by Coleridge · Cluster: Imagination · Fragment · Heroic Couplet
Abstract
Prose drafts and glosses behind poems — love likened to the sun, Glycine’s song, the self-conscious looking-glass and spider-world figure behind ‘Work without Hope’, and the dedication to the Ode on the Departing Year; imagination, love and the poet-prophet.
Connections
Topoi: Poet as Prophet Motifs: Mirror, Sun, Birds, Seasons Themes & Concepts: Imagination, Romantic Love, Melancholy Forms & Genres: Essay, Nonfiction
Testo integrale / Full text
A QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS IN THE COURT OF LOVE [Vide ante, p. 409.] Why is my Love like the Sun?
- The Dawn = the presentiment of my Love. No voice as yet had made the air Be music with thy name: yet why That obscure [over aching] Hope: that yearning Sigh? That sense of Promise everywhere? Beloved! flew thy spirit by?
- The Sunrise = the suddenness, the all-at-once of Love — and the first silence — the beams of Light fall first on the distance, the interspace still dark.
- The Cheerful Morning — the established Day-light universal.
- The Sunset — who can behold it, and think of the Sun-rise? It takes all the thought to itself. The Moon-reflected Light — soft, melancholy, warmthless — the absolute purity (nay, it is always pure, but), the incorporeity of Love in absence — Love per se is a Potassium — it can subsist by itself, tho’ in presence it has a natural and necessary combination with the comburent principle. All other Lights (the fixed Stars) not borrowed from the absent Sun — Lights for other worlds, not for me. I see them and admire, but they irradiate nothing. B PROSE VERSION OF GLYCINE’S SONG IN ZAPOLYA [Vide ante, pp. 426, 919, 920.] On the sky with liquid openings of Blue, The slanting pillar of sun mist, Field-inward flew a little Bird. Pois’d himself on the column, Sang with a sweet and marvellous voice, 5 Adieu! adieu! I must away, Far, far away, Set off to-day. Listened — listened — gaz’d — Sight of a Bird, sound of a voice — 10 It was so well with me, and yet so strange. Heart! Heart! Swell’st thou with joy or smart? But the Bird went away — Adieu! adieu! 15 All cloudy the heavens falling and falling — Then said I — Ah! summer again — The swallow, the summer-bird is going, And so will my Beauty fall like the leaves From my pining for his absence, 20 And so will his Love fly away. Away! away! Like the summer-bird, Swift as the Day. But lo! again came the slanting sun-shaft, 25 Close by me pois’d on its wing, The sweet Bird sang again, And looking on my tearful Face Did it not say, ‘Love has arisen, 30 True Love makes its summer, In the Heart’? 1845 C Notebook No. 29, p. 168. 21 Feb. 1825. MY DEAR FRIEND I have often amused myself with the thought of a self-conscious Looking-glass, and the various metaphorical applications of such a fancy — and this morning it struck across the Eolian Harp of my Brain that there was something pleasing and emblematic (of what I did not distinctly make out) in two such Looking-glasses fronting, each seeing the other in itself, and itself in the other. Have you ever noticed the Vault or snug little Apartment which the Spider spins and weaves for itself, by spiral threads round and round, and sometimes with strait lines, so that its lurking parlour or withdrawing-room is an oblong square? This too connected itself in my mind with the melancholy truth, that as we grow older, the World (alas! how often it happens that the less we love it, the more we care for it, the less reason we have to value its Shews, the more anxious are we about them — alas! how often do we become more and more loveless, as Love which can outlive all change save a change with regard to itself, and all loss save the loss of its Reflex, is more needed to sooth us and alone is able so to do!) What was I saying? O, I was adverting to the fact that as we advance in years, the World, that spidery Witch, spins its threads narrower and narrower, still closing on us, till at last it shuts us up within four walls, walls of flues and films, windowless — and well if there be sky-lights, and a small opening left for the Light from above. I do not know that I have anything to add, except to remind you, that pheer or phere for Mate, Companion, Counterpart, is a word frequently used by Spencer (sic) and Herbert, and the Poets generally, who wrote before the Restoration (1660), before I say that this premature warm and sunny day, antedating Spring, called forth the following.
