Coleridge: Early Visions

The close association of poetry with sickness, feverish dreams, and isolation, set against the consoling, healing presence of the beloved, was now initiated. The theme was deepened by tragic sickness in his own family. Early in 1791 came news of Luke’s sudden death of a fever at Exeter; and this was quickly followed by the death of his beloved Nancy, after a long consumptive illness. Again, Coleridge turned to poetry, writing several more sonnets of deep and clumsy emotion:

Pain after pain, and woe succeeding woe –

Is my heart destin’d for another blow?

O my sweet sister! and must thou too die?

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Significantly, he already linked these deaths with that of his father, and the sense of being “fated to rove thro’ Life” bereft of those who had been closest to him in childhood. Perhaps this also explains the intense emotion with which he finally left Christ’s Hospital that summer, celebrated in his “Sonnet: On Quitting School for College” (another theme taken from Bowles). He bid “Adieu, adieu!” to the “much-lov’d cloisters pale!”, and spoke in tears of his happy days there, most of which he would later say were miserable.

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THREE PRODIGAL SON (#ulink_a0cb0ce8-3415-5684-9afc-f7edffe9a77a)

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Coleridge was just nineteen when he went up to Jesus College, Cambridge in the autumn of 1791. Though academically outstanding, there was little in his letters or adolescent poetry to suggest any real creative originality by this age (compared for example with Shelley or Keats). With characteristic acuteness, he himself later remarked on this.

(#litres_trial_promo) He was widely read, marvellously articulate, noisily self-confident but lacked any driving sense of literary vocation. Outwardly gregarious, as Lamb remembered, he was also an intensely lonely young man who longed for friendship. His unhappy family background, and growing sense of being an orphan in the world, made him even more emotionally volatile and self-conscious than most students. He referred jocosely to his “fat vacuity” of face, and his frequent blushes.

In his letters to George, and especially to the Evans family, there is overwhelming evidence of his passionate desire for intimacy and acceptance. The almost hysterical intensity of this, at times, may itself have been an alienating factor for fellow students. Self-dramatising and self-mocking by turns, he was like some brilliant overgrown child, performing ceaseless exhausting parlour games for his elders, and never settling down. He danced and jumped on his own shadow – sitting scholarship exams, writing for poetry prizes, dabbling in university politics, running up disastrous debts, flirting with drink, whores, and suicide – and all the time seemed to know that the performance was somehow hollow, a dazzling demand for attention, sympathy, and recognition. Yet in the process something real and extraordinary did happen: it released the language of his imagination, at first in his letters, then gradually in his poetry.

The opening note of this commedia of university life was struck, very early on, with almost conscious design, in his first letter from Jesus College to Mrs Evans and her daughters, written in February 1792.

Believe me, that You and my Sisters have the very first row in the front box of my Heart’s little theatre – and – God knows! you are not crowded. There, my dear Spectators! you shall see what you shall see – Farce, Comedy, & Tragedy – my Laughter, my Chearfulness, and my Melancholy. A thousand figures pass before you, shifting in perpetual succession – these are my Joys and my Sorrows, my Hopes and my Fears, my Good tempers, and my Peevishnesses: you will however observe two, that remain unalterably fixed – and these are Love and Gratitude. In short, my dear Mrs Evans! my whole heart shall be laid open like any sheep’s heart…Come Ladies! will you not take your seats in this play house?

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Coleridge’s first act in Cambridge was to go round to Pembroke College to see his schoolboy mentor Thomas Middleton, as soon as he got off the London coach. Middleton, who was studying hard for his finals the following summer, reasserted his old scholarly influence, and did much to shape the success of Coleridge’s first year, which was otherwise lonely and unsettled. He found his own college, Jesus, bleak and unfriendly, “the very palace of winds”, set on the edge of the city surrounded by the exposed parklands of Jesus Green. “Neither Lectures, or Chapel – or anything – is begun,” he wrote plaintively to George. “The College very thin – and Middleton has not the least acquaintance with any of Jesus, except a very black-guardly fellow, whose phisiog: I did not like.”

