{"id":59591,"date":"2025-10-21T09:00:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T13:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=59591"},"modified":"2026-04-13T20:19:22","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T00:19:22","slug":"happy-birthday-samuel-taylor-coleridge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=59591","title":{"rendered":"“My thoughts bustle along like a Surinam toad, with little toads sprouting out of back, side, and belly, vegetating while it crawls.” — Samuel Taylor Coleridge"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nHe looked at his own Soul
\nwith a telescope. What seemed
\nall irregular, he saw and
\nshewed to be beautiful
\nConstellations: and he added
\nto the Consciousness hidden
\nworlds within worlds.<\/p>\n

–Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks<\/em><\/big><\/p>\n

It’s his birthday today. <\/p>\n

I’ll start with a personal anecdote because Coleridge entered my life early. <\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

\nWhen I was 9, 10 years old, I loved a book called The Boyhood of Grace Jones<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, by Jane Langton (Langton wrote one of my favorite books ever called The Diamond in the Window<\/a>\"\"<\/i>). The Boyhood of Grace Jones<\/i> takes place in 1939, and tells the story of a young girl named Grace Jones about to start middle school who has taken to wearing her father’s Navy middy blouse. She cuts her hair short, and decides to behave like a boy. I cannot tell you how much I related to this as a child. I dressed “like a boy” too. Grace is obsessed with all things sea-worthy, and has a couple of imaginary sailor friends, Captain Nancy and Captain John. <\/p>\n

Entering middle school, though, changes everything. The sexes separate, drastically. The girls are all in a state of apoplexy over Rhett Butler (Gone With the Wind<\/i> premiered), and Grace refuses to buy into ANY of it, much to the consternation of her mother and some of her teachers. Why does she dress like a boy? Why does she swagger through the hallways shouting, “Ahoy there, matey?” Why doesn’t she have a crush on Clark Gable? <\/p>\n

I was in love with Grace. She follows her obsessions to extremes. I knew a little something about that. Everything changes, again, for Grace, when, in English class, the teacher assigns a poem. It is “Kubla Khan”, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.<\/p>\n

And something happens to Grace Jones when she reads it.<\/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

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

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 had never heard of Samuel Taylor Coleridge when I was 10 years old. The Boyhood of Grace Jones<\/i> introduced me to him. <\/p>\n

Grace’s obsession goes through the roof 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><\/blockquote>\n

I mean, this is in a book for kids. Amazing. <\/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

Jane Langton is a great writer.<\/p>\n

In the back of this magic book the entirety of the texts of the two Coleridge poems referenced printed, Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner. And so I, a child, caught up in Grace’s enthusiasm, read them over and over and over again until I, too, had them memorized. Grace’s obsessions are free-range. All she wants is to be inspired. Over the course of the book, things shift. It is the beginning of adolescence, and she finds herself caught up in the Gone With the Wind<\/i> mania. Clark Gable competes with Coleridge. It’s such a wonderful book. I highly recommend it!<\/p>\n

This was my introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and it was almost like a master-class in HOW to read him. We read “Kubla Khan” in high school, and all I could think about was Grace Jones! <\/p>\n

Coleridge described the famous “person from Porlock” incident – the knock on the door that interrupted the composing of the poem “Kubla Khan” – in an introduction to the published poem of “Kubla Khan.” Coleridge writes of himself in the third person: <\/p>\n

On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This whole anecdote is a wonderful metaphor for the elusive nature of creativity, as well as the delusional dream-palace erected in our heads of the perfect work of art, fully realized. Everything falls short of that imagined paradise. (Scroll down for Stevie Smith’s poem on the “person from Porlock.”)<\/p>\n

Coleridge started taking opium because of a toothache, and it became a lifelong addiction. He went to Cambridge. He was not particularly ambitious. He didn’t get a degree. He got swept up by the French Revolution, like all of his generation did, and fostered all kinds of idealistic Utopian plans\/hopes. Like many, he somehow missed the ensuing Terror and its implications. He started publishing poems, his marriage was bad, he met Wordsworth, one of the most important friendships of his life. They collaborated, and the publication of their Lyrical Ballads<\/i> marks the beginning of the Romantic era. The collaboration pushed Coleridge to produce more. <\/p>\n

He was invigorated, despite his other circumstances (opium, terrible marriage, a melancholy disposition). He wrote a lot and Wordsworth was his main audience. He traveled to Germany, and was swept away by the philosophical revolution occurring there. When he returned, he settled down near Wordsworth, and began a life of hardship and opium addiction. He struggled mightily. He was always on the brink of disaster. Real disaster came when he and Wordsworth quarreled in 1810. The friendship was never quite the same again and the loss hit Coleridge hard. His gigantic prose book, Biographia Literaria<\/i>, came out in 1817. As important as he was as a poet, he is equally important as a literary critic. I have always found his observations indispensable. He died in 1834. <\/p>\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 also eventually got radio play. I felt like the smartest person in the world because I immediately knew it referenced Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”. <\/p>\n

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