Influenced by the ‘divine Chit chat’ of William Cowper,1 and by other eighteenth‐century poets such as James Thomson whose immensely popular The Seasons related lyrical descriptions of nature to moods of consciousness, Coleridge in the poems discussed in this section effectively patented a new genre of poem: the conversation poem. Richard Holmes includes nine poems under this heading in his thematically arranged selection of Coleridge’s poems and argues provocatively that ‘the Conversation Poems can be read as a single sequence, exploring an extending pastoral vision of friendship and family life, rooted in the countryside’.2 Holmes is a persuasive advocate for the ambition as well as the pleasingness of the poems, yet it may be more accurate to see Coleridge as inventing a form able to deal with very different challenges, less a planned ‘sequence’ than a series of seemingly improvised performances. These performances shape themselves, often after arduous revision, into achieved coherences that are the more impressive for continually threatening to undo their hard‐won sense of order and wholeness.
In most of the conversation poems, there is a trajectory described by M. H. Abrams:
The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation.3
‘The Eolian Harp’ answers to this description, even as its movement is more fluid than Abrams’s generic account allows. The poem, first published as ‘Effusion XXXV’, went through many adjustments before it reached its final form, effectively in the errata slip to Sibylline Leaves (1817), where Coleridge added lines that seem to distil the essence of his most joyously affirmative thinking in the 1790s:
O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound‐like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where – (26–9)4
These lines not only define Coleridge’s understanding of the ‘One Life’, but also recreate his sense of what it might be like to experience it. This recreative quality has much to do with the poetry’s balanced caesural pauses and phrasing, so that ‘light’ and ‘sound’, for example, fold round one another. It is evident throughout ‘The Eolian Harp’, which locates itself in the particular and local. Coleridge, addressing ‘My pensive Sara!’ (1), immediately provokes our interest: why is Sara ‘pensive’? The answer to that question follows after the reference to ‘our Cot, our Cot o’ergrown / With white‐flower’d Jasmine, and the broad‐leav’d Myrtle’ (3–4), where the repetition caresses without coddling, and is double: Sara, like the poet, is attuned to the coming of evening and able to imagine a liminal space between sound and silence, precisely rendered in the sonically exquisite last line and a half of the first paragraph: ‘The stilly murmur of the distant Sea / Tells us of silence’ (11–12).
However, she is also ‘pensive’, we might surmise, because she does not share in the poet’s surmises, rendered in the next three paragraphs, in which the poet’s voyaging, associative thoughts are set going by the Eolian harp placed in the casement. If the initial suggestion of a breeze playing on and over the harp is erotic, the subsequent ‘witchery of sound’ (20) is more evidently self‐reflexive, related to the effect produced by the poem Coleridge is writing and we are reading. Coleridge strikes a subtly nuanced balance between ‘half yielding’ (15) and an active process in which the mind is part of the ‘one Life within us and abroad, / Which meets all motion and becomes it soul’. The poem follows yet urges on the mind’s associative instincts, one of which is to recur to the trope of silence and music begun in the first paragraph; at the end of the second paragraph, ‘the mute still air / Is Music slumbering on her instrument’ (32–3), a potent image of inspiration’s imminence that draws its power from the interplay of vowels and short and longer words.
The third and fourth paragraphs pursue the poet’s adventure of thought, repeating, as Max F. Schulz remarks, ‘the same sequence’: ‘the note of tranquillity …, the sudden sound of the wind harp, … the mounting exaltation of his thought’.5 Coleridge first makes explicit the analogy between breeze and harp, and ‘idle flitting phantasies’ (40) and ‘indolent and passive brain’ (41), then suggests how that mental passivity is capable of speculative daring, as he pushes the analogy one step further, imagining ‘all of animated nature’ (44) as ‘organic Harps’ (45) swept over by ‘one intellectual breeze, / At once the Soul of each, and God of all’ (47–8). Though framed as a question, the speculation verges on a brilliantly moving pantheism that allows for difference – the harps are ‘diversely fram’d’ (45) – but seeks out a benignant, all‐influencing ‘intellectual breeze’. It marks, this section, a highpoint of the poem as a vehicle for philosophical investigation, one carried out without strain, reaching rarefied heights yet staying in touch with ordinary experience, apprehended with extraordinary deftness, agility, and depth.
