Coleridge: Early Visions

5

In spring 1787 Luke qualified as a doctor, and returned to Devon to take up a practice at Thorverton, near Exeter, where he was soon to marry. Coleridge missed him greatly – “I have now no one, to whom I can open my heart in full confidence” – and asked him to keep up “an epistolary correspondence”. In May that year he sent Luke his first serious poems, six stanzas on “Easter Holidays”, and a Latin translation which was accepted by Bowyer for the Christ’s Hospital “Album”. This was a notable distinction at the age of fourteen and a half. The theme is loneliness and misfortune, rendered in the manner of Gray:

Then without child or tender wife,

To drive away each care, each sigh,

Lonely he treads the paths of life,

A stranger to Affection’s tye…22

Bowyer promised he would be a Deputy Grecian within a year, “if I take particular care of my exercises etc”. Coleridge added that the Bowdons were still very kind to him – “I dine there every Saturday” – and that George in Hackney was now his mainstay. “He is father, brother, and every thing to me.”23 Instead of plum cake, he now asked for a copy of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, the famous volume of the “Graveyard School”, with its celebration of solitary musings on death and mutability. Adolescence had arrived.

Over the next two years poetry, classics and Platonic philosophy became his dominant interests, as befitted a Grecian. He also discovered his own protégé, a boy called Tom Evans, whose widowed mother lived in London with three teenage daughters, soon to be extravagantly courted by Coleridge and the dashing Bob Allen. It was a time of rapid intellectual development, with long enthusiastic talks in the cloisters, alternating with lonely hours spent up on the school leads – or flat roof. Coleridge found he could secretly climb out through a Ward window and sit gazing at the sunset and the stars, with the spires and domes of the city laid out beneath him.

The taste for roof-top contemplation was one that returned to him years later, at Greta Hall in Keswick. It was there in 1802 that he recalled the first stirrings of his poetic longing, the rich self-conscious sense of beauty and isolation in the world.

In my first Dawn of Youth that Fancy stole

With many secret Yearnings on my Soul.

At eve, sky-gazing in “ecstatic fit”

(Alas! for cloister’d in a city School

The Sky was all, I knew, of Beautiful)

At the barr’d window often did I sit,

And oft upon the leaded School-roof lay…24

Coleridge often later talked of these inspired times to his friends – he described them also in “Frost at Midnight” – and it is interesting how each subtly adapted them to conform to quite different aspects of his boyhood mythology. For Wordsworth, they became the “seedtime” of a visionary poet, the “liveried schoolboy, in the depths of the huge city, on the leaded roof”, who lay alone gazing upon “the clouds moving in heaven”, and who closed his eyes to see by the “internal light” of imagination

…trees, and meadows, and thy native Stream,

Far distant, thus beheld from year to year

Of thy long exile.25

By contrast, for Charles Lamb the genius of Coleridge was not solitary at all. He saw him already as a public figure, finding his natural audience in the gregarious cloisters of Christ’s Hospital – not exiled amidst the clouds but thoroughly at home amidst a circle of admiring boys, urbane, eloquent and sociable. Lamb wrote a celebrated encomium of this schoolboy hero, a radiant figure already bursting with confidence, though perhaps comically so:

Come back into memory, like as thy wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee – the dark pillar not yet turned – Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! – How I have seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar – while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity boy!26

This is a very different Coleridge from the Wordsworthian exile. Nor does Elia take him entirely seriously – the Neoplatonic mystics and gnostics have the air of being plucked out of a conjuror’s hat, and there is a certain undercurrent of affectionate mockery. In the frequent “wit-combats” with Val Le Grice in the cloisters, Lamb added shrewdly that Coleridge was like a magnificent Spanish galleon – “far higher in Learning”, but wordy and cumbersome – being harried by an English man-o’-war, quick and inventive.

6

The year 1789 was a turning point for Coleridge’s whole generation. With the fall of the Bastille in July, the first tide of revolutionary excitement flooded through Europe, reaching even into the remote cloisters of Christ’s Hospital. The sixteen-and-a-half-year-old Coleridge now wrote his first substantial and original poem, “The Fall of the Bastille”. In it he records the “universal cry” of liberty from “Gallia’s shore”, and imagines the spirit of freedom reaching down even to the humble field-labourer:

…mark yon peasant’s raptur’d eyes;

Secure he views his harvests rise;

No fetter vile the mind shall know,

And Eloquence shall fearless glow…27

The excitement was indeed universal, and a hundred such Odes filled the newspapers and magazines: “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”. Wordsworth, already at Cambridge, felt the same sudden intensification of life among the undergraduates, and planned a walking tour in France for the following summer. But perhaps Coleridge alone characteristically pointed out that language itself – “Eloquence” – had been freed.

