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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University
IN THE CONTEXT OF A RECENT REVIVAL OF INTEREST IN ROMANTIC LITERARY form, (1) this essay hopes to demonstrate that Samuel Taylor Coleridge is among the most purposeful practitioners of verse as verse in his era. The essay suggests that, along with his deep engagement with the shifting political scene and with philosophical and religious disputes, he cherished the particulars of willed poetic craftsmanship, and was quick to criticize in his own work and in that of others lapses in sound, whether from haste to express opinions however true or false, from lack of training, from a natively faulty sense of rhythm or weight of vowels, or from erroneous views about the equivalence of poetry and prose. Amid his many ardent defenses--of the sanctity of the human soul, of the trinity, of the clerisy, and of method--his defense of the ancient art of musical perfection in words was similarly ardent and his insistence on its purpose--pleasure--decisive throughout his life.
Mellifluous and varied metrics was his darling study. (2) New volumes of The Collected Coleridge have revealed more and more contexts in which Coleridge expressed his thoughts about the value of meter, demonstrated his practical expertise in meter, criticized the meters of other poets, and admonished fellow poets not to forget meter in the excitement of disputation. Coleridge's preoccupation with meter occupies many pages of the Collected Notebooks, Collected Letters, Biographia Literaria, the Lectures 1808-1818, Table Talk, the Marginalia, and Shorter Works and Fragments. (3) He was interested not only in meter as a topic in itself but also as a discipline that touches many of his other interests. Meter, for him, is the chief vehicle for achieving the aim of poetry, which is pleasure; it quickens passions; it demands technical skill and knowledge of other and older languages. Meter pulls Coleridge back from the chasm of idealism to the vivacious body that his spirit filled. Meter draws its power from both the disciplined will and the body's rhythmical energy; it spans the intersection of mind and body and reconciles head and heart, specifically the heart-beat.
Coleridge's contemporaries recognized his passion for prosody; his own criticism of other people's verse harps on meter and errors of meter as politely as possible, given his fear that a crucial skill risked being lost to the poetic tradition; his definitions of poetry stress energy and movement rather than the belabored distinctions between primary and secondary imagination; and his practice as a poet at its best fulfills his own requirements for verse, promoting this purpose, for instance, in "Christabel." Throughout, he demonstrated in his own acts and in his praise or detraction of others a belief in carefully weighted sound as the true measure of poetic excellence.
In 1832, trying to capture as much of the essence of his failing father-in-law as possible, Coleridge's nephew described Coleridge's unusually intense passion for versification:
Mr. Coleridge has almost from the commencement of his poetic life looked upon versification as constituting in and by itself a much more important branch of the art poetic than most of his eminent contemporaries appear to have done. And this more careful study shows itself in him in no technical peculiarities or fantastic whims, against which the genius of our language revolts; but in a more exact adaptation of the movement to the feeling, and in a finer selection of particular words with reference to their local fitness for sense and sound. (Table Talk 1.564)
Merging his own impressions with his uncle's remarks in a conversation on 31 March 1832, Henry Nelson Coleridge goes on to describe Coleridge as a musical poet rather than a pictorial one, for "the whole man is made up of music; and yet Mr. Coleridge has no ear for music, as it is technically called." He compares the exquisite versification of the conclusion to "Kubla Khan" to "an outburst or crash of harps in the still air of autumn. The verses seem as if played to the ear upon some unseen instrument." In the poem's "symphony and song" the long and fluctuating pentameters contract into tetrameters after a reverberating silence, changing keys and closing chords. The musicality is even more pronounced when Coleridge recites in person. In an auditory performance near to operatic "recitative," Coleridge plays the "rhapsode": "it is perfectly miraculous with what exquisite searching he elicits and makes sensible every particle of the meaning, not leaving a shadow of a shade of the feeling, the mood, the degree, untouched" (TT 1.564). Recalling his friend's voice from years long past, the elderly Wordsworth told the album publisher Samuel Carter Hall that Coleridge was "quite an epicure in sound." (4)
1. Meter, Skill, and Discipline
Although this tribute of an adoring nephew doing double duty as a son-in-law may strike the reader as lavish, and Wordsworth's praise as minimal, Coleridge's attentiveness to the many aspects of sound formed a conscious part of his poetic and critical work. In recuperating John Donne's meter he emphasizes verse as a precise rendering of passion. He praises Donne's manly meter, a meter that can think as well as sing. As early as 1795 he imitates Donne's "dromedary muse"--"Thought's Forge and Furnace, Mangle-press and Screw" (5)--to demonstrate how spondaic and trochaic substitutions reenact twists of thought. In his 1811 annotations to Charles Lamb's copy of Donne's poems he exults in Donne's achievement of intensity through metrical variation at a time when many readers still thought Donne's numbers knotted and irregular. "To read Dryden, Pope &c, you need only count syllables; but to read Donne you must measure Time, & discover the Time of Each word by the Sense & Passion" (Marg. 2.216). As Coleridge in his own verse extends and varies the lengths of syllables, feeling them out in his voice and ear as they reproduce feeling, so in Donne's verse he recognizes variable time, the answer that accentual English verse makes to classical quantity. Donne's "Fine vigorous Exultation" reveals "both Soul & Body in full puissance!" (Marg. 2.219) Coleridge praises line 16 of Donne's "The Triple Fool"--" Grief, which Verse did restrain"--where Donne "roughly emphasized the two main words, Grief & Verse, and therefore made each the first Syllable of a Trochee:--u, or Dactyl" (Marg. 2.221). (6) In the manly native tradition of verse, Donne's passion takes form in sound by analogy to the soul expressing its power in the body.