Here Sara’s pensiveness comes to the fore. Coleridge’s unbounded flight of fancy receives a check from ‘a mild reproof’ (49) that a look of hers gives him, as though she were reading his thoughts and rejecting them as ‘shapings of the unregenerate mind’ (55). Coleridge’s rejection of his beautiful skein of analogous thoughts seems self‐destructive, yet it has humorous aspect as it catches one dynamic of his relationship with Sara. Charles and Mary Lamb certainly thought this was the case. It figures, too, his sense of being isolated from an audience, an admission with its own pathos given that he goes on to pay homage to ‘The Incomprehensible’ (59), an altogether darker conception of God. God is, within a few lines, the supreme poet, passing over ‘animated nature’ like an ‘intellectual breeze’, and a guilt‐inducing presence beyond comprehension, leaving Coleridge to experience a lurch into self‐debasement as ‘A sinful and most miserable man, / Wilder’d and dark’ (62–3). The poem finishes on a more positive note, returning to ‘this Cot, and thee, heart‐honour’d Maid!’ (64), but its poet is no purveyor of saccharine pastoral trifles. Thought is delight but also danger in ‘The Eolian Harp’. Speculations about the ‘one life’ mirror the very process of meaning‐making in the poem. They may also, the poet guiltily fears, cost him his soul.
‘This Lime‐Tree Bower My Prison’ starts with deprivation and loss, the poet unable, because of ‘an accident, which disabled him from walking’ (p. 136), to join his friends, including the poem’s addressee, Charles Lamb, on an exploration of the countryside; it concludes with an enhanced sense of the beauty both of what the friends are imagined as having experienced and what the poet himself, looking from his bower, has found. Lamb, the poem speculates, ‘Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood, / Silent with swimming sense’ (38–9), intuiting what Humphry House calls Coleridge’s ‘Theistic Metaphysic of Nature’ in the possible vicinity of ‘such hues / As cloath the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes / Spirits perceive his presence’ (41–3).6 The ‘hues’ that inhere in the ‘bodily’ (41) join hands with the world of spirit in this deftly intermingled dance of terms. In a comparable way, Coleridge respects Lamb’s otherness (‘may stand’) and shares in his experience. His own personal response to nature is attuned to the interplay of light and shade, sound and silence, an interplay that seems to tremble on the verge of a covert theology, as does the subsequent rehabilitation of a rook which here is no Macbeth‐like harbinger of evil, but is delighted in as it ‘Flew creeking’ (74; Coleridge’s italics); the poem articulates the doctrinal views that ‘Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure’ (61) and that ‘No sound is dissonant, which tells of Life’ (76), yet it manages to allow these statements of provisional belief to emerge from the poem’s imaginative journey, one marked by great assuredness in the handling of diction (kept close to sensuous response), enjambments, pauses, and emphases.