Feeling his wings and independence for the first time, he visited Ottery during the summer, where he went through the solemn rite of recarving his initials in the Pixies’ Parlour, alongside those of his distant brothers. He learned too that his beloved sister Nancy was gravely ill, and this appears in one of his earliest sonnets, “Life”, dated September 1789, “musing in torpid woe a Sister’s pain”.28 Another sonnet, “To the Autumnal Moon”, also belongs to this period.

This quickening of the poetic impulse – he produced two more translations for Bowyer’s “Album” – reflects another outside influence. Thomas Middleton, now at Pembroke College, Cambridge, sent him a copy of the second edition of William Bowles’ Sonnets. This was one of those books, now largely forgotten, which magically captured the spirit of the times; Coleridge was so excited by it that he wrote out by hand no less than forty copies to give to friends during his last eighteen months at school.29

The collection, a slim octavo volume in fine bold print, consisted of twenty-one sonnets, “Written chiefly on Picturesque Spots, During a Tour”, which Bowles had made through Wales, Scotland, France and Germany in the previous year, while recovering from an unhappy love-affair. It concentrates notably on the evocative, melancholy feelings of seashores and river banks – the shores of Tynemouth, Dover, Ostend; the rivers Tweed, Wenbeck, Itchin, and the Rhine. Bowles, born in the West Country and a graduate of Trinity College, Oxford, exactly ten years older than Coleridge, brilliantly captured a new Romantic sense of spiritual isolation and nostalgia for childhood, projecting into natural surroundings the image of a rootless, wandering poet at the mercy of his dreams and memories.

Coleridge could instantly recognise this aspect of himself in many of the gentle, highly musical, and nakedly emotional sonnets, with their familiar imagery, such as “The Bells, Ostend”:

…And hark! with lessening cadence now they fall!

And now, along the white and level tide,

They fling their melancholy music wide;

Bidding me many a tender thought recall

Of summer-days, and those delightful years

When from an ancient tower, in life’s fair prime,

The mournful magic of their mingling chime

First waked my wondering childhood into tears!

In discovering Bowles, Coleridge found that for the first time in his life he was reading “a contemporary”; unlike the remote classics, these poems possessed an immediate reality of circumstances for him, so as to “inspire an actual friendship as of a man for a man”. They assumed “the properties of flesh and blood”.30 For the next five years, until he became aware of Wordsworth (who had also been greatly struck by Bowles, stopping to read through the entire volume while crossing London Bridge), they were the dominant influence on his own poetry, though he could only match the “austere” style – “so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real” – intermittently.

In fact throughout this period of apprenticeship there was a long struggle between the “florid diction” and epigrammatic polish and personifications of many of his longer and more formal Odes, Effusions and Monodies; and the Bowles-like plain style, expressing emotion in run-on lines, musical alliteration, and bold monosyllabic statements of personal feeling. This second style – a profound attack on eighteenth-century conventions – became particularly evident in his own shorter pieces and sonnets composed between 1789 and 1794. These included many sonnets about his own experience of change and loss, and family griefs: “To the Autumnal Moon”; “Pain”; “On Quitting School for College”; “On Receiving an Account that his only Sister’s Death was Inevitable”; and his masterpiece in the Bowles’ style (but wonderfully transforming it) “To the River Otter”.

In the Biographia he well described what he was groping after, as a poetry “of the lines running into each other, instead of closing at each couplet, and of natural language, neither bookish, nor vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp, nor of the kennel [the gutter], such as ‘I will remember thee’; instead of the same thought tricked up in the rag-fair finery of – ‘Thy image on her wing/Before my Fancy’s eye shall Memory bring.’”31 He counted Bowles’ poetry, along with the friendship of Tom Evans’ family, as the two humanising forces in his academic life as a Grecian. Between them, they drew him out of the bookish maze of metaphysics and classical philosophy, into the living world.32

7

In his happier recollections Coleridge described his final period as a Grecian, between 1790 and 1791, as “the era of poetry and love”. With Bob Allen and Val Le Grice he would escort the three Miss Evanses (Anne, Eliza, and Mary) home on a Saturday, from their milliner’s shop in the West End to the family house at Villiers Street, off the Strand. On summer mornings they would carry “the pillage of the Flower Gardens within six miles of Town with Sonnet or Love-rhyme wrapped round the Nosegay”.33

