{"id":28119,"date":"2010-10-02T10:50:15","date_gmt":"2010-10-02T14:50:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=28119"},"modified":"2015-05-11T12:31:57","modified_gmt":"2015-05-11T16:31:57","slug":"the-books-six-centuries-of-great-poetry-a-stunning-collection-of-classic-british-poems-from-chaucer-to-yeats-samuel-taylor-coleridge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=28119","title":{"rendered":"The Books: Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats<\/i>: Samuel Taylor Coleridge"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry<\/p>\n

Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are the pure Magic. These are the clear vision. The rest is only poetry.\u201d \u2013 Rudyard Kipling on Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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William Hazlitt, friends to both men, wrote:<\/p>\n

Coleridge has told me that he himself liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel-walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his voice met with no collateral interruption.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Camille Paglia, in her book Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World’s Best Poems<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, writes about “Kubla Khan”:<\/p>\n

Sensitive about the poem’s eccentric structure, Coleridge attached a preface whose peculiar claims were accepted as fact by early readers and critics. In it he says that, while recuperating from “a slight indisposition” in the countryside, he was lulled asleep by an “anodyne” (laudanum, an opiate to which he was addicted) just as he was reading a passage in a seventeenth-century travelogue describing the lavish palace of the Chinese emperor Kubla Khan. Awaking from three hours of “profound sleep”, he began to write out the “two to three hundred lines” that had somehow coalesced during his dream. But a knock on the door suddenly called him away. Returning little more than an hour later, he found “to his no small surprise and mortification” that the rest of the poem had faded from memory.<\/p>\n

The fifty-four line text of “Kubla Khan” is therefore to be understood, according to the subtitle, as a “fragment”. Was Coleridge’s defense strategy aimed at shadowy carpers or at his own festering doubts? The poem certainly does not feel incomplete to us, whose looser standards of form descend from the radical innovations of Romanticism and nineteenth-century realism. We no longer expect perfection, symmetry, or sharp closure in works of art. Indeed, modernist plays and dance pieces can end so ambiguously that raised house-lights must signal the end of a performance. “Kubla Khan” anticipates the fractures and fragmentation in Western culture that would be registered in collage, the jigsaw medium invented by Picasso on the eve of World War I and applied by T.S. Eliot to the shards of literature shifted from rubble in The Waste Land<\/i> (1922).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps, Mr. Coleridge, it would have been better to not answer the door while in the throes of inspiration. But I think it’s a wonderful metaphor for the elusive nature of creativity, of the dream-palace of wonder we have erected in our heads – the perfect work of art, fully realized – and how most often everything falls short. That’s the way it should be. The point is not perfection, the point is to keep creating. But it’s a great story illustrating that, nonetheless.<\/p>\n

Now for a personal anecdote. When I was a kid, 9, 10 years old, I loved a book called The Boyhood of Grace Jones<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, by Jane Langton (one of my favorite authors as a kid). The book tells the story of a young girl named Grace Jones, living in 1939. Grace Jones is about to start middle school, and has taken to wearing her father’s Navy middy blouse, and has cut her hair short, and decides to behave like a boy. She is obsessed with all things sea-worthy, and has a couple of imaginary friends from a book she has read, Captain Nancy and Captain John, sailors both, who follow her around, give her advice, support her, or scorn her. She tries to live up to their expectations of her. Meanwhile, in the world of middle school, suddenly boys become boys, and girls girls – and the girls are all swooning over Rhett Butler (Gone With the Wind<\/i> just came out), and Grace refuses to buy into ANY of it, much to the consternation of her mother and some of her teachers, who wonders why Grace is so ODD. Why does she dress like a boy? Why does she swagger through the hallways shouting, “Ahoy there, matey?” Grace is a terrific character. I was in love with her. She is an obsessive. She follows her obsessions to their ultimate. And then, in an English class, one day the teacher assigns a poem for them to read overnight. It is “Kubla Khan”, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. And something happens to Grace Jones when she reads it. It’s like the top of her head blows off. <\/p>\n

Dizzy with incantation, intoxicated with rhythm, Grace almost fell out of the tree. She had discovered poetry and nature in one fell swoop. “Beware,” she whispered to herself, “Beware! Beware! Weave a circle round him thrice …” Then her eyes raced back to the beginning of the poem, and she started to read the whole thing aloud once more, mumbling and whispering at first, then ranting and shouting – <\/p>\n