‘Frost at Midnight’ takes its point of departure from the fourth book, ‘A Winter Evening’, of Cowper’s The Task, in which the poet pictures himself looking into a fire, ‘myself creating what I saw’ (290) and associating the ‘sooty films’ (292) with ‘some stranger’s near approach’ (295).7 The work of others was often a spur to Coleridge, even as his own conversation poems prompted poets such as Wordsworth in ‘Tintern Abbey’ to experiment with a new form.8 Cowper is content to see his experience as merely involving ‘fancy ludicrous and wild’ (284); such self‐ironizing detachment gives way in Coleridge to a poem that trusts its associative apprehensions and where they may lead. The poem contains four verse‐paragraphs. In the first, the poet imagines how ‘The Frost performs its secret ministry, / Unhelped by any wind’ (1–2).9 In the clipped, withheld wording the poet communicates his sense of beginning a ‘secret ministry’ of his own, initially ‘Unhelped by any wind’ of inspiration. Yet the poem’s delicacy of suggestion shows in the way in which Coleridge avoids explicit analogies. Instead, we find him, in his cottage, everyone else asleep, including his infant son, detecting a ‘calm’ that ‘disturbs / And vexes meditation with its strange / And extreme silentness’ (8–10). Such vexing disturbance will prove an incitement to poetic exploration; it is among the poem’s indications that the self exists in a large universe. Movements of imagination and memory through space and time begin to dominate the poem. At first, the poet, Cowper‐like, half mocks the need felt by ‘the idling Spirit’ (20) to find ‘a companionable form’ (19), ‘every where / Echo or mirror seeking of itself’ (21–2). The poem, that is, gets in its deconstruction at the outset. But soon the speaker discovers that these processes of echo‐ and mirror‐seeking are not arbitrary; they are the means by which an intelligible structure can be shaped and discerned.
The second paragraph begins with the recollection of the poet as a boy at school watching the ‘fluttering stranger’ (26), the film on the hearth, hoping it would portend the arrival of someone known to him, ‘Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved, / My playmate when we both were clothed alike’ (42–3). That final reference takes the poet right back to his earliest infancy, and the transition to the ‘Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side’ (44) feels inevitable, as does the speaker’s parental hopes for his child, anticipating that Hartley Coleridge will, unlike his father who had been ‘reared / In the great city’ (51–2), ‘wander like a breeze’ (54). The natural description here involves a cunningly circular syntax that has the ‘clouds’ (56) imaging ‘both lakes and shores / And mountain crags’ (57–8), itself an intimation in its harmony of ‘The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible / Of that eternal language, which thy God / Utters’ (59–61). Nature becomes ‘intelligible’, a ‘language’ spoken by God, reinterpreted by Coleridge as poet‐priest in the effortlessly interlinked blank‐verse movements of the poem. The final paragraph brings the poem back to the initial scene in the context of assuring the child that ‘all seasons shall be sweet to thee’ (65), including moments such as the present, transformed in imagination, when ‘eave‐drops fall / Heard only in the trances of the blast’ (70–1), mirroring, as Schulz points out, the earlier hearing of the baby’s ‘gentle breathings’ (45) in ‘interspersed vacancies / And momentary pauses of the thought’ (46–7),10 and ushering in the great conclusion:
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon. (72–4)
These lines were followed in the first printing by a further six lines describing the baby’s ‘eagerness’, which were subsequently cut by Coleridge as spoiling the poem’s ‘rondo, and return upon itself’.11 In effecting a ‘return upon itself’, the poem invites us to read ‘the secret ministry of frost’ differently, now seen as benign if still inscrutable and having deep affinities with the poetic mind of its observer. The three lines are full of words describing forms of soundlessness: a state intimated by ‘secret’, rephrased in the perception of ‘silent icicles’, where the adjective impresses because of its very redundancy (has anyone ever expected icicles to speak?), as if inviting a full look at what is usually taken for granted,12 and culminating in an image of reciprocity for mind and nature, poet and moon, one of a mute and mutual shining and caught in the nearness of ‘Quietly’ and ‘quiet’.13
‘Dejection: An Ode’, composed in 1802, in dialogue with the first four stanzas of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, and revision of a longer verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, stands as the culmination of and near‐valediction to the Coleridgean conversation poem.14 There would be later ventures, such as ‘To William Wordsworth’, but ‘Dejection: An Ode’ takes the conversation poem into a changed generic and experiential dimension, one in which the colloquial if measured style rises to and plumbs impassioned heights and depths associated with the form of the ode and in which the affirmations of earlier poems encounter a crisis. This crisis has to do with the poet’s state of mind, named in the title as ‘dejection’ and evident in the way in which the apparently confident accents of the opening, ‘Well! If the Bard was weatherwise, who made / The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence’ (1–2), slide by means of the expressive syntax of the opening stanza into the poet’s confession of his altered condition. Coleridge speculates that the Eolian harp in his window, emblem here of his poetic stagnation in the ‘dull sobbing’ (6) it produces, might be awakened to something livelier by ‘The coming‐on of rain and squally blast’ (14) forecast by the ‘New Moon, / With the old Moon in her arms’, as the epigraph from the ‘grand old ballad’ has it. He hopes, almost as though referring back to earlier inspirations commemorated in previous conversation poems, that such ‘sounds’ (17) – always important in Coleridge, alongside their close companion, silence – ‘Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give, / Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live!’ (19–20). The rhyme cuts to the heart of the poem’s concerns; who or what is the source of the giving that makes life worth living?
