William Hazlitt describes Samuel Taylor Coleridge as ‘too rich in intellectual wealth, to need to task himself to any drudgery: he has only to draw the sliders of his imagination, and a thousand subjects expand before him, startling him with their brilliancy, or losing themselves in endless obscurity’.1 Hazlitt’s insight, though negative in this characterization, is suggestive of the nature of Coleridge’s achievement in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, ‘The Pains of Sleep’, and Christabel. Imaginative and experimental, Coleridge’s intellect informs the moral and aesthetic universes created and uncreated in the poetry. Deftly generating images and impressions, Coleridge immediately undercuts any certainty, favouring sublime ‘obscurity’ in his innovative and evanescent poetry.
The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, featuring in the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads as the first poem in the collection, and in volume one of the 1802 edition, breathes new life into the ballad. The Rime encompasses religious and supernatural themes along with travel and scientific elements, uniting them via the ballad’s capacious form. Biographia Literaria, Coleridge’s literary memoir, recollects the poem as based on strict poetic principles developed by Wordsworth and Coleridge,2 where Wordsworth explains The Rime as an attempt at a collaborative project from which he removed himself after realizing the creative differences between the pair.3 The Advertisement to the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads claims that ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere was professedly written in imitation of the style, as well as of the spirit of the elder poets’;4 but this gloss of the poem deliberately declines to discuss the innovative quality of a poem which estranges as it intrigues the reader. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has attracted critical attention, in part, for the perplexing moral universe created in the poem. William Empson observes that Coleridge seems to be playing a trick on the reader, implying a Christian framework and ‘using it to teach moral truths which were not its own’ by having the only practical moral as ‘Don’t pull poor pussy’s tail, because God loves all His creatures’.5 But Edward E. Bostetter points out the chilling quality of the poem’s ethical dimension: ‘The moral conception here is primitive and savage – utterly arbitrary in its ruthlessness … it is the Old Testament morality of the avenging Jehovah.’6 However, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, though often discussed as a poem primarily concerned by morality, indulges in digression, archaisms, and inexplicable shifts to complicate any sense of straightforward didacticism. Evading easy answers, the poem heightens rather than dispels the tension embedded in the poem, courting the reader’s attempt to discover significance only to refuse it. The menacing brutality of the Rime, despite the comforting rhymes of the mariner at the close of the poem, suggests the continuing impulse in Coleridge’s poetry to complicate. Fissure and doubts shadow the poetry despite the outward ‘impulse for unity’.7
Kubla Khan develops the poet as a bard‐like figure who encapsulates an almost pure kind of poetry. The Preface immediately creates a series of problems that work to distance the reader from the poetry. The reader is offered not the vision experienced by the disoriented and rudely awoken poet, but ‘a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease’.8 The poem is characterized not as an aesthetic achievement, but as a ‘psychological’ curiosity. But the poem seems to free itself from pathologized constraints, focusing on the creative imagination as a force:
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon‐lover! (Kubla Khan, 12–16)
The passionate energy of the speaker, where exclamation marks repeatedly underscore the ecstatic vision experienced, take the focus away from any notion of a record of ‘the dream of pain and disease’. The preface seems disconnected from the poem as the imagination, the synthesizing faculty, creates an excitement that propels the poetry forwards after the initial description of the ‘stately pleasure‐dome’ (2) and its surroundings. The irregular rhymes that deploy cross‐rhyme and couplets bolster the savage and enchanting beauty of the scene. The wailing woman’s cry becomes the song that the poet would revive, the song that seems impossible to articulate in poetry:
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey‐dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise. (Kubla Khan, 42–54)
The leap from the wailing woman’s cry to the symphony and song of the ‘damsel with a dulcimer’ (37) suggests the increasing complexity of the poet’s vision. In the act of retelling, the poet deepens and refines his vision, as the excitement increases from line to line. The poet’s dream, though apparently foiled as he cannot rebuild ‘that dome in air’, is far from lost. The power and mystery of poetic creation ripple through this implicit avowal of creative limits. Kathleen Wheeler argues that ‘the narrator is symbolically the imagination itself, or the ideal poet, the ideal creator, omniscient, mysterious, and unknown’.9 While this insight is suggestive, Coleridge keeps the narrator resolutely human. Though the power of the poetry and vision transfigures him, as in Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, such divine inspiration cannot last. Poetic inspiration inspires ‘holy dread’ as the poet is both elevated and maddened by the vision and ‘milk of Paradise’.