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
\nA stately pleasure-dome decree …<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By the time Grace noticed her dog Whitey at the bottom of the tree, sniffling and whining a doggy greeting, the two mimeographed pages in her hand were a damp smudge of purple ink. She never discovered the questions Mrs. Humminger had typed up on the second page, but she wouldn’t have been able to read them anyway, they were so blurred by now. But she knew the whole poem by heart. She slipped and fumbled down the tree, fondled Whitey, staggered home, burst into the kitchen door, struck a pose, and cried, “Beware! Beware! My flashing eyes! My floating hair!”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was in love with the book. This was a heroine I could recognize. I did that kind of stuff too. I would read something and get so excited that I immediately needed to play make-believe with it. I always wanted to LIVE in the books I loved. I had never heard of Samuel Taylor Coleridge when I was 10 years old, but this book introduced me to him. Grace becomes more and more obsessed with him. The final nail in the coffin in her obsession is when the class is assigned “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. <\/p>\n

The Ancient Mariner<\/i> was even more staggering than Kubla Khan<\/i>. There wasn’t the slightest breeze moving in the top of the white pine tree, but Grace had to hang on with both arms to the branches on either side of her to keep from losing her balance, as Coleridge’s verses reeled and throbbed, ebbed and flowed across the pages of the book wedged open in her lap. The ancient mariner had shot a lucky bird, an albatross, with his crossbow, and ever since then his ship has been doomed with a curse. And what a curse! All the other sailors died, one by one, and after that he was alone.<\/p>\n

Alone, alone, all, all alone,
\nAlone on a wide, wide sea!
\nAnd never a saint took pity on
\nMy soul in agony.<\/p>\n

The many men, so beautiful!
\nAnd they all dead did lie:
\nAnd a thousand thousand slimy things
\nLived on; and so did I.
\n…………………
\nAn orphan’s curse would drag to hell
\nA spirit from on high;
\nBut oh! more horrible than that
\nIs the curse in a dead man’s eye!<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There was something about the rhythm. It burned and froze. It beat and pulsed. It surged and dragged. It made Grace want to laugh and cry …<\/p>\n

Grace began to learn this poem by heart too. It was easy. The verses beat themselves into her brain like hammerblows, leaving deep dents in her memory. By the time she was ready to climb down from the top of the tree and stumble home, stiff with cold, the dry grass of the field, like a dull mirror, was giving back the tawny color of the sunset sky. She had memorized forty-two stanzas. And that night at home she learned forty more while she was eating her supper and washing the dishes. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Later that night, Grace is so worked up about the Ancient Mariner that she can’t sleep.<\/p>\n

She lay looking up at the cold moon, which was sailing high in the night sky, sucking the summer warmth from the ground, casting a cold, bald light on the floor beside the bed. The radiator hissed and knocked. The powerful rhythms of The Ancient Mariner<\/i> were still tumbling and racing through her head. She couldn’t stop them. After the third time through all of the eighty-four stanzas she had learned that day she sat up warily, turning away from the window, and stared wide-eyed at the darkest corner of her room, where the open door into the hall cast a dense shadow. What if an angel should appear there, writing in a book of gold? Was it true that someone was keeping track? Watching her? Writing it all down on the good or bad side of the page? That would be terrible. It would be much worse to have an angel watching her than Captain Nancy or Captain John, because Nancy and John were her friends, after all, and they weren’t writing it all down like that and holding a lot of things against her forever after.<\/p>\n

Grace kept her eyes pricked open, staring as hard as she could at the dark corner, trying by sheer force of will to materialize an angel writing in a book of gold. But she couldn’t do it, and she slumped back under the covers.<\/p>\n

Was<\/i> it true? Were angels true? Was God true? Grace wondered about God for the thousandth time. Her father didn’t believe in religion. He scoffed at the Sunday morning preachers on the radio. He always said the word “God” sarcastically, so that it came out “Gawd<\/i>“. But Grace didn’t know whether he was right or not. What if he were wrong? Somebody in the family should take some responsibility about religion. Just in case it was<\/i> true. Somebody, somebody<\/i>, should pray for everybody. Grace shut her eyes and put her folded hands under her chin, and prayed for them all (just in case), ending up with a line from The Ancient Mariner<\/i>, ” ‘O, shrive me, shrive me, holy man! Amen.”<\/p>\n

BANG! exploded the radiator. Bubblety-gurglety-poppety-BANG!<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the back of this magic little book is the entirety of the texts of the two Coleridge poems referenced in the book, Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner – which I, a child, caught up in Grace’s enthusiasm, read over and over and over again. Grace’s obsessions are free-range, they run wild and unfettered, her intelligence being susceptible to suggestion. All she wants is to be inspired. Over the course of the book, things shift for her – it is the beginning of adolescence, and she finds herself caught up, almost against her will, in the Gone With the Wind<\/i> mania at the time. So it’s all about Coleridge and Clark Gable. What a wonderful book. <\/p>\n

