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Title: Poems of Coleridge

Author: Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons

Release Date: June, 2005 [EBook #8208]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on July 2, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS OF COLERIDGE ***




Jonathan Ingram, Jerry Fairbanks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team




POEMS OF COLERIDGE

SELECTED AND ARRANGED
WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES

BY
ARTHUR SYMONS




CONTENTS


INTRODUCTION

THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

CHRISTABEL

KUBLA KHAN

LEWTI

THE BALLAD OF THE DARK LADIE

LOVE

THE THREE GRAVES

DEJECTION: AN ODE

ODE TO TRANQUILLITY

FRANCE: AN ODE

FEARS IN SOLITUDE

THIS LIME-TREE BOWER MY PRISON

TO A GENTLEMAN (W. WORDSWORTH)

HYMN BEFORE SUN-RISE

FROST AT MIDNIGHT

THE NIGHTINGALE

THE EOLIAN HARP

THE PICTURE

THE GARDEN OF BOCCACCIO

THE TWO FOUNTS

A DAY-DREAM

SONNET

LINES TO W. LINLEY, ESQ.

DOMESTIC PEACE

SONG FROM _ZAPOLYA_

HUNTING SONG FROM _ZAPOLYA_

WESTPHALIAN SONG

YOUTH AND AGE

WORK WITHOUT HOPE

TIME, REAL AND IMAGINARY

LOVE'S APPARITION

LOVE, HOPE, AND PATIENCE

DUTY SURVIVING SELF-LOVE

LOVE'S FIRST HOPE

PHANTOM

TO NATURE

FANCY IN NUBIBUS

CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL OBJECT

PHANTOM OR FACT?

LINES SUGGESTED BY THE LAST WORDS OF BERENGARIUS

FORBEARANCE

_SANCTI DOMINICI PALLIUM_

ON DONNE'S POETRY

ON A BAD SINGER

_NE PLUS ULTRA_

HUMAN LIFE

THE BUTTERFLY

THE PANG MORE SHARP THAN ALL

THE VISIONARY HOPE

THE PAINS OF SLEEP

LOVE'S BURIAL-PLACE

LOVE, A SWORD

THE KISS

NOT AT HOME

NAMES (FROM LESSING)

To LESBIA (FROM CATULLUS)

THE DEATH OF THE STARLING (FROM CATULLUS)

ON A CATARACT (FROM STOLBERG)

HYMN TO THE EARTH (FROM STOLBERG)

THE VISIT OF THE GODS (FROM SCHILLER)

TRANSLATION (FROM OTTFRIED)

THE VIRGIN'S CRADLE-HYMN

EPITAPHS ON AN INFANT

AN ODE TO THE RAIN

ANSWER TO A CHILD'S QUESTION

SOMETHING CHILDISH, BUT VERY NATURAL

LINES ON A CHILD

THE KNIGHT'S TOMB

FIRE, FAMINE, AND SLAUGHTER

THE TWO ROUND SPACES ON THE TOMBSTONE

THE DEVIL'S THOUGHTS

COLOGNE

SONNETS ATTEMPTED IN THE MANNER OF CONTEMPORARY WRITERS

LIMBO

METRICAL FEET

THE HOMERIC HEXAMETER (FROM SCHILLER)

THE OVIDIAN ELEGIAC METRE (FROM SCHILLER)

CATULLIAN HENDECASYLLABLES (FROM MATTHISON)

To ----

EPITAPH ON A BAD MAN

THE SUICIDE'S ARGUMENT

THE GOOD, GREAT MAN

INSCRIPTION FOR A FOUNTAIN ON A HEATH

INSCRIPTION FOR A TIME-PIECE

A TOMBLESS EPITAPH

EPITAPH

NOTES




INTRODUCTION

In one of Rossetti's invaluable notes on poetry, he tells us that to him
"the leading point about Coleridge's work is its human love." We may
remember Coleridge's own words:


  "To be beloved is all I need,
  And whom I love, I love indeed."


Yet love, though it is the word which he uses of himself, is not really
what he himself meant when using it, but rather an affectionate sympathy,
in which there seems to have been little element of passion. Writing to his
wife, during that first absence in Germany, whose solitude tried him so
much, he laments that there is "no one to love." "Love is the vital air of
my genius," he tells her, and adds: "I am deeply convinced that if I were
to remain a few years among objects for whom I had no affection, I should
wholly lose the powers of intellect."

With this incessant, passionless sensibility, it was not unnatural that his
thirst for friendship was stronger than his need of love; that to him
friendship was hardly distinguishable from love. Throughout all his letters
there is a series of causeless explosions of emotion, which it is hardly
possible to take seriously, but which, far from being insincere, is really,
no doubt, the dribbling overflow of choked-up feelings, a sort of moral
leakage. It might be said of Coleridge, in the phrase which he used of
Nelson, that he was "heart-starved." Tied for life to a woman with whom he
had not one essential sympathy, the whole of his nature was put out of
focus; and perhaps nothing but "the joy of grief," and the terrible and
fettering power of luxuriating over his own sorrows, and tracing them to
first principles, outside himself or in the depths of his sub-
consciousness, gave him the courage to support that long, everpresent
divorce.

Both for his good and evil, he had never been able to endure emotion
without either diluting or intensifying it with thought, and with always
self-conscious thought. He uses identically the same words in writing his
last, deeply moved letter to Mary Evans, and in relating the matter to
Southey. He cannot get away from words; coming as near to sincerity as he
can, words are always between him and his emotion. Hence his over-emphasis,
his rhetoric of humility. In 1794 he writes to his brother George: "Mine
eyes gush out with tears, my heart is sick and languid with the weight of
unmerited kindness." Nine days later he writes to his brother James: "My
conduct towards you, and towards my other brothers, has displayed a strange
combination of madness, ingratitude, and dishonesty. But you forgive me.
May my Maker forgive me! May the time arrive when I shall have forgiven
myself!" Here we see both what he calls his "gangrened sensibility" and a
complete abandonment to the feelings of the moment. It is always a self-
conscious abandonment, during which he watches himself with approval, and
seems to be saying: "Now that is truly 'feeling'!" He can never concentrate
himself on any emotion; he swims about in floods of his own tears. With so
little sense of reality in anything, he has no sense of the reality of
direct emotion, but is preoccupied, from the moment of the first shock, in
exploring it for its universal principle, and then nourishes it almost in
triumph at what he has discovered. This is not insincerity; it is the
metaphysical, analytical, and parenthetic mind in action. "I have
endeavoured to feel what I ought to feel," he once significantly writes.

Coleridge had many friends, to some of whom, as to Lamb, his friendship was
the most priceless thing in life; but the friendship which meant most to
him, not only as a man, but as a poet, was the friendship with Wordsworth
and with Dorothy Wordsworth. "There is a sense of the word Love," he wrote
to Wordsworth in 1812, "in which I never felt it but to you and one of your
household." After his quarrel in that year he has "an agony of weeping."
"After fifteen years of such religious, almost superstitious idolatry and
self-sacrifice!" he laments. Now it was during his first, daily
companionship with the Wordsworths that he wrote almost all his greatest
work. "The Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel" were both written in a kind of
rivalry with Wordsworth; and the "Ode on Dejection" was written after four
months' absence from him, in the first glow and encouragement of a return
to that one inspiring comradeship. Wordsworth was the only poet among his
friends whom he wholly admired, and Wordsworth was more exclusively a poet,
more wholly absorbed in thinking poetry and thinking about poetry, and in a
thoroughly practical way, than almost any poet who has ever lived. It was
not only for his solace in life that Coleridge required sympathy; he needed
the galvanizing of continual intercourse with a poet, and with one to whom
poetry was the only thing of importance. Coleridge, when he was by himself,
was never sure of this; there was his _magnum opus_, the revelation of
all philosophy; and he sometimes has doubts of the worth of his own poetry.
Had Coleridge been able to live uninterruptedly in the company of the
Wordsworths, even with the unsympathetic wife at home, the opium in the
cupboard, and the _magnum opus_ on the desk, I am convinced that we
should have had for our reading to-day all those poems which went down with
him into silence.

What Coleridge lacked was what theologians call a "saving belief" in
Christianity, or else a strenuous intellectual immorality. He imagined
himself to believe in Christianity, but his belief never realized itself in
effective action, either in the mind or in conduct, while it frequently
clogged his energies by weak scruples and restrictions which were but so
many internal irritations. He calls upon the religion which he has never
firmly apprehended to support him under some misfortune of his own making;
it does not support him, but he finds excuses for his weakness in what seem
to him its promises of help. Coleridge was not strong enough to be a
Christian, and he was not strong enough to rely on the impulses of his own
nature, and to turn his failings into a very actual kind of success. When
Blake said, "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise,"
he expressed a profound truth which Nietzsche and others have done little
more than amplify. There is nothing so hopeless as inert or inactive
virtue: it is a form of life grown putrid, and it turns into poisonous,
decaying matter in the soul. If Coleridge had been more callous towards
what he felt to be his duties, if he had not merely neglected them, as he
did, but justified himself for neglecting them, on any ground of
intellectual or physical necessity, or if he had merely let them slide
without thought or regret, he would have been more complete, more
effectual, as a man, and he might have achieved more finished work as an
artist.

To Coleridge there was as much difficulty in belief as in action, for
belief is itself an action of the mind. He was always anxious to believe
anything that would carry him beyond the limits of time and space, but it
was not often that he could give more than a speculative assent to even the
most improbable of creeds. Always seeking fixity, his mind was too fluid
for any anchor to hold in it. He drifted from speculation to speculation,
often seeming to forget his aim by the way, in almost the collector's
delight over the curiosities he had found in passing. On one page of his
letters he writes earnestly to the atheist Thelwall in defence of
Christianity; on another page we find him saying, "My Spinosism (if
Spinosism it be, and i' faith 'tis very like it)"; and then comes the
solemn assurance: "I am a Berkleyan." Southey, in his rough,
uncomprehending way, writes: "Hartley was ousted by Berkeley, Berkeley by
Spinoza, and Spinoza by Plato; when last I saw him Jacob Behmen had some
chance of coming in. The truth is that he plays with systems"; so it seemed
to Southey, who could see no better. To Coleridge all systems were of
importance, because in every system there was its own measure of truth. He
was always setting his mind to think about itself, and felt that he worked
both hard and well if he had gained a clearer glimpse into that dark
cavern. "Yet I have not been altogether idle," he writes in December, 180O,
"having in my own conceit gained great light into several parts of the
human mind which have hitherto remained either wholly unexplained or most
falsely explained." In March, 1801, he declares that he has "completely
extricated the notions of time and space." "This," he says, "I have
_done_; but I trust that I am about to do more--namely, that I shall
be able to evolve all the five senses, and to state their growth and the
causes of their difference, and in this evolvement to solve the process of
life and consciousness." He hopes that before his thirtieth year he will
"thoroughly understand the whole of Nature's works." "My opinion is this,"
he says, defining one part at least of his way of approach to truth, "that
deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and that all
truth is a species of revelation." On the other hand, he assures us,
speaking of that _magnum opus_ which weighed upon him and supported
him to the end of his life, "the very object throughout from the first page
to the last [is] to reconcile the dictates of common sense with the
conclusions of scientific reasoning."

This _magnum opus_, "a work which should contain all knowledge and
proclaim all philosophy, had," says Mr. Ernest Coleridge, "been Coleridge's
dream from the beginning." Only a few months before his death, we find him
writing to John Sterling: "Many a fond dream have I amused myself with, of
your residing near me, or in the same house, and of preparing, with your
and Mr. Green's assistance, my whole system for the press, as far as it
exists in any _systematic_ form; that is, beginning with the
Propyleum, On the Power and Use of Words, comprising Logic, as the Canons
of _Conclusion_, as the criterion of _Premises_, and lastly as
the discipline and evolution of Ideas (and then the Methodus et Epochee, or
the Disquisition on God, Nature, and Man), the two first grand divisions of
which, from the Ens super Ens to the _Fall_, or from God
to Hades, and then from Chaos to the commencement of living organization,
containing the whole of the Dynamic Philosophy, and the deduction of the
Powers and Forces, are complete." Twenty years earlier, he had written to
Daniel Stuart that he was keeping his morning hours sacred to his "most
important Work, which is printing at Bristol," as he imagined. It was then
to be called "Christianity, the one true Philosophy, or Five Treatises on
the Logos, or Communicative Intelligence, natural, human, and divine." Of
this vast work only fragments remain, mostly unpublished: two large quarto
volumes on logic, a volume intended as an introduction, a commentary on the
Gospels and some of the Epistles, together with "innumerable fragments of
metaphysical and theological speculation." But out of those fragments no
system was ever to be constructed, though a fervent disciple, J. H. Green,
devoted twenty-eight years to the attempt. "Christabel" unfinished, the
_magnum opus_ unachieved: both were but parallel symptoms of a mind
"thought-bewildered" to the end, and bewildered by excess of light and by
crowding energies always in conflict, always in escape.

Coleridge's search, throughout his life, was after the absolute, an
absolute not only in thought but in all human relations, in love,
friendship, faith in man, faith in God, faith in beauty; and while it was
this profound dissatisfaction with less than the perfect form of every art,
passion, thought, or circumstance, that set him adrift in life, making him
seem untrue to duty, conviction, and himself, it was this also that formed
in him the double existence of the poet and the philosopher, each
supplementing and interpenetrating the other. The poet and the philosopher
are but two aspects of one reality; or rather, the poetic and the
philosophic attitudes are but two ways of seeing. The poet who is not also
a philosopher is like a flower without a root. Both seek the same
infinitude; one apprehending the idea, the other the image. One seeks truth
for its beauty; the other finds beauty, an abstract, intellectual beauty,
in the innermost home of truth. Poetry and metaphysics are alike a
disengaging, for different ends, of the absolute element in things.

