Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 1 (of 2)

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

CXXVI. TO THE SAME.

Keswick, July 19, 1802.

My dear Sir,—I trouble you with another letter to inform you that I have finished the First Book[259] of the “Erste Schiffer.” It consists of 530 lines; the Second Book will be a hundred lines less. I can transcribe both legibly in three single-sheet letters; you will only be so good as to inform me whither and whether I am to send them. If they are likely to be of any use to Tomkins he is welcome to them; if not, I shall send them to the “Morning Post.” I have given a faithful translation in blank verse. To have decorated Gesner would have been, indeed, “to spice the spices;” to have lopped and pruned somewhat would have only produced incongruity; to have done it sufficiently would have been to have published a poem of my own, not Gesner’s. I have aimed at nothing more than purity and elegance of English, a keeping and harmony in the colour of the style, a smoothness without monotony in the versification. If I have succeeded, as I trust I have, in these respects, my translation will be just so much better than the original as metre is better than prose, in their judgment, at least, who prefer blank verse to prose. I was probably too severe on the morals of the poem, uncharitable perhaps. But I am a downright Englishman, and tolerate downright grossness more patiently than this coy and distant dallying with the appetites. “Die pflanzen entstehen aus dem saamen, gewisse thiere gehen aus dem hervor andre so, andre anders, ich hab es alles bemerkt, was hab ich zu thun.” Now I apprehend it will occur to nineteen readers out of twenty, that a maiden so very curious, so exceedingly inflamed and harassed by a difficulty, and so subtle in the discovery of even comparatively distant analogies, would necessarily have seen the difference of sex in her flocks and herds, and the marital as well as maternal character could not have escaped her. Now I avow that the grossness and vulgar plain sense of Theocritus’ shepherd lads, bad as it is, is in my opinion less objectionable than Gesner’s refinement, which necessarily leads the imagination to ideas without expressing them. Shaped and clothed, the mind of a pure being would turn away from them from natural delicacy of taste, but in that shadowy half-being, that state of nascent existence in the twilight of imagination and just on the vestibule of consciousness, they are far more incendiary, stir up a more lasting commotion, and leave a deeper stain. The suppression and obscurity arrays a simple truth in a veil of something like guilt, that is altogether meretricious, as opposed to the matronly majesty of our Scripture, for instance; and the conceptions as they recede from distinctness of idea approximate to the nature of feeling, and gain thereby a closer and more immediate affinity with the appetites. But, independently of this, the whole passage, consisting of precisely one fourth of the whole poem, has not the least influence on the action of the poem, and it is scarcely too much to say that it has nothing to do with the main subject, except indeed it be pleaded that Love is induced by compassion for this maiden to make a young man dream of her, which young man had been, without any influence of the said Cupid, deeply interested in the story, and, therefore, did not need the interference of Cupid at all; any more than he did the assistance of Æolus for a fair wind all the way to an island that was within sight of shore.

I translated the poem, partly because I could not endure to appear irresolute and capricious to you in the first undertaking which I had connected in any way with your person; in an undertaking which I connect with our journey from Keswick to Grasmere, the carriage in which were your son, your daughter, and your wife (all of whom may God Almighty bless! a prayer not the less fervent, my dear sir! for being a little out of place here); and, partly, too, because I wished to force myself out of metaphysical trains of thought, which, when I wished to write a poem, beat up game of far other kind. Instead of a covey of poetic partridges with whirring wings of music, or wild ducks shaping their rapid flight in forms always regular (a still better image of verse), up came a metaphysical bustard, urging its slow, heavy, laborious, earth-skimming flight over dreary and level wastes. To have done with poetical prose (which is a very vile Olio), sickness and some other and worse afflictions first forced me into downright metaphysics. For I believe that by nature I have more of the poet in me. In a poem written during that dejection, to Wordsworth, and the greater part of a private nature, I thus expressed the thought in language more forcible than harmonious:[260]—

Yes, dearest poet, yes!
There was a time when tho’ my path was rough,
The joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence fancy made me dreams of happiness:
For Hope grew round me, like the climbing vine,
And fruit, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
But now afflictions bow me down to earth:
Nor care I, that they rob me of my mirth,
But oh! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination.
········
For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all I can;
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man—
This was my sole resource, my wisest plan:
And that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the temper of my soul.

Thank heaven! my better mind has returned to me, and I trust I shall go on rejoicing. As I have nothing better to fill the blank space of this sheet with, I will transcribe the introduction of that poem to you, that being of a sufficiently general nature to be interesting to you. The first lines allude to a stanza in the Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence: “Late, late yestreen I saw the new moon with the old one in her arms, and I fear, I fear, my master dear, there will be a deadly storm.”

Letter, written Sunday evening, April 4.

Well! if the Bard was weatherwise, who made
The dear old Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,
This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence
Unrous’d by winds, that ply a busier trade
Than that, which moulds yon clouds in lazy flakes,
Or the dull sobbing draft, that drones and rakes
Upon the strings of this Eolian lute,
Which better far were mute.
For lo! the New Moon, winter-bright!
And overspread with phantom light
(With swimming phantom light o’erspread,
But rimmed and circled with a silver thread)
I see the Old Moon in her lap foretelling
The coming on of rain and squally blast!
And O! that even now the gust were swelling,
And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast.
········
A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear!
A stifling, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
That finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear!
This, William, well thou know’st,
Is that sore evil which I dread the most,
And oftnest suffer. In this heartless mood,
To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo’d,
That pipes within the larch-tree, not unseen,
The larch, that pushes out in tassels green
Its bundled leafits, woo’d to mild delights,
By all the tender sounds and gentle sights
Of this sweet primrose-month, and vainly woo’d!
O dearest Poet, in this heartless mood,
All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
Have I been gazing on the Western sky,
And its peculiar tint of yellow-green:
And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye!
And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
That give away their motion to the stars;
Those stars, that glide behind them, or between,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen;
Yon crescent moon, as fix’d as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue,
A boat becalm’d! thy own sweet sky-canoe![261]
I see them all, so exquisitely fair!
I see, not feel! how beautiful they are!
My genial spirits fail;
And what can these avail,
To lift the smoth’ring weight from off my breast?
It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west;
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
········
O Wordsworth! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live;
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate, cold world, allow’d
To the poor, loveless, ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth,
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the earth!
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and powerful voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!
O pure of heart! thou need’st not ask of me
What this strong music in the soul may be?
What and wherein it doth exist,
This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,
This beautiful and beauty-making Power.
Joy, blameless poet! Joy that ne’er was given
Save to the pure, and in their purest hour,
Joy, William, is the spirit and the power
That wedding Nature to us gives in dower,
A new Earth and new Heaven,
Undream’d of by the sensual and proud—
We, we ourselves rejoice!
And thence comes all that charms or ear or sight,
All melodies an echo of that voice!
All colours a suffusion from that light!
Calm, steadfast spirit, guided from above,
O Wordsworth! friend of my devoutest choice,
Great son of genius! full of light and love,
Thus, thus, dost thou rejoice.
To thee do all things live, from pole to pole,
Their life the eddying of thy living Soul!
Brother and friend of my devoutest choice,
Thus mayst thou ever, ever more rejoice!

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I have selected from the poem, which was a very long one and truly written only for the solace of sweet song, all that could be interesting or even pleasing to you, except, indeed, perhaps I may annex as a fragment a few lines on the “Æolian Lute,” it having been introduced in its dronings in the first stanza. I have used Yule for Christmas.