In 1797 Coleridge also wrote Christabel and Kubla Khan. Both of these poems remained unfinished, and lay unpublished till 1816. Christabel is the tale of a kind of vampire which, by taking the shape of a lovely lady, wins the confidence of the heroine Christabel. The tale is barely begun when it collapses. Already Coleridge’s fatal indecision is declaring itself. The poem is long enough, however, to show us Coleridge’s superlative power as a poet. There are passages of wonderful beauty and of charming natural description, though they scarcely reach the heights of the Ancient Mariner. The meter, now known as the Christabel meter, is a loose but exceedingly melodious form of the octosyllabic couplet. It became exceedingly popular, and its influence is still unimpaired. We give a brief extract to show the meter, and also to give a slight idea of the poet’s descriptive power:
There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.
Kubla Khan is the echo of a dream—the shadow of a shadow. Coleridge avers that he dreamt the lines, awoke in a fever of inspiration, threw the words on paper, but before the fit was over was distracted from the composition, so that the glory of the dream never returned and Kubla Khan remained unfinished. The poem, beginning with a description of the stately pleasure-dome built by Kubla Khan in Xanadu, soon becomes a dreamlike series of dissolving views, grows wilder and wilder into a dervish-dance of the imagination, and collapses in mid-career.
In the same year Coleridge composed several other poems, including the fine Frost at Midnight, Love, and the Ode to France. In 1802 he wrote the great ode Dejection, in which he already bewails the suspension of his “shaping spirit of Imagination.” Save for a few fragments, such as the beautiful epitaph The Knight’s Tomb, the remainder of his poems are of poorer quality and slight in bulk. His play Remorse was, on the recommendation of Byron, accepted by the management of the Drury Lane Theatre and produced in 1813. It succeeded on the stage, but as literature it is of little importance.
3. Features of his Poetry. Within its peculiar limits his poetical work, slight though it is, is of the highest.
(a) The most conspicuous feature of the poems is their intense imaginative power. Sometimes this riots into excess. It exploits the weird, the supernatural, and the obscure. Yet, such is the power of true imagination, it can produce what Coleridge calls “that willing suspension of disbelief,” and for the moment he can compel us to believe it all. He sees nature with a penetrating and revealing glance, drawing from it inspiration for the stuff of his poetry. He is particularly fine in his descriptions of the sky and the sea and the wider and more remote aspects of things.