In Coleridge, metaphysics joined with an unbounded imagination, in equal
flight from reality, from the notions of time and space. Each was an equal
denial of the reality of what we call real things; the one experimental,
searching, reasoning; the other a "shaping spirit of imagination," an
embodying force. His sight was always straining into the darkness; and he
has himself noted that from earliest childhood his "mind was habituated to
the Vast." "I never regarded my senses," he says, "as the criteria of my
belief"; and "those who have been led to the same truths step by step,
through the constant testimony of their senses, seem to want a sense which
I possess." To Coleridge only mind existed, an eternal and an eternally
active thought; and it was as a corollary to his philosophical conception
of the universe that he set his mind to a conscious rebuilding of the world
in space. His magic, that which makes his poetry, was but the final release
in art of a winged thought fluttering helplessly among speculations and
theories; it was the song of release.

De Quincey has said of Coleridge: "I believe it to be notorious that he
first began the use of opium, not as a relief from any bodily pains or
nervous irritations--for his constitution was strong and excellent--but as
a source of luxurious sensations." Hartley Coleridge, in the biographical
supplement to the "Biographia Literaria," replies with what we now know to
be truth: "If my Father sought more from opium than the mere absence of
pain, I feel assured that it was not luxurious sensations or the glowing
phantasmagoria of passive dreams; but that the power of the medicine might
keep down the agitations of his nervous system, like a strong hand grasping
the strings of some shattered lyre." In 1795. that is, at the age of
twenty-three, we find him taking laudanum; in 1796, he is taking it in
large doses; by the late spring of 1801 he is under the "fearful slavery,"
as he was to call it, of opium. "My sole sensuality," he says of this time,
"was not to be in pain." In a terrible letter addressed to Joseph Cottle in
1814 he declares that he was "seduced to the _accursed_ habit
ignorantly"; and he describes "the direful moment, when my pulse began to
fluctuate, my heart to palpitate, and such a dreadful falling abroad, as it
were, of my whole frame, such intolerable restlessness, and incipient
bewilderment ... for my case is a species of madness, only that it is a
derangement, an utter impotence of the volition, and not of the
intellectual faculties." And, throughout, it is always the pains, never the
pleasures, of opium that he registers.

Opium took hold of him by what was inert in his animal nature, and not by
any active sensuality. His imagination required no wings, but rather
fetters; and it is evident that opium was more often a sedative than a spur
to his senses.

The effect of opium on the normal man is to bring him into something like
the state in which Coleridge habitually lived. The world was always a
sufficiently unreal thing to him, facts more than remote enough,
consequences unrelated to their causes; he lived in a mist, and opium
thickened the mist to a dense yellow fog. Opium might have helped to make
Southey a poet; it left Coleridge the prisoner of a cobweb-net of dreams.
What he wanted was some astringent force in things, to tighten, not to
loosen, the always expanding and uncontrollable limits of his mind. Opium
did but confirm what the natural habits of his constitution had bred in
him: an overwhelming indolence, out of which the energies that still arose
intermittently were no longer flames, but the escaping ghosts of flame,
mere black smoke.

At twenty-four, in a disinterested description of himself for the benefit
of a friend whom he had not yet met, he declares, "the walk of the whole
man indicates _indolence capable of energies_." It was that walk which
Carlyle afterwards described, unable to keep to either side of the garden-
path. "The moral obligation is to me so very strong a stimulant," Coleridge
writes to Crabb Robinson, "that in nine cases out of ten it acts as a
narcotic. The blow that should rouse, _stuns_ me." He plays another
variation on the ingenious theme in a letter to his brother: "Anxieties
that stimulate others infuse an additional narcotic into my mind.... Like
some poor labourer, whose night's sleep has but imperfectly refreshed his
overwearied frame, I have sate in drowsy uneasiness, and doing nothing have
thought what a deal I have to do." His ideal, which he expressed in 1797 in
a letter to Thelwall, and, in 1813, almost word for word, in a poem called"
The Night-Scene," was, "like the Indian Vishnu, to float about along an
infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotus, and wake once in a
million years for a few minutes just to know that I was going to sleep a
million years more." Observe the effect of the desire for the absolute,
reinforced by constitutional indolence, and only waiting for the
illuminating excuse of opium.

From these languors, and from their consequences, Coleridge found relief in
conversation, for which he was always ready, while he was far from always
ready for the more precise mental exertion of writing. "Oh, how I wish to
be talking, not writing," he cries in a letter to Southey in 1803, "for my
mind is so full, that my thoughts stifle and jam each other." And, in 1816,
in his first letter to Gillman, he writes, more significantly, "The
stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; but when
I am alone, the horrors that I have suffered from laudanum, the
degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me." It was along one
avenue of this continual escape from himself that Coleridge found himself
driven (anywhere, away from action) towards what grew to be the main waste
of his life. Hartley Coleridge, in the preface to "Table-Talk," has told us
eloquently how, "throughout a long-drawn summer's day, would this man talk
to you in low, equable, but clear and musical tones, concerning things
human and divine"; we know that Carlyle found him "unprofitable, even
tedious," and wished "to worship him, and toss him in a blanket"; and we
have the vivid reporting of Keats, who tells us that, on his one meeting
with Coleridge, "I walked with him, at his alderman-after-dinner pace, for
near two miles, I suppose. In those two miles he broached a thousand
things. Let me see if I can give you a list--nightingales--poetry--on
poetical sensation--metaphysics--different genera and species of dreams--
nightmare--a dream accompanied with a sense of touch--single and double
touch--a dream related--first and second consciousness--the difference
explained between will and volition--so say metaphysicians from a want of
smoking the second consciousness--monsters--the Kraken--mermaids--Southey
believes in them--Southey's belief too much diluted--a ghost story--Good-
morning--I heard his voice as he came towards me--I heard it as he moved
away--I had heard it all the interval--if it may be called so." It may be
that we have had no more wonderful talker, and, no doubt, the talk had its
reverential listeners, its disciples; but to cultivate or permit disciples
is itself a kind of waste, a kind of weakness; it requires a very fixed and
energetic indolence to become, as Coleridge became, a vocal utterance,
talking for talking's sake.

But beside talking, there was lecturing, with Coleridge a scarcely
different form of talk; and it is to this consequence of a readiness to
speak and a reluctance to write that we owe much of his finest criticism,
in the imperfectly recorded "Lectures on Shakespeare." Coleridge as a
critic is not easily to be summed up. What may first surprise us, when we
begin to look into his critical opinions, is the uncertainty of his
judgments in regard to his own work, and to the work of his friends; the
curious bias which a feeling or an idea, affection or a philosophical
theory, could give to his mind. His admiration for Southey, his
consideration for Sotheby, perhaps in a less degree his unconquerable
esteem for Bowles, together with something very like adulation of
Wordsworth, are all instances of a certain loss of the sense of proportion.
He has left us no penetrating criticisms of Byron, of Shelley, or of Keats;
and in a very interesting letter about Blake, written in 1818, he is unable
to take the poems merely as poems, and chooses among them with a scrupulous
care "not for the want of innocence in the poem, but from the too probable
want of it in many readers."

Lamb, concerned only with individual things, looks straight at them, not
through them, seeing them implacably. His notes to the selections from the
Elizabethan dramatists are the surest criticisms that we have in English;
they go to the roots. Coleridge's critical power was wholly exercised upon
elements and first principles; Lamb showed an infinitely keener sense of
detail, of the parts of the whole. Lamb was unerring on definite points,
and could lay his finger on flaws in Coleridge's work that were invisible
to Coleridge; who, however, was unerring in his broad distinctions, in the
philosophy of his art.

"The ultimate end of criticism," said Coleridge, "is much more to establish
the principles of writing than to furnish rules how to pass judgment on
what has been written by others." And for this task he had an incomparable
foundation: imagination, insight, logic, learning, almost every critical
quality united in one; and he was a poet who allowed himself to be a
critic. Those pages of the "Biographia Literaria," in which he defines and
distinguishes between imagination and fancy, the researches into the
abstract entities of poetry in the course of an examination of Wordsworth's
theories and of the popular objections to them, all that we have of the
lectures on Shakespeare, into which he put an illuminating idolatry,
together with notes and jottings preserved in the "Table-Talk," "Anima
Poetae," the "Literary Remains," and on the margins of countless books,
contain the most fundamental criticism of literature that has ever been
attempted, fragmentary as the attempt remains. "There is not a man in
England," said Coleridge, with truth, "whose thoughts, images, words, and
erudition have been published in larger quantities than _mine_; though
I must admit, not _by_, nor _for_, myself." He claimed, and
rightly, as his invention, a "science of reasoning and judging concerning
the productions of literature, the characters and measures of public men,
and the events of nations, by a systematic subsumption of them, under
principles deduced from the nature of man," which, as he says, was unknown
before the year 1795. He is the one philosophical critic who is also a
poet, and thus he is the one critic who instinctively knows his way through
all the intricacies of the creative mind.

Most of his best criticism circles around Shakespeare; and he took
Shakespeare almost frankly in the place of Nature, or of poetry. He
affirms, "Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate
workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of
place." This granted (and to Coleridge it is essential that it should be
granted, for in less than the infinite he cannot find space in which to use
his wings freely) he has only to choose and define, to discover and to
illuminate. In the "myriad-minded man," in his "oceanic mind," he finds all
the material that he needs for the making of a complete aesthetics. Nothing
with Coleridge ever came to completion; but we have only to turn over the
pages about Shakespeare, to come upon fragments worth more than anyone
else's finished work. I find the whole secret of Shakespeare's way of
writing in these sentences: "Shakespeare's intellectual action is wholly
unlike that of Ben Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher. The latter see the
totality of a sentence or passage, and then project it entire. Shakespeare
goes on creating, and evolving B out of A, and C out of B, and so on, just
as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems
forever twisting and untwisting its own strength. "And here are a few
axioms: 'The grandest efforts of poetry are where the imagination is called
forth, not to produce a distinct form, but a strong working of the mind';
or, in other words, "The power of poetry is, by a single word perhaps, to
instill that energy into the mind which compels the imagination to produce
the picture." "Poetry is the identity of all other knowledges," "the
blossom and fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human
passions, emotions, language." "Verse is in itself a music, and the natural
symbol of that union of passion with thought and pleasure, which
constitutes the essence of all poetry "; "a more than usual state of
emotion, with more than usual order," as he has elsewhere defined it. And,
in one of his spoken counsels, he says: "I wish our clever young poets
would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose--
words in their best order; poetry--the best words in the best order."

Unlike most creative critics, or most critics who were creative artists in
another medium, Coleridge, when he was writing criticism, wrote it wholly
for its own sake, almost as if it were a science. His prose is rarely of
the finest quality as prose writing. Here and there he can strike out a
phrase at red-heat, as when he christens Shakespeare "the one Proteus of
the fire and flood"; or he can elaborate subtly, as when he notes the
judgment of Shakespeare, observable in every scene of the "Tempest," "still
preparing, still inviting, and still gratifying, like a finished piece of
music"; or he can strike us with the wit of the pure intellect, as when he
condemns certain work for being "as trivial in thought and yet enigmatic in
expression, as if Echo and the Sphinx had laid their heads together to
construct it." But for the most part it is a kind of thinking aloud, and
the form is wholly lost in the pursuit of ideas. With his love for the
absolute, why is it that he does not seek after an absolute in words
considered as style, as well as in words considered as the expression of
thought? In his finest verse Coleridge has the finest style perhaps in
English; but his prose is never quite reduced to order from its tumultuous
amplitude or its snake-like involution. Is it that he values it only as a
medium, not as an art? His art is verse, and this he dreads, because of its
too mortal closeness to his heart; the prose is a means to an end, not an
end in itself.

The poetry of Coleridge, though it is closely interwoven with the
circumstances of his life, is rarely made directly out of those
circumstances. To some extent this is no doubt explained by a fact to which
he often refers in his letters, and which, in his own opinion, hindered him
not only from writing about himself in verse, but from writing verse at
all. "As to myself," he writes in 1802, "all my poetic genius ... is gone,"
and he attributes it "to my long and exceedingly severe metaphysical
investigations, and these partly to ill-health, and partly to private
afflictions which rendered any subjects, immediately connected with
feeling, a source of pain and disquiet to me." In 1818 he writes: "Poetry
is out of the question. The attempt would only hurry me into that sphere of
acute feelings from which abstruse research, the mother of self-oblivion,
presents an asylum." But theory worked with a natural tendency in keeping
him for the most part away from any attempt to put his personal emotions
into verse. "A sound promise of genius," he considered, "is the choice of
subjects very remote from the private interests and circumstances of the
writer himself." With only a few exceptions, the wholly personal poems,
those actually written under a shock of emotion, are vague, generalized,
turned into a kind of literature. The success of such a poem as the almost
distressingly personal "Ode on Dejection" comes from the fact that
Coleridge has been able to project his personal feeling into an outward
image, which becomes to him the type of dejection; he can look at it as at
one of his dreams which become things; he can sympathize with it as he
could never sympathize with his own undeserving self. And thus one stanza,
perhaps the finest as poetry, becomes the biography of his soul:


  "There was a time when, though my path was rough,
    This joy within me dallied with distress,
  And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
    Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:
  For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
  And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine
  But now afflictions bow me down to earth:
  Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth;
      But oh! each visitation
  Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
    My shaping spirit of Imagination.
  For not to think of what I needs must feel,
    But to be still and patient all I can,
  And haply by abstruse research to steal
    From my own nature all the natural man--
    This was my sole resource, my only plan:
  Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
  And now is almost grown the habit of my soul."


