant
age point.)37

  As the Hall itself was full of workmen, the Wordsworths were quartered in Coleorton Farm, ten minutes’ walk across the fields to the west, a “roomy”, comfortable, rambling old building with beamed ceilings and large fireplaces, offering fine views to Ashby and Coleorton village. “The sitting room,” enthused Dorothy, “where by the fireside we have seen some glorious sunsets, we far more than like – we already love it.” The Hall and its mysterious turrets looked “exceedingly well by moonlight”.38

  Both Coleridge and Wordsworth had writing-rooms, but some doubling-up was required: the children shared a nursery, Wordsworth slept with Mary, Dorothy with Sara Hutchinson, and Coleridge with Hartley, who was still frightened of the dark. Coleridge recalled touchingly how Hartley used to hug him in his sleep, “between sleeping and waking”, and talk endlessly of Derwent and little Sara “before his eyes are fully open in the morning, and while he is closing them at Night”.39

  Despite the Greek lessons, pursued each day, paternal discipline was not very strict. To Dorothy, the boy appeared a “restless, whirling, self-sufficing creature” and they had trouble keeping him “silent and still” in the sitting-room. Like his father, he was perfectly undomesticated: “he is absolutely in a dream when you tell him to do the simplest things – his Books, his Slate, his Pencils, he drops them just where he finds them no longer useful.” Yet his sweet temper made her forgive him everything.

  Similarly Coleridge needed much organizing, especially at mealtimes (which he often missed) and at night when he went rambling or drinking at the local taverns or stayed up till dawn. She thought he had almost completely cut out his brandy, but there was “some danger in the strong beer” which he found in the nearby inns at Ashby and Thringston village. There is no overt mention of opium, but of course he was still taking it: “Stimulants to keep him in spirits while he is talking”, as she tactfully put it to Lady Beaumont.40

  The atmosphere at Coleorton Farm was very strange throughout the winter. Outwardly, the three women were running a thoroughly domestic household, largely dominated by the children: Mary was weaning little Tom, Dorothy was managing cooking and laundry, Asra was schooling and copying manuscripts. But the two men were engaged in a subliminal battle of wills of extraordinary intensity. It involved not only the whole question of their future careers and poetical precedence, but also Coleridge’s drinking and opium-taking, and what were clearly disputed claims on Asra’s affections.

  For Wordsworth, Coleridge’s return to their ancient comradeship meant that the Prelude could now be worked over in great detail. A grand formal reading in the sitting-room at Coleorton was planned for the New Year. For Coleridge there was the pressing matter of the London lectures. But Wordsworth finally persuaded him to postpone them, after a long discussion over Christmas. He thought him in too “dreamy and miserable state of mind” to undertake any regular work, and better off at Coleorton where they could “manage” him and keep him from the temptations of brandy and company.41 There was still the plan for the Mediterranean travel book – “not formal Travels, but certain remarks and reflections which suggested themselves to him during his residence abroad”.42 But any immediate chance of financial income in the spring, as Coleridge had promised his wife, was thereby abandoned. This led on to talks about Coleridge’s separation, in which Asra was again closely involved.

  There were long rambles through the estate woodlands together, and an all-day expedition to visit Grace Dieu Abbey, a romantic ruin (once the home of the Jacobean dramatist Francis Beaumont) beneath the lowering crags of Charnwood Forest. Asra rode there on a little ass, which the men took turns to lead “over the dirty places”.43 All this time Coleridge seems to have been tortured by his feelings for Asra. Perhaps he was remembering that strange vow of sexual fidelity he had made at the bedside of Cecilia Bertozzi, the siren of Syracuse, two years before. His Notebook entries show the terrible contradiction of his emotions, which he could not express to her. “I should feel myself as much as fallen and unworthy of her Love in any tumult of Body indulged towards her, as if I had roamed (like a Hog) in the rankest Lanes of a (prostitute) city…” Yet at the same time he felt this love heaving within him, “like a Volcano beneath a sea always burning, tho’ in silence…”44

  8

  It is very difficult to reconstruct what followed. Two days after Christmas, early in the morning, there was some sort of confrontation between him and Asra and Wordsworth. (Possibly Coleridge had been up all night, and gone into her room, but this is speculation.) Coleridge seems to have run out across the fields to the local inn, the Queen’s Head, in a mood of despair and started drinking the “strong ale” that Dorothy had feared. He stayed alone at the inn most of the morning, drinking and writing in his Notebook. At the inn, Coleridge emblazoned into his Notebook, in huge, drunken capital letters, two portentous words, “THE EPOCH”, followed by three pages of frantic scrawl. Later he tore out all these pages, leaving only the Delphic explanation: “Saturday, 27th December, 1806 – Queen’s Head, Stringston, 1/2 a mile from Coleorton Church, 50 minutes after 10.”45*

