Coleridge: Early Visions

Thither, while the murmuring throng

Of wild-bees hum their drowsy song,

By Indolence and Fancy brought,

A youthful Bard, “unknown to Fame”,

Wooes the Queen of Solemn Thought…

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Perhaps the most striking aspect of this poem is the prose preface, which Coleridge subsequently attached to it for publication in 1796. In it he first shows his genius for mythologising the place and conditions in which his poetry was conceived. In a quiet and delicately understated way, it entwines local folklore with the magic psychology of memory and love, in a manner that points towards much later work. It was his first attempt to re-invent a poetic world of natural emblems, in which the imagination stealthily transforms the everyday into the visionary. The little sandstone cave of his childhood becomes, or half becomes, a cavern of emotions “measureless to man”, haunted by a magic “damsel”.

The Pixies, in the superstition of Devonshire, are a race of beings invisibly small, and harmless or friendly to man. At a small distance from a village in that county, half-way up a wood-covered hill, is an excavation called the Pixies’ Parlour. The roots of old trees form its ceiling; and on its sides are innumerable cyphers, among which the author discovered his own cypher and those of his brothers, cut by the hand of their childhood. At the foot of the hill flows the river Otter. To this place, during the summer months of the year 1793, the Author conducted a party of young ladies; one of whom, of stature elegantly small, and of complexion colourless yet clear, was proclaimed the Faery Queen.

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7

It was hardly surprising that Coleridge did not return to Cambridge in September 1793 in the most prosaic state of mind. In fact, he lingered in London to see Mary, and much of the money provided for his debts was squandered on unspecified entertainment. “So small a sum remained, that I could not mock my Tutor with it.”

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By the end of October his “Embarrassments” buzzed round him “like a Nest of Hornets”, and in November he gave up all attempts to get his affairs under control. Instead he abandoned himself to a whirl of drunken socialising, alternating with grim solitary resolutions to shoot himself as the final solution to bad debts, unrequited love, and academic disgrace. (The example of Frank seems to have mixed itself up with the fate of Goethe’s Young Werther.) No letters survive from this traumatic month, for not even the Evans family were now in his confidence, but he subsequently gave George a lurid account.

My Agitations were a delirium – I formed a Party, dashed to London at eleven o’clock at night, and for three days lived in all the tempest of Pleasure – resolved on my return – but I will not shock your religious feelings – I again returned to Cambridge – staid a week – such a week! – Where Vice has not annihilated Sensibility, there is little need of a Hell! On Sunday night I packed up a few things, – went off in the mail…still looking forwards with a kind of recklessness to the dernier resort of misery…

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This was the Sunday of 24 November.

Oddly enough, the one thing that flourished during these delirious three weeks of November was Coleridge’s poetry. In a desperate attempt to recoup his debts, Coleridge had put money in an Irish lottery in London, and while awaiting the outcome he wrote an Ode “To Fortune”, composed while walking from a tavern in Gray’s Inn Lane, and the lottery shop in the Cornhill. He submitted it to the Morning Chronicle, and to his amazement it was published in the paper on 7 November, earning him a guinea (unlike the lottery). This was, ironically, his first professional publication: and the following year the same newspaper was publishing an entire sequence of his sonnets. It contains a suggestive confusion of unpaid debts with unrequited love, both exciting bitter and evidently liberating tears:

Let the little bosom cold

Melt only at the sunbeam ray of gold –

My pale cheeks glow – the big drops start –

The rebel Feeling riots at my heart!

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It was this rebellious release of dammed-up, pent-up emotions – going all the way back to childhood – that was evidently so important to Coleridge throughout these catastrophic and glorious weeks.

Despite the “delirium”, Coleridge was also regularly attending a newly founded Literary Society in Cambridge, formed by Charles Le Grice and a Trinity College undergraduate, Christopher Wordsworth – younger brother of William. The minutes between 5 and 13 November record a brilliant and relatively sober Coleridge, declaiming his love-poetry of the summer, “spouting” Bowles, quoting the Greek poets with crashing fluency, and studiously promising to deliver a special paper on modern poetry. His poem “To Fortune” was read from the newspaper to great applause; and there was earnest discussion of the elder Wordsworth’s “Evening Walk”. The only ominous note was his failure to appear and deliver his special paper at the Society’s meeting of 20 November, as arranged. But his absence was not especially remarked upon, for his inspired vagaries were obviously well-known among the undergraduates.