I had to share that story because that was my introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and it was almost like a master-class in HOW to read him. This in a book for kids! Go Jane Langton!<\/p>\n

To this day, I do not know that much about him, and those are really the only two poems of his that I am familiar with. I know we read “Kubla Khan” in high school, and all I could think about was Grace Jones. I already felt like an expert in that poem, and knew a bunch of it by heart – not because I had memorized it, but because I had read The Boyhood of Grace Jones<\/i> so often.<\/p>\n

Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, writes:<\/p>\n

Along with Doctor Johnson, Coleridge is the great critical intelligence among English poets, but a very different kind of intelligence from the Doctor’s. His interests extend beyond poetry to society, philosophy and religion, but poetry is the heart of wider concerns with language and the power of imagination and ideas. Unlike Johnson, he had no settled opinions; he was a man in search of truth, perplexed by personal, philosophical, political and aesthetic indecisions. We find consistency of principle, uncertainty of application. His mature political thought is lucid, but he cannot – for example in On the Constitution of Church and State<\/i> – bridge the gap between idea and implementation in practical, institutional forms. Yet Hazlitt is wrong: Coleridge does not<\/i> indulge in casuistry to get out of an intellectual corner.<\/p>\n

Uncertainty has aesthetic consequences. Unlike other Romantic poets, he never establishes a personal mode. He writes Augustan verse of little distinction, discursive poems, then the handful of meditations and nature poems in which he is most himself, and finally three great poems that defy classification: “Christabel,” “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Of these poems, two are ostensibly unfinished. Throughout his work there are fragments, including “The Destiny of Nations”. Other poems he worked on for years and remained dissatisfied. His “Dejection: An Ode” adopts a fragmentary form, juxtaposing verse paragraphs that are thematically but not logically sequential. Formal fragmentation reflects the theme: like a modernist, he breaks it to make it whole. He did not complete his vast projected philosophical work. His attempt to schematize transcendental philosophy distorted the ideas imagination could apply but analysis unraveled.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Coleridge started taking opium because he had a toothache, and it became a lifelong addiction. He went to Cambridge. He was not particularly ambitious. He was disappointed in himself, and didn’t get a degree. He got swept up by the French Revolution, and had all kinds of idealistic plans of utopias that could be created in the wake of the Revolution. He started publishing poems, he was in a bad marriage, and he met Wordsworth – one of the most important friendships of his life. They were collaborators, and their publication of Lyrical Ballads<\/i> marks the beginning of the new Romantic era. It was a fruitful collaboration. It seemed to push Coleridge on to produce more. He was invigorated, despite other circumstances in his life (opium, terrible marriage, a melancholy disposition). He wrote a lot. Wordsworth was his main audience, the man he was writing for. He traveled to Germany, and was swept away by the philosophical revolution occurring there at that time. Schmidt writes:<\/p>\n

After visiting Germany in 1798-99, he returned to England and settled near Wordsworth in Cumberland to continue his studies. He fell hopelessly in love with Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, but he was already married. He wrote journalism, lectured, traveled, suffered further financial hardship and grew increasingly dependent on opium. In 1810 he quarreled openly – conflict had been brewing – with Wordsworth. It was one of the great losses of his life. They were reconciled, but the original friendship was over. His reputation grew as his powers declined. In 1817 his prose masterpiece Biographia Literaria<\/i> was published. His mature political writing is the quintessence of that English Toryism rooted in Sir Robert Filmer and Richard Hooker, adhered to by Swift, Johnson and Goldsmith, and richly proclaimed by Edmund Burke. Its expression is elegiac: that moment in English history was over. Coleridge died in 1834.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In writing of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, Schmidt writes (echoing Grace Jones’ experience of the poem):<\/p>\n

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” achieves what no other literary ballad of the period did: the tone of folk ballad. In an impersonal ballad singer’s voice, Coleridge explores in dramatic ways a theme developed in the discursive poems. The Mariner chooses one of three young men bound for a wedding feast. He tells his story: his ship, ice-bound near the pole, the albatross of good omen, his gratuitous act of slaying it, the punishment wrought on the whole crew; his individual penance and regeneration when in his heart he blessed the creatures about the becalmed ship. Released, he travels the world teaching reverence, love of God and his creatures. For six hundred and twenty-five lines Coleridge touches our deepest interests. The poem works on us like a dream: questions of belief or disbelief never arise: we attend. Passages have entered common language; the images draw back to consciousness folk elements and hermetic symbolism. Wordsworth wrote privately to the publisher urging that the poem be dropped from future editions of Lyrical Ballads<\/i> as being out of key with the other poems in the book. He was uncomfortable with its dimensions and themes: Did he sense, too, how much more powerful, durable and inevitable<\/i> it was than the other poems in the book?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One more personal anecdote. When I was in high school, Frankie Goes to Hollywood hit the airwaves. “Relax” was, of course, the big hit. I bought the album, and there was another song included called “Welcome To the Pleasure-Dome”, which I’m sure eventually got radio play. I felt like the smartest person in the world because I immediately knew it was referencing Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”. <\/p>\n

