Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.”
The Education of Nature
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772–1834)
1. His Life. Coleridge was born in Devonshire, and was the youngest of the thirteen children of the vicar of Ottery St. Mary. As a child he was unusually precocious: “I never thought as a child,” he says, “never had the language of a child.” When he was nine years old his father died, and then at the age of ten he obtained a place in Christ’s Hospital, where he astonished his schoolmates, one of whom was Charles Lamb, with his queer tastes in reading and speculation. He went to Cambridge (1791), where he was fired with the revolutionary doctrines. He abandoned the university and enlisted in the Light Dragoons, but a few months as a soldier ended his military career. In 1794 he returned to Cambridge, and later in the year became acquainted at Oxford with Southey, with whom he planned the founding of an ideal republic in America. With Southey he lived for a space at Bristol, and there he met Southey’s wife’s sister, whom he eventually married. At Bristol Coleridge lectured, wrote poetry, and issued a newspaper called The Watchman, all with the idea of converting humanity; yet in spite of it all humanity remained unperturbed in its original sin. At this time (1797) he met Wordsworth, and, as has already been noticed, planned their joint production of the Lyrical Ballads, which was published at Bristol.
After a brief spell as a Unitarian minister, Coleridge, who was now dependent on a small annuity from two rich friends, studied German philosophy on the Continent; returned to England (1799), and for a time lived in the Lake District; tried journalism and lecturing; and in general pursued a restless and unhappy existence. As a writer and lecturer he was already failing, and failing fast. His work languished, and his ability and energy were relaxed. The cause of this early decline lay in his habit of opium-taking, which was now apparently past mending. He parted from his wife and children, leaving them to the charity of his friends. Till 1816 he drifted about in London, a moral and physical wreck, his rare genius revealing itself only in fitful gleams. In 1816, after repeated efforts to rid himself of the foul fiend that would not let him be, he entered the house of a Mr. Gillman, in Highgate. This provided for him a kind of refined and sympathetic inebriates’ home. Here he gradually shook himself free from opium-taking, and he spent the last years of his life in an atmosphere of subdued content, visited by his friends, and conversing interminably in that manner of wandering but luminous intelligence that marked his later years. From the house in Highgate he issued a few books that, with all their faults, are among the best of their class.
2. His Poetry. The real blossoming of Coleridge’s poetical genius was brief indeed, but the fruit of it was rich and wonderful. With the exception of a very few pieces, the best of his poems were composed within two years, 1797–98.
His first book was Poems on Various Subjects (1797), issued at Bristol. The miscellaneous poems that the volume contains have only a very moderate merit. Then, in collaboration with Wordsworth, he produced the Lyrical Ballads. This remarkable volume contains nineteen poems by Wordsworth and four by Coleridge; and of these four by far the most noteworthy is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Wordsworth has set on record the origin of the Ancient Mariner. He and Coleridge discussed the poem during their walks on the Quantock Hills. The main idea of the voyage, founded on a dream of his own, was Coleridge’s; Wordsworth suggested details, and they thought of working on it together. Very soon, however, Coleridge’s imagination was fired with the story, and his friend very sensibly left him to write it all. Hence we have that marvelous series of dissolving pictures, so curiously distinct and yet so strangely fused into one: the voyage through the polar ice; the death of the albatross; the amazing scenes during the calm and the storm; and the return home. In style, in swift stealthiness of narrative speed, and in its weird and compelling strength of imagination the poem is without a parallel.