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While he should have been debating the finer points of verse at Trinity, Coleridge was probably drinking heavily in Holborn; but very little is known of this final climactic week in London at the end of November. Coleridge later embroidered such a tapestry of adventures that they became the subject of a novel by his friend Charles Lloyd, Edmund Oliver, published in 1798. But the absence of any reliable witness is indicated by the fact that no friend knew of his whereabouts, or succeeded in making contact with him, for the next two months, until February 1794. As on that famous night at Ottery, he simply ran away in a storm of emotion, and awaited discovery and rescue, with “inward and gloomy satisfaction”.

Amid the general chaos of debts and guilt and misery, so strangely shadowed by the growing confidence in his own powers as a poet, there may have been some final, isolating horror. He might, for example, have thought that his whoring had given him a venereal disease.

(#litres_trial_promo) Certainly his final resolution was not an act of rebellion at all, but a bitterly remorseful attempt to redeem his honour in the most humiliating tradition of family loyalties. Like John, like James, like Frank, he volunteered for the army.

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On 2 December 1793, he accepted the six and a half guinea bounty of a volunteer private in the 15th Light Dragoons, reporting to Colonel Gwynne’s recruiting office in Chancery Lane. Two days later he was sworn in at the regimental headquarters in Reading, and was issued with leather breeches, stable jacket, riding boots, and a carbine, and began his training mucking out the stables. He gave his name, according to his initials, as Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. The outlandish surname, somehow so expressive of his total inability to ride a horse, may have been a last, muffled dactylic tribute to Frank, whose middle name was Syndercombe. He became, in his own mocking phrase, “a very indocile Equestrian”.

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8

The Army has a way of dealing with even its most unlikely recruits. After two months’ basic training at Reading, during which he did guard duty at the Reading Fair and wrote love-letters on behalf of his illiterate comrades, he was seconded to Henley on Thames as temporarily unfit to ride. He had saddle-sores and boils: “dreadfully troublesome eruptions, which so grimly constellated my Posteriors.”

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His orders were to nurse a fellow dragoon, whose illness turned out to be smallpox, at that time usually a fatal disease. The two men were isolated in the single room of the Pest House, a low brick building in the grounds of Henley workhouse. Here, in the first fortnight of February 1794, Coleridge faithfully nursed his “poor Comrade” through fever and real delirium, amidst “the putrid smell and the fatiguing Struggles” of long, sleepless nights. Food and buckets of water were left at the door (for which Coleridge had to pay), and for eight days and nights he did not undress, bathing and feeding his comrade through the crisis.

Both men survived, but the experience of this nightmare of sickness may well have contributed something to the hallucinations of the Ancient Mariner, four years later. It was another intense vision of the sickroom and its peculiar intimacies. Coleridge later told many tales, to Gillman, to Bowles and others, of his military service, but most of them were comic accounts of how his real identity as a runaway Cambridge scholar was discovered. In one version, he was on guard duty, and could not prevent himself from correcting a Greek quotation from Euripedes, made by the duty officer. In another, he was found regaling his fellow dragoons with stories from Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War. In a third, a line of Latin verse was found pencilled on the wall above his harness peg.

(#litres_trial_promo) But curiously he chose to say nothing about his time in the little, claustrophobic Pest House, which affected him more deeply than any other part of his ordeal.

News of his whereabouts eventually leaked back to Cambridge via the Grecians of Christ’s Hospital, some of whom must have heard of his adventures in Holborn. Once the story was out, Coleridge received several letters of support and offers of help, from Val Le Grice, Tucker, and Bob Allen. Even his old headmaster, James Bowyer, allowed it to be understood that his prize pupil had volunteered with his permission, thereby safeguarding the precious Christ’s Hospital Exhibition, which would otherwise have been instantly forfeited.