Elsewhere, in personal poems like "Frost at Midnight," and "Fears in
Solitude," all the value of the poem comes from the delicate sensations of
natural things which mean so much more to us, whether or not they did to
him, than the strictly personal part of the matter. You feel that there he
is only using the quite awake part of himself, which is not the essential
one. He requires, first of all, to be disinterested, or at least not
overcome by emotion; to be without passion but that of abstract beauty, in
Nature, or in idea; and then to sink into a quiet lucid sleep, in which his
genius came to him like some attendant spirit.

In the life and art of Coleridge, the hours of sleep seem to have been
almost more important than the waking hours. "My dreams became the
substance of my life," he writes, just after the composition of that
terrible poem on "The Pains of Sleep," which is at once an outcry of agony,
and a yet more disturbing vision of the sufferer with his fingers on his
own pulse, his eyes fixed on his own hardly awakened eyes in the mirror. In
an earlier letter, written at a time when he is trying to solve the problem
of the five senses, he notes: "The sleep which I have is made up of ideas
so connected, and so little different from the operations of reason, that
it does not afford me the due refreshment." To Coleridge, with the help of
opium, hardly required, indeed, there was no conscious division between day
and night, between not only dreams and intuitions, but dreams and pure
reason. And we find him, in almost all his great poems, frankly taking not
only his substance but his manner from dreams, as he dramatizes them after
a logic and a passion of their own. His technique is the transposition into
his waking hours of the unconscious technique of dreams. It is a kind of
verified inspiration, something which came and went, and was as little to
be relied upon as the inspiration itself. On one side it was an exact
science, but on the other a heavenly visitation. Count and balance
syllables, work out an addition of the feet in the verse by the foot-rule,
and you will seem to have traced every miracle back to its root in a
natural product. Only, something, that is, everything, will have escaped
you. As well dissect a corpse to find out the principle of life. That
elusive something, that spirit, will be what distinguishes Coleridge's
finest verse from the verse of, well, perhaps of every conscious artist in
our language. For it is not, as in Blake, literally unconscious, and
wavering on every breath of that unseen wind on which it floats to us; it
is faultless; it is itself the wind which directs it, it steers its way on
the wind, like a seagull poised between sky and sea, and turning on its
wings as upon shifted sails.

This inspiration comes upon Coleridge suddenly, without warning, in the
first uncertain sketch of "Lewti," written at twenty-two; and then it
leaves him, without warning, until the great year 1797, three years later,
when "Christabel" and "The Ancient Mariner" are begun. Before and after,
Coleridge is seen trying to write like Bowles, like Wordsworth, like
Southey, perhaps, to attain "that impetuosity of transition and that
precipitancy of fancy and feeling, which are the _essential_ qualities
of the sublimer Ode," and which he fondly fancies that he has attained in
the "Ode on the Departing Year," with its one good line, taken out of his
note-book. But here, in "Lewti," he has his style, his lucid and liquid
melody, his imagery of moving light and the faintly veiled transparency of
air, his vague, wildly romantic subject matter, coming from no one knows
where, meaning one hardly knows what; but already a magic, an incantation.
"Lewti" is a sort of preliminary study for "Kubla Khan"; it, too, has all
the imagery of a dream, with a breathlessness and awed hush, as of one not
yet accustomed to be at home in dreams.

"Kubla Khan," which was literally composed in sleep, comes nearer than any
other existing poem to that ideal of lyric poetry which has only lately
been systematized by theorists like Mallarme. It has just enough meaning to
give it bodily existence; otherwise it would be disembodied music. It seems
to hover in the air, like one of the island enchantments of Prospero. It is
music not made with hands, and the words seem, as they literally were,
remembered. "All the images," said Coleridge, "rose up before me as
_things_, with a parallel production of the correspondent
expressions." Lamb, who tells us how Coleridge repeated it "so enchantingly
that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into my parlour
when he says or sings it to me," doubted whether it would "bear daylight."
It seemed to him that such witchcraft could hardly outlast the night. It
has outlasted the century, and may still be used as a touchstone; it will
determine the poetic value of any lyric poem which you place beside it.
Take as many poems as you please, and let them have all the merits you
please, their ultimate merit as poetry will lie in the degree of their
approach to the exact, unconscious, inevitable balance of qualities in the
poetic art of "Kubla Khan."

In "The Ancient Mariner," which it seems probable was composed before, and
not after "Kubla Khan," as Coleridge's date would have us suppose, a new
supernaturalism comes into poetry, which, for the first time, accepted the
whole responsibility of dreams. The impossible, frankly accepted, with its
own strict, inverted logic; the creation of a new atmosphere, outside the
known world, which becomes as real as the air about us, and yet never loses
its strangeness; the shiver that comes to us, as it came to the wedding-
guest, from the simple good faith of the teller; here is a whole new
creation, in subject, mood, and technique. Here, as in "Kubla Khan,"
Coleridge saw the images "as _things_"; only a mind so overshadowed by
dreams, and so easily able to carry on his sleep awake, could have done so;
and, with such a mind, "that willing suspension of disbelief for a moment,
which constitutes poetic faith," was literally forced upon him. "The
excellence aimed at," says Coleridge, "was to consist in the interesting of
the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally
accompany such situations," those produced by supernatural agency,
"supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human
being who, from whatever sense of delusion, has at any time believed
himself under supernatural agency." To Coleridge, whatever appealed vitally
to his imagination was real; and he defended his belief philosophically,
disbelieving from conviction in that sharp marking off of real from
imaginary which is part of the ordinary attitude of man in the presence of
mystery.

It must not be forgotten that Coleridge is never fantastic. The fantastic
is a playing with the imagination, and Coleridge respects it. His intellect
goes always easily as far as his imagination will carry it, and does not
stop by the way to play tricks upon its bearer. Hence the conviction which
he brings with him when he tells us the impossible. And then his style, in
its ardent and luminous simplicity, flexible to every bend of the spirit
which it clothes with flesh, helps him in the idiomatic translation of
dreams. The visions of Swedenborg are literal translations of the
imagination, and need to be retranslated. Coleridge is equally faithful to
the thing seen and to the laws of that new world into which he has
transposed it.

"The Ancient Mariner" is the most sustained piece of imagination in the
whole of English poetry; and it has almost every definable merit of
imaginative narrative. It is the only poem I know which is all point and
yet all poetry; because, I suppose, the point is really a point of mystery.
It is full of simple, daily emotion, transported, by an awful power of
sight, to which the limits of reality are no barrier, into an unknown sea
and air; it is realized throughout the whole of its ghastly and marvellous
happenings; and there is in the narrative an ease, a buoyancy almost, which
I can only compare with the music of Mozart, extracting its sweetness from
the stuff of tragedy; it presents to us the utmost physical and spiritual
horror, not only without disgust, but with an alluring beauty. But in
"Christabel," in the first part especially, we find a quality which goes
almost beyond these definable merits. There is in it a literal spell, not
acting along any logical lines, not attacking the nerves, not terrifying,
not intoxicating, but like a slow, enveloping mist, which blots out the
real world, and leaves us unchilled by any "airs from heaven or blasts from
hell," but in the native air of some middle region. In these two or three
brief hours of his power out of a lifetime, Coleridge is literally a
wizard. People have wanted to know what "Christabel" means, and how it was
to have ended, and whether Geraldine was a vampire (as I am inclined to
think) or had eyes in her breasts (as Shelley thought). They have wondered
that a poem so transparent in every line should be, as a whole, the most
enigmatical in English. But does it matter very much whether "Christabel"
means this or that, and whether Coleridge himself knew, as he said, how it
was to end, or whether, as Wordsworth declared, he had never decided? It
seems to me that Coleridge was fundamentally right when he said of the
"Ancient Mariner," "It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian
Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a
well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he
_must_ kill the aforesaid merchant, because one of the date-shells
had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son." The "Ancient Mariner,"
if we take its moral meaning too seriously, comes near to being an
allegory. "Christabel," as it stands, is a piece of pure witchcraft,
needing no further explanation than the fact of its existence.

Rossetti called Coleridge the Turner of poets, and indeed there is in
Coleridge an aerial glitter which we find in no other poet, and in Turner
only among painters. With him colour is always melted in atmosphere, which
it shines through like fire within a crystal. It is liquid colour, the dew
on flowers, or a mist of rain in bright sunshine. His images are for the
most part derived from water, sky, the changes of weather, shadows of
things rather than things themselves, and usually mental reflections of
them. "A poet ought not to pick Nature's pocket," he said, and it is for
colour and sound, in their most delicate forms, that he goes to natural
things. He hears


                "the merry nightingale
  That crowds and hurries and precipitates
  With fast thick warble his delicious notes;"


and an ecstasy comes to him out of that natural music which is almost like
that of his own imagination. Only music or strange effects of light can
carry him swiftly enough out of himself, in the presence of visible or
audible things, for that really poetic ecstasy. Then all his languor drops
off from him, like a clogging garment.

The first personal merit which appears in his almost wholly valueless early
work is a sense of colour. In a poem written at twenty-one he sees Fancy


  "Bathed in rich amber-glowing floods of light,"


and next year the same colour reappears, more expressively, in a cloud,


              "wholly bright,
  With a rich and amber light."


The two women in "The Two Graves," during a momentous pause, are found
discussing whether the rays of the sun are green or amber; a valley is


  "Tinged yellow with the rich departing light;"


seen through corn at evening,


  "The level sunshine glimmers with green light;"


and there is the carefully observed


                          "western sky
  And its peculiar tint of yellow green."


"The Ancient Mariner" is full of images of light and luminous colour in sky
and sea; Glycine's song in "Zapolya" is the most glittering poem in our
language, with a soft glitter like that of light seen through water. And he
is continually endeavouring, as later poets have done on a more deliberate
theory, to suffuse sound with colour or make colours literally a form of
music; as in an early poem


 "Where melodies round honey-dropping flowers,
  Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,
  Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untamed wing."


With him, as with some of them, there is something pathological in this
sensitiveness, and in a letter written in 180O he says: "For the last month
I have been trembling on through sands and swamps of evil and bodily
grievance. My eyes have been inflamed to a degree that rendered reading
scarcely possible; and, strange as it seems, the act of mere composition,
as I lay in bed, perceptibly affected them, and my voluntary ideas were
every minute passing, more or less transformed into vivid spectra."

Side by side with this sensitiveness to colour, or interfused with it, we
find a similar, or perhaps a greater, sensitiveness to sound, Coleridge
shows a greater sensitiveness to music than any English poet except Milton.
The sonnet to Linley records his ecstatic responsiveness to music;
Purcell's music, too, which he names with Palestrina's ("some madrigals
which he heard at Rome") in the "Table-Talk." "I have the intensest delight
in music," he says there, "and can detect good from bad"; a rare thing
among poets. In one of his letters he notes: "I hear in my brain ...
sensations ... of various degrees of pain, even to a strange sort of uneasy
pleasure.... I hear in my brain, and still more in my stomach." There we
get the morbid physical basis of a sensitiveness to music which came to
mean much to him. In a note referring to "Christabel," and to the reasons
why it had never been finished, he says: "I could write as good verse now
as ever I did, if I were perfectly free from vexations, and were in the
_ad libitum_ hearing of fine music, which has a sensible effect in
harmonizing my thoughts, and in animating and, as it were, lubricating my
inventive faculty." "Christabel," more than anything of Coleridge, is
composed like music; you might set at the side of each section, especially
of the opening, _largo, vivacissimo_, and, as the general expression
signature, _tempo rubato_. I know no other verse in which the effects
of music are so precisely copied in metre. Shelley, you feel, sings like a
bird; Blake, like a child or an angel; but Coleridge certainly writes
music.

The metre of the "Ancient Mariner" is a re-reading of the familiar ballad-
metre, in which nothing of the original force, swiftness or directness is
lost, while a new subtlety, a wholly new music, has come into it. The metre
of "Christabel" is even more of an invention, and it had more immediate
consequences. The poem was begun in 1797, and not published till 1816; but
in 1801 Scott heard it recited, and in 1805 reproduced what he could of it
in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" and the other metrical romances which, in
their turn, led the way to Byron, who himself heard "Christabel" recited in
1811. But the secret of Coleridge's instinct of melody and science of
harmony was not discovered. Such ecstasy and such collectedness, a way of
writing which seems to aim at nothing but the most precisely expressive
simplicity, and yet sets the whole brain dancing to its tune, can hardly be
indicated more exactly than in Coleridge's own words in reference to the
Italian lyrists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They, attained
their aim, he says, "by the avoidance of every word which a gentleman would
not use in dignified conversation, and of every word and phrase which none
but a learned man would use; by the studied position of words and phrases,
so that not only each part should be melodious in itself, but contribute to
the harmony of the whole, each note referring and conducing to the melody
of all the foregoing and following words of the same period or stanza; and,
lastly, with equal labour, the greater because unbetrayed, by the variation
and various harmonies of their metrical movement." These qualities we may
indeed find in many of Coleridge's songs, part Elizabethan, part eighteenth
century, in some of his infantile jingles, his exuberant comic verse (in
which, however, there are many words "which a gentleman would not use"),
and in a poem like "Love," which has suffered as much indiscriminate praise
as Raphael's Madonnas, which it resembles in technique and sentiment, and
in its exquisite perfection of commonplace, its _tour de force _of an
almost flawless girlishness. But in "Christabel" the technique has an
incomparable substance to work upon; substance at once simple and abnormal,
which Coleridge required, in order to be at his best.

It has been pointed out by the profoundest poetical critic of our time that
the perfection of Coleridge's style in poetry comes from an equal balance
of the clear, somewhat matter-of-fact qualities of the eighteenth century
with the remote, imaginative qualities of the nineteenth century. "To
please me," said Coleridge in "Table-Talk," "a poem must be either music or
sense." The eighteenth-century manner, with its sense only just coupled
with a kind of tame and wingless music, may be seen quite by itself in the
early song from "Robespierre":


  "Tell me, on what holy ground
   May domestic peace be found?"


