in the unlikely role of wartime civil service secretary, Coleridge promulgated by-laws, visited military hospitals (appalled by the syphilitic cases, several to a bed), wrote political propaganda, and clean-copied the last despatches from Governor Admiral Ball to Nelson before the Battle of Trafalgar.
His shape-shifting during this period, 1804–05, is extraordinary, yet characteristic. At Valletta, I found that his lonely rooms in the Governor’s Palace directly overlooked the harbour. Having borrowed a naval telescope, the bustling secretary somehow disappeared for hours, studying the many ships arriving and departing, dosing his homesickness with opium and erotic poetry, and writing learned notes on ‘organic form’.
It was here I found Coleridge unexpectedly praying to the moon. His strange, metaphysical account of ‘Sabaism’, or sun- and moon-worship, had previously gone unnoticed. But it told me something crucial about his religious beliefs, always suspended – ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’ – between a punishing Christianity and pure, exhilarating Pantheism. It also reminded me how central the moon is to all his poetry, from The Ancient Mariner to ‘Limbo’.
In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder Moon dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists … the dim Awaking of a forgotten or hidden Truth of my inner Nature … the Creator! the Evolver!
Back in England, I located the little lost house in Calne, Wiltshire, opposite the churchyard, where he went to ground in 1813, given up by almost all his friends – even by Wordsworth – as a hopeless opium addict who would achieve nothing. On the hillside above his house I saw the symbolic Cherhill White Horse, carved in the chalk around 1780, galloping towards London, which always gave him hope. Two years later he re-emerged with a draft of his prose masterpiece the Biographia Literaria, a fantastic mixture of humorous autobiography, brilliant psychological criticism, and plagiarised German philosophy. So much of this, like his lectures, is best read in fragments. For instance this inspired lecture note – a mere four words – summarising the opening of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. ‘Suppression prepares for Overflow.’ I came to think that this contained, or rather anticipated, all Freud.
Yet some of the most vivid lessons came from his childhood at Ottery St Mary in Devon, which reappears in so many of his best early poems, like the ‘Sonnet to the River Otter’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’. In the sonnet, he explores the infinitely subtle shifts of feeling between the immediate experience of the child and the recollections of the adult. The recreation of this movement remains one of the greatest challenges to biographical narrative. Coleridge succeeds in catching it with wonderful simplicity, using the stone-skimming children’s game of ducks and drakes, and the ‘bedded sand’ of memory:
What happy and what mournful hours, since last
I skimm’d the smooth thin stone along thy breast,
Numbering its light leaps! yet so deep imprest
Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes
I never shut amid the sunny ray,
But straight with all their tints thy waters rise,
Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows grey,
And bedded sand that vein’d with various dyes
Gleam’d through thy bright transparence!
Then there was the time as a small boy that he ventured into a deep cave near the banks of the River Otter. This was a haunted place known locally as ‘the Pixies’ Parlour’. Greatly daring, he carved his initials in the stone at the very back. A decade later he returned as a young man, to crawl in again and admire these initials, as he put it, ‘cut by the hand of childhood’. After another two decades, now nearly forty, the physical fact had become a metaphysical one. In a poem, ‘A Tombless Epitaph’ (1809), he compared his crawling into this dark cave with his later exploration of the cave of philosophy. The mineral glitter of this reimagined mental cave, the cave of his own mind and imagination, adds a whole new dimension to the ‘caverns measureless to man’ of ‘Kubla Khan’:
… Yes, oft alone,
Piercing the long-neglected holy Cave,
The haunt obscure of old Philosophy,
He bade with lifted torch its starry wall
Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame
Of odorous lamps tended by Saint and Sage.
When I crawled into that same sandstone cave almost exactly two hundred years later, I made a surprising discovery. Raising my trembling lighter, I spied at the very back of the cave the carved initials ‘STC’.
What actually happened, as recorded in my notebook, was that I was so delighted that I sprang up and almost knocked myself out on the low stone ceiling. A large sliver of sandstone came down. As I crouched there, seeing stars in the darkness, I suddenly realised that the cave stone was too soft to retain the original initials. Something else had happened to them, equally interesting. They had been recarved. I reflected on the implications of this idea in my notebook, and my eventual footnote read: ‘Such carvings and recarvings of his initials, ceremoniously repeated by generation after generation of unknown memorialists, suddenly seemed to me like a symbol of the essentially cumulative process of biography itself.’
Another informative place for me was Coleridge’s house at Greta Hall, Keswick, where he lived close to the Wordsworths at Grasmere between 1800 and 1804. Suitably enough, it had once been an observatory. The top-floor study has astonishing views of Derwentwater and the high fells spreading all round. He would climb out of the window and sit on the ‘leads’, or flat roof, gazing at the expanse and writing. One eloquent letter begins: ‘From the leads on the house top of Greta Hall, Keswick, Cumberland, at the present time in the occupancy and usufruct-possession of ST Coleridge Esq, gentleman poet and Philosopher in a mist.’ Another offers to send his friend, the young chemist Humphry Davy, the whole Lake District panorama wrapped up in a single pill of opium.
Here he wrote the famous ‘Dejection: an Ode’ (1802), which we now know exists in two drafts, the first as a secret love letter to Sara Hutchinson; the second as a formal ode on the powers of Nature and the Imagination to heal personal grief and depression. Sara was the sister of Wordsworth’s wife Mary Hutchinson; no melting Muse, but a small, handsome, capable woman who strode about the fells, looked after the Wordsworth children, and copied both poets’ manuscripts. She had a determined chin, kindly eyes and thick auburn hair. Coleridge (who had married in 1795) had fallen fatally in love with her at first sight in 1799, and given her the dreamy soubriquet ‘Asra’ in his notebooks and poetry.
There she remains as a fantasy figure for the next twenty years, though she never quite went to bed with him. Instead she did secretarial work, accompanied him on walks, nursed him when ill, and tried to prevent him taking opium, which led to their eventual estrangement in 1812.
In the formal ode, Sara is simply an unnamed ‘virtuous Lady’. In the draft verse letter (not published in full until 1988) she is ‘O Sister! O Beloved! … dear Sara … My Comforter! A Heart within my Heart.’ In a memorable bird image, Coleridge also describes her voluptuously as ‘nested with the Darlings of [her] Love’, and feeling in her embracing arms
Even what the conjugal & mother Dove
That borrows genial warmth from those she warms,
Feels in her thrill’d wings, blessedly outspread! …
Here too, in pursuing him, I had an instructive experience. I discovered that Greta Hall had become a small girls’ boarding school, so I wrote to the headmistress asking permission to visit. It turned out that Coleridge’s study on the top floor was now the sixth-form dormitory. Accordingly I was granted a half-hour afternoon inspection, under Matron’s watchful eye, while the girls were safely away, out in the fields playing hockey.
After we had inspected the room, I asked Matron if I might