Heightened states form the focus of much of Coleridge’s poetry, with ‘The Pains of Sleep’ painting an affecting portrait of the tormented poet. Though composed in 1803, Coleridge published the poem alongside Kubla Khan and Christabel in 1816. Though it has been read as a record of Coleridge’s opium‐fuelled dreams, the poem carefully evades such simplistic interpretations by its arresting structure, which moves from the calm of the poet composing himself for sleep in ‘reverential resignation’ (‘The Pains of Sleep’, 7) to the brawl of his recollected dream, to self‐accusing guilt and self‐exculpation. Yet the opening sets up the uneasiness that will descend into nightmare in the second stanza. Choosing submission, Coleridge’s poem immediately positions the poet as a supplicant. Though ‘not unblest’ (‘The Pains of Sleep’, 11) with the negatives shadowing the sense that he has almost descended to such a state, he senses that he is surrounded, within and without, by ‘Eternal strength and wisdom’ (‘The Pains of Sleep’, 13). Yet the focus of the poem is not the submission he now feels, but the agony of the preceding night:
But yester‐night I prayed aloud
In anguish and in agony,
Up‐starting from the fiendish crowd
Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:
A lurid light, a trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,
And whom I scorned, those only strong!
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
Still baffled, and yet burning still! (‘The Pains of Sleep’, 14–22)
Surrounded by a ‘fiendish crowd’ of torturing demons, Coleridge is oppressed by ‘Life‐stifling fear, soul‐stifling shame’ (32). The rhyme of ‘agony’ and ‘me’ makes suffering the poet’s identifying feature. Yet the emotions chosen, the thirst for revenge and the powerless will, present the poet as imprisoned by the same vices that consigned Satan and the fallen angels to Hell in Paradise Lost. Horrified by these tormenting visions, the poet cannot discern whether these horrors are things ‘I suffered, or I did’ (29). The vision overwhelms and terrifies the poet who suffers without recourse to knowledge or certainty. If Kubla Khan made vision a triumph that cannot quite be sustained and fully articulated by the human poet, ‘The Pains of Sleep’ makes vision a degrading horror that offers a window into hell. The final, solving stanza shows such vision to be no aberration; three nights are cursed by such torments as ‘Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me / Distemper’s worst calamity’ (35–6). Denied the sustenance of rest, the poet attempts to find a reason for such torment:
I wept as I had been a child;
And having thus by tears subdued
My anguish to a milder mood,
Such punishments, I said, were due
To natures deepliest stained with sin,—
For aye entempesting anew
The unfathomable hell within
The horror of their deeds to view,
To know and loathe, yet wish and do!
Such griefs with such men well agree,
But wherefore, wherefore fall on me?
To be beloved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed. (‘The Pains of Sleep’, 40–52)
The poet’s tears, a kind of catharsis, offer a new perspective on the baffling suffering experienced over that night and the previous two nights. In explicitly Christian terms, he affirms that misery is appropriate agony for ‘natures deepliest stained with sin’, yet this apparent moral is undermined by the insertion of ‘I said’ partway through his explanation of nightmarish torment. Coleridge appears to be grasping for a rationale for his suffering rather than discovering an unassailable truth. The ‘hell’ within once again recalls Milton’s Satan’s torments in Book IV of Paradise Lost as he discovers that ‘myself am Hell’,10 but moral reasoning seems undermined by the suffering falling on the poet himself. If the poet’s explanation for such misery is correct, then it follows that Coleridge is one of Satan’s men, imprisoned by the ‘unfathomable hell within’. Or, as in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, such agonies are arbitrary, unjust, and nightmarish, borne undeservedly by morally upstanding men even as the vicious go unpunished. The repeated ‘wherefore’ agonizingly reveals the depth of the poet’s pain, where the broken sense that his question will never be answered pervades the poetry. The final couplet seems a solving gesture, but one that deliberately fails to provide the answer that he needs. Uncertainty assails the poet even as he attempts to close ‘The Pains of Sleep’ with some semblance of an affirmation.