Here there is both matter and manner, of a kind; in "The Kiss" of the same
year, with its one exquisite line,


  "The gentle violence of joy,"


there is only the liquid glitter of manner. We get the ultimate union of
eighteenth and nineteenth century qualities in "Work without Hope," and in
"Youth and Age," which took nine years to bring into its faultless ultimate
form. There is always a tendency in Coleridge to fall back on the
eighteenth-century manner, with its scrupulous exterior neatness, and its
comfortable sense of something definite said definitely, whenever the
double inspiration flags, and matter and manner do not come together. "I
cannot write without a _body of thought_," he said at a time before he
had found himself or his style; and he added: "Hence my poetry is crowded
and sweats beneath a heavy burden of ideas and imagery! It has seldom
ease." It was an unparalleled ease in the conveying of a "body of thought"
that he was finally to attain. In "Youth and Age," think how much is
actually said, and with a brevity impossible in prose; things, too, far
from easy for poetry to say gracefully, such as the image of the steamer,
or the frank reference to "this altered size"; and then see with what an
art, as of the very breathing of syllables, it passes into the most flowing
of lyric forms. Besides these few miracles of his later years, there are
many poems, such as the Flaxman group of "Love, Hope, and Patience
supporting Education," in which we get all that can be poetic in the
epigram softened by imagination, all that can be given by an ecstatic plain
thinking. The rarest magic has gone, and he knows it; philosophy remains,
and out of that resisting material he is able, now and again, to weave, in
his deftest manner, a few garlands.

ARTHUR SYMONS.





SELECTIONS FROM THE
POEMS OF COLERIDGE




THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

IN SEVEN PARTS

Facile credo, plures esse Naturas invisibiles quam visibiles in rerum
universitate. Sed horum omnium familiam quis nobis enarrabit? et gradus et
cognationes et discrimina et singulorum munera? Quid agunt? quae loca
habitant? Harum rerum notitiam semper ambivit ingenium humanum, nunquam
attigit. Juvat, interea, non diffiteor, quandoque in animo, tanquam in
tabula, majoris et melioris mundi imaginem contemplari: ne mens assuefacta
hodiernae vitae minutiis se contrahat nimis, et tota subsidat in pusillas
cogitationes. Sed veritati interea invigilandum est, modusque servandus, ut
certa ab incertis, diem a nocte, distinguamus.--T. BURNET, _Archaeol.
Phil_. p. 68.


ARGUMENT


How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country
towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the
tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things
that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own
Country.


PART I


  It is an ancient Mariner,
  And he stoppeth one of three.
  "By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
  Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

  "The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,
  And I am next of kin;
  The guests are met, the feast is set:
  May'st hear the merry din."

  He holds him with his skinny hand,
  "There was a ship," quoth he.
  "Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!"
  Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

  He holds him with his glittering eye
  The Wedding-Guest stood still,
  And listens like a three years' child:
  The Mariner hath his will.

  The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
  He cannot choose but hear;
  And thus spake on that ancient man,
  The bright-eyed Mariner.

  "The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,
  Merrily did we drop
  Below the kirk, below the hill,
  Below the lighthouse top.

  The sun came up upon the left,
  Out of the sea came he!
  And he shone bright, and on the right
  Went down into the sea.

  Higher and higher every day,
  Till over the mast at noon--"
  The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,
  For he heard the loud bassoon.

  The bride hath paced into the hall,
  Red as a rose is she;
  Nodding their heads before her goes
  The merry minstrelsy.

  The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,
  Yet he cannot choose but hear;
  And thus spake on that ancient man,
  The bright-eyed Mariner.

  "And now the Storm-blast came, and he
  Was tyrannous and strong:
  He struck with his o'ertaking wings
  And chased us south along.

  With sloping masts and dipping prow,
  As who pursued with yell and blow
  Still treads the shadow of his foe,
  And forward bends his head,
  The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
  And southward aye we fled.

  And now there came both mist and snow,
  And it grew wondrous cold:
  And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
  As green as emerald.

  And through the drifts the snowy clifts
  Did send a dismal sheen:
  Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken--
  The ice was all between.

  The ice was here, the ice was there,
  The ice was all around:
  It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
  Like noises in a swound!

  At length did cross an Albatross,
  Thorough the fog it came;
  As if it had been a Christian soul,
  We hailed it in God's name.

  It ate the food it ne'er had eat,
  And round and round it flew.
  The ice did split with a thunder-fit;
  The helmsman steered us through!

  And a good south wind sprung up behind;
  The Albatross did follow,
  And every day, for food or play,
  Came to the mariners' hollo!

  In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
  It perched for vespers nine;
  Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
  Glimmered the white moon-shine."

  "God save thee, ancient Mariner!
  From the fiends, that plague thee thus!--
  Why look'st thou so?"--With my cross-bow
  I shot the Albatross.

       *     *     *     *     *

PART II


  The Sun now rose upon the right:
  Out of the sea came he,
  Still hid in mist, and on the left
  Went down into the sea.

  And the good south wind still blew behind,
  But no sweet bird did follow,
  Nor any day for food or play
  Came to the mariners' hollo!

  And I had done a hellish thing,
  And it would work 'em woe:
  For all averred, I had killed the bird
  That made the breeze to blow.
  Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay,
  That made the breeze to blow!

  Nor, dim nor red, like God's own head,
  The glorious Sun uprist:
  Then all averred, I had killed the bird
  That brought the fog and mist.
  'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,
  That bring the fog and mist.

  The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
  The furrow followed free;
  We were the first that ever burst
  Into that silent sea.

  Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
  'Twas sad as sad could be;
  And we did speak only to break
  The silence of the sea!

  All in a hot and copper sky,
  The bloody Sun, at noon,
  Right up above the mast did stand,
  No bigger than the Moon.

  Day after day, day after day,
  We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
  As idle as a painted ship
  Upon a painted ocean.

  Water, water, every where,
  And all the boards did shrink;
  Water, water, every where
  Nor any drop to drink.

  The very deep did rot: O Christ!
  That ever this should be!
  Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
  Upon the slimy sea.

  About, about, in reel and rout
  The death-fires danced at night;
  The water, like a witch's oils,
  Burnt green, and blue and white.

  And some in dreams assured were ,
  Of the Spirit that plagued us so;
  Nine fathom deep he had followed us
  From the land of mist and snow.

  And every tongue, through utter drought,
  Was withered at the root;
  We could not speak, no more than if
  We had been choked with soot.

  Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
  Had I from old and young!
  Instead of the cross, the Albatross
  About my neck was hung.


PART III


  There passed a weary time. Each throat
  Was parched, and glazed each eye.
  A weary time! a weary time!
  How glazed each weary eye,
  When looking westward, I beheld
  A something in the sky.

  At first it seemed a little speck,
  And then it seemed a mist;
  It moved and moved, and took at last
  A certain shape, I wist.

  A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist!
  And still it neared and neared:
  As if it dodged a water-sprite,
  It plunged and tacked and veered.

  With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
  We could nor laugh nor wail;
  Through utter drought all dumb we stood!
  I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,
  And cried, A sail! a sail!

  With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
  Agape they heard me call:
  Gramercy! they for joy did grin,
  And all at once their breath drew in,
  As they were drinking all.

  See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more!
  Hither to work us weal;
  Without a breeze, without a tide,
  She steadies with upright keel!

  The western wave was all a-flame,
  The day was well nigh done!
  Almost upon the western wave
  Rested the broad bright Sun;
  When that strange shape drove suddenly
  Betwixt us and the Sun.

  And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,
  (Heaven's Mother send us grace!)
  As if through a dungeon-grate he peered
  With broad and burning face.

  Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
  How fast she nears and nears!
  Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,
  Like restless gossameres?

  Are those her ribs through which the Sun
  Did peer, as through a grate?
  And is that Woman all her crew?
  Is that a Death? and are there two?
  Is Death that Woman's mate?

  Her lips were red, her looks were free,
  Her locks were yellow as gold:
  Her skin was as white as leprosy,
  The Night-mare Life-in-Death was she,
  Who thicks man's blood with cold.

  The naked hulk alongside came,
  And the twain were casting dice;
  "The game is done! I've won! I've won!"
  Quoth she, and whistles thrice.

  The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:
  At one stride comes the dark;
  With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea,
  Off shot the spectre-bark.

  We listened and looked sideways up!
  Fear at my heart, as at a cup,
  My life-blood seemed to sip!
  The stars were dim, and thick the night,
  The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white;
  From the sails the dew did drip--
  Till clomb above the eastern bar
  The horned Moon, with one bright star
  Within the nether tip.

  One after one, by the star-dogged Moon,
  Too quick for groan or sigh,
  Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,
  And cursed me with his eye.

  Four times fifty living men,
  (And I heard nor sigh nor groan)
  With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,
  They dropped down one by one.

  The souls did from their bodies fly,--
  They fled to bliss or woe!
  And every soul, it passed me by,
  Like the whizz of my cross-bow!


PART IV


  "I fear thee, ancient Mariner!
  I fear thy skinny hand!
  And thou art long, and lank, and brown,
  As is the ribbed sea-sand.[1]

  I fear thee and thy glittering eye,
  And thy skinny hand, so brown."--
  Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest!
  This body dropt not down.

  Alone, alone, all, all alone,
  Alone on a wide wide sea!
  And never a saint took pity on
  My soul in agony.

  The many men, so beautiful!
  And they all dead did lie:
  And a thousand thousand slimy things
  Lived on; and so did I.

  I looked upon the rotting sea,
  And drew my eyes away;
  I looked upon the rotting deck,
  And there the dead men lay.

  I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;
  But or ever a prayer had gusht,
  A wicked whisper came, and made
  My heart as dry as dust.

  I closed my lids, and kept them close,
  And the balls like pulses beat;
  For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky,
  Lay like a load on my weary eye,
  And the dead were at my feet.

  The cold sweat melted from their limbs,
  Nor rot nor reek did they:
  The look with which they looked on me
  Had never passed away.

  An orphan's curse would drag to hell
  A spirit from on high;
  But oh! more horrible than that
  Is a curse in a dead man's eye!
  Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,
  And yet I could not die.

  The moving Moon went up the sky,
  And no where did abide:
  Softly she was going up,
  And a star or two beside--

  Her beams bemocked the sultry main,
  Like April hoar-frost spread;
  But where the ship's huge shadow lay,
  The charmed water burnt alway
  A still and awful red.

  Beyond the shadow of the ship,
  I watched the water-snakes:
  They moved in tracks of shining white,
  And when they reared, the elfish light
  Fell off in hoary flakes.

  Within the shadow of the ship
  I watched their rich attire:
  Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
  They coiled and swam; and every track
  Was a flash of golden fire.

  O happy living things! no tongue
  Their beauty might declare:
  A spring of love gushed from my heart,
  And I blessed them unaware:
  Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
  And I blessed them unaware.

  The selfsame moment I could pray;
  And from my neck so free
  The Albatross fell off, and sank
  Like lead into the sea.


PART V


  Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing,
  Beloved from pole to pole!
  To Mary Queen the praise be given!
  She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,
  That slid into my soul.

  The silly buckets on the deck,
  That had so long remained,
  I dreamt that they were filled with dew;
  And when I awoke, it rained.

  My lips were wet, my throat was cold,
  My garments all were dank;
  Sure I had drunken in my dreams,
  And still my body drank.

  I moved, and could not feel my limbs:
  I was so light--almost
  I thought that I had died in sleep;
  And was a blessed ghost.

  And soon I heard a roaring wind:
  It did not come anear;
  But with its sound it shook the sails,
  That were so thin and sere.

  The upper air burst into life!
  And a hundred fire-flags sheen,
  To and fro they were hurried about!
  And to and fro, and in and out,
  The wan stars danced between.

  And the coming wind did roar more loud,
  And the sails did sigh like sedge;
  And the rain poured down from one black cloud;
  The Moon was at its edge.

  The thick black cloud was cleft, and still
  The Moon was at its side:
  Like waters shot from some high crag,
  The lightning fell with never a jag,
  A river steep and wide.

  The loud wind never reached the ship,
  Yet now the ship moved on!
  Beneath the lightning and the Moon
  The dead men gave a groan.

  They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,
  Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;
  It had been strange, even in a dream,!
  To have seen those dead men rise.

  The helmsman steered, the ship moved on;
  Yet never a breeze up blew;
  The mariners all 'gan work the ropes,
  Where they were wont to do;
  They raised their limbs like lifeless tools--
  We were a ghastly crew.

  The body of my brother's son
  Stood by me, knee to knee:
  The body and I pulled at one rope
  But he said nought to me.

  "I fear thee, ancient Mariner!"
  Be calm, thou Wedding-Guest!
  'Twas not those souls that fled in pain,
  Which to their corses came again,
  But a troop of spirits blest:

  For when it dawned--they dropped their arms,
  And clustered round the mast;
  Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths,
  And from their bodies passed.

  Around, around, flew each sweet sound,
  Then darted to the Sun;
  Slowly the sounds came back again,
  Now mixed, now one by one.

  Sometimes a-dropping from the sky
  I heard the sky-lark sing;
  Sometimes all little birds that are,
  How they seemed to fill the sea and air
  With their sweet jargoning!

  And now 'twas like all instruments,
  Now like a lonely flute;
  And now it is an angel's song,
  That makes the heavens be mute.

  It ceased; yet still the sails made on
  A pleasant noise till noon,
  A noise like of a hidden brook
  In the leafy month of June,
  That to the sleeping woods all night
  Singeth a quiet tune.

  Till noon we quietly sailed on,
  Yet never a breeze did breathe:
  Slowly and smoothly went the ship,
  Moved onward from beneath.

