Coleridge

My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner, and read, read, read; fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe’s island, finding a mountain of plumb- cake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating it into the shapes of tables and chairs– hunger and fancy!

Coleridge’s physical energy exhausted Hucks. He bathed in the sacred pool at Holywell, climbed Penmaenmawr, Snowdon, Plynlimon and Cader Idris; and at Beaumaris “ordered a supper sufficient for ten aldermen”. While tramping, Coleridge fuelled himself with vast supplies of bread, cheese and brandy. He insisted on climbing Penmaenmawr without a guide: they got lost, ran out of water, and were then benighted and thought they were pursued by monsters. Years later Coleridge said the discovery of water under a flat stone on the summit when they “grinned like idiots”, provided an image for the Ancient Mariner.

He wrote an agonised sonnet beginning, “Thou bleedest, my poor Heart!…”; but added drily: “When a Man is unhappy, he writes damned bad Poetry, I find.”

“I cannot write without a body of thought– hence my Poetry is crowded and sweats beneath a heavy burthen of Ideas and Imagery! It has seldom Ease…” But this was soon to come.

He felt that “domestic Sorrows & external disappointments” had depressed him below “writing- point in the thermometer of mind”.

The Epic could no longer draw on classical or religious mythology for the framework of its action. It must become contemporary with the world of scientific, anthropological, and psychological exploration: it must centre in some way on the drama of self- knowledge, on the growth of consciousness and civilisation.

(Strange! very strange!) the scritch owl only wak’d Sole voice, sole eye of all that world of beauty!

he launched into a strange dreamlike evocation of Oriental philosophy. “I should much wish, like the Indian Vishna, to float about along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotos, & wake once in a million years for a few minutes– just to know I was going to sleep a million years more.”

But at night he wrapped himself in his greatcoat and dozed quietly on the deck, watching the shifting movements of the stars, and the glitter of the sea.

On 26 November he finally caught the all- night coach for London, and his new career. The following day, awaking at dawn, he pulled out his Notebook and made a strange, symbolic entry, describing a flock of starlings glimpsed from his carriage window over the low, wintry landscape. “Starlings in vast flights drove along like smoke, mist, or any thing misty without volition– now a circular area inclined in an Arc– now a Globe– now from complete Orb into an Elipse & Oblong– now a balloon with the car suspended, now a concaved Semicircle– & still it expands & condenses, some moments glimmering & shivering, dim & shadowy, now thickening, deepening, blackening!”

When Pitt became Prime Minister at the perilously early age of twenty- four, he was entirely unprepared to respond to the moral and intellectual challenge of the French revolutionary movement.

across which “mists, & Clouds, & Sunshine make endless combinations, as if heaven & Earth were forever talking to each other.”

It was not exactly a search for oblivion, but through physical effort and danger, to submit himself to the great healing forces of nature.

He now argues that the poet is a metaphysician who actively engages with nature, who goes out of himself, who hunts down the otherness of being. Coleridge’s revived belief in these powers shines out: It is easy to cloathe Imaginary Beings with our own Thoughts & Feelings; but to send ourselves out of ourselves, to think ourselves in to the Thoughts and Feelings of Beings in circumstances wholly & strangely different from our own: hoc labor, hoc opus: and who has achieved it? Perhaps only Shakespeare. Metaphysics is a word, that you, my dear Sir! are no great Friend to. But yet you will agree, that a great Poet must be, implicitè if not explicitè, a profound Metaphysician. He may not have it in logical coherence, in his Brain & Tongue; but he must have it by Tact: for all sounds, & forms of human nature he must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent Desert – the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an Enemy upon the Leaves that strew the Forest; the Touch of a Blind Man feeling the face of a darling Child.

He had seen, clearly enough, a vision of his own life from that majestic and terrible vantage point: beleaguered by precipices, menaced by thunder, haunted by visions of home, but all the time the quill pen moving companionably over the paper, talking, talking, talking, even in that wilderness.

In London he put one part of this scheme into immediate operation, by applying to the Equitable Assurance Society for a Life Policy in favour of Mrs Coleridge, which would bring her £1,000 in the event of his death. Hanging, drowning and suicide were not covered.16 The premium was high, £27 per annum, and he had some doubts if his “phiz” would past muster, so he determined to “rouge a little” if necessary.17 The Policy, No. T.20743 was dated 7 April 1803 and granted. He never allowed this premium to lapse for the rest of his life.

Coleridge entered in his Notebook the possibilities contained in his own biography: “Of a great metaphysician: he looked into his own Soul with a Telescope: what seemed all irregular, he saw & showed to be beautiful Constellations & he added to the Consciousness hidden worlds within worlds.”