The allusion to Paul’s account of God, ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28) is at once ironic and implicitly devout. Coleridge is not proclaiming a general principle of life‐endowing goodness; he is asking to be shaken out of the condition that envelops him, the condition that stanza 2 will call ‘A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief’ (22). As the poem develops, it achieves a force and eloquence of utterance that means it can at least give expression to the feeling of being ‘stifled’; it shows a keen sensitivity to natural appearance and inner feeling that is the reverse of ‘drowsy’, and in its evocation of the poet’s own distress and its recognition of the value of joy, it rises beyond the ‘unimpassioned’. If this results in a poetic victory, it is won at the cost of emotional defeat. Coleridge defines his predicament in different ways, but possibly the central word in the poem is ‘heartless’ in the phrase ‘wan and heartless mood’ (25): the poet is without heart, without conviction; he can ‘see, but not feel, how beautiful’ (38) natural objects are. His ‘genial spirits fail’ (39), he goes on to say, echoing Milton’s Samson, who asserts, in Samson Agonistes, ‘My genial spirits droop’ (594), that is, his inner source of inspiration falters.
Much of the poetic power of ‘Dejection: An Ode’ derives from the gap between the poet’s capacity for lucid analysis and the anguishing consequences for him of his reasoning. If it is true that ‘we receive but what we give, / And in our life alone does Nature live’ (47–8), not only do the near‐pantheist ideas of ‘The Eolian Harp’ get their comeuppance, but the poet realizes that his inability to ‘give’ means that ‘nature’ cannot ‘live’ for him as it did formerly. As he describes the condition from which he is exiled, Coleridge produces memorable accounts of what a marriage between mind and Nature might produce, ‘A new Earth and new Heaven’ (69), something close to an apocalyptic transformation. As it is, he can only recommend the ‘beautiful and beauty‐making power’ (63) of ‘Joy’ to his poem’s addressee, a ‘Lady’ in the poem’s final form, one to whom Coleridge turns in the final stanza to wish her well. Touchingly, he does so after describing an imaginative response to the storm after it finally arrives, rousing in him less a rediscovery of a ‘beauty‐making power’ than images of war’s horrors and the cries of a lost child, one of the most piteously unsentimental images through which a major English poet has projected feeling.
From that image, in an early version first attributed to Wordsworth, then later to Otway, of a ‘little child’ (121) who ‘now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother hear’ (125), Coleridge offers, in a final transition of great poignancy, a line chastened by reserve and ‘stifled’ restraint: ‘’Tis midnight, but small thoughts have I of sleep’ (126). The rest of this last stanza dwells on the ‘Joy’ that the poet hopes the Lady will experience, a flood of harmony entering the poem through interlaced and couplet rhymes. One line, however, remains unrhymed, as though defeating Coleridge’s best efforts: it is the apostrophe, ‘O simple spirit, guided from above’ (137). The transcendental ‘above’, in this poem, finds no answering verbal partner, no ‘love’, to use the word one expects to find, obliquely reminding the reader of Coleridge’s nearness to the group from which he seeks to distinguish himself in the poem: ‘the poor loveless ever‐anxious crowd’ (52).