Omitted from the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) for which it was written, Coleridge did not publish Christabel until 1816, including it in his collection with Kubla Khan and ‘The Pains of Sleep’. Having survived through recital for many years, the poem had earned many plaudits before its publication, most notably from Byron, who requested that John Murray publish the poem. Christabel’s relationship with the Rime of the Ancient Mariner is revealed through both poems’ preoccupation with the problem of evil while creating ambiguity through sustained focus on the limits and possibilities of interpretation. Geraldine and Christabel’s relationship opens up many critical possibilities, with Coleridge implying vampiric, lesbian, and Christian overtones to the poem. ‘Christabel’, a portmanteau of Christ and Abel, announces her as a good victim, with Coleridge retaining Christ’s suffering rather than his power. The ‘Abel’ element immediately suggests a missing sisterly presence that should mimic Cain’s role; the reader is primed to expect Geraldine and her seductive darkness even before her arrival into the poem. More fascinated with formal experimentation than the Rime, Coleridge announces a new metrical system ‘of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables’ (‘Preface to Christabel’, p. 69). The consequence is that, as O’Neill and Mahoney suggest, ‘each line seems like a stealthy event’.11 Ostensibly relating Christabel’s encounter with the most fair and fatal Geraldine, the narrator continually questions and suggests readings of Geraldine that shroud her in mystery that deepens with every line. As in ‘The Thorn’, the questioning and doubt experienced by the speaker destabilize the poem, deliberately undermining any narrative simplicity. Suggestive rather than overt, Coleridge makes the poem whisper its discomfiting statements, as in the line ‘Some say, she sees my lady’s shroud’, and make possibly innocuous events, such as the mastiff’s howls, seem prescient and eerie. This oddly questioning mode adds a metapoetic dimension to the poem, as the narrator asks: ‘Is the night chilly and dark? / The night is chilly, but not dark’ (Christabel 1.14–15). Going over his gothic checklist, the narrator is forced to admit that the scene does not quite conform to the genre, just as the story deliberately fails to pinpoint Geraldine as entirely evil. Christabel creates the impression that it knows not what it is; its mystery becomes the centre and circumference of the poetry.
Christabel’s first encounter with Geraldine sees the former almost overcome by the otherworldly beauty of the ‘damsel bright’ (Christabel 1.58):
There she sees a damsel bright,
Drest in a silken robe of white,
That shadowy in the moonlight shone:
The neck that made that white robe wan,
Her stately neck, and arms were bare;
Her blue‐veined feet unsandl’d were,
And wildly glittered here and there
The gems entangled in her hair.
I guess, ’twas frightful there to see
A lady so richly clad as she—
Beautiful exceedingly! (Christabel 1.58–68)
This passage, inspirational for Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ and Shelley’s supernatural female ‘Upborne by her wild and glittering hair’ (46) in ‘The Two Spirits: An Allegory’, shows Coleridge playing with symbolism as aesthetic pleasure threatens to overwhelm moral judgement. Geraldine, as yet unnamed, is clothed in dazzling white outshined only by her skin. Her bare and blue‐veined feet are both beautiful and vulnerable, and the ‘wildly’ glittering jewels in her hair are the only suggestion of her possible danger. The inclusion of ‘I guess’ attempts to explain Christabel’s recoil from Geraldine, but rather than her gorgeous appearance seeming to hypnotize Christabel, it seems that she instinctively avoids evil, praying that ‘Mary mother, save me now!’ (Christabel 1.69). Christabel, orphaned, is vulnerable and motherless, in the moment of encounter with the beautiful and dangerous Geraldine.