  Though he destroyed his original Notebook entry, Coleridge reverted quite explicitly to this moment of confrontation in a series of painful subsequent notes. In September 1807 he wrote: “O agony! O the vision of that Saturday morning – of the Bed – O cruel! is he not beloved, adored by two – & two such Beings. – And must I not be beloved near him except as a Satellite? – But O mercy, mercy! is he not better, greater, more manly, & altogether more attractive to any but the purest Woman? And yet…he does not pretend, he does not wish, to love you as I love you, Sara!”46

  Again, in May 1808, he broke out: “O that miserable Saturday morning! The thunder-cloud had long been gathering, and I had now been gazing, and now averting my eyes, from it, with anxious fears, of which I scarcely dared be conscious…But a minute and a half with ME and all the time evidently restless & going – An hour and more with Wordsworth – [in Greek code] in bed – O agony!’47 Several of the poems he wrote at Coleorton over the next three months all touch, more or less obliquely, on this sense of Wordsworth’s and Asra’s devastating betrayal.

  Was this “vision” of Wordsworth and Asra in bed together real then? Or was it part of some drunken, jealous delusion? Coleridge himself never seemed to be quite sure. Years later, he would be able to explain it away as a “horrid phantasm” on his part, and “intellectually” reject any idea of an actual sexual relationship between the two. Yet the bed scene itself, so repeatedly described, seems difficult to dismiss.

  Coleridge himself had once cuddled with Asra and Mary on the sofa at Gallow Hill, and this form of tenderness was once current, almost indiscriminately, in their shared household. One might almost suspect Asra of still teasing and flirting with her two poets, perhaps unconscious of the perils of what she was doing. For Wordsworth, so confident in his emotional life, this offered no threat and might even be a way of asserting his power – not merely over Asra, but also over Coleridge. Asra, one might conclude, was as a patriarchal gift that he might bestow or withhold.

  If this seems extravagant, it was nonetheless very much what Coleridge feared in his worst moments, especially when in the grip of opium or drink. His love for Asra was not weakened, as events showed; but his jealousy of Wordsworth – still his greatest friend – was much intensified. He feared Wordsworth’s power over her, and that she would “learn from W. – to pity & withdraw herself from my affections”.48

  Years later, he was still brooding on that “dreadful Saturday Morning, at Coleorton”. By then he saw more clearly the true psychological nature of the drama enacted. “Did I believe it? Did I not even know, that it was not so, could not be so?…Yes! Yes! I knew the horrid phantasm to be a mere phantasm and yet what anguish, what gnawings of despair, what throbbings and lancinations of positive Jealousy! – even to this day the undying worm of distempered sleep or morbid Day-Dreams.”49 Yet despite this rationalization, Coleridge would still recall more than
a decade later (and still in Greek code) Asra’s “beautiful breasts uncovered” that morning at Coleorton farmhouse.50

  9

  Even harder to understand, normal life seems to have continued at Coleorton. The following Sunday, 2 January 1807, Wordsworth began his planned reading from the thirteen books of The Prelude. Each evening after supper, Coleridge and the three women gathered solemnly round him in the firelit parlour. His deep, Cumbrian voice filled the room, and swept them into the mighty vision of his own life, hour after hour. The readings continued over several nights. As Coleridge sat there he was overwhelmed by the conviction that his friend had completed a masterpiece. He viewed him “with steadfast eye…in the choir of ever-enduring men”.

  Immediately after the last reading, Coleridge went to his study and spent most of the night drafting a reply, what is in effect the last of the Conversation Poems, “To William Wordsworth”. There is not a word of doubt, not a hint of reproach. It is a poem of unstinting affirmation and praise, and the most passionate celebration of their friendship which Coleridge ever put into words. But at the same time it is a lament for his own failures, his sense of lost genius, characteristically orchestrated in images of such striking energy and beauty that they demonstrate the opposite: that his genius was still very much alive, despite everything.

  Comfort from thee, and utterance of thy love

  Came with such heights and depth of harmony,

  Such sense of wings uplifting, that the storm

  Scattered and whirl’d me, till my thoughts became

  A bodily tumult…

  Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe

  Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart…