I Am Torn About Coleridge

Each year for the last fourteen, I’ve chosen one classic poet to read rather thoroughly. Last year it was Longfellow, for instance, and this year it was Coleridge. Part of my self-given liberal education has been devoted to learning to appreciate poetry in the English language from the days of meter and form. Since no school ever trained me in the art of reading this literature, and since I have indeed been steadily growing in my understanding, almost every poet becomes a new treasure to me. I liked Longfellow so much more than I thought I would!

So it came as a surprise to find that Coleridge disappointed me. It’s presumptuous of me to think I know enough to say that he struck me as inferior in skill to Shelley and Wordsworth, although that’s the way the situation looks to me. But my dissatisfaction came from something else. After all, a poet can pale in comparison to Wordsworth and still be very, very good. Partly, I just didn't like reading his many overtures to the woman he wished he had married or his eloquent, poetic laments on how he couldn't write poetry anymore.

But then this reaction might have come from the peculiar arrangement of the collection I read. In the Penguin edition I had, editor Richard Holmes arranges the 101 poems he selected into eight categories: Sonnets, Conversational Poems, Ballads, Hill Walking Poems, “Asra” Poems, Confessional Poems, Visionary Fragments, and Topical Poems. So I read, for instance, fourteen poems written to the secret object of his heart in a row. (Was she a secret, though? Was anyone at the time really fooled by his respelling of Sara as Asra?) The happy result of this arrangement, though, is that the poems I enjoyed most also came one after another and seemed to magnify the beauty and power in each other. So I was torn about Coleridge. Some mornings I rushed to the book and was rewarded, and on other days I trudged to my reading knowing I was going to cover thirty more pages of irrationality or immorality.

I know I became acquainted with many new poems in reading the Coleridge collection, but I want to end with a few remarks about “The Eolian Harp,” which I’ve known and enjoyed for many years. It is undoubtedly beautiful. “The stilly murmur of the distant Sea / Tells us of silence” is just pretty stuff, with all its sibilant s’s imitating the watery susurration and the quaint extra suffix on the word still. And some of the images are marvelous:

Fairy-Land,
Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers,
Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,
Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untamed wing!

Or how about the rhythm on these lines:

Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air
Is Music slumbering on her instrument.

The successive accents on breeze and warbles and again on mute and still (with their viscous t-s-t sound combination) slow down the line to match the calm cadence of the air.

But then, what does the poem mean? I’ve read that the focal point of the poem called “The Eolian Harp” is the harp itself, not the descriptions of the idyllic setting, and its suggestion to Coleridge’s mind that he ask whether perhaps

all animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?

But then Coleridge follows that climax with a but. The woman he sits with reminds him that this view is not orthodox Christian doctrine, and he says he is brought to his senses and becomes grateful again for “Peace, and this Cot, and thee, heart-honored Maid!" Does Coleridge believe in his supposition that he is only a material instrument animated by the collective soul of the universe? Or does he believe the Christian orthodoxy of Sara? If he favors the idea of the World Soul, why does he end with Sara’s correction? If he’s comfortable with his Christianity at this moment, why does he write us such a lovely poem depicting his flight of fancy? It seems Coleridge was torn about himself, too.