SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 1772-1834 WHAT a poet but for the metaphysician ! A poet feels; a metaphysician reasons. The one leaps; the other digs. Without imagination, the one cannot breathe; and the other cannot guess at the direction of a vein of thought. But for the poet, it is life; for the metaphysician, a stimulant. In the same mind the two tendencies conflict, unless one consent to serve. To his friends and the Highgate circle Coleridge was the more signal marvel because he united both. For posterity he would have been a profounder philosopher had he been less of a poet. Had he concerned himself less with the solution of mental problems, he must have filled a wider, not a more exalted, space in the history of poetry. His positive poetical career was brief. The quantity of his work in the period is moderate. Virtually the whole bears an unmistakable stamp of high intelligence and noble feeling. Religious Musings abound in grand images and reflections; as, for instance, on the folly of hatred within our Heavenly Father's vast human family : No Cain Injures uninjured-in her best aim❜d blow with the converse, in the lines immediately preceding, which Lamb declared to be without a rival in the whole compass of my poetical reading': There is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind, This is indeed to dwell with the Most High ! Can press no nearer to the Almighty's Throne : and The Eolian Harp, in its author's belief, 'the most perfect poem he ever wrote: Such a soft floating witchery of sound As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve A light in sound, a sound-like power in light, 2 Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere ! 2 No subtlety, the most intricate, daunts his Muse, when the theme crosses her path; not even David Hartley's Aether, with its fluids, impacts, essences, Self-working tools, uncaused effects, and all Those blind omniscients, those almighty slaves, A reader stands amazed at the more than equal courage of the Ne Plus Ultra : Sole Positive of Night! Antipathist of Light! Fate's only essence! primal scorpion rod- Condensed blackness and abysmal storm Arms the Grasp enorm The Intercepter— The Substance that still casts the shadow Death!- The unrevealable, And hidden one, whose breath Gives wind and fuel to the fires of Hell!— Of both th' eternities in Heaven! Save to the Lampads Seven That watch the throne of Heaven! 4 Notwithstanding the encroaching waves even here of wrangling politics, the Ode to the Departing Year is a relief to the brain, with its invocation : O Albion! O my mother Isle ! Hence for many a fearless age Has social Quiet loved thy shore; Nor ever proud invader's rage Or sack'd thy towers, or stain'd thy fields with gore.5 Often too sensitive an imagination seems to be seeking refuge in any casual topic from thoughts, like Fears in Solitude, too troubling. The theme may be simple landscapepainting; moor and farmland : The fruit-like perfume of the golden furze; Of that huge amphitheatre of rich forest-scenery, where 6 with dun-red bark The fir-trees, and the unfrequent slender oak, 7 an effect of frost at midnight, with its quiet which may be felt : 'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood, Inaudible as dreams! 8 a Knight's Tomb, conjured up with the elegance of a Greek epigram, on a Westmoreland hill-side : Where is the grave of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn? The oak that in summer was sweet to hear, And whistled and roar'd in the winter alone, Is gone and the birch in its stead is grown.— The Knight's bones are dust, and his good sword rust :- 9 a picture of a mother with a new-born babe : She listen'd to the tale divine, And closer still the Babe she prest; Joy rose within her, like a summer's morn; Peace, Peace on Earth! the Prince of Peace is born; ideal vers de société, such as: I ask'd my fair one happy day, What I should call her in my lay; By what sweet name from Rome or Greece ; Lalage, Neæra, Chloris, Sappho, Lesbia, or Doris, Arethusa, or Lucrece ; 'Ah!' replied my gentle fair, 'Beloved, what are names but air? Choose thou whatever suits the line ; Call me Sappho, call me Chloris, Call me Lalage or Doris, Only, only call me thine ; ' 11 10 epigrams in swarms, political, social, merry, malicious, raging sometimes, as the terrible scream at Pitt in Fire, Famine, and Slaughter; 12 even sonorous sonnets, for example, on Schiller's 13 Robbers, and on Kosciuszko : O what a loud and fearful shriek was there, Their Kosciusko fall! 14 Then there is a sketch, the Three Graves, which its author had not the heart to complete; a thing shorn of all comeliness; squalidly tragic and cruel; wonderful in its harsh force : ‘O God, forgive me,' he exclaim'd; 'I have torn out her heart!' 15 |