Coleridge: Darker Reflections

Darker Reflections

Richard Holmes

ONE ADRIFT IN THE MEDITERRANEAN

1

“Signals, Drums, Guns, Bells, & the sound of Voices weighing up & clearing Anchors”. So Coleridge fled south aboard the Speedwell, expecting to die but half-hoping to be reborn. “Monday April 9th, 1804, really set sail…No health or Happiness without Work.”1

Behind him he left his family under Southey’s care in the Lake District; he left the Wordsworths and his love Sara Hutchinson; he left Charles Lamb and Daniel Stuart and all his London friends; each of them anxiously speculating about his future. “Far art thou wandered now,” wrote Wordsworth in The Prelude, “in search of health,/And milder breezes…Speed thee well”.2

Ahead of him lay the glittering Mediterranean, the legendary outposts of Gibraltar, Malta and Sicily, a war-zone of fleets and harbour-fortresses, where he would fight his own battles against opium and despair. “Do we not pity our past selves?” he reflected in his new Notebook, using a special metallic pencil designed to withstand sea-salt. “Is not this always accompanied by Hope? It makes the Images of the Past vivid…Are not vivid Ideas themselves a sort of pleasure, as Music whether sad or lively, is always Music?”3

Down in his cabin on the first night, he watched the lights of England recede along the Cornish coast through the brass porthole above his narrow berth. The 130-ton ship moved uneasily, not rolling on its beam, but rocking sharply from stem to stern, “as a cruel Nurse rocks a screaming baby”.4 Coleridge lay with his eyes closed, thirty-one years old, but hearing childhood music. “Thought of a Lullaby song, to a Child on a Ship: great rocking Cradle…creak of main top Irons, rattle of Ropes, & squeak of the Rudder…And so play Bo-peep with the Rising Moon, and the Lizard Light. ‘There is thy native country, Boy! Whither art thou going to…’”5

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Coleridge’s ship the Speedwell was a two-masted merchant brig, lightly armed with fourteen guns, but carrying a heavy cargo of eighty-four cannons in her hold destined for Trieste.6 Smartly trimmed in silver and gold, she was one of the fastest merchants in the fleet, commanded by a thoughtful Scotsman, Captain John Findlay, from whom Coleridge gradually extracted much sea-lore, sailor’s yarns and sea-shanties.

She was part of the spring-time convoy of thirty-five ships, escorted by ten men-o’-war and the flagship HMS Leviathan, going to join Nelson’s fleet in the Mediterranean and carrying supplies to British and allied ports in the war against France and Spain. Having finally left Spithead on 9 April 1804, the first leg of their journey ran through the Bay of Biscay and round Cape St Vincent to Gibraltar.

As the French fleet under Villeneuve was bottled up by Nelson’s squadron off Toulon, the greatest danger came from privateers and corsairs operating out of Spanish and North African ports. So Captain Findlay cheerfully instructed Coleridge: “in a calm [they] will run out, pick up a merchant Vessel under the very stern of the Commodore, as a Fox will a Fowl when the Wolf dog that guards the poultry yard can only bark at him from his Chain”.7 Coleridge kept a close eye on the wind throughout their voyage, as he did on all other maritime matters, so the whole imagery of the sea journey came to possess him.

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By the second day he had found his sea-legs, and with hair flying and double-waistcoats flapping, he patrolled the deck agog with excitement, questioning and noting. Nothing seemed to escape his attention. If a merchantman lagged behind or failed to obey signals, the seventy-four-gun Leviathan fired warning shots at her – “Commodore’s strengthening Pills for the Memory”, and a fine of five shillings.8 Down in the first hold, a sheep abandoned its hay, “kneeling its poor face to the Deck, its knees black, worn and sore…alas! it came from flat peaceable meadows”.9 At victuals, a ship’s boy ran up the rigging to the main top “with a large Leg of Mutton swung, Albatross-fashion about his neck”.10

Always there was “great sea-Savannah” rolling unpastured about them, in all its changing lights and sounds. “The beautiful bright Slate, & the Soap stone colour by the Vessel’s side, in a brisk gale, immediately under the mast in a froth-cream, that throws itself into network, with its brisk sound, which the word brisk itself may be made to imitate by hissing on the ‘isk’…”11 These observations went on constantly, by day and night, and several were later incorporated into the 1817 edition of the “Mariner”, such as the eerie light of the compass and rudder-man’s lamp “reflected with forms on the Main Sail”.12

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”.13 Mrs 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”.15 Surprisingly, 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,16 or 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”.17 But 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.18 This 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