  Under the keel nine fathom deep,
  From the land of mist and snow,
  The spirit slid: and it was he
  That made the ship to go.
  The sails at noon left off their tune,
  And the ship stood still also.

  The Sun, right up above the mast,
  Had fixed her to the ocean:
  But in a minute she 'gan stir,
  With a short uneasy motion--
  Backwards and forwards half her length
  With a short uneasy motion.

  Then like a pawing horse let go,
  She made a sudden bound:
  It flung the blood into my head,
  And I fell down in a swound.

  How long in that same fit I lay,
  I have not to declare;
  But ere my living life returned,
  I heard and in my soul discerned
  Two voices in the air.

  "Is it he?" quoth one, "Is this the man?
  By him who died on cross,
  With his cruel bow he laid full low
  The harmless Albatross.

  The spirit who bideth by himself
  In the land of mist and snow,
  He loved the bird that loved the man
  Who shot him with his bow."

  The other was a softer voice,
  As soft as honey-dew:
  Quoth he, "The man hath penance done,
  And penance more will do."


PART VI


FIRST VOICE

  "But tell me, tell me! speak again,
  Thy soft response renewing--
  What makes that ship drive on so fast?
  What is the ocean doing?"

SECOND VOICE

  "Still as a slave before his lord,
  The ocean hath no blast;
  His great bright eye most silently
  Up to the Moon is cast--

  If he may know which way to go;
  For she guides him smooth or grim.
  See, brother, see! how graciously
  She looketh down on him."

FIRST VOICE

  "But why drives on that ship so fast,
  Without or wave or wind?"

SECOND VOICE

  "The air is cut away before,
  And closes from behind.

  Fly, brother, fly! more high, more high!
  Or we shall be belated:
  For slow and slow that ship will go,
  When the Mariner's trance is abated."

  I woke, and we were sailing on
  As in a gentle weather:
  'Twas night, calm night, the moon was high,
  The dead men stood together.

  All stood together on the deck,
  For a charnel-dungeon fitter:
  All fixed on me their stony eyes,
  That in the Moon did glitter.

  The pang, the curse, with which they died,
  Had never passed away:
  I could not draw my eyes from theirs,
  Nor turn them up to pray.

  And now this spell was snapt: once more
  I viewed the ocean green,
  And looked far forth, yet little saw
  Of what had else been seen--

  Like one, that on a lonesome road
  Doth walk in fear and dread,
  And having once turned round walks on,
  And turns no more his head;
  Because he knows, a frightful fiend
  Doth close behind him tread.

  But soon there breathed a wind on me,
  Nor sound nor motion made:
  Its path was not upon the sea,
  In ripple or in shade.

  It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek
  Like a meadow-gale of spring--
  It mingled strangely with my fears,
  Yet it felt like a welcoming.

  Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship,
  Yet she sailed softly too:
  Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze--
  On me alone it blew.

  Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed
  The light-house top I see?
  Is this the hill? is this the kirk?
  Is this mine own countree?

  We drifted o'er the harbour-bar,
  And I with sobs did pray--
  O let me be awake, my God!
  Or let me sleep alway.

  The harbour-bay was clear as glass,
  So smoothly it was strewn!
  And on the bay the moonlight lay,
  And the shadow of the Moon.

  The rock shone bright, the kirk no less,
  That stands above the rock:
  The moonlight steeped in silentness
  The steady weathercock.

  And the bay was white with silent light
  Till rising from the same,
  Full many shapes, that shadows were,
  In crimson colours came.

  A little distance from the prow
  Those crimson shadows were:
  I turned my eyes upon the deck--
  Oh, Christ! what saw I there!

  Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat,
  And, by the holy rood!
  A man all light, a seraph-man,
  On every corse there stood.

  This seraph-band, each waved his hand:
  It was a heavenly sight!
  They stood as signals to the land,
  Each one a lovely light;

  This seraph-band, each waved his hand,
  No voice did they impart--
  No voice; but oh! the silence sank
  Like music on my heart.

  But soon I heard the dash of oars,
  I heard the Pilot's cheer;
  My head was turned perforce away,
  And I saw a boat appear.

  The Pilot and the Pilot's boy,
  I heard them coming fast:
  Dear Lord in Heaven! it was a joy
  The dead men could not blast.

  I saw a third--I heard his voice:
  It is the Hermit good!
  He singeth loud his godly hymns
  That he makes in the wood.
  He'll shrieve my soul, he'll wash away
  The Albatross's blood.


PART VII


  This Hermit good lives in that wood
  Which slopes down to the sea.
  How loudly his sweet voice he rears!
  He loves to talk with marineres
  That come from a far countree.

  He kneels at morn, and noon, and eve--
  He hath a cushion plump:
  It is the moss that wholly hides
  The rotted old oak-stump.

  The skiff-boat neared: I heard them talk,'
  "Why, this is strange, I trow!
  Where are those lights so many and fair,
  That signal made but now?"

  "Strange, by my faith!" the Hermit said--
  "And they answered not our cheer!
  The planks looked warped! and see those sails,
  How thin they are and sere!
  I never saw aught like to them,
  Unless perchance it were

  Brown skeletons of leaves that lag
  My forest-brook along;
  When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow,
  And the owlet whoops to the wolf below,
  That eats the she-wolf's young."

  "Dear Lord! it hath a fiendish look-
  (The Pilot made reply)
  I am a-feared"--"Push on, push on!"
  Said the Hermit cheerily.

  The boat came closer to the ship,
  But I nor spake nor stirred;
  The boat came close beneath the ship,
  And straight a sound was heard.

  Under the water it rumbled on,
  Still louder and more dread:
  It reached the ship, it split the bay;
  The ship went down like lead.

  Stunned by that loud and dreadful sound,
  Which sky and ocean smote,
  Like one that hath been seven days drowned
  My body lay afloat;
  But swift as dreams, myself I found
  Within the Pilot's boat.

  Upon the whirl, where sank the ship,
  The boat spun round and round;
  And all was still, save that the hill
  Was telling of the sound.

  I moved my lips--the Pilot shrieked
  And fell down in a fit;
  The holy Hermit raised his eyes,
  And prayed where he did sit.

  I took the oars: the Pilot's boy,
  Who now doth crazy go,
  Laughed loud and long, and all the while
  His eyes went to and fro.
  "Ha! ha!" quoth he, "full plain I see,
  The Devil knows how to row."

  And now, all in my own countree,
  I stood on the firm land!
  The Hermit stepped forth from the boat,
  And scarcely he could stand.

  "O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!"
  The Hermit crossed his brow.
  "Say quick," quoth he, "I bid thee say
  What manner of man art thou?"

  Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
  With a woful agony,
  Which forced me to begin my tale;
  And then it left me free.

  Since then, at an uncertain hour,
  That agony returns:
  And till my ghastly tale is told,
  This heart within me burns.

  I pass, like night, from land to land;
  I have strange power of speech;
  That moment that his face I see,
  I know the man that must hear me:
  To him my tale I teach.

  What loud uproar bursts from that door!
  The wedding-guests are there:
  But in the garden-bower the bride
  And bride-maids singing are:
  And hark the little vesper bell,
  Which biddeth me to prayer!

  O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
  Alone on a wide wide sea:
  So lonely 'twas, that God himself
  Scarce seemed there to be.

  O sweeter than the marriage-feast,
  Tis sweeter far to me,
  To walk together to the kirk
  With a goodly company!--

  To walk together to the kirk,
  And all together pray,
  While each to his great Father bends,
  Old men, and babes, and loving friends,
  And youths and maidens gay!

  Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
  To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
  He prayeth well, who loveth well
  Both man and bird and beast.

  He prayeth best, who loveth best
  All things both great and small;
  For the dear God who loveth us,
  He made and loveth all.

  The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
  Whose beard with age is hoar,
  Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest
  Turned from the bridegroom's door.

  He went like one that hath been stunned,
  And is of sense forlorn:
  A sadder and a wiser man,
  He rose the morrow morn.

1797-1798.

[Footnote 1: For the last two lines of this stanza,
I am indebted to Mr. Wordsworth. It was on a delightful
walk from Nether Stowey
to Dulverton, with him and his sister, in the autumn of 1797,
that this poem was planned, and in part composed. [Note of
S. T. C., first printed in _Sibylline Leaves_.]]




CHRISTABEL


PART THE FIRST

  'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
  And the owls have awakened the crowing cock,"
  Tu--whit!--Tu--whoo!
  And hark, again! the crowing cock,
  How drowsily it crew.

  Sir Leoline; the Baron rich,
  Hath a toothless mastiff, which
  From her kennel beneath the rock
  Maketh answer to the clock,
  Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour;
  Ever and aye, by shine and shower,
  Sixteen short howls, not over loud;
  Some say, she sees my lady's shroud.

  Is the night chilly and dark?
  The night is chilly, but not dark.
  The thin gray cloud is spread on high,
  It covers but not hides the sky.
  The moon is behind, and at the full;
  And yet she looks both small and dull.
  The night is chill, the cloud is gray:
  'Tis a month before the month of May,
  And the Spring comes slowly up this way.

  The lovely lady, Christabel,
  Whom her father loves so well,
  What makes her in the wood so late,
  A furlong from the castle gate?
  She had dreams all yesternight
  Of her own betrothed knight;
  And she in the midnight wood will pray
  For the weal of her lover that's far away.

  She stole along, she nothing spoke,
  The sighs she heaved were soft and low,
  And naught was green upon the oak
  But moss and rarest misletoe:
  She kneels beneath the huge oak tree,
  And in silence prayeth she.

  The lady sprang up suddenly,
  The lovely lady, Christabel!
  It moaned as near, as near can be,
  But what it is she cannot tell.--
  On the other side it seems to be,
  Of the huge, broad-breasted, old oak tree.

  The night is chill; the forest bare;
  Is it the wind that moaneth bleak?
  There is not wind enough in the air
  To move away the ringlet curl
  From the lovely lady's cheek--
  There is not wind enough to twirl
  The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
  That dances as often as dance it can,
  Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
  On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.

  Hush, beating heart of Christabel!
  Jesu, Maria, shield her well!
  She folded her arms beneath her cloak,
  And stole to the other side of the oak.
      What sees she there?

  There she sees a damsel bright,
  Drest in a silken robe of white,
  That shadowy in the moonlight shone:
  The neck that made that white robe wan,
  Her stately neck, and arms were bare;
  Her blue-veined feet unsandal'd were,
  And wildly glittered here and there
  The gems entangled in her hair.
  I guess, 'twas frightful there to see
  A lady so richly clad as she--
  Beautiful exceedingly!

  Mary mother, save me now!
  (Said Christabel,) And who art thou?

  The lady strange made answer meet,
  And her voice was faint and sweet:--
  Have pity on my sore distress,
  I scarce can speak for weariness:
  Stretch forth thy hand, and have no fear!
  Said Christabel, How camest thou here?
  And the lady, whose voice was faint and sweet,
  Did thus pursue her answer meet:--

  My sire is of a noble line,
  And my name is Geraldine:
  Five warriors seized me yestermorn,
  Me, even me, a maid forlorn:
  They choked my cries with force and fright,
  And tied me on a palfrey white.

  The palfrey was as fleet as wind,
  And they rode furiously behind.
  They spurred amain, their steeds were white:
  And once we crossed the shade of night.
  As sure as Heaven shall rescue me,
  I have no thought what men they be;
  Nor do I know how long it is
  (For I have lain entranced I wis)
  Since one, the tallest of the five,
  Took me from the palfrey's back,
  A weary woman, scarce alive.
  Some muttered words his comrades spoke:
  He placed me underneath this oak;
  He swore they would return with haste;
  Whither they went I cannot tell
  I thought I heard, some minutes past,
  Sounds as of a castle bell.
  Stretch forth thy hand (thus ended she),
  And help a wretched maid to flee.

  Then Christabel stretched forth her hand,
  And comforted fair Geraldine:
  O well, bright dame! may you command
  The service of Sir Leoline;
  And gladly our stout chivalry
  Will he send forth and friends withal
  To guide and guard you safe and free
  Home to your noble father's hall.

  She rose: and forth with steps they passed
  That strove to be, and were not, fast.
  Her gracious stars the lady blest,
  And thus spake on sweet Christabel:
  All our household are at rest,
  The hall as silent as the cell;
  Sir Leoline is weak in health,
  And may not well awakened be,
  But we will move as if in stealth,
  And I beseech your courtesy,
  This night, to share your couch with me.

  They crossed the moat, and Christabel
  Took the key that fitted well;
  A little door she opened straight,
  All in the middle of the gate;
  The gate that was ironed within and without
  Where an army in battle array had marched out.
  The lady sank, belike through pain,
  And Christabel with might and main
  Lifted her up, a weary weight,
  Over the threshold of the gate:
  Then the lady rose again,
  And moved, as she were not in pain.

  So free from danger, free from fear,
  They crossed the court: right glad they were.
  And Christabel devoutly cried
  To the lady by her side,
  Praise we the Virgin all divine
  Who hath rescued thee from thy distress!
  Alas! alas! said Geraldine,
  I cannot speak for weariness.
  So free from danger, free from fear,
  They crossed the court: right glad they were.

  Outside her kennel, the mastiff old
  Lay fast asleep, in moonshine cold.
  The mastiff old did not awake,
  Yet she an angry moan did make!
  And what can ail the mastiff bitch?
  Never till now she uttered yell
  Beneath the eye of Christabel.
  Perhaps it is the owlet's scritch:
  For what can ail the mastiff bitch?

  They passed the hall, that echoes still,
  Pass as lightly as you will!
  The brands were flat, the brands were dying,
  Amid their own white ashes lying;
  But when the lady passed, there came
  A tongue of light, a fit of flame
  And Christabel saw the lady's eye,
  And nothing else saw she thereby,
  Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall,
  Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall.
  O softly tread, said Christabel,
  My father seldom sleepeth well.