(#litres_trial_promo) George Coleridge was naturally distraught and, still not knowing Coleridge’s regiment, persuaded his fellow Jesus College undergraduate Tucker, to forward an unaddressed letter, begging him to get in touch and saying that their mother was ill with worry.

This letter reached Coleridge at the Henley Pest House on 6 February, but he did not dare to open it for two days. His reply on 8 February was hysterical with grief and guilt. “I have been a fool even to madness. What shall I dare promise? My mind is illegible to myself – I am lost in the labyrinth, the trackless wilderness of my own bosom…The shame and sorrow of those who loved me – the anguish of him, who protected me from my childhood upwards – the sore travail of her who bore me – intolerable Images of horror! They haunt my sleep – they enfever my Dreams!”

(#litres_trial_promo) The “riot” of feeling was still running with melodramatic strength, oddly confused with the “loathsome form” of the feverish man Coleridge was still patiently nursing.

George immediately answered with a letter of great patience and kindness. “A handsome Sum shall be gotten ready for the liquidation of your College debts, if either my interest or person can procure it – and the business of your discharge commenc’d immediately – Write me as swift as wind – that I may take every step for restoring you to happiness & myself.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Once these communications were opened in such a manner, Coleridge was immensely relieved. He could now play the part of the prodigal son, and he proceeded to do so with something approaching gusto.

To James Coleridge, who was put in charge of the delicate and expensive business of negotiating the discharge (which was rumoured to cost more than forty guineas), he wrote that his conduct had “displayed a strange Combination of Madness, Ingratitude, & Dishonesty”; adding pitifully that recruits from his regiment were already being drafted for service abroad. (The manuscript of this letter still hangs in the Officers Mess of the 15th King’s Royal Hussars, one of its most treasured memorabilia.)

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While to George he promised more expansively “a minute history” of all his secret thoughts and actions for the last two years at Cambridge. This emotional confession was written late one Sunday night, 23 February, after his duties at the Pest House were completed. Though it studiously omits any details about Mary Evans, Frend’s trial, or his new political and literary aspirations, it does reveal much of the pent-up guilt he had felt for so long.

His new identity as Trooper Comberbache gave him, paradoxically, a chance to be himself. For the first time one can really hear the voice of the frantic young poet & intellectual, dramatising and over-dramatising himself with a lurid satisfaction that so frequently hovers on pure comedy. As so often in Coleridge’s later life, the absurd disaster of his practical affairs seems almost a liberation of the spirit. His letter soars upwards out of the catastrophe it recounts, with something close to exultation. He makes the worst of everything, brilliantly.

I laugh almost like an insane person when I cast my eye backward on the prospect of my past two years – What a gloomy Huddle of eccentric Actions, and dim-discovered motives! To real Happiness I bade adieu from the moment, I received my first Tutor’s Bill – since that time since that period my Mind has been irradiated by Bursts only of Sunshine – at all other times gloomy with clouds, or turbulent with tempests…I became a proverb to the University for Idleness – the time, which I should have bestowed on the academic studies, I employed in dreaming out wild Schemes of impossible extrication. It had been better for me, if my Imagination had been less vivid – I could not with such facility have shoved aside Reflection! How many and how many hours have I stolen from the bitterness of Truth in these soul-enervating Reveries – in building magnificent Edifices of Happiness on some fleeting Shadow of Reality! My Affairs became more and more involved – I fled to Debauchery – fled from silent and solitary Anguish to all the uproar of senseless Mirth! Having, or imagining that I had, no stock of Happiness, to which I could look forwards, I seized the empty gratifications of the moment, and snatched at the Foam, as the Wave passed by me. – I feel a painful blush on my cheek, while I write it – but even for the Un. Scholarship, for which I affected to have read so severely, I did not read three days uninterruptedly – for the whole six weeks, that preceded the examination, I was almost constantly intoxicated! My Brother, you shudder as you read –

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No doubt George was intended to shudder; but also, to forgive. Even allowing for the Wertherism and exaggeration of all this (Coleridge was deliberately dismissing any academic achievement whatever), it is interesting to find him, long before his days of opium addiction, accusing himself of “soul-enervating Reveries”, and touching on the “Kubla Khan” imagery of edifices, waves and fleeting shadows.