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With the return of the Master, Dr William Pearce, he was assigned rooms on the ground floor, opposite the gatehouse. They were cold and damp, and he mistakenly spent much money on credit trying to furnish them comfortably. These debts were to be the cause of growing difficulties between him and his brothers. After a bad bout of flu, when he took opium without “any disagreeable effects”, he established under Middleton’s guidance a strict, scholarly routine. Chapel twice a day, mathematical reading and lectures in the morning, walks in the afternoons, and long evenings of classical reading and translation work in Middleton’s rooms until eleven o’clock at night, occasionally enlivened by taking pot-shots at the Pembroke College rats.

Val Le Grice sent him parcels of second-hand books from London, and he discovered manuscripts of Thomas Gray’s poems in the Pembroke Library, which he copied out as he had done Bowles’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In November he reported virtuously to George, “If I were to read on as I do now – there is not the least doubt, that I should be Classical Medallist, and a very high Wrangler – but Freshmen always begin very furiously. I am reading Pindar, and composing Greek verse, like a mad dog. I am very fond of Greek verse, and shall try hard for the Brown’s Prize ode…There is no such thing as discipline at our college.”

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A letter to Edward Coleridge, written in a “feverish state of body and mind” had a less reassuring effect, being full of “petulance and passion”, complaining about the college, lack of money, and the wild behaviour of the young bloods.

(#litres_trial_promo) That month, two undergraduates fought a duel at Newmarket, and one was killed. Thereafter, Coleridge was careful to edit his letters to Ottery and Hackney – they are very different from the wild accounts he sent to the Evans family – and he assured George that he was an “economist”, living without invitations or wine parties, and stressed the improving friendship with Middleton.

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The Christmas vacation of 1791 was spent with the Evanses in Villiers Street where Coleridge passed a “potently medicinal” fortnight, eating turkey, tutoring Tom, and walking the three sisters to their milliner’s shop in Jermyn Street. The sixth-form flirtation now subtly altered into a general seduction of the whole family. He liked both Anne and Mary – the former for her intelligence, the latter for her “beautiful little leg” – but the real attraction, at least initially, was the mother, who treated him with “maternal affection”. He longed to be considered as one of her “very children”, but felt that he was physically too ugly for that.

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Back at Cambridge for the Easter term, while he assured George that he was soberly reading Homer and Horace for the Rustat Exams, he regaled the Evans family with a more colourful version of his doings, as he had promised. He had purchased a swanskin waistcoat in the latest mode, kept a cat in his rooms, and was planning to hire an allotment garden with a fellow undergraduate, George Caldwell (later a Fellow and Tutor of Jesus). He attended wine parties, at which three or four freshmen were “deplorably drunk”, and described hauling one of them out of the shallow Cambridge gutter in King’s Parade. (The man insisted that he save his friend instead: “never mind me – I can swim.”)

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In his rooms, he raised the ghost of Thomas Gray – this for Mary’s benefit – who advised him in a hollow voice: “O Young Man…write no more verses – in the first place, your poetry is vile stuff: and secondly (here he sighed almost to bursting) all poets go to – 11, we are so intolerably addicted to the Vice of Lying!”

(#litres_trial_promo) He sent his verses, “Odelings” and translations to Mary – also copies of Bowles, a sure mark of favour. But it was Anne he proposed as his Valentine, perhaps because she was not so dauntingly pretty. He would even have sent the drawing of a heart pierced with arrows – “But as the Gods have not made me a drawer (of any thing but corks) you must accept the will for the deed.”

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Physical inferiority was a constant, if comic note, in these early letters: he described his bad teeth, and asked for a box of “Mr Stringer’s tooth powder”, and noted that a dashing literary lady had described him as “a very gentle Bear”.