  Sweet Christabel her feet doth bare,
  And jealous of the listening air
  They steal their way from stair to stair,
  Now in glimmer, and now in gloom,
  And now they pass the Baron's room,
  As still as death with stifled breath!
  And now have reached her chamber door;
  And now doth Geraldine press down
  The rushes of the chamber floor.

  The moon shines dim in the open air,
  And not a moonbeam enters here.
  But they without its light can see
  The chamber carved so curiously,
  Carved with figures strange and sweet,
  All made out of the carver's brain,
  For a lady's chamber meet:
  The lamp with twofold silver chain
  Is fastened to an angel's feet.

  The silver lamp burns dead and dim;
  But Christabel the lamp will trim.
  She trimmed the lamp, and made it bright,
  And left it swinging to and fro,
  While Geraldine, in wretched plight,
  Sank down upon the floor below.

  O weary lady, Geraldine,
  I pray you, drink this cordial wine!
  It is a wine of virtuous powers;
  My mother made it of wild flowers.
  And will your mother pity me,
  Who am a maiden most forlorn?
  Christabel answered--Woe is me!
  She died the hour that I was born.
  I have heard the grey-haired friar tell
  How on her death-bed she did say,
  That she should hear the castle-bell
  Strike twelve upon my wedding-day.
  O mother dear! that thou wert here!
  I would, said Geraldine, she were!

  But soon with altered voice, said she--
  "Off, wandering mother! Peak and pine!
  I have power to bid thee flee."
  Alas! what ails poor Geraldine?
  Why stares she with unsettled eye?
  Can she the bodiless dead espy?
  And why with hollow voice cries she,
  "Off, woman, off! this hour is mine--
  Though thou her guardian spirit be,
  Off, woman, off! 'tis given to me."

  Then Christabel knelt by the lady's side,
  And raised to heaven her eyes so blue--,
  Alas! said she, this ghastly ride--
  Dear lady! it hath wildered you!
  The lady wiped her moist cold brow,
  And faintly said, "'tis over now!"
  Again the wild-flower wine she drank:
  Her fair large eyes 'gan glitter bright,
  And from the floor whereon she sank,
  The lofty lady stood upright:
  She was most beautiful to see,
  Like a lady of a far countree.
  And thus the lofty lady spake--
  "All they who live in the upper sky,
  Do love you, holy Christabel!
  And you love them, and for their sake
  And for the good which me befel,
  Even I in my degree will try,
  Fair maiden, to requite you well.
  But now unrobe yourself; for I
  Must pray, ere yet in bed I lie."

  Quoth Christabel, So let it be!
  And as the lady bade, did she.
  Her gentle limbs did she undress,
  And lay down in her loveliness.

  But through her brain of weal and woe
  So many thoughts moved to and fro,
  That vain it were her lids to close;
  So half-way from the bed she rose,
  And on her elbow did recline
  To look at the lady Geraldine.

  Beneath the lamp the lady bowed,
  And slowly rolled her eyes around
  Then drawing in her breath aloud,
  Like one that shuddered, she unbound
  The cincture from beneath her breast:
  Her silken robe, and inner vest,
  Dropt to her feet, and full in view,
  Behold! her bosom and half her side------
  A sight to dream of, not to tell!
  O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!

  Yet Geraldine nor speaks nor stirs;
  Ah! what a stricken look was hers!
  Deep from within she seems half-way
  To lift some weight with sick assay,
  And eyes the maid and seeks delay;
  Then suddenly, as one defied,
  Collects herself in scorn and pride,
  And lay down by the Maiden's side!--
  And in her arms the maid she took,
          Ah wel-a-day!
  And with low voice and doleful look
  These words did say:
    In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell,
  Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel!
  Thou knowest to-night, and wilt know to-morrow,
  This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow;
        But vainly thou warrest,
          For his is alone in
        Thy power to declare,
          That in the dim forest
        Thou heard'st a low moaning,
  And found'st a bright lady, surpassingly fair;
  And didst bring her home with thee in love and
     in charity,
  To shield her and shelter her from the damp
     air."


THE CONCLUSION
TO PART THE FIRST


  It was a lovely sight to see
  The lady Christabel, when she
  Was praying at the old oak tree.
     Amid the jagged shadows
     Of mossy leafless boughs,
     Kneeling in the moonlight,
     To make her gentle vows;
  Her slender palms together prest,
  Heaving sometimes on her breast;
  Her face resigned to bliss or bale--
  Her face, oh call it fair not pale,
  And both blue eyes more, bright than clear,
  Each about to have a tear.

  With open eyes (ah woe is me!)
  Asleep, and dreaming fearfully,
  Fearfully dreaming, yet, I wis,.
  Dreaming that alone, which is--
  O sorrow and shame! Can this be she,
  The lady, who knelt at the old oak tree?
  And lo! the worker of these harms,
  That holds the maiden in her arms,
  Seems to slumber still and mild,
  As a mother with her child.

  A star hath set, a star hath risen,
  O Geraldine! since arms of thine
  Have been the lovely lady's prison.
  O Geraldine! one hour was thine
  Thou'st had thy will! By tairn and rill,
  The night-birds all that hour were still.
  But now they are jubilant anew,
  From cliff and tower, tu-whoo! tu-whoo!
  Tu-whoo! tu-whoo! from wood and fell!

  And see! the lady Christabel
  Gathers herself from out her trance;
  Her limbs relax, her countenance
  Grows sad and soft; the smooth thin lids
  Close o'er her eyes; and tears she sheds
  Large tears that leave the lashes bright!
  And oft the while she seems to smile
  As infants at a sudden light!

  Yea, she doth smile, and she doth weep,
  Like a youthful hermitess,
  Beauteous in a wilderness,
  Who, praying always, prays in sleep.
  And, if she move unquietly,
  Perchance,'tis but the blood so free
  Comes back and tingles in her feet.
  No doubt, she hath a vision sweet.
  What if her guardian spirit 'twere,
  What if she knew her mother near?
  But this she knows, in joys and woes,
  That saints will aid if men will call:
  For the blue sky bends over all!

1797.


PART THE SECOND


  Each matin bell, the Baron saith,
  Knells us back to a world of death.
  These words Sir Leoline first said,
  When he rose and found his lady dead:
  These words Sir Leoline will say
  Many a morn to his dying day!

  And hence the custom and law began
  That still at dawn the sacristan,
  Who duly pulls the heavy bell,
  Five and forty beads must tell
  Between each stroke--a warning knell,
  Which not a soul can choose but hear
  From Bratha Head to Wyndermere.
  Saith Bracy the bard, So let it knell!
  And let the drowsy sacristan
  Still count as slowly as he can!
  There is no lack of such, I ween,
  As well fill up the space between.
  In Langdale Pike and Witch's Lair,
  And Dungeon-ghyll so foully rent,
  With ropes of rock and bells of air
  Three sinful sextons' ghosts are pent,
  Who all give back, one after t'other,
  The death-note to their living brother;
  And oft too, by the knell offended,
  Just as their one! two! three! is ended,
  The devil mocks the doleful tale
  With a merry peal from Borrowdale.

  The air is still! through mist and cloud
  That merry peal comes ringing loud;
  And Geraldine shakes off her dread,
  And rises lightly from the bed;
  Puts on her silken vestments white,
  And tricks her hair in lovely plight,
  And nothing doubting of her spell
  Awakens the lady Christabel
  "Sleep you, sweet lady Christabel?
  I trust that you have rested well."

  And Christabel awoke and spied
  The same who lay down by her side--
  O rather say, the same whom she
  Raised up beneath the old oak tree!
  Nay, fairer yet! and yet more fair!
  For she belike hath drunken deep
  Of all the blessedness of sleep!
  And while she spake, her looks, her air,
  Such gentle thankfulness declare,
  That (so it seemed) her girded vests
  Grew tight beneath her heaving breasts.
  "Sure I have sinn'd!" said Christabel,
  "Now heaven be praised if all be well!"
  And in low faltering tones, yet sweet,
  Did she the lofty lady greet
  With such perplexity of mind
  As dreams too lively leave behind.

  So quickly she rose, and quickly arrayed
  Her maiden limbs, and having prayed
  That He, who on the cross did groan,
  Might wash away her sins unknown,
  She forthwith led fair Geraldine
  To meet her sire, Sir Leoline.

  The lovely maid and the lady tall
  Are pacing both into the hall,
  And pacing on through page and groom,
  Enter the Baron's presence-room.

  The Baron rose, and while he prest
  His gentle daughter to his breast,
  With cheerful wonder in his eyes
  The lady Geraldine espies,
  And gave such welcome to the same,
  As might beseem so bright a dame!

  But when he heard the lady's tale,
  And when she told her father's name,
  Why waxed Sir Leoline so pale,
  Murmuring o'er the name again,
  Lord Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine?

  Alas! they had been friends in youth;
  But whispering tongues can poison truth;
  And constancy lives in realms above;
  And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
  And to be wroth with one we love
  Doth work like madness in the brain.
  And thus it chanced, as I divine,
  With Roland and Sir Leoline.
  Each spake words of high disdain
  And insult to his heart's best brother:
  They parted--ne'er to meet again!
  But never either found another
  To free the hollow heart from paining--
  They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
  Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
  A dreary sea now flows between.
  But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
  Shall wholly do away, I ween,
  The marks of that which once hath been.
  Sir Leoline, a moment's space,
  Stood gazing on the damsel's face:
  And the youthful Lord of Tryermaine
  Came back upon his heart again.

  O then the Baron forgot his age,
  His noble heart swelled high with rage;
  He swore by the wounds in Jesu's side
  He would proclaim it far and wide,
  With trump and solemn heraldry,
  That they, who thus had wronged the dame
  Were base as spotted infamy!
  "And if they dare deny the same,
  My herald shall appoint a week,
  And let the recreant traitors seek
  My tourney court--that there and then
  I may dislodge their reptile souls
  From the bodies and forms of men!"
  He spake: his eye in lightning rolls!
  For the lady was ruthlessly seized; and he kenned
  In the beautiful lady the child of his friend!

  And now the tears were on his face,
  And fondly in his arms he took
  Fair Geraldine, who met the embrace,
  Prolonging it with joyous look.
  Which when she viewed, a vision fell
  Upon the soul of Christabel,

  The vision of fear, the touch and pain!
  She shrunk and shuddered, and saw again--
  (Ah, woe is me! Was it for thee,
  Thou gentle maid! such sights to see?)

  Again she saw that bosom old,
  Again she felt that bosom cold,
  And drew in her breath with a hissing sound:
  Whereat the Knight turned wildly round,
  And nothing saw, but his own sweet maid
  With eyes upraised, as one that prayed.

  The touch, the sight, had passed away,
  And in its stead that vision blest,
  Which comforted her after-rest,
  While in the lady's arms she lay,
  Had put a rapture in her breast,
  And on her lips and o'er her eyes
  Spread smiles like light!

                             With new surprise,
  "What ails then my beloved child?"
  The Baron said--His daughter mild
  Made answer, "All will yet be well!"
  I ween, she had no power to tell
  Aught else: so mighty was the spell.
  Yet he, who saw this Geraldine,
  Had deemed her sure a thing divine.
  Such sorrow with such grace she blended,
  As if she feared she had offended

  Sweet Christabel, that gentle maid!
  And with such lowly tones she prayed
  She might be sent without delay
  Home to her father's mansion.

                               "Nay!
  Nay, by my soul!" said Leoline.
  "Ho! Bracy the bard, the charge be thine!
  Go thou, with music sweet and loud,
  And take two steeds with trappings proud,
  And take the youth whom thou lov'st best
  To bear thy harp, and learn thy song,
  And clothe you both in solemn vest,
  And over the mountains haste along,
  Lest wandering folk, that are abroad,
  Detain you on the valley road.

  "And when he has crossed the Irthing flood,
  My merry bard! he hastes, he hastes
  Up Knorren Moor, through Halegarth Wood,
  And reaches soon that castle good
  Which stands and threatens Scotland's wastes.

  "Bard Bracy! bard Bracy! your horses are fleet,
  Ye must ride up the hall, your music so sweet,
  More loud than your horses' echoing feet!
  And loud and loud to Lord Roland call,
  Thy daughter is safe in Langdale hall!
  Thy beautiful daughter is safe and free--
  Sir Leoline greets thee thus through me.

  He bids thee come without delay
  With all thy numerous array;
  And take thy lovely daughter home:
  And he will meet thee on the way
  With all his numerous array
  White with their panting palfreys' foam:
  And, by mine honour! I will say,
  That I repent me of the day
  When I spake words of fierce disdain
  To Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine!--
  --For since that evil hour hath flown,
  Many a summer's sun hath shone;
  Yet ne'er found I a friend again
  Like Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine."

  The lady fell, and clasped his knees,
  Her face upraised, her eyes o'erflowing;
  And Bracy replied, with faltering voice,
  His gracious hail on all bestowing;
  "Thy words, thou sire of Christabel,
  Are sweeter than my harp can tell;
  Yet might I gain a boon of thee,
  This day my journey should not be,
  So strange a dream hath come to me;
  That I had vowed with music loud
  To clear yon wood from thing unblest,
  Warn'd by a vision in my rest!
  For in my sleep I saw that dove,
  That gentle bird, whom thou dost love,
  And call'st by thy own daughter's name--
  Sir Leoline! I saw the same,
  Fluttering, and uttering fearful moan,
  Among the green herbs in the forest alone.
  Which when I saw and when I heard,
  I wonder'd what might ail the bird;
  For nothing near it could I see,
  Save the grass and green herbs underneath the old tree.

