Coleridge: Darker Reflections. Richard Holmes
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was full of curious “images and imagined actions” free from desire but implying “awakened Appetite”. In this dream which clearly featured Asra in some form of tropical paradise, Coleridge found himself in a primitive state of society “like that of those great Priests of Nature who formed the Indian worship in its purity, when all things, strictly of Nature, were reverenced according to their importance, undebauched by associations of Shame and Impudence”.142
It was probably now, in the summer gardens of San Antonio, that he began his unfinished poem to Asra, “The Blossoming of the Solitary Date-Tree”. It was suggested by a fact “mentioned by Linnaeus, of a date tree in a nobleman’s garden which year after year had put forth a full show of blossoms, but never produced fruit, till a branch from another date-tree had been conveyed from a distance of some hundred leagues”. It opens with the image of huge frosty mountain peaks “beneath the blaze of a tropical Sun”, an image of unreflected or unrequited love. “What no-one with us shares, scarce seems our own.” In one stanza it catches his mood of renewed hopefulness and the richness of the Mediterranean landscape offering him an “overflow” of gifts; and in the next shadows this with a sense of exile, of living in a “lonesome tent”, far away from the voice that can inspire him.
Coleridge lost the manuscript in his subsequent journeyings, but years later was able to reconstruct a rough version of the third and fourth stanzas. The first of these was a projection of his ideal poetic self, dedicated to the highest view of his life’s vocation and gratefully conscious of Nature’s gifts to him in Italy:
Imagination; honourable aims;
Free commune with the choir that cannot die;
Science and song; delight in little things,
The buoyant child surviving in the man;
Fields, forests, ancient mountains, ocean, sky,
With all their voices – O dare I accuse
My earthly lot as guilty of my spleen,
Or call my destiny niggard! O no! no!
It is her largeness, and her overflow,
Which being incomplete, disquieteth me so!
The second, by contrast, was a vision of his solitary wandering self, rootless and exiled, adrift from Asra’s love and hallucinating her voice:
For never touch of gladness stirs my heart,
But tim’rously beginning to rejoice
Like a blind Arab, that from sleep doth start
In lonesome tent, I listen for thy voice.
Belovéd! ‘tis not thine; thou art not there!
Then melts the bubble into idle air.
And wishing without hope I restlessly despair.143
The poem continues with a counter-image of satisfied love, a child basking in its mother’s gaze, which has an almost Italianate, Madonna-like intensity. But it ends with Coleridge’s poignant question, to be repeated again and again in the coming years, “Why was I made for Love and Love denied to me?”144
These moments of dreamy pleasure and sudden despondency seemed to alternate at San Antonio as Coleridge hovered in a kind of weightless trance in his Maltese exile, frantically busy and yet curiously passive, floating and yet marooned. There are no true rivers anywhere on the island, only wells and thin water-courses, but the image of a dried-up stream – perhaps inspired by the hesitant plashing of the Eagle Fountain (1623) in the gardens – produced one of Coleridge’s most memorable images of that summer. He is no longer a bird, but a fish. “STC – The Fish gasps on the glittering mud, the mud of this once full stream, now only moist enough to be glittering mud. The tide will flow back, time enough to lift me up with straws & withered sticks and bear me down into the ocean. O me! that being what I have been I should be what I am!”145
The heat began to increase in July, and at 4 a.m. one morning there was an earthquake, which seemed to him like the premonition of some great battle. Typically, Coleridge was awake, and saw his old friend the moon above the Garrison Battery, almost at the full, but very strange with a “reddish smoke-colour” like a god of war.146 With the heat came increasing noise, or at least sensitivity to it and Coleridge was regularly woken in the Treasury by trumpets of the “accursed Reveille” in the square below and the “malignant torture” of the parade drums, which attacked his head “like a party of yelling drinking North American Indians attacking a Crazy Fort with a tired Garrison”.147
The Public Secretary’s temper frayed even with the ordinary Maltese, whose carts thundered down the steps of Valletta, whose children screamed (“horrid fiendliness – for fun!”), and whose boatmen howled. “But it goes through everything – their Street-Cries, their Priests, their Advocates: their very Pigs yell rather than squeak.” The dogs howled all night, and the “Cats in their amours” were like imps in hell. “He who has only heard caterwauling on English Roofs can have no idea of a cat-serenade in Malta.”
This note of comic exasperation suggests perhaps the real, underlying stresses of Coleridge’s daily work, and the typically drawn state of bureaucratic nerves in wartime. It led to various frictions in the Treasury. Mr Underwood, in particular, was irritated beyond measure by Coleridge’s ceaseless literary talk and maddening tendency to produce exquisite Italian sonnets from his pile of official paper, innocently repeating the same translation to every visitor, as something “he had just thrown off”.148
The heat also produced lugubrious stories, such as the one about the consul’s clerk in Tripoli, who got out of bed in the middle of the night to drink water, remembered with horror the danger of scorpions when walking in the dark with bare feet, “went back & slipped his feet into his Shoes, in one of which a Scorpion was, & bit him mortally”. Coleridge thought this narrative so neat, that it was actually an “invention”.149
Relations nevertheless remained generally good. Vittori Barzoni discussed each edition of the Malta Gazette with the Public Secretary, and later described Coleridge as an outstanding personality with whom he had “the closest intimacy”.150 Captain Decatur of the US navy relished his company, and when he was about to sail to a new Mediterranean station, sent from his ship outside Valletta harbour a warm note of farewell which also captures the urgency of these months: “I am extremely near the shore, & have not time to be lengthy, & have only to beg you will believe me since whom [sic] I assure there is no man’s good opinion whom I would set a higher value on. PS. Should you come out, make a sign & I shall heave to immediately.”151
By the end of July 1805, Coleridge was able to send his wife a draft for £110 from his accumulated salary, which with the Wedgwood annuity put Sara in the best financial position she had been in for some time. The threatened loss of the family home at Greta Hall had also dissolved, since the prospective buyer had withdrawn.
Coleridge’s actual return to England remained as problematic as ever, though he tried to appear more decisive than he felt. “I have been hoping and expecting to get away from England for 5 months past, and Mr Chapman not arriving, Sir Alexander’s Importunities have always overpowered me, tho my gloom has increased at each disappointment. I am determined however to go in less than a month.”152 By contrast he emphasized the importance of his work in the wartime administration. “My office, as Public Secretary, the next civil dignity to the