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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.”21 This 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”.22 Wordsworth 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”.23 This 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”,24 and 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.”25 His 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.”28 But 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

Three nights later he was sitting at his post under a bright moon – “how hard to describe that sort of Queen’s metal plating, which the Moonlight forms on the bottle-green Sea” – with Spain on his left hand and the Barbary Coast on his right. “This is Africa! That is Europe! There is division, sharp boundary, abrupt change! and what are they in Nature – two Mountain banks, that make a noble River of the interfluent Sea…no division, no Change, no Antithesis.”30

As the Speedwell slipped into the Mediterranean, he mused on this strange difference between human and natural geography, how human associations form our landscapes and boundaries far more than Nature herself. The power of human association with physical places and objects was perhaps the foundation of biography – “a Pilgrimage to see a great man’s Shin Bone found unmouldered in his Coffin”. Yet surely in this biography was a form of stupid superstition. “A Shakespeare, a Milton, a Bruno, exist in the mind as pure Action, defecated of all that is material & passive.” He could look at the fabled mulberry tree that Shakespeare planted without emotion. Yet as he gazed out into the moonlit path between two continents, Coleridge recognized deeper feelings of connection within himself. “At certain times, uncalled and sudden, subject to no bidding of my own or others, these Thoughts would come upon me, like a Storm, & fill the Place with something more than Nature.”31

Coleridge planned to put his meditations into a traveller’s anthology, “Comforts and Consolations”,32 which was aimed at those who suffered from “speculative Gloom”. Perhaps partly inspired by Marcus Aurelius, it enshrined the significant idea that depression could be treated by stoic self-analysis, and the application of “the Reason, the Imagination, and the moral Feelings” to our own mental processes and mood-shifts. But writing to Southey he also mentioned the cheerfulness of unaccustomed abstemiousness: he was eating no meat, and despite his crate of fine wines, “marvellous Brandy, & Rum 20 years old” provided by Sir George Beaumont, was drinking nothing but lemonade. The abstinence also included opium, at least for the first fortnight.33

5

At dawn on 19 April, Coleridge’s telescope picked out the great brown rock of Gibraltar’s “famous Apes Hill” detaching itself from the limestone sweeps and ridges of the Spanish coast. By the evening they were anchored under Europa Point and awaiting quarantine clearance – a rigid requirement in a zone of rapidly transmitted plagues and fevers, which killed off far more men than actual combat.

Coleridge was now entering a new world: colourful, hot, violent, polyglot, dominated by war and the rumours of war. People of every race and degree thronged the island – Jews, Arabs, Spaniards, Italians, Greeks. His first expedition along the quayside yielded a muleteer with the face of a monkey, a learned Jew in university dress, a Greek woman with earrings the size of “chain rings on a landing place for mooring boats”, a senior English officer with an “angel Face” woman on his arm, and “Soldiers of all Regiments & Runaway Sailors” of every nation.34

Taken by Captain Findlay to Griffith’s Hotel, through a stinking labyrinth of backstreets, he found himself plunged into the active-service culture of the British navy abroad: patriotic, punctilious, hard-drinking, with its endless yarns about weather, battles and promotion. The first news he heard was of the previous Portsmouth convoy, largely wrecked in a foul-weather passage to the West Indies; and of Nelson’s dispatches intercepted by a French frigate.

He delivered letters of introduction to the navy chaplain, and to Major Adye, a young gunnery officer. Adye was a one-time pupil of his brother George’s, who sportingly volunteered to act as his guide to the rock. Then he spent the afternoon climbing over Europa Point, pleased to see the homely pink geraniums clinging to the walls among the exotic prickly pears. ‘Reluctantly I returned to a noisy Dinner of 17 Sea Captains, indifferent food, and burning Wines.”

Much discussion turned on Nelson’s Mediterranean strategy, and the importance of Malta for securing the trade routes into the eastern Mediterranean, the casus belli of 1803. “Struggle in the minds of the (native) inhabitants between their Dislike of English manners & their Dread of French Government. I find it a common opinion that if the Peace had continued the French would have monopolized the Commerce of the Levant.”35 This was to become a topic of dominant importance during his time in Malta. Coleridge finally escorted Captain Findlay – “my now very tipsy Capt” – back to the Speedwell, and left him drinking with three other merchant masters in his cabin.

