Coleridge: Early Visions

During these difficult childhood years, after being the “darling” who sat, as he fondly recalled, “at my mother’s side, on my little stool, to read my little book, and to listen to the talk of my elders”, he clearly felt he became at first an anxiety, and then a disappointment, to her.

(#litres_trial_promo) He felt this rejection as deeply as anything in his life, and at sixteen would say of the mother of a schoolfriend in London that she “taught me what it was to have a mother”.

(#litres_trial_promo) In later life, he often repeated this sense of looking for mother-substitutes. At twenty-nine, he told his friend Tom Poole that Mrs Poole “was the only Being whom I ever felt in the relation of Mother”.

(#litres_trial_promo) In middle age the search for a lost mother continued, with strange consequences.

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Exactly how this process of alienation occurred is difficult to say, for Coleridge wrote and talked more and more about his father, and less and less about his mother as he grew older. But he seems to have felt, very early on, that in her eyes by comparison with his brothers, he was already a failure by the time he left Ottery. There are no contemporary accounts of mother and son together in these early days. But some years later, when he revisited Ottery in the autumn of 1799, there was a revealing incident which was recorded by his friend, Robert Southey. “We were all a good deal amused by the old lady,” – Ann Coleridge, aged seventy-two, was by then rather deaf – “she could not hear what was going on, but seeing Samuel arguing with his brothers, took it for granted that he must have been in the wrong, and cried out, ‘Ah, if your poor father had been alive, he’d soon have convinced you.’”

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It was amusing to Southey, but not to Coleridge. In his poetry it was to produce the recurring image of a lost or rejected child, for ever attempting to return home, or recover the feelings of home, or somehow – marvellously – to reinvent them.

The pluck and determination of his older brothers was exemplified by John, who had been in Calcutta since 1771, and within five years rose to the rank of lieutenant. His courage and generosity became legendary in the family. His vivid, good-hearted letters arrived regularly at Ottery throughout Coleridge’s boyhood, often bringing money. They could hardly have failed to fire Sam’s imagination. In 1775 a typical missive arrived from Monghyr, on the Ganges, a hundred miles south of the Nepalese border.

I left Calcutta about the end of April…You have no doubt heard of Monghyr, famous for its wild, romantic situation, and especially for its being the Montpellier of the East. About two miles from the garrison there is a Hotwell in which the water continually boils; the Natives esteem it sacred, and flock thither from all parts of the country to receive a Holy Sprinkling, as they imagine it has the Virtue of cleansing them from their sins…

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It may have been glimpses like this that first turned Coleridge towards his lifelong fascination with travel books. James came to rely on John for help in his own military career, eventually receiving from him the sum of £1,000 to purchase a commission. Francis so worshipped John that he finally contrived to join him in India at the incredibly early age of twelve. John even had a remarkable plan for Sam to join him in India as a cadet; but this was to be forestalled by his own tragic death from malaria, at Tillicherry, in January 1787. He died penniless, having sent all his money home or lent it to fellow officers.

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8

By the age of six, Sam’s obsessive reading had reached unhealthy proportions. Coleridge again described this with a keen eye on the young prodigy in the making. He had imported “all the gilt-covered little books” from his aunt’s every-thing shop at Crediton, and among them The Arabian Nights:

one tale of which (the tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure virgin) made so deep an impression on me (I had read it in the evening while my mother was mending stockings) that I was haunted by spectres, whenever I was in the dark – and I distinctly remember the anxious & fearful eagerness, with which I used to watch the window, in which the books lay – & whenever the Sun lay upon them, I would seize it, carry it by the wall, & bask, & read.

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The childish mixture of fantasy and superstition is acutely recalled: the beautiful virgin who is also a fearful spectre; the relentless moving finger of the sun which is also a kind of benevolent, protecting power. Again, these are themes that Coleridge would carry into his adult poetry of his late twenties, in “Christabel” and the Ancient Mariner.

In his forties he was still recalling the impact of The Arabian Nights in his essays: “…I can never forget with what a strange mixture of obscure dread and intense desire I used to look at the volume and watch it, till the morning sunshine had reached and nearly covered it, when, and not before, I felt the courage given me to seize the precious treasure…”

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Coleridge also saw himself as little Sam, becoming almost comically peculiar and precocious. “So I became a dreamer – and acquired an indisposition to all bodily activity – and I was fretful, and inordinately passionate, and as I could not play at any thing, and was slothful, I was despised & hated by the boys; and because I could read & spell, & had, I may truly say, a memory & understanding forced into almost an unnatural ripeness, I was flattered & wondered at by all the old women.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Here, incidentally, is the first glimpse of Coleridge the talker, ensconced in a circle of his clucking admirers. (He later told Godwin that he was “accustomed only to the conversation of grown persons”, and became “arrogant & conceited”.)

