by Coleridge · Cluster: Mortality · Grave · Memento Mori
Abstract
An alternate version of the grave-and-Cherub-Hope quatrain (on the death of ‘Perdita’) with scholarly notes on the Heraclitus Sibyl fragment; mortality, hope and textual commentary.
Connections
Topoi: Poet as Prophet Motifs: Grave Themes & Concepts: Mortality, Grief and Loss Forms & Genres: Fragment, Elegy Historical References: Ancient Greece
Testo integrale / Full text
O’er her piled grave the gale of evening sighs,
And flowers will grow upon its grassy slope,
I wipe the dimming waters from mine eye
Even on the cold grave dwells the Cherub Hope.
Unpublished Letter to Thomas Poole, Feb. 1. 1801, on the death of Mrs.
Robinson (‘Perdita’).
Alice du Clos (ll. 111, 112), ante, p. 473.
minute descriptions of natural objects and scenic effects. The
concluding lines are illegible.
Poole, ‘Reply of Coleridge on my urging him to exert himself.’ First
collected in 1893.
following quotation from The Select Discourses by John Smith, 1660: —
‘So the Sibyl was noted by Heraclitus as ¼±¹½¿¼s½ó ÃÄy¼±Ä¹ ³µ»±ÃÄp º±v
º±»»}À¹Ãı Ƹµ³³¿¼s½·, as one speaking ridiculous and unseemly speeches
with her furious mouth.’ The fragment is misquoted and misunderstood:
for ³µ»±ÃÄq, etc. should be ¼{Á¹Ãı unperfumed, inornate lays, not
redolent of art. — Render it thus:
Not her’s, etc.
£Äy¼±Ä¹ ¼±¹½¿¼s½ó is ‘with ecstatic mouth’.
J. D. Campbell in a note to this Fragment (P. W., 1893, pp. 464-5)
quotes the ‘following prose translation of the same passage’, from
Coleridge’s Statesman’s Manual (1816, p. 132); ‘Multiscience (or a
variety and quantity of acquired knowledge) does not test intelligence.
But the Sibyll with wild enthusiastic mirth shrilling forth unmirthful,
inornate and unperfumed truths, reaches to a thousand years with her
voice through the power of God.’
The prose translation is an amalgam of two fragments. The first sentence
is quoted by Diogenes Laertius, ix. 1: the second by Plutarch, de Pyth.
orac. 6, p. 377.
S. T. C. with books from a lending library.