They spent five hectic days at Gibraltar. Coleridge togged himself out in sailor’s nankeen trousers and canvas shirt, and roamed all over the island, basking in the heat, drinking beer, making notes on plants, racial types, architecture, naval gossip and Mediterranean politics. In a packed letter to his newspaper editor Daniel Stuart, he leaped from subject to subject with all his old ebullience. The island was worth “a dozen plates by Hogarth”. The climate of the south would “re-create” him. Whole days were spent “scrambling about on the back of the Rock among the Monkeys: I am a match for them in climbing, but in Hops & flying leaps they beat me.”36

Meanwhile Major Adye briefed him on military matters, and sent a Corporal to escort him round the cliff-side gun emplacements – “The Noise so deafening in these galleries on the discharge of Guns, that the Soldiers’ Ears have bled.” By contrast, he scrambled alone into the deep silence of St Michael’s Cave, with its massy natural pillars and huge stalactites “the models of Trees in stone”, and wondered at the subterranean chambers (an old fascination) where men had descended three or four hundred feet “till the Smoke of their torches became intolerable”.37

Sitting high up at Signal House, the very summit of Gibraltar, “which looks over the blue Sea-lake to Africa”, the magic of the Mediterranean south rose up to him in sight and sound and smell (the crushed tansy under his shoe). He thought how many mountains he had stood on in his life, and how the Rock was something profoundly new and mysterious, in all its warlike nameless shapes and intimations. “What a complex Thing! At its feet mighty ramparts establishing themselves in the Sea with their huge artillery – hollow trunks of Iron where Death and Thunder sleep; the gardens in deep Moats between lofty and massive walls; a Town of All Nations & all languages;…fences of the prickly aloe, strange Plant that does not seem to be alive, but to have been a thing fantastically carved in wood & coloured, some Hieroglyph or temple Ornament of undiscovered meaning.”38

Coleridge was deeply excited by the Mediterranean, and his whole body responded to the physical impact of sun and sea. Moving easily among the soldiers and sailors, picking up their talk and laughter, he saw himself once again as footloose adventurer, poetic traveller, special correspondent for Daniel Stuart’s newspaper. His letter gives detailed naval “intelligence” of Nelson’s lost dispatches, and the Hindoostan burnt out with only four survivors and the loss of fifty guns and £300,000 of cargo, “chiefly of naval Stores of all kinds for Malta with a hundred Artificers”. Malta would be in “great Distress” for these losses, and he thought this would be the first crucial chance to get the news to London, by the return convoy: “after Letters will be better worth the postage”.39

But, of course, beneath breathless activity, the manly sweating extraversion of the new self, older feelings stirred. “What change of place, Country, climate, company, situation, health – of Shrubs, Flowers, Trees – moving Seasons: & ever is that one feeling at my heart, felt like a faint Pain, a spot which it seems I could lay my finger on.” It was Asra, of course; and everything she represented of the Wordsworths, the Lakes, lost love.

The past self stood like a ghostly reflection in every company; the remembered hills rose up behind every sunlit cliff and rock. “I talk loud or eager, or I read or meditate the abstrusest Researches; or I laugh, jest, tell tales of mirth; & ever as it were, within & behind, I think & image you; and while I am talking of Government or War or Chemistry, there comes ever into my bodily eye some Tree, beneath which we have rested, some Rock where we have walked together, or on the perilous road edging high above the Crummock Lake, where we sat beneath the rock, & those dear Lips pressed my forehead.”40 This was the cargo of memory that could not be sunk or abandoned or burnt; the secret self that crouched below the waterline.

Coleridge’s last day on Gibraltar was spent on a “long & instructive walk” with Major Adye round the entire defences, from the gun emplacements to the brewery, discussing British strategy in the Mediterranean. They visited St Michael’s Cave again, and Coleridge was more and more struck by its mysterious rock formations, “the obelisks, the pillars, the rude statues of strange animals” like some cathedral of half-created forms and monuments.41

They planned to meet again in Malta, and Adye promised to carry home to England whatever letters and journals Coleridge had prepared. Back on the Speedwell, they discussed the dangers of the voyage ahead, and sailors’ superstitions about dates and positions of the moon which reminded Coleridge of his Mariner. Captain Findlay said briskly, “Damn me! I have no superstition”, but then revealed that he thought “Sunday is a really lucky day to sail on.” They were interrupted by a huge cargo-ship, which nearly rammed them as they lay at anchor, and were only saved by Findlay shouting directions to the lubberly crew to go about. “Myself, the Capt. and the Mate all confessed, that our knees trembled under us,” for the towering forecastle threatened to strike them amidships and sink them instantly. This at any rate was not a good omen.42