Even Bowyer’s teaching of poetry became a pleasure and fascination, according to Coleridge. “At the same time that we were studying the Greek Tragic Poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons…I learnt from him, that Poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes.”34

Both Lamb and Leigh Hunt deny that Bowyer’s teaching of poetry was any more than “commonplace”, and that his taste in moderns reached any higher than Pope. Perhaps Coleridge responded more subtly than they; but in reality he seems to have gained this crucial insight into the structure of poetry from his own reading of Bowles and Edward Young.*

Nevertheless he claimed too that Bowyer was an early champion of the plain style: “he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by sound sense…Lute, harp, and lyre, muse, muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hyppocrene were all abominations to him.”35 Perhaps this was so; but the fact remains that his main contribution to the Christ’s Hospital “Album” for 1790 was the highly ornate “Monody on the Death of Chatterton”, packed with eighteenth-century personifications, and opening with full bardic diapason: “Now prompts the Muse poetic lays” – the very style that Bowyer was meant to abominate.

The truth seems to be that he was experimenting with every kind of poetic style and pose. His worship of Chatterton was genuine, and he had copied Bowles’ “Monody on the Death of Henry Headley” into his hymn-book to inspire him. But this did not prevent him from turning the solemn enterprise on its head with an answering “Monody on a Tea-Kettle” for George:

While Bats shall shriek and Dogs shall howling run

The tea-kettle is spoilt and Coleridge is undone!

In March 1791 he also sent his brother a Pindaric ode on Euclid’s geometry of ghastly ingenuity. His accompanying comment on learning mathematics – a thing he could never do – contains an interesting prophesy of critical debates to come: “though Reason is feasted, Imagination is starved: whilst Reason is luxuriating in its proper Paradise, Imagination is wearily travelling over a dreary desert.”36 Those images of fruitful Paradise and sterile desert were to haunt him long after.

8

Officially his career at Christ’s Hospital ended in triumph. As the senior Grecian in his year, he was awarded in January 1791 a School Exhibition worth £40 to take him to Cambridge, renewable for four years; and the following month obtained a place at Jesus College, with a promise of a Rustat Scholarship of £30, especially reserved for the sons of clergymen who showed outstanding merit. Bob Allen went to Oxford without an award, and Val Le Grice did not go up for another year. These awards delighted his family – especially George – and promised to relieve them of most of his expenses, which normally would have been more than £100 per annum.

Yet throughout that last winter Coleridge was periodically ill with rheumatic fever, contracted as a result of a late autumn bathing expedition to the New River. For several months he spent long periods in the school sanatorium, dosed with opium to help him sleep, and doing little except write some striking scraps of poetry. He lay listening to the distant shouts and laughter of the boys in the cloisters, as he recorded in his sonnet “Pain”. Coleridge’s long history of illness – often recurring in damp climates, and during winter months – now began. The sonnet is his first vision of the feverish invalid, besieged by “the trembling sense of wan Disease”, cut off from the normal, healthy daylight world around him, a theme to be powerfully developed.37

He also wrote a love-poem, “Genevieve”, addressed to his young nurse, whose short lyrical lines contain the first hint of the ballads he would later write. They praise her tender solicitude and generous, maternal bosom in its starched apron like a swan:

When sinking low the sufferer wan

Beholds no hand outstretch’d to save,

Fair, as the bosom of the Swan

That rises graceful o’er the wave,

I’ve seen your breast with pity heave,

And therefore love I you, sweet Genevieve!38

The close association of poetry with sickness, feverish dreams, and isolation, set against the consoling, healing presence of the beloved, was now initiated. The theme was deepened by tragic sickness in his own family. Early in 1791 came news of Luke’s sudden death of a fever at Exeter; and this was quickly followed by the death of his beloved Nancy, after a long consumptive illness. Again, Coleridge turned to poetry, writing several more sonnets of deep and clumsy emotion:

Pain after pain, and woe succeeding woe –

Is my heart destin’d for another blow?

O my sweet sister! and must thou too die?39

Significantly, he already linked these deaths with that of his father, and the sense of being “fated to rove thro’ Life” bereft of those who had been closest to him in childhood. Perhaps this also explains the intense emotion with which he finally left Christ’s Hospital that summer, celebrated in his “Sonnet: On Quitting School for College” (another theme taken from Bowles). He bid “Adieu, adieu!” to the “much-lov’d cloisters pale!”, and spoke in tears of his happy days there, most of which he would later say were miserable.40

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