  "And in my dream, methought, I went
  To search out what might there be found;
  And what the sweet bird's trouble meant,
  That thus lay fluttering on the ground.
  I went and peered, and could descry
  No cause for her distressful cry;
  But yet for her dear lady's sake
  I stooped, methought, the dove to take,
  When lo! I saw a bright green snake
  Coiled around its wings and neck.
  Green as the herbs on which it couched,
  Close by the dove's its head it crouched;
  And with the dove it heaves and stirs,
  Swelling its neck as she swelled hers!
  I woke; it was the midnight hour,
  The clock was echoing in the tower;
  But though my slumber was gone by,
  This dream it would not pass away--
  It seems to live upon my eye!
  And thence I vowed this self-same day
  With music strong and saintly song
  To wander through the forest bare,
  Lest aught unholy loiter there."

  Thus Bracy said: the Baron, the while,
  Half-listening heard him with a smile;
  Then turned to Lady Geraldine,
  His eyes made up of wonder and love;
  And said in courtly accents fine,
  "Sweet maid, Lord Roland's beauteous dove,
  With arms more strong than harp or song,
  Thy sire and I will crush the snake!"
  He kissed her forehead as he spake,
  And Geraldine in maiden wise
  Casting down her large bright eyes,
  With blushing cheek and courtesy fine
  She turned her from Sir Leoline;
  Softly gathering up her train,
  That o'er her right arm fell again;
  And folded her arms across her chest,
  And couched her head upon her breast,
  And looked askance at Christabel--
  Jesu, Maria, shield her well!

  A snake's small eye blinks dull and shy,
  And the lady's eyes they shrunk in her head,
  Each shrunk up to a serpent's eye,
  And with somewhat of malice, and more of dread,
  At Christabel she look'd askance!--
  One moment--and the sight was fled!
  But Christabel in dizzy trance
  Stumbling on the unsteady ground
  Shuddered aloud, with a hissing sound;
  And Geraldine again turned round,
  And like a thing, that sought relief,
  Full of wonder and full of grief,
  She rolled her large bright eyes divine
  Wildly on Sir Leoline.

  The maid, alas! her thoughts are gone,
  She nothing sees--no sight but one!
  The maid, devoid of guile and sin,
  I know not how, in fearful wise,
  So deeply had she drunken in
  That look, those shrunken serpent eyes,
  That all her features were resigned
  To this sole image in her mind:
  And passively did imitate
  That look of dull and treacherous hate!
  And thus she stood, in dizzy trance,
  Still picturing that look askance
  With forced unconscious sympathy
  Full before her father's view--
  As far as such a look could be
  In eyes so innocent and blue!

  And when the trance was o'er, the maid
  Paused awhile, and inly prayed:
  Then falling at the Baron's feet,
  "By my mother's soul do I entreat
  That thou this woman send away!"
  She said: and more she could not say:
  For what she knew she could not tell,
  O'er-mastered by the mighty spell.

  Why is thy cheek so wan and wild,
  Sir Leoline? Thy only child
  Lies at thy feet, thy joy, thy pride,
  So fair, so innocent, so mild;
  The same, for whom thy lady died!
  O, by the pangs of her dear mother
  Think thou no evil of thy child!
  For her, and thee, and for no other,
  She prayed the moment ere she died:
  Prayed that the babe for whom she died,
  Might prove her dear lord's joy and pride!
    That prayer her deadly pangs beguiled,
          Sir Leoline!
    And wouldst thou wrong thy only child,
          Her child and thine?

  Within the Baron's heart and brain
  If thoughts, like these, had any share,
  They only swelled his rage and pain,
  And did but work confusion there.
  His heart was cleft with pain and rage,
  His cheeks they quivered, his eyes were wild,
  Dishonour'd thus in his old age;
  Dishonour'd by his only child,
  And all his hospitality
  To the insulted daughter of his friend
  By more than woman's jealousy
  Brought thus to a disgraceful end--
  He rolled his eye with stern regard
  Upon the gentle minstrel bard,
  And said in tones abrupt, austere--
  "Why, Bracy! dost thou loiter here?
  I bade thee hence!" The bard obeyed;
  And turning from his own sweet maid,
  The aged knight, Sir Leoline,
  Led forth the lady Geraldine!

  1801.


THE CONCLUSION
TO PART THE SECOND


  A little child, a limber elf,
  Singing, dancing to itself,
  A fairy thing with red round cheeks,
  That always finds, and never seeks,
  Makes such a vision to the sight
  As fills a father's eyes with light;
  And pleasures flow in so thick and fast
  Upon his heart, that he at last
  Must needs express his love's excess
  With words of unmeant bitterness.
  Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together
  Thoughts so all unlike each other;
  To mutter and mock a broken charm,
  To dally with wrong that does no harm.
  Perhaps 'tis tender too and pretty
  At each wild word to feel within
  A sweet recoil of love and pity.
  And what, if in a world of sin
  (O sorrow and shame should this be true!)
  Such giddiness of heart and brain
  Comes seldom save from rage and pain,
  So talks as it's most used to do.

?1801.




KUBLA KHAN

  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
  A stately pleasure-dome decree:
  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
  Through caverns measureless to man
    Down to a sunless sea.
  So twice five miles of fertile ground
  With walls and towers were girdled round:
  And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
  Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
  And here were forests ancient as the hills,
  Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

  But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
  Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
    A savage place! as holy and enchanted
    As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
    By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
    And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
    As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
    A mighty fountain momently was forced:
    Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
    Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
    Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
    And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
    It flung up momently the sacred river.
    Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
    Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
    Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
    And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
    And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
    Ancestral voices prophesying war!

    The shadow of the dome of pleasure
    Floated midway on the waves;
    Where was heard the mingled measure
    From the fountain and the caves.
  It was a miracle of rare device,
  A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

    A damsel with a dulcimer
    In a vision once I saw:
    It was an Abyssinian maid;
    And on her dulcimer she played,
    Singing of Mount Abora.
    Could I revive within me
    Her symphony and song,
    To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
  That with music loud and long,
  I would build that dome in air,
  That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
  And all who heard should see them there,
  And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
  His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
  Weave a circle round him thrice,
  And close your eyes with holy dread,
  For he on honey-dew hath fed,
  And drunk the milk of Paradise.

1798.




LEWTI
OR THE CIRCASSIAN LOVE-CHAUNT


  At midnight by the stream I roved,
  To forget the form I loved.
  Image of Lewti! from my mind
  Depart; for Lewti is not kind.

  The Moon was high, the moonlight gleam
    And the shadow of a star
  Heaved upon Tamaha's stream;
    But the rock shone brighter far,
  The rock half sheltered from my view
  By pendent boughs of tressy yew.--
  So shines my Lewti's forehead fair,
  Gleaming through her sable hair,
  Image of Lewti! from my mind
  Depart; for Lewti is not kind.

  I saw a cloud of palest hue,
  Onward to the moon it passed;
  Still brighter and more bright it grew,
  With floating colours not a few,
  Till it reach'd the moon at last:
  Then the cloud was wholly bright,
  With a rich and amber light!
  And so with many a hope I seek
  And with such joy I find my Lewti;
  And even so my pale wan cheek
  Drinks in as deep a flush of beauty!
  Nay, treacherous image! leave my mind,
  If Lewti never will be kind.

  The little cloud-it floats away,
  Away it goes; away so soon?
  Alas! it has no power to stay:
  Its hues are dim, its hues are grey--
  Away it passes from the moon!
  How mournfully it seems to fly,
  Ever fading more and more,
  To joyless regions of the sky--
  And now 'tis whiter than before!
  As white as my poor cheek will be,
  When, Lewti! on my couch I lie,
  A dying man for love of thee.
  Nay, treacherous image! leave my mind--
  And yet, thou didst not look unkind.

  I saw a vapour in the sky,
  Thin, and white, and very high;
  I ne'er beheld so thin a cloud:
  Perhaps the breezes that can fly
  Now below and now above,
  Have snatched aloft the lawny shroud
  Of Lady fair--that died for love.
  For maids, as well as youths, have perished
  From fruitless love too fondly cherished.
  Nay, treacherous image! leave my mind--
  For Lewti never will be kind.

  Hush! my heedless feet from under
  Slip the crumbling banks for ever:
  Like echoes to a distant thunder,
  They plunge into the gentle river.
  The river-swans have heard my tread,
  And startle from their reedy bed.
  O beauteous birds! methinks ye measure
  Your movements to some heavenly tune!
  O beauteous birds! 'tis such a pleasure
  To see you move beneath the moon,
  I would it were your true delight
  To sleep by day and wake all night.

  I know the place where Lewti lies
  When silent night has closed her eyes:
    It is a breezy jasmine-bower,
  The nightingale sings o'er her head:
    Voice of the Night! had I the power
  That leafy labyrinth to thread,
  And creep, like thee, with soundless tread,
  I then might view her bosom white
  Heaving lovely to my sight,
  As these two swans together heave
  On the gently-swelling wave.

  Oh! that she saw me in a dream,
    And dreamt that I had died for care;
  All pale and wasted I would seem
    Yet fair withal, as spirits are!
  I'd die indeed, if I might see
  Her bosom heave, and heave for me!
  Soothe, gentle image! soothe my mind!
  To-morrow Lewti may be kind.

1794.




THE BALLAD OF THE DARK LADIE
A FRAGMENT


  Beneath yon birch with silver bark,
  And boughs so pendulous and fair,
  The brook falls scatter'd down the rock:
  And all is mossy there!

  And there upon the moss she sits,
  The Dark Ladie in silent pain;
  The heavy tear is in her eye,
    And drops and swells again.

  Three times she sends her little page
  Up the castled mountain's breast,
  If he might find the Knight that wears
       The Griffin for his crest.

  The sun was sloping down the sky,
  And she had linger'd there all day,
  Counting moments, dreaming fears--
      Oh wherefore can he stay?

  She hears a rustling o'er the brook,
  She sees far off a swinging bough!
  "'Tis He! 'Tis my betrothed Knight!
      Lord Falkland, it is Thou!"

  She springs, she clasps him round the neck,
  She sobs a thousand hopes and fears,
  Her kisses glowing on his cheeks
      She quenches with her tears.

       *       *       *       *       *

  "My friends with rude ungentle words
  They scoff and bid me fly to thee!
  O give me shelter in thy breast!
      O shield and shelter me!

  "My Henry, I have given thee much,
  I gave what I can ne'er recall,
  I gave my heart, I gave my peace,
      O Heaven! I gave thee all."

  The Knight made answer to the Maid,
  While to his heart he held her hand,
  "Nine castles hath my noble sire,
      None statelier in the land.

  "The fairest one shall be my love's,
  The fairest castle of the nine!
  Wait only till the stars peep out,
      The fairest shall be thine:

  "Wait only till the hand of eve
  Hath wholly closed yon western bars,
  And through the dark we two will steal
      Beneath the twinkling stars!"--

  "The dark? the dark? No! not the dark?
  The twinkling stars? How, Henry? How?
  O God! 'twas in the eye of noon
      He pledged his sacred vow!

  "And in the eye of noon my love
  Shall lead me from my mother's door,
  Sweet boys and girls all clothed in white
      Strewing flowers before:

  "But first the nodding minstrels go
  With music meet for lordly bowers,
  The children next in snow-white vests,
      Strewing buds and flowers!

  "And then my love and I shall pace,
  My jet black hair in pearly braids,
  Between our comely bachelors
      And blushing bridal maids."

       *       *       *       *       *
1798.




LOVE

  All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
  Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
  All are but ministers of Love,
      And feed his sacred flame.

  Oft in my waking dreams do I
  Live o'er again that happy hour,
  When midway on the mount I lay,
      Beside the ruined tower.

  The moonshine, stealing o'er the scene
  Had blended with the lights of eve;
  And she was there, my hope, my joy,
      My own dear Genevieve!

  She leant against the armed man,
  The statue of the armed knight;
  She stood and listened to my lay,
      Amid the lingering light.

  Few sorrows hath she of her own.
  My hope! my joy! my Genevieve!
  She loves me best, whene'er I sing
      The songs that make her grieve.

  I played a soft and doleful air,
  I sang an old and moving story--
  An old rude song, that suited well
      That ruin wild and hoary.

  She listened with a flitting blush,
  With downcast eyes and modest grace;
  For well she knew, I could not choose
      But gaze upon her face.

  I told her of the Knight that wore
  Upon his shield a burning brand;
  And that for ten long years he wooed
    The Lady of the Land.

  I told her how he pined: and ah!
  The deep, the low, the pleading tone
  With which I sang another's love,
    Interpreted my own.

  She listened with a flitting blush,
  With downcast eyes, and modest grace;
  And she forgave me, that I gazed
      Too fondly on her face!

  But when I told the cruel scorn
  That crazed that bold and lovely Knight,
  And that he crossed the mountain-woods,
      Nor rested day nor night;

  That sometimes from the savage den,
  And sometimes from the darksome shade,
  And sometimes starting up at once
      In green and sunny glade,--

  There came and looked him in the face
  An angel beautiful and bright;
  And that he knew it was a Fiend,
      This miserable Knight!

  And that unknowing what he did,
  He leaped amid a murderous band,
  And saved from outrage worse than death
      The Lady of the Land!

  And how she wept, and clasped his knees;
  And how she tended him in vain--
  And ever strove to expiate
      The scorn that crazed his brain;--

  And that she nursed him in a cave;
  And how his madness went away,
  When on the yellow forest-leaves
      A dying man he lay;--

  His dying words-but when I reached
  That tenderest strain of all the ditty,
  My faltering voice and pausing harp
      Disturbed her soul with pity!

  All impulses of soul and sense
  Had thrilled my guileless Genevieve;
  The music and the doleful tale,
      The rich and balmy eve;

  And hopes, and fears that kindle hope,
  An undistinguishable throng,
  And gentle wishes long subdued,
      Subdued and cherished long!

