NOTES
I am indebted to Mr. Heinemann, the owner of the copyright of Dykes Campbell's edition of Coleridge's Poetical Works (Macmillan & Co., 1893) for permission to use that text (one of the most carefully edited texts of any English poet) in this volume of selections. My aim, in making these selections, has been to give every poem of Coleridge's that seems to me really good, and nothing else. Not every poem, none perhaps of those in blank verse, is equal throughout; but I think readers of Coleridge will be surprised to find how few of the poems contained in this volume are not of almost flawless workmanship, as well of incomparable poetic genius. Scarcely any English poet gains so much as Coleridge by not being read in a complete edition. The gulf between his best and his worst work is as wide as the gulf between good and evil. Even Wordsworth, even Byron, is not so intolerable to read in a complete edition. But Coleridge, much more easily than Byron or Wordsworth, can be extricated from his own lumber-heaps; it is rare in his work to find a poem which is really good in parts and not really good as a whole. I have taken every poem on its own merits as poetry, its own technical merits as verse; and thus have included equally the frigid eighteenth-century conceits of "The Kiss" and the modern burlesque license of the comic fragments. But I have excluded everything which has an interest merely personal, or indeed any other interest than that of poetry; and I have thus omitted the famous "Ode on the Departing Year," in spite of the esteem in which Coleridge held it, and in spite of its one exquisite line—
"God's image, sister of the Seraphim"—
and I have omitted it because as a whole it is untempered rhetoric, shapeless in form; and I have also omitted confession pieces such as that early one which contains, among its otherwise too emphatic utterances, the most delicate and precise picture which Coleridge ever drew of himself:
"To me hath Heaven with bounteous hand assigned
Energic Reason and a shaping mind,
The daring ken of Truth, the Patriot's part,
And Pity's sigh, that breathes the gentle heart—
Sloth-jaundiced all! and from my graspless hand
Drop Friendship's precious pearls, like hour-glass sand.
I weep, yet stoop not! the faint anguish flows,
A dreamy pang in Morning's feverish doze."
Every poem that I have given I have given in full, and, without exception, in the form in which Coleridge left it. The dates given after the poems are Dykes Campbell's; occasionally I have corrected the date given in the text of his edition by his own correction in the notes.
p. I. The Ancient Mariner. The marginal analysis which Coleridge added in reprinting the poem (from the Lyrical Ballads) in Sibylline Leaves, has been transferred to this place, where it can be read without interrupting the narrative in verse.