Coleridge: Darker Reflections. Richard Holmes
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Coleridge emblazoned into his Notebook, in huge, drunken capital letters, two portentous words, “THE EPOCH”, followed by three pages of frantic scrawl. Later he tore out all these pages, leaving only the Delphic explanation: “Saturday, 27th December, 1806 – Queen’s Head, Stringston, 1/2 a mile from Coleorton Church, 50 minutes after 10.”45*
Though he destroyed his original Notebook entry, Coleridge reverted quite explicitly to this moment of confrontation in a series of painful subsequent notes. In September 1807 he wrote: “O agony! O the vision of that Saturday morning – of the Bed – O cruel! is he not beloved, adored by two – & two such Beings. – And must I not be beloved near him except as a Satellite? – But O mercy, mercy! is he not better, greater, more manly, & altogether more attractive to any but the purest Woman? And yet…he does not pretend, he does not wish, to love you as I love you, Sara!”46
Again, in May 1808, he broke out: “O that miserable Saturday morning! The thunder-cloud had long been gathering, and I had now been gazing, and now averting my eyes, from it, with anxious fears, of which I scarcely dared be conscious…But a minute and a half with ME and all the time evidently restless & going – An hour and more with Wordsworth – [in Greek code] in bed – O agony!’47 Several of the poems he wrote at Coleorton over the next three months all touch, more or less obliquely, on this sense of Wordsworth’s and Asra’s devastating betrayal.
Was this “vision” of Wordsworth and Asra in bed together real then? Or was it part of some drunken, jealous delusion? Coleridge himself never seemed to be quite sure. Years later, he would be able to explain it away as a “horrid phantasm” on his part, and “intellectually” reject any idea of an actual sexual relationship between the two. Yet the bed scene itself, so repeatedly described, seems difficult to dismiss.
Coleridge himself had once cuddled with Asra and Mary on the sofa at Gallow Hill, and this form of tenderness was once current, almost indiscriminately, in their shared household. One might almost suspect Asra of still teasing and flirting with her two poets, perhaps unconscious of the perils of what she was doing. For Wordsworth, so confident in his emotional life, this offered no threat and might even be a way of asserting his power – not merely over Asra, but also over Coleridge. Asra, one might conclude, was as a patriarchal gift that he might bestow or withhold.
If this seems extravagant, it was nonetheless very much what Coleridge feared in his worst moments, especially when in the grip of opium or drink. His love for Asra was not weakened, as events showed; but his jealousy of Wordsworth – still his greatest friend – was much intensified. He feared Wordsworth’s power over her, and that she would “learn from W. – to pity & withdraw herself from my affections”.48
Years later, he was still brooding on that “dreadful Saturday Morning, at Coleorton”. By then he saw more clearly the true psychological nature of the drama enacted. “Did I believe it? Did I not even know, that it was not so, could not be so?…Yes! Yes! I knew the horrid phantasm to be a mere phantasm and yet what anguish, what gnawings of despair, what throbbings and lancinations of positive Jealousy! – even to this day the undying worm of distempered sleep or morbid Day-Dreams.”49 Yet despite this rationalization, Coleridge would still recall more than a decade later (and still in Greek code) Asra’s “beautiful breasts uncovered” that morning at Coleorton farmhouse.50
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Even harder to understand, normal life seems to have continued at Coleorton. The following Sunday, 2 January 1807, Wordsworth began his planned reading from the thirteen books of The Prelude. Each evening after supper, Coleridge and the three women gathered solemnly round him in the firelit parlour. His deep, Cumbrian voice filled the room, and swept them into the mighty vision of his own life, hour after hour. The readings continued over several nights. As Coleridge sat there he was overwhelmed by the conviction that his friend had completed a masterpiece. He viewed him “with steadfast eye…in the choir of ever-enduring men”.
Immediately after the last reading, Coleridge went to his study and spent most of the night drafting a reply, what is in effect the last of the Conversation Poems, “To William Wordsworth”. There is not a word of doubt, not a hint of reproach. It is a poem of unstinting affirmation and praise, and the most passionate celebration of their friendship which Coleridge ever put into words. But at the same time it is a lament for his own failures, his sense of lost genius, characteristically orchestrated in images of such striking energy and beauty that they demonstrate the opposite: that his genius was still very much alive, despite everything.
Comfort from thee, and utterance of thy love
Came with such heights and depth of harmony,
Such sense of wings uplifting, that the storm
Scattered and whirl’d me, till my thoughts became
A bodily tumult…
Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe
Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart…
In silence listening, like a devout child,
My soul lay passive, by thy various strain
Driven as in surges now beneath the stars,
With momentary stars of my own birth,
Fair constellated foam, still darting off
Into the darkness; now a tranquil sea,
Outspread and bright, yet swelling to the moon.51
In these contrasted metaphors of passivity and power, of childlike submission and elemental force, Coleridge defined some essential paradox in his relations with Wordsworth. The poem also celebrated the “dear tranquil time” of their evenings together, and the “sweet sense of Home” he had found at Coleorton, in that “happy vision of beloved faces” sitting round the room. Yet it ends, unlike the previous Conversation Poems so long ago in the Quantocks, with a movement of withdrawal into himself, the feeling of spiritual struggles yet to come.
And when O Friend! my comforter and guide!
Strong in thyself, and powerful to give strength! –
Thy long sustained Song finally closed,
And thy deep voice had ceased – yet thou thyself
Wert still before my eyes, and round us both
That happy vision of beloved faces –
Scarce conscious, and yet conscious of its close
I sate, my being blended in one thought
(Thought was it? or aspiration? or resolve?)
Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound –
And when I rose, I found myself in prayer.52
Neither Wordsworth nor Dorothy left any record of their reactions to Coleridge’s poem, though four years later Wordsworth would try to prevent its publication. What made him uneasy was not Coleridge’s praise, but the extremely emotional nature of Coleridge’s description of their friendship. Rightly, perhaps, he felt that it left him vulnerable. Coleridge himself had no such qualms, regarding it as leaving a great deal unsaid, as his Notebooks would show.
But Wordsworth did measure the transformation that was coming over their friendship in a short, cruelly effective, lyric entitled