(#litres_trial_promo) The small, dishevelled schoolboy had grown into a large, shambling young man, with a mass of long dark hair and excitable manners. The mouth was “voluptuous”, the eyebrows stormy, the eyes bigger than ever. (All these features he would later enumerate with mock impartiality.) Nevertheless, he was proud of his robust energy, and described a marathon eight-hour walk round the villages of Cambridge with Middleton, ending benighted in a quagmire and pursued by footpads and Jack-o’-lanterns.

He also boated on the Cam, and fell in gloriously: “we swam to shore, and walking dripping home, like so many River Gods.”

(#litres_trial_promo) There was no doubt that “brother Coly” in his tragical farcical role was a grand success at Villiers Street, and when he went there again for the Easter vacation it began to feel like his adopted home. It was to be the first of many.

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Despite, or perhaps because of, these distractions, it is clear that Coleridge worked very hard at Cambridge throughout the spring and summer of 1792. “I have been writing for all the prizes,” he told George, and he submitted pieces for university awards in the Greek Sapphic Ode (Brown Medal), the Latin Ode, and the Greek Epigrams. He also found time to provide George with the text of sermons to preach at Hackney, an early example of his skill in assimilating and rehandling the writings of others, invaluable for a journalist and lecturer, but a dangerous facility for a literary man later to be much tempted by plagiarism. “I have sent you a sermon metamorphosed from an obscure publication by vamping, transposition, etc – if you like it, I can send you two more of the same kidney.”

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(#litres_trial_promo) Doggerel verses – “A Fragment found in a Lecture Room” – and an elegant Greek epitaph were also sent, carefully sandwiched round an urgent request for £5 or £10, “as I am at present cashless”.

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The first academic year closed brilliantly in June 1792, when Coleridge’s Greek Sapphic “Ode on the Slave Trade” was declared the winner of the Brown Gold Medal. He had chosen a subject that was politically popular – the West Indian slave trade had recently been debated both in parliament, and in the University Senate – and which showed his growing interest in public affairs, and the libertarian ideas of the French Revolution. Technically it was not quite flawless: Richard Porson, the new Professor of Greek, privately offered to show 134 examples of bad Greek in it. Since the Ode was twenty-five stanzas long, this was more than one error per line.

But for a freshman it was a triumph; he formally declaimed it before the assembled Fellows at Commencement on 3 July, and proudly posted an autographed copy to George, before going down to Ottery for the long vacation. George was so delighted by his youngest brother’s success that he broke out into congratulatory verses earnesly praising the Sacred Fire that flowed “spontaneous from thy golden lyre”.

(#litres_trial_promo) For a few brief weeks, Coleridge basked in the approval of his entire family, perhaps the one time in his life that he felt he had achieved what was expected of him.

Through July and August he made a triumphal tour of West Country relatives: Edward at Salisbury, his half-sister at Tiverton, James at Exeter, his mother at Ottery. Racy accounts flowed back to George at Hackney, now written in Latin, prose alternating with hexameters. There was much talk of events in revolutionary France – the storming of the Tuileries Palace, and Tom Paine being elected to the National Convention. Coleridge was amazed at the conservative attitudes displayed: it was thought “very sad” that Paine was “not cut to pieces at Canterbury” on his way to the Continent.

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In fact he was witnessing the beginning of the great wave of English reaction against France, which would harden further with the September Massacres in Paris. “King and Country” mobs would soon sweep through many of the great cities, and by December Paine would be burnt in effigy even on the Cornhill at Cambridge; and Joseph Priestley be driven out of Birmingham by rioters, who set fire to his house.

Coleridge was depressed by the narrow provincialism of his family circle, and later told George that this visitation to Devon “annihilated whatever tender ideas” he had treasured of the place. He found Edward vain and eccentric, indulging in “Punnomania, with which he at present foams”. While James was cold, a stickler for appearances, and much concerned with the Sidmouth Volunteers. Coleridge could only show them “the semblance of Affection – perhaps, by persevering in appearing, I at last shall learn to be, a Brother.”

(#litres_trial_promo) They in turn evidently found him difficult and demanding, and it is notable that his mother forbade him to drink wine at table, “not a ‘single drop’”.

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