Searching for quantity, intonation, and "puissance" in English meter, Coleridge prefers the variousness of Renaissance prosody over the regularity of meter since Dryden. He notes Beaumont and Fletcher's ingenious use of "Iambic Pentameter Hyperacatalectic, their Proceleusmatics, and Dispondaeuses-proceleusmatics," "not to mention the Choriambics, the Ionics, the Paeons, and the Epitrites." Trained by his knowledge of Greek, he hears "Quantity," "Accent," "emphasis," and "retardation & acceleration of the Times of Syllables according to the meaning of the words, the passion that accompanies them, and even the Character of the Person that uses them" (Marg. 1.376-77). All ears, Coleridge scans as he quotes and as he translates, sometimes tapping out a meter without words, sometimes scanning the simplest phrases--"Fleas that bite" (CN 716). He hears "in all comic metres the Gulping of short syllables, and the abbreviation of syllables ordinarily long by the rapid pronunciation of eagerness & vehemence." He knows that meter saves texts, "for the rule of the metre lost, what was to restrain the actors from interpolation?" (Marg. 1.384). Coleridge imitates meters from Homer, Catullus, and Ovid; he tries out Pindaric odes, Popean or Akensidean epistles, and sonnets, showing how poets exercised their prosodic muscles.
This precision applies to his own meter as well. From early poems to late Coleridge almost never sounds the same note. His zany poems play with song meters:
May all the curses, which they grunt In raging moan like goaded hog, Alight upon thee, damned Bog! (1791; Beer 14)
He tries insulting tetrameters:
Ah then, what simile will suit? Spindle leg in great jack-boot? Pismire crawling in a rut? Or a spigot in a butt? (Beer 74)
His early compliments sound flirtatious and jaunty.
Welcome, LADIES! to the cell, Where the blameless PIXIES dwell. But thou, Sweet Nymph, proclaim'd our Faery Queen, With what obeisance meet Thy presence shall we greet? (Beer 36-37)
His political jeremiads boom the outrage of a biblical prophet:
Like a cloud that travels on, Steamed up from Cairo's swamps of pestilence, Even so, my countrymen! have we gone forth And borne to distant tribes slavery and pangs, And, deadlier far, our voices, whose deep taint With slow perdition murders the whole man, His body and his soul! (Beer 285)
His conversation poems recreate the murmurs of intimate talk merging with interior questions, and the surrounding song of nightingales--
With skirmish and capricious passagings, And murmurs musical and swift jug jug, And one low piping sound more sweet than all-- Stirring the air with such a harmony. (Beer 195)
His supernatural poems frighten as they enact the whisperings of a lonely night--"Tu whit--tu-whoo! / And hark, again! the crowing cock, / How drowsily it crew,"--or the fast approach of a ship--" `But why drives on that ship so fast, / Withouten wave or wind?'" (Beer 260 and 242). When he confesses a loss of energy in "Dejection: An Ode," his opening sentences are so beautifully shaped in counterpoint to the metrical lines as to perfectly illustrate George Wright's admiration for "the flow of the syllables, the pulsing speechscape, sentences plunging forward on the currents of time and feeling which usually flow unobserved but are here marked and measured into paradoxically invisible...
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