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It had, by that point, entered into my personal lexicon – because of Grace Jones, and, of course, because we had to read it in school. So often when you read literature, especially as a kid, it stays outside<\/i> of you. It doesn’t enter into your experience and your language and your thought process. Coleridge did. I’m still not sure what it all signifies, and what it means, but the language … the language … It’s got such REVERB. <\/p>\n

Through caverns measureless to man
\nDown to a sunless sea.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To me, that one phrase alone starts off a series of images, crazy and untrammeled, in my head. I picture the “measureless” caverns, which gives me a shiver of dread and awe (like: please … measure them. Because I can’t deal with the thought of a cavern that is “measureless”) and then there’s the “sunless sea”, which is terrifying to contemplate. A sea deep beneath the earth. Untouched by sun. There are also complex and specific language elements here, the alliteration which gives those lines a sibilant sound, adding to the creepiness, and the reverb. It’s all “s”s. <\/p>\n

Schmidt observes:<\/p>\n

What the poem means is inseparable from the words and rhythms it uses. Paraphrase hardly gets a toehold. It is not until the second half of the poem that the “I” appears: “A damsel with a dulcimer \/ In a vision once I saw …” … The first half of the poem evokes the “stately pleasure dome”. In the second half the “I” wishes to retrieve it. Could he hear the music he once heard in a vision, he could re-create in air “That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!” He would be like Kubla Khan, himself sacred and exalted. The dulcimer recalls the harps we hear elsewhere in Coleridge’s work, instruments that harmonize the world of ideas and the world of the senses, and liberate imagination from the constraints of literal vision. In “Kubla Khan” the poetry achieves an intensity unprecedented in the discursive poems. The dulcimer’s sound would recreate not things perceived but imagined. Contemplation authenticates it; it can even transform and generate objects of contemplation, as in “Frost at Midnight”. “Could I revive within me”: it is a conditional clause. In face he cannot. He cannot even “complete” the poem. If he could, he could complete himself<\/i>, become one with “flashing eye” and “floating hair”. Yet from its partial disclosure we can infer the vision. The poem is about desire, not the failure of desire. In this thwarted hope resides its power. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kubla Khan<\/b><\/big><\/p>\n

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
\nA stately pleasure-dome decree:
\nWhere Alph, the sacred river, ran
\nThrough caverns measureless to man
\nDown to a sunless sea.<\/p>\n

So twice five miles of fertile ground
\nWith walls and towers were girdled round:
\nAnd there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
\nWhere blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
\nAnd here were forests ancient as the hills,
\nEnfolding sunny spots of greenery.<\/p>\n

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
\nDown the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
\nA savage place! as holy and enchanted
\nAs e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
\nBy woman wailing for her demon-lover!
\nAnd from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
\nAs if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
\nA mighty fountain momently was forced:
\nAmid whose swift half-intermitted burst
\nHuge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
\nOr chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
\nAnd ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
\nIt flung up momently the sacred river.
\nFive miles meandering with a mazy motion
\nThrough wood and dale the sacred river ran,
\nThen reached the caverns measureless to man,
\nAnd sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
\nAnd ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
\nAncestral voices prophesying war!<\/p>\n

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
\nFloated midway on the waves;
\nWhere was heard the mingled measure
\nFrom the fountain and the caves.
\nIt was a miracle of rare device,
\nA sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!<\/p>\n

A damsel with a dulcimer
\nIn a vision once I saw:
\nIt was an Abyssinian maid,
\nAnd on her dulcimer she played,
\nSinging of Mount Abora.
\nCould I revive within me
\nHer symphony and song,
\nTo such a deep delight ‘twould win me
\nThat with music loud and long
\nI would build that dome in air,
\nThat sunny dome! those caves of ice!
\nAnd all who heard should see them there,
\nAnd all should cry, Beware! Beware!
\nHis flashing eyes, his floating hair!
\nWeave a circle round him thrice,
\nAnd close your eyes with holy dread,
\nFor he on honey-dew hath fed
\nAnd drunk the milk of Paradise.<\/p>\n

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