“No cloud, no relique of the sunken day
Distinguishes the West, no long thin slip
Of sullen light, no obscure trembling hues.
Come, we will rest on this old mossy bridge!
You see the glimmer of the stream beneath,
But hear no murmuring: it flows silently,
O’er its soft bed of verdure. All is still,
A balmy night! and tho’ the stars be dim,
Yet let us think upon the vernal showers
That gladden the green earth, and we shall find
A pleasure in the dimness of the stars.”
We happen also to have Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal for April and May. Here are a few extracts from it:—
April 6th.—“Went a part of the way home with Coleridge. . . . The spring still advancing very slowly. The horse-chestnuts budding, and the hedgerows beginning to look green, but nothing fully expanded.”
April 9th.—“Walked to Stowey . . . The sloe in blossom, the hawthorns green, the larches in the park changed from black to green in two or three days. Met Coleridge in returning.”
April 12th.—“ . . . The spring advances rapidly, multitudes of primroses, dog-violets, periwinkles, stitchwort.”
April 27th.—“Coleridge breakfasted and drank tea, strolled in the wood in the morning, went with him in the evening through the wood, afterwards walked on the hills: the moon; a many-coloured sea and sky.”
May 6th, Sunday.—“Expected the painter [101] and Coleridge. A rainy morning—very pleasant in the evening. Met Coleridge as we were walking out. Went with him to Stowey; heard the nightingale; saw a glow-worm.”
What was it which these three young people (for Dorothy certainly must be included as one of its authors) proposed to achieve by their book? Coleridge, in the Biographia Literaria, says (vol. ii. c. 1): “During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself—(to which of us I do not recollect)—that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the agents and incidents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them, when they present themselves.
“In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, [103] by awakening the mind’s attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.
“With this view I wrote The Ancient Mariner, and was preparing, among other poems, The Dark Ladie and the Christabel, in which I should have more nearly have realised my ideal, than I had done in my first attempt.”
Coleridge, when he wrote to Cottle offering him the Lyrical Ballads, affirms that “the volumes offered to you are, to a certain degree, one work in kind” [104a] (Reminiscences, p. 179); and Wordsworth declares, “I should not, however, have requested this assistance, had I not believed that the poems of my Friend would in a great measure have the same tendency as my own, [104b] and that though there would be found a difference, there would be found no discordance in the colours of our style; as our opinions on the subject of poetry do almost entirely coincide” (Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800).
It is a point carefully to be borne in mind that we have the explicit and contemporary authority of both poets that their aim was the same.
There are difficulties in the way of believing that The Ancient Mariner was written for the Lyrical Ballads. It was planned in 1797 and was originally intended for a magazine. Nevertheless, it may be asserted that the purpose of The Ancient Mariner and of Christabel (which was originally intended for the Ballads) was, as their author said, truth, living truth. He was the last man in the world to care for a story simply as a chain of events with no significance, and in these poems the supernatural, by interpenetration with human emotions, comes closer to us than an event of daily life. In return the emotions themselves, by means of the supernatural expression, gain intensity. The texture is so subtly interwoven that it is difficult to illustrate the point by example, but take the following lines:—
“Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.* * * *
The self-same moment I could pray:
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.* * * *
And the hay was white with silent light
Till rising from the same,
Full many shapes, that shadows were,
In crimson colours came.A little distance from the prow
Those crimson shadows were:
I turned my eyes upon the deck—
Oh, Christ! what saw I there!Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat,
And, by the holy rood!
A man all light, a seraph-man,
On every corse there stood.”
Coleridge’s marginal gloss to these last stanzas is “The angelic spirits leave the dead bodies, and appear in their own forms of light.”