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The Reverend John now intervened. With characteristic forthrightness he actually burnt the offending storybooks, and enrolled Sam in the King’s School where he remained a pupil to the age of nine. He soon “outstripped” all of his age. His schoolboy horizons opened, and there is evidence of much wandering about the town, and down by the River Otter, and to neighbouring houses, often in the company of Francis, with whom fraternal warfare continued. “Frank had a violent love of beating me – but whenever that was superseded by any humour or circumstance, he was always very fond of me – & used to regard me with a strange mixture of admiration & contempt – strange it was not – : for he hated books, and loved climbing, fighting, playing, & robbing orchards, to distraction.”

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One memorable trip was to the Pixies’ Parlour, a mysterious sandstone cave beneath the roots of an ancient oak tree, in a field about a mile south of the town overlooking the river. It was a place of folklore – goblins, ghosts – where Sam bravely imitated his elders by carving his initials in the shadowy recess. It was a cave that reappeared many times in his poetry, and finally became an image of his lifelong search for esoteric knowledge:

Yea, oft alone,

Piercing the long-neglected holy cave,

The haunt obscure of old Philosophy,

He bade with lifted torch its starry walls

Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame

Of odorous lamps tended by Saint and Sage.

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As an undergraduate he was to go back to find those initials, entwined with those of his heroic brothers.

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Another visit was to Sir Stafford Northcote’s new country house, the Pynes, outside Ottery. Frank had fallen in love with the baronet’s daughter Maria, to whom he was later to send messages of devotion from India. But Sam was taken by a different kind of recondite beauty – the splendid, polished, Georgian spiral staircase. Years later, when trying to explain the complex structure of his essay-collection, The Friend, with its expanding themes and “interposed” lighter pieces of diversion, or “landing-places”, he suddenly recalled his first, awesome impression of the great house.

Before all other objects, I was most struck by the magnificent staircase, relieved at well proportioned intervals by spacious landing-places, this adorned with shewy plants, the next looking out on an extensive prospect through the stately window with its side panes of rich blues and saturated amber or orange tints: while from the last and highest the eye commanded the whole spiral ascent with the marbled pavement of the great hall from which it seemed to spring up as if it merely used the ground on which it rested. My readers will find no difficulty in translating these forms of the outward senses into their intellectual analogies…

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In fact Coleridge himself always had the greatest difficulty with the “architectural” structure of his prose books, as his readers found to their cost. They were to be less like solid Georgian staircases, and far more like the visionary, suspended, self-circling stairways of Piranesi’s famous engravings. Something of this seems already foreshadowed in the childhood sense – recorded with such visual accuracy – that on looking down over the banisters from the top of Northcote’s spiral stairs, the entire structure seemed independent of the ground, simply springing up above it into the air, magically and alarmingly unsupported.

Most fondly recalled of all were the endless expeditions down to the placid, rippling waters of the Otter, which meander through low red-earthed banks and shallow shingle spits, six miles down to the sea at Budleigh Salterton:

Dear native brook! where first young Poesy

Stared wildly-eager in her noontide dream!

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Paddling, paper-boat sailing, and solemn games of ducks and drakes, are all recalled in later verse. Sam also learned to swim here, a pastime he practised at home and abroad for many years, well into his middle age. The river produced the first really accomplished poem of his youth, which he wrote at the age of twenty-one, while still at university, the sonnet “To the River Otter”.

Here again, the poetic memory is far happier than those of the letters, reaching towards a more universal and perhaps more conventionally acceptable nostalgia for childhood, the Paradise lost, that the Romantics would foster. Yet it is brilliant with living detail, full of Coleridge’s sensitivity to light and movement. The rapid, effortless bouncing stone enacts the freedom of the child’s mind – the skips and flights of the imagination – while the glowing waters become a symbol of memory itself.

…What happy and what mournful hours, since last

I skimm’d the smooth thin stone along thy breast,

Numbering its light leaps! yet so deep imprest

Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes I never shut amid the sunny ray,

But straight with all their tints thy waters rise, Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows grey,