  She wept with pity and delight,
  She blushed with love, and virgin-shame;
  And like the murmur of a dream,
      I heard her breathe my name.

  Her bosom heaved--she stepped aside,
  As conscious of my look she stepped--
  Then suddenly, with timorous eye
      She fled to me and wept.

  She half enclosed me with her arms,
  She pressed me with a meek embrace;
  And bending back her head, looked up,
      And gazed upon my face.

  'Twas partly love, and partly fear,
  And partly 'twas a bashful art,
  That I might rather feel, than see,
      The swelling of her heart.

  I calmed her fears, and she was calm,
  And told her love with virgin pride;
  And so I won my Genevieve,
      My bright and beauteous Bride.

1798-1799.




THE THREE GRAVES

A FRAGMENT OF A SEXTON'S TALE
PART I


  The grapes upon the Vicar's wall
    Were ripe as ripe could be;
  And yellow leaves in sun and wind
    Were falling from the tree.

  On the hedge-elms in the narrow lane
    Still swung the spikes of corn:
  Dear Lord! it seems but yesterday--
    Young Edward's marriage-morn.

  Up through that wood behind the church,
    There leads from Edward's door
  A mossy track, all over boughed,
    For half a mile or more.

  And from their house-door by that track
    The bride and bridegroom went;
  Sweet Mary, though she was not gay,
    Seemed cheerful and content.

  But when they to the church-yard came,
    I've heard poor Mary say,
  As soon as she stepped into the sun,
    Her heart it died away.

  And when the Vicar join'd their hands,
    Her limbs did creep and freeze;
  But when they prayed, she thought she saw
    Her mother on her knees.

  And o'er the church-path they returned--
    I saw poor Mary's back,
  Just as she stepped beneath the boughs
    Into the mossy track.

  Her feet upon the mossy track
    The married maiden set:
  That moment--I have heard her say--
    She wished she could forget.

  The shade o'er-flushed her limbs with heat--
    Then came a chill like death:
  And when the merry bells rang out,
    They seemed to stop her breath.

  Beneath the foulest mother's curse
    No child could ever thrive:
  A mother is a mother still,
    The holiest thing alive.

  So five months passed: the mother still
    Would never heal the strife;
  But Edward was a loving man,
    And Mary a fond wife.

  "My sister may not visit us,
    My mother says her nay:
  O Edward! you are all to me,
  I wish for your sake I could be
    More lifesome and more gay.

  "I'm dull and sad! indeed, indeed
    I know I have no reason!
  Perhaps I am not well in health,
    And 'tis a gloomy season."

  'Twas a drizzly time--no ice, no snow!
    And on the few fine days
  She stirred not out, lest she might meet
    Her mother in the ways.

  But Ellen, spite of miry ways
    And weather dark and dreary,
  Trudged every day to Edward's house,
    And made them all more cheery.

  Oh! Ellen was a faithful friend,
    More dear than any sister!
  As cheerful too as singing lark;
  And she ne'er left them till 'twas dark,
    And then they always missed her.

  And now Ash-Wednesday came-that day
    But few to church repair:
  For on that day you know we read
    The Commination prayer.

  Our late old Vicar, a kind man,
    Once, Sir, he said to me,
  He wished that service was clean out
    Of our good Liturgy.

  The mother walked into the church-
    To Ellen's seat she went:
  Though Ellen always kept her church
    All church-days during Lent.

  And gentle Ellen welcomed her
    With courteous looks and mild:
  Thought she, "What if her heart should melt,
    And all be reconciled!"

  The day was scarcely like a day--
    The clouds were black outright:
  And many a night, with half a moon,
    I've seen the church more light.

  The wind was wild; against the glass
    The rain did beat and bicker;
  The church-tower swinging over head,
    You scarce could hear the Vicar!

  And then and there the mother knelt,
    And audibly she cried-
  "Oh! may a clinging curse consume
    This woman by my side!

  "O hear me, hear me, Lord in Heaven,
    Although you take my life--
  O curse this woman, at whose house
    Young Edward woo'd his wife.

  "By night and day, in bed and bower,
    O let her cursed be!!! "
  So having prayed, steady and slow,
    She rose up from her knee!
  And left the church, nor e'er again
    The church-door entered she.

  I saw poor Ellen kneeling still,
    So pale! I guessed not why:
  When she stood up, there plainly was
    A trouble in her eye.

  And when the prayers were done, we all
    Came round and asked her why:
  Giddy she seemed, and sure, there was
    A trouble in her eye.

  But ere she from the church-door stepped
    She smiled and told us why:
  "It was a wicked woman's curse,"
    Quoth she, "and what care I?"

  She smiled, and smiled, and passed it off
    Ere from the door she stept--
  But all agree it would have been
    Much better had she wept.

  And if her heart was not at ease,
    This was her constant cry--
  "It was a wicked woman's curse--
   God's good, and what care I?"

  There was a hurry in her looks,
    Her struggles she redoubled:
  "It was a wicked woman's curse,
    And why should I be troubled?"

  These tears will come--I dandled her
    When 'twas the merest fairy--
  Good creature! and she hid it all:
    She told it not to Mary.

  But Mary heard the tale: her arms
   Round Ellen's neck she threw;
  "O Ellen, Ellen, she cursed me,
   And now she hath cursed you!"

  I saw young Edward by himself
   Stalk fast adown the lee,
  He snatched a stick from every fence,
   A twig from every tree.

  He snapped them still with hand or knee,
   And then away they flew!
  As if with his uneasy limbs
   He knew not what to do!

  You see, good Sir! that single hill?
   His farm lies underneath:
  He heard it there, he heard it all,
   And only gnashed his teeth.

  Now Ellen was a darling love
   In all his joys and cares:
  And Ellen's name and Mary's name
  Fast-linked they both together came,
   Whene'er he said his prayers.

  And in the moment of his prayers
   He loved them both alike:
   Yea, both sweet names with one sweet joy
   Upon his heart did strike!

  He reach'd his home, and by his looks
   They saw his inward strife:
  And they clung round him with their arms,
   Both Ellen and his wife.

  And Mary could not check her tears,
   So on his breast she bowed;
  Then frenzy melted into grief,
   And Edward wept aloud.

  Dear Ellen did not weep at all,
   But closelier did she cling,
  And turned her face and looked as if
   She saw some frightful thing.


PART II


  To see a man tread over graves
    I hold it no good mark;
  'Tis wicked in the sun and moon,
    And bad luck in the dark!

  You see that grave? The Lord he gives,
    The Lord, he takes away:
  O Sir! the child of my old age
    Lies there as cold as clay.

  Except that grave, you scarce see one
    That was not dug by me;
  I'd rather dance upon 'em all
    Than tread upon these three!

  "Aye, Sexton!'tis a touching tale."
    You, Sir! are but a lad;
  This month I'm in my seventieth year,
    And still it makes me sad.

  And Mary's sister told it me,
    For three good hours and more;
  Though I had heard it, in the main,
    From Edward's self, before.

  Well! it passed off! the gentle Ellen
    Did well nigh dote on Mary;
  And she went oftener than before,
  And Mary loved her more and more:
    She managed all the dairy.

  To market she on market-days,
    To church on Sundays came;
  All seemed the same: all seemed so, Sir!
    But all was not the same!

  Had Ellen lost her mirth? Oh! no!
    But she was seldom cheerful;
  And Edward look'd as if he thought
    That Ellen's mirth was fearful.

  When by herself, she to herself
    Must sing some merry rhyme;
  She could not now be glad for hours,
    Yet silent all the time.

  And when she soothed her friend, through all
    Her soothing words 'twas plain
  She had a sore grief of her own,
    A haunting in her brain.

  And oft she said, I'm not grown thin!
    And then her wrist she spanned;
  And once when Mary was down-cast,
    She took her by the hand,
  And gazed upon her, and at first
    She gently pressed her hand;

  Then harder, till her grasp at length
    Did gripe like a convulsion!
  "Alas!" said she, "we ne'er can be
    Made happy by compulsion!"

  And once her both arms suddenly
    Round Mary's neck she flung,
  And her heart panted, and she felt
    The words upon her tongue.

  She felt them coming, but no power
    Had she the words to smother;
  And with a kind of shriek she cried,
    "Oh Christ! you're like your mother!"

  So gentle Ellen now no more
    Could make this sad house cheery;
  And Mary's melancholy ways
    Drove Edward wild and weary.

  Lingering he raised his latch at eve,
   Though tired in heart and limb:
  He loved no other place, and yet
   Home was no home to him.

  One evening he took up a book,
    And nothing in it read;
  Then flung it down, and groaning cried,
    "O! Heaven! that I were dead."

  Mary looked up into his face,
    And nothing to him said;
  She tried to smile, and on his arm
    Mournfully leaned her head.

  And he burst into tears, and fell
    Upon his knees in prayer:
  "Her heart is broke! O God! my grief,
    It is too great to bear!"

  'Twas such a foggy time as makes
    Old sextons, Sir! like me,
  Rest on their spades to cough; the spring
    Was late uncommonly.

  And then the hot days, all at once,
    They came, we knew not how:
  You looked about for shade, when scarce
    A leaf was on a bough.

  It happened then ('twas in the bower,
    A furlong up the wood:
  Perhaps you know the place, and yet
    I scarce know how you should,)

  No path leads thither, 'tis not nigh
    To any pasture-plot;
  But clustered near the chattering brook,
    Lone hollies marked the spot.

  Those hollies of themselves a shape
    As of an arbour took,
  A close, round arbour; and it stands
    Not three strides from a brook.

  Within this arbour, which was still
    With scarlet berries hung,
  Were these three friends, one Sunday morn,
    Just as the first bell rung.

  'Tis sweet to hear a brook, 'tis sweet
   To hear the Sabbath-bell,
  'Tis sweet to hear them both at once,
   Deep in a woody dell.

  His limbs along the moss, his head
    Upon a mossy heap,
  With shut-up senses, Edward lay:
  That brook e'en on a working day
    Might chatter one to sleep.

  And he had passed a restless night,
   And was not well in health;
  The women sat down by his side,
   And talked as 'twere by stealth.

  "The Sun peeps through the close thick leaves,
    See, dearest Ellen! see!
  'Tis in the leaves, a little sun,
    No bigger than your ee;

  "A tiny sun, and it has got
    A perfect glory too;
  Ten thousand threads and hairs of light,
  Make up a glory gay and bright
    Round that small orb, so blue."

  And then they argued of those rays,
    What colour they might be;
  Says this, "They're mostly green"; says that,
    "They're amber-like to me."

  So they sat chatting, while bad thoughts
    Were troubling Edward's rest;
  But soon they heard his hard quick pants,
    And the thumping in his breast.

  "A mother too!" these self-same words
    Did Edward mutter plain;
  His face was drawn back on itself,
    With horror and huge pain.

  Both groan'd at once, for both knew well
    What thoughts were in his mind;
  When he waked up, and stared like one
    That hath been just struck blind.

  He sat upright; and ere the dream
    Had had time to depart,
  "O God, forgive me!" (he exclaimed)
    "I have torn out her heart."

  Then Ellen shrieked, and forthwith burst
    Into ungentle laughter;
  And Mary shivered, where she sat,
    And never she smiled after.

1797-1809.

_Carmen reliquum in futurum tempus relegatum._ To-morrow!
and To-morrow! and To-morrow!----[Note of S.T.C.--l8l5.]




DEJECTION: AN ODE


  Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon,
  With the old Moon in her arms;
  And I fear, I fear, my Master dear!
  We shall have a deadly storm.
_Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence._


I

  Well! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made
    The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,
    This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence
  Unroused by winds, that ply a busier trade
  Than those which mould yon cloud in lazy flakes,
  Or the dull sobbing drafty that moans and rakes
     Upon the strings of this AEolian lute,
     Which better far were mute.
     For lo! the New-moon winter-bright!
     And overspread with phantom light,
     (With swimming phantom light o'erspread
     But rimmed and circled by a silver thread)
  I see the old Moon in her lap, foretelling
     The, coming-on of rain and squally blast.
  And oh that even now the gust were swelling,
     And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast!
  Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed,
     And sent my soul abroad,
  Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give,
  Might startle this dull pain, and make it move
            and live!



II

  A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
     A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
     Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
            In word, or sigh, or tear--

  O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood,
  To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd,


    All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
  Have I been gazing on the western sky,
    And its peculiar tint of yellow green:
  And still I gaze--and with how blank an eye
  And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
  That give away their motion to the stars;
  Those stars, that glide behind them or between,
  Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen
  Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew
  In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
  I see them all so excellently fair,
  I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!



III


    My genial spirits fail;
    And what can these avail
  To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
    It were a vain endeavour,
    Though I should gaze for ever
  On that green light that lingers in the west:
  I may not hope from outward forms to win
  The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.



IV


  O Lady! we receive but what we give,
  And in our life alone does Nature live:
  Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!
    And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
  Than that inanimate cold world allowed
  To the poor loveless, ever-anxious crowd,
    Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
  A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud--
    Enveloping the Earth--
  And from the soul itself must there be sent
    A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
  Of all sweet sounds the life and element!


V


  O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me
  What this strong music in the soul may be!
  What, and wherein it doth exist,
  This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,
  This beautiful and beauty-making power.
    Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given,
  Save to the pure, and in their purest hour,
  Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower,
  Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power,
  Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower,
    A new Earth and new Heaven,
  Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud--
  Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud--
    We in ourselves rejoice!
  And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,
    All melodies the echoes of that voice,
  All colours a suffusion from that light.


VI


  There was a time when, though my path was rough,
    This joy within me dallied with distress,
  And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
    Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:
  For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
  And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
  But now afflictions bow me down to earth:
  Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth
      But oh! each visitation
  Suspends what nature gave m