Strain in the manner of G. HERBERT, which might be entitled THE ALONE MOST DEAR: a Complaint of Jacob to Rachel as in the tenth year of her service he saw in her or fancied that he saw symptoms of Alienation. [N.B. The Thoughts and Images being modernized and turned into English.] (It was fancy) [Pencil note by Mrs. Gillman.] All Nature seems at work. [Snails] Slugs leave their lair; The Bees are stirring; Birds are on the wing; And WINTER slumb’ring in the open air Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring. And [But] I the while, the sole unbusy thing. Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing. Yet well I ken the banks whereAmaranths blow Have traced the fount whence Streams of Nectar flow. Bloom, O ye Amaranths! bloom for whom ye may — For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams! away! ? Lip unbrighten’d, wreathless B. With unmoist Lip and wreathless Brow I stroll; And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul? WORK without Hope draws nectar in a sieve; And HOPE without an Object cannot live. I speak in figures, inward thoughts and woes Interpreting by Shapes and outward shews: { Where daily nearer me with magic Ties, { What time and where, (wove close with magic Ties Line over line, and thickning as they rise) The World her spidery threads on all sides spin Side answ’ring side with narrow interspace, My Faith (say I; I and my Faith are one) Hung, as a Mirror, there! And face to face (For nothing else there was between or near) One Sister Mirror hid the dreary Wall, { bright compeer But that is broke! And with that { only pheere I lost my object and my inmost All —— Faith in the Faith of THE ALONE MOST DEAR! JACOB HODIERNUS. Ah! me!! Call the World spider: and at fancy’s touch Thought becomes image and I see it such. With viscous masonry of films and threads Tough as the nets in Indian Forests found It blends the Waller’s and the Weaver’s trades And soon the tent-like Hangings touch the ground A dusky chamber that excludes the day But cease the prelude and resume the lay DEDICATION Ode on the Departing Year, 1796, pp. -4. [Vide ante, p. 160.] TO THOMAS POOLE, OF STOWEY. MY DEAR FRIEND — Soon after the commencement of this month, the Editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer (a newspaper conducted with so much ability, and such unmixed and fearless zeal for the interests of Piety and Freedom, that I cannot but think my poetry honoured by being permitted to appear in it) requested me, by Letter, to furnish him with some Lines for the last day of this Year. I promised him that I would make the attempt; but almost immediately after, a rheumatic complaint seized on my head, and continued to prevent the possibility of poetic composition till within the last three days. So in the course of the last three days the following Ode was produced. In general, when an Author informs the Public that his production was struck off in a great hurry, he offers an insult, not an excuse. But I trust that the present case is an exception, and that the peculiar circumstances which obliged me to write with such unusual rapidity give a propriety to my professions of it: nec nunc eam apud te jacto, sed et ceteris indico; ne quis asperiore limâ carmen examinet, et a confuso scriptum et quod frigidum erat ni statim traderem. (I avail myself of the words of Statius, and hope that I shall likewise be able to say of any weightier publication, what he has declared of his Thebaid, that it had been tortured with a laborious Polish.) For me to discuss the literary merits of this hasty composition were idle and presumptuous. If it be found to possess that impetuosity of Transition, and that Precipitation of Fancy and Feeling, which are the essential excellencies of the sublimer Ode, its deficiency in less important respects will be easily pardoned by those from whom alone praise could give me pleasure: and whose minuter criticisms will be disarmed by the reflection, that these Lines were conceived ‘not in the soft obscurities of Retirement, or under the Shelter of Academic Groves, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow’. I am more anxious lest the moral spirit of the Ode should be mistaken. You, I am sure, will not fail to recollect that among the Ancients, the Bard and the Prophet were one and the same character; and you know, that although I prophesy curses, I pray fervently for blessings. Farewell, Brother of my Soul! —— O ever found the same, And trusted and belov’d! Never without an emotion of honest pride do I subscribe myself Your grateful and affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. BRISTOL, December 26, 1796.