The narrator repeatedly implies Geraldine’s sinister qualities, such as where the ‘mastiff old’ (Christabel 1.147) moans angrily as Geraldine passes, and the almost coy suggestion, ‘Perhaps it is the owlet’s scritch’ (Christabel 1.152), serves only to increase the reader’s sense of Geraldine’s danger. Seeming possessed, Geraldine attempts to expel Christabel’s mother from her protective role, bidding her ghost: ‘“Off, wandering mother! Peak and pine! / I have power to bid thee flee”’ (Christabel 1.205–6). The narrator even wonders: ‘Why stares she with unsettled eye? / Can she the bodiless dead espy?’ (Christabel 1.208–9). Despite such leading commentary, the narrator can still seem to sympathize with her, even referring to her as ‘poor Geraldine’ (Christabel 1.207). Unsettling in both her beauty and her ambiguous moral position, the sensual encounter between the two women shows Geraldine take a dominant, even maternal role with regards to Christabel. Here, the narrator explicitly associates beauty with danger:
Her silken robe, and inner vest,
Dropt to her feet, and full in view,
Behold! her bosom and half her side—
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
O shield her! shield sweet Christabel! (Christabel 1.250–4)
Reminiscent of Spenser’s Acrasia and Duessa, Geraldine’s beauty has a power to destroy those who look upon her. ‘Behold!’ enjoins the reader to imagine Geraldine’s naked frame. The narrator resists any lingering description, eschewing the blazon in favour of a terrified series of exclamation marks that suggest fear for Christabel at Geraldine’s hands, but the fear is tinged by erotic desire. Rather than making Geraldine simply evil, the narrator presents her as troubling and troubled:
Ah! what a stricken look was hers!
Deep from within she seems half‐way
To lift some weight with sick assay,
And eyes the maid and seeks delay; (Christabel 1.256–9)
Geraldine is seemingly compelled to be the seductress, and the narrator records a flicker of doubt in her performance. Desperately attempting to lift the ‘weight’ that forces her to continue with the destruction of Christabel, the triplet rhymes agonizingly lengthen Geraldine’s trial. Though later, Geraldine will seem arrogantly proud of the spell cast on Christabel, as she ‘tricks her hair in lovely plight, / And nothing doubting of her spell’ (Christabel 2.365–6), Coleridge refuses to allow the reader to simply align Geraldine with evil without thinking more deeply of the forces working upon her.
The plot, following Christabel’s enchantment, seems almost Shakespearean in its development. Christabel’s father, Sir Leoline, after Geraldine informs him that her father is an old and estranged friend of his youth, vows to protect her in his name. Overlooking his daughter’s stunned behaviour and her plea that Geraldine be sent from court, Sir Leoline decides to follow his resolution to protect the woman he believes to be his former friend’s daughter. Explained by the narrator as an overcompensation for the enmity sprung up between the two men – ‘And to be wroth with one we love, / Doth work like madness in the brain’ (Christabel 2.412–13) – the psychological acuity developed in the poem balances the supernatural elements carefully.
It is Bracy the bard who dreams the symbolic vision of the snake crushing the dove, a vision that has him dismissed from court as he seeks to defend Christabel against her serpentine enemy, Geraldine. The poet, as in Kubla Khan, has the power to see deeply into the life of things, but here, such power can only be frustrated by the audience, unwilling to partake in the vision offered to them. Coleridge creates a poetry of blurred boundaries, where art and life, the supernatural and the natural, become not two separate things, but amorphous and entwined.12 If, as Seamus Perry persuasively writes, Coleridge’s work pivots on the tension between unity and division, these split allegiances bubble under the surface, creating a strain that the poet aims to unify despite his talent for division.13