Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Samuel Taylor (1772-1834), an English poet. He was a clergyman's son, and, from his earliest years, a great reader. He admired Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Nights, and other tales of adventure. Orphaned in his ninth year, he was sent to London, where he became a "blue-coat boy" at Christ's Hospital. He seems to have been a precocious lad, who "read right through the catalogue" of a library to which a chance acquaintance had subscribed for him, but who looked with contempt upon his duller comrades. While other boys played football, he loved to dream or watch the drifting clouds. As he grew older, he would discourse occasionally to his mates in the cloisters of the school, or recite Homer in the original Greek, holding them spellbound by his wonderful voice and intonation.

At nineteen he went to Cambridge, but getting into debt carelessly in his second year, he ran away from college and joined a regiment of dragoons. He soon regretted this step, and was bought out of the army by his friends. He returned to college, where he adopted Unitarian and democratic views. He became absorbed in visionary schemes, one of which was to found a model colony on the banks of the Susquehanna. He left college without taking a degree, and began writing prose and verse for the magazines. He became closely associated with Southey and Wordsworth, the three comprising the "Lake School" of poets. Coleridge married early, but with insufficient means. Thereafter he received assistance frequently from his friends. Finally, he weakly deserted the wife and children he could not support, and Southey, who had married Mrs. Coleridge's sister, took them under his care.

For fifteen years Coleridge was a slave to the opium habit, begun by taking the drug in time of illness. Such habit may in large measure account for the failure to fulfill the great promise of his youth. His genius was many sided, but, whatever path he entered, a weak will and a vacillating purpose prevented arrival at the goal. After a severe struggle, and by the aid of a devoted physician, the habit was overcome. During the years left to him Coleridge devoted his time to philosophy and criticism.

Coleridge's personal magnetism, his powerful, if ill-balanced mind, his remarkable gift as a talker, won him many friends. That his faults and failures call for pity more than blame may be inferred from the fact that these friends continued to love and honor him. He seemed to write under sudden inspiration, and, if interrupted, was often utterly unable to complete what he had begun. He said of himself: "The author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him; but the tomorrow is yet to come."

Coleridge's influence on the opinion of the day was prodigious. To his friends, Wordsworth, Southey, and Lamb, his companionship seemed to act as a spur to better work, while Hazlitt, Scott, Poe, Lowell, and many others acknowledge a great debt.

His most important poetical work was done in the year 1798. The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Ode to France, Kubla Khan, and other poems were produced at this time. As he never equalled this work at any other period of his life, this year is called Coleridge's annus mirabilis, or wonderful year.

The origin of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is of interest. The two friends, Wordsworth and Coleridge, started on a walking tour. As they had little money, it was suggested that they produce conjointly a poem for the New Monthly Magazine, the proceeds to defray the expense of the trip. On a previous occasion they had planned to publish a volume of verses for which Coleridge was to furnish poems whose incidents and scenes should be in part supernatural, but which should aim to depict faithfully the actual emotions which would be felt should such incidents and scenes be true. They now planned The Ancient Mariner to be constructed along these lines. Coleridge told of a dream related by a friend. Wordsworth added a few hints--suggested some lines. That same evening he withdrew from the endeavor. He has himself said, "Our respective manners proved so widely different that it would have been quite presumptuous in me to do anything but separate from an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog." The poem thus begun in November, 1797, was completed in March following, and was published in Lyrical Ballads during the summer. Wordsworth contributed most of the other poems to the volume. The Ancient Mariner was most harshly criticized at its appearance, Wordsworth himself attributing to it the failure of the Lyrical Ballads. None of Coleridge's friends realized that he had produced an immortal poem.

The tale is wholly imaginative, but the genius of the poet produces the impression of vivid reality. There is something weird in the very opening of the poem. The Mariner stops a man about to attend a wedding and "holds him with his glittering eye," while he relates his story. The wedding guest hears occasionally the music and merriment of the feast; but he cannot leave the old sailor, who is constrained by a "woeful agony" to recount his sin and suffering. The tale is of a ship sailing into southern seas, driven to cross the line by storms, and caught in the ice of the Antarctic regions. An albatross appears, and is welcomed as a bird of good omen. The ice splits and the breeze helps them northward. But the mariner shoots the albatross on a sudden impulse, and woe follows the cruel deed. The ship enters the Pacific Ocean and is becalmed. The dead bird is hung about the sailor's neck by his companions, as a penance for his crime. There is no water to drink and the crew perish of thirst. Then a phantom ship appears, on whose deck Death and Life-in-Death throw dice for the soul of the wretched mariner. Life-in-Death wins. The mariner sees the souls of the dead men leave their bodies; he endures the awful loneliness of the wide ocean; he sees "the curse in a dead man's eye." At last, in an instant of self forgetfulness, he blesses the happy creatures of the deep--the water snakes that play about the ship. That moment the spell beings to break. Sleep refreshes him and there is an element of hope in all that follows. At last he beholds his native land; but he is ever after constrained to wander from place to place, and teach by his tale the lesson of love for all life.

The unusual setting of the story, as well as the ballad meter, simple but artistic, are admirably suited to make impressive the supernatural element introduced into the poem, which would be grotesque, were it less realistic. We must regard the albatross as the keynote of the tale. Six of the seven parts into which the poem is divided end with some reference to this bird.

The versification is varied; the words and phrases felicitous; the melody of the stanzas unsurpassed; while the imagery is so vivid that what we remember seems to be the pictures we have seen, rather than the events that have been narrated.

The following extracts give some idea of this power:

QUOTATIONS.

OCH CLO.-The other day I was what you would call floored by a Jew. He passed me several times, crying for old clothes in the most nasal and extraordinary tone I even heard. At last I was so provoked, that I said to him, "Pray, why can't you say, 'old clothes' in a plain way as I do now?" The Jew stopped, and looking very gravely at me, said in a clear and even fine accent, "Sir, I can say old clothes as well as you can; but if you had to say so ten times a minute, for an hour together, you would say Och Clo as I do now;" and so he marched off. I was so confounded with the justice of his retort, that I followed and gave him a shilling, the only one I had.-Coleridge, Table Talk.

Doing an evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.

Greatness and goodness are not means but ends.

A dwarf sees farther than a giant when he has the giant's shoulders to mount on.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose,--words in their best order; poetry,--the best words in their best order.

CRITICISMS

Coleridge suffered an almost lifelong punishment for his errors, whilst the world at large has the unwithering fruits of his labors and his genius and his sufferings.-De Quincey.

The largest and most spacious intellect, the subtlest and most comprehensive, that has yet existed among men.--De Quincey.

He is a wonderful man. His conversation teems with soul, mind, and spirit. Then he is so benevolent, so good-tempered and cheerful, and, like William, interests himself so much about every trifle. At first I thought him very plain, that is, for about three minutes: he is pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish, loose-growing, half-curling, rough black hair. But, if you hear him speak for five minutes, you think no more of them. His eye is large and full, and not very dark, but grey-such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind; it has more of "the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling" than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark eyebrows, and an overhanging forehead.-Dorothy Wordsworth.

Of Coleridge's best verses I venture to affirm the world has nothing like them, and can never have.-Swinburne.

To the man himself Nature had given, in high measure, the seeds of a noble endowment; and to unfold it had been forbidden him.-Carlyle.

The most wonderful man I ever knew was Coleridge.-Wordsworth.