A THOUGHT SUGGESTED BY A VIEW[347:1]
OF SADDLEBACK IN CUMBERLAND
On stern Blencartha's perilous height
The winds are tyrannous and strong;
And flashing forth unsteady light
From stern Blencartha's skiey height,
As loud the torrents throng! [5]
Beneath the moon, in gentle weather,
They bind the earth and sky together.
But oh! the sky and all its forms, how quiet!
The things that seek the earth, how full of noise and riot!
1800.
FOOTNOTES:
[347:1] First published in the Amulet, 1833, reprinted in Friendship's Offering, 1834: included in Essays on His Own Times, 1850, iii. 997. First collected in P. and D. W., 1877-80. These lines are inserted in one of the Malta Notebooks, and appear from the context to have been written at Olevano in 1806; but it is almost certain that they belong to the autumn of 1800 when Coleridge made a first acquaintance of 'Blencathara's rugged coves'. The first line is an adaptation of a line in a poem of Isaac Ritson, quoted in Hutchinson's History of Cumberland, a work which supplied him with some of the place-names in the Second Part of Christabel. Compare, too, a sentence in a letter to Sir H. Davy of Oct. 18, 1800:—'At the bottom of the Carrock Man . . . the wind became so fearful and tyrannous, etc.'
LINENOTES:
[Title]] A Versified Reflection F. O. 1834. In F. O. 1834, the lines were prefaced by a note:—[A Force is the provincial term in Cumberland for any narrow fall of water from the summit of a mountain precipice. The following stanza (it may not arrogate the name of poem) or versified reflection was composed while the author was gazing on three parallel Forces on a moonlight night, at the foot of the Saddleback Fell. S. T. C.] A —— by the view of Saddleback, near Threlkeld in Cumberland, Essays, &c.