The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels. Adam Nicolson
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The tiny hut had been subdivided on the condition that the man called Davies would take the smoke out of the rooms in which the family was trying to live. But Holland knew him. ‘Davies is one of the greatest rascals that haunts the hills.’ He happened that morning to be outside, in the field making hay. Holland went up to him, and asked why he had not done what he had promised. Davies lied calmly to his vicar.
The man was civil to me, and assured me that he was by the agreement to do no such thing. At this the old woman’s daughter rushed out of doors, and there was such a terrible set to that I and my family walked off; but the sound of their voices, shrill and deep, followed us most part of the way to Over Stowey. A sad set – the wretched inhabitants of three or four huts, like a nest in the bosom of Quantock, and living there without law or religion or the fear of God or man; for they never come to church, and what to do with them I scarce can tell.
These are the people of Wordsworth’s poetry seen from the point of view of the hierarchy presiding over them. Holland may have felt resourceless in meeting them, but his answers were the stock ones: fear the law, submit to the disciplines of the Church of England, restore the picture because the picture is the frame of goodness. These were precisely the attitudes that the young men of the next generation were set on changing.
The Coleridges were embedded in this beautiful and troubled world. The three of them – Coleridge himself, his wife Sara and their son little Hartley – were living with a much-loved maid called Nanny in a small cottage up at the top end of Lime Street. They had a well and a garden at the back, in which Coleridge thought he could ‘raise vegetables & corn enough for myself & Wife, and feed a couple of shouted & grunting Cousins from the refuse’. There were indeed two pigs, plus ducks and geese, and some apple trees whose trunks were ‘crooked earth-ward’ and whose boughs ‘hang above us in an arborous roof’.
The house had three small dark rooms on each floor, in which the fires smoked and draughts found their way through windows and doors. The thatch was half-rotten. Anything left there would get damp. On wash days, the ‘little Hovel is almost afloat – poor Sara tired off her legs’. On the street side, a cobbled pavement stood up out of the mud that caked the street itself. A small millstream ran down the side of the pavement, ‘the dear gutter of Stowey’ which Coleridge said he preferred to any purling Italian brook, but the road itself was dusty in summer and in winter ‘an impassable Hog-stye … a Slough of Despond’. The half-foetid smell of tan-pits at the back came wafting over everything. At night, the people living in the parish workhouse just down from the cottage fought and argued, so that as Coleridge joked to Sara, Lime Street more often than not was ‘vocal with the Poorhouse Nightingales’.
Coleridge had been married to Sara for nearly two years. She was the sister of Robert Southey’s wife Edith, and all of them had been planning to set out on a dream expedition to America, where, with eight others, they were going to establish a Utopian community called Pantisocracy, meaning ‘the rule of all’, to be set up on the cheap land along the banks of the Susquehanna River in Ohio. It was to be ‘a Social Colony, in which there was to be a community of property and where all that was selfish was to be proscribed’. There were to be no formal laws, but ‘by excluding all the little deteriorating passions – injustice, wrath, anger, clamour and evil-speaking, – an example would be set to the world of Human Perfectibility’.
Stephen Fricker, Sarah’s father – only when she married Coleridge and at his insistence did she drop the ‘h’ from her name – had been a wine and coal merchant and publican in Bristol, with a good house in the country and another in Bath. Her mother, who came from a rather more upmarket family, with moneyed connections, had overseen the family’s life, and they had lived among the fashionable, in ‘a smartish way’. Sarah and her sisters were well educated, learning mathematics and grammar, history and French as befitted young women of bon ton. Sarah all her life used to drop her h’s in a distinguished, relaxed, upper-class way, and insert little French phrases into her conversation, discussing events entre nous and en passant, emphasising, au fait and au fond, how important it was to remain au courant. The seal she used to close up her letters, however despondent their contents might have become, year after year impressed the phrase ‘Toujours gai’ into the wax.
Stephen Fricker had spent beyond his means, and had failed at every scheme he had tried. In 1786, when Sarah was sixteen, he was declared bankrupt. A few months later he died, broken, aged forty-eight. The Fricker family was destitute. Their mother opened a dame school in Bristol and the teenage girls were set to work as needlewomen. There was zest and spark in them. They retained their ‘polished, calculated light style’, and for all their poverty had moved happily in the modern, radical, open-minded Bristol circles to which Robert Southey had introduced Coleridge.
When Sarah first met him, at dinner one day, unexpectedly, he had been on a walking tour in Wales and had returned ‘brown as a berry’. Her first evaluation was undeceived: ‘Plain but eloquent and clever. His clothes were worn out; his hair wanted cutting. He was a dreadful figure.’ Southey, who was ‘very neat, gay and smart’, agreed: ‘He is a diamond set in lead.’
The diamond could talk, the heady prospects of ‘the Scheme of Pantisocracy’ were in the air, Sarah herself was a woman of courage and self-possession, both forthright and capable of discretion and delicacy, and within a fortnight of meeting they had agreed to marry. Things did not run smooth. Coleridge seems to have committed himself to her at first only philosophically and as a duty. He and Southey both thought she would make an excellent Pantisocratic bride, just as her sister Edith would for Southey and a third Fricker sister, Mary, already had for a third Bristol poet-Pantisocrat, Robert Lovell. The young idealists had plumped for brides en bloc. On top of that, Coleridge was still agonisingly and undecidedly in love with another girl, Mary Evans, and when he went back to London and Cambridge for a while, he failed – to Southey’s and Lovell’s consternation and disgust – to give a thought to Sarah or to write her a single line, despite writing to others in the same household.
Coleridge’s chaos alienated Lovell and the other Frickers, who advised against the marriage and swirled superior offers in front of Sarah’s eyes. Two rich young men proposed when Coleridge was away, but she would have neither. When Coleridge returned to Bristol early in 1795, something had changed, and he could begin to be amazed by this beautiful, competent, strong-minded woman, who was quite clearly and courageously in love with him, despite what all around her were saying to the contrary. By the summer of that year he had fallen in love with her in return.
For £5 a year, before their marriage, they rented a cottage in Clevedon, on the shores of the Bristol Channel, where the tallest of the roses in the garden looked in at the window of the first-floor bedroom, and there, away from the world, in August 1795, in anticipation of their happiness, Coleridge had written his first great poem.
As much as Wordsworth’s twin entrancements with Annette Vallon and Michel Beaupuy, and his lines on the baker’s cart, this poem, called ‘Effusion 35’ in 1795, later ‘The Eolian Harp’, stands at the headwaters of the Quantocks year. Coleridge and Sara – no ‘h’ was an attempt to classicise her – are together on a warm and quiet August evening, within earshot of the sea. They sit beside their cottage, ‘o’ergrown/With white-flower’d Jasmin, and the broad-leav’d Myrtle’, and while Venus appears in the evening sky they watch the light fading from the clouds. Quietness envelops them, and the revolutionary world is a universe away.
How exquisite the scents
Snatch’d from yon bean-field! and the world so hush’d!
The stilly murmur of the distant Sea
Tells us of Silence.
Detailed, located, precise, simple, receptive. In the window of the cottage they have placed an Aeolian harp, a ten-stringed musical instrument, a yard long and about five inches square, part of the domestic equipment for all aesthetic middle-class families in the late eighteenth century, by which the wind passing over the strings plays strange and ethereal music, seeming at times like audible moonlight, quiveringly present and absent as