by Coleridge · Cluster: Bible · Sin and the Fall · Fall from Innocence
Abstract
A prose-poem fragment (prefatory note and plan) on the guilt-haunted, God-pursued wanderings of Cain after Abel’s murder; themes of sin and the fall, guilt and the outcast wanderer, drawing on the Bible.
Connections
Archetypes: Outsider Themes & Concepts: Sin and the Fall, Guilt Forms & Genres: Fragment Historical References: Bible Characters: Cain
Testo integrale / Full text
PREFATORY NOTE
A prose composition, one not in metre at least, seems primâ facie to
require explanation or apology. It was written in the year 1798, near
Nether Stowey, in Somersetshire, at which place (sanctum et amabile
nomen! rich by so many associations and recollections) the author had
taken up his residence in order to enjoy the society and close
neighbourhood of a dear and honoured friend, T. Poole, Esq. The work was
to have been written in concert with another [Wordsworth], whose name is
too venerable within the precincts of genius to be unnecessarily brought
into connection with such a trifle, and who was then residing at a small
distance from Nether Stowey. The title and subject were suggested by
myself, who likewise drew out the scheme and the contents for each of
the three books or cantos, of which the work was to consist, and which,
the reader is to be informed, was to have been finished in one night! My
partner undertook the first canto: I the second: and which ever had
done first, was to set about the third. Almost thirty years have
passed by; yet at this moment I cannot without something more than a
smile moot the question which of the two things was the more
impracticable, for a mind so eminently original to compose another man’s
thoughts and fancies, or for a taste so austerely pure and simple to
imitate the Death of Abel? Methinks I see his grand and noble
countenance as at the moment when having despatched my own portion of
the task at full finger-speed, I hastened to him with my
manuscript — that look of humourous despondency fixed on his almost blank
sheet of paper, and then its silent mock-piteous admission of failure
struggling with the sense of the exceeding ridiculousness of the whole
scheme — which broke up in a laugh: and the Ancient Mariner was written
instead.
Years afterward, however, the draft of the plan and proposed incidents,
and the portion executed, obtained favour in the eyes of more than one
person, whose judgment on a poetic work could not but have weighed with
me, even though no parental partiality had been thrown into the same
scale, as a make-weight: and I determined on commencing anew, and
composing the whole in stanzas, and made some progress in realising this
intention, when adverse gales drove my bark off the ‘Fortunate Isles’ of
the Muses: and then other and more momentous interests prompted a
different voyage, to firmer anchorage and a securer port. I have in vain
tried to recover the lines from the palimpsest tablet of my memory: and
I can only offer the introductory stanza, which had been committed to
writing for the purpose of procuring a friend’s judgment on the metre,
as a specimen: —
Encinctured with a twine of leaves,
That leafy twine his only dress!
A lovely Boy was plucking fruits,
By moonlight, in a wilderness.
(In a moonlight wilderness Aids to Reflection, 1825.)
The moon was bright, the air was free,
And fruits and flowers together grew
On many a shrub and many a tree:
And all put on a gentle hue,
Hanging in the shadowy air
Like a picture rich and rare.
It was a climate where, they say,
The night is more belov’d than day.
But who that beauteous Boy beguil’d,
That beauteous Boy to linger here?
Alone, by night, a little child,
In place so silent and so wild —
Has he no friend, no loving mother near?
I have here given the birth, parentage, and premature decease of the
‘Wanderings of Cain, a poem’, — intreating, however, my Readers, not to
think so meanly of my judgment as to suppose that I either regard or
offer it as any excuse for the publication of the following fragment
(and I may add, of one or two others in its neighbourhood) in its
primitive crudity. But I should find still greater difficulty in
forgiving myself were I to record pro taedio publico a set of petty
mishaps and annoyances which I myself wish to forget. I must be content
therefore with assuring the friendly Reader, that the less he attributes
its appearance to the Author’s will, choice, or judgment, the nearer to
the truth he will be.
S. T. COLERIDGE (1828).