Coleridge himself wrote that “no motive on earth” would make him venture on another sea-voyage of more than three days: “I would rather starve in a hovel”.
Confined in his quarters, he grew fat and pallid, and his Mediterranean tan faded away. Gazing out through the closed porthole, he thought distractedly of Asra at Grasmere. It was perhaps now that the first images of his fine, bleak meditative poem on their love, “Constancy to an Ideal Object” began to coalesce.
…Home and Thou are one.
The peacefull’st cot, the moon shall shine upon,
Lulled by the thrush, and wakened by the lark,
Without thee were but a becalméd bark,
Whose Helmsman on an ocean waste and wide
Sits mute and pale his mouldering helm beside.192
But it would be many years before the verse were completed.
The Gosport finally sighted Portsmouth in early August, where it was quarantined, and then allowed to continue eastwards into the Thames estuary. Here Coleridge took the earliest chance of disembarking at the little quayside and customs post of Stangate Creek, on the edge of the Medway. He “leaped on land” on the afternoon of 17 August 1806. Leaving his box of books and papers in Captain Derkheim’s care, to be taken on up to Wapping, he hurried to “a curious little Chapel” by the quayside at Lower Halstow, which still exists, overlooking the mournful expanse of the Kentish marshes towards Sheerness. He found it open and empty, and dropping to his knees “offered, I trust, as deep a prayer as ever without words or thoughts was sent up by a human Being”.
Going outside again, he surveyed the lapping waters and the tide running up through the baked mud and yellowing bulrushes of his native land. “Almost immediately after landing Health seemed to flow in upon me, like the mountain waters upon the dry stones of a vale-stream after Rains.”193 The following morning he was in London, at the Bell Inn in the Strand, wondering if he had enough money for a “decent Hat” and a pair of shoes.
1
Now he had returned home after two and a half years of wandering, Coleridge suddenly felt that he had no real home to return to. He walked down the Strand in a dirty shirt, full of dismay, hearing everyone talk of the death of Pitt and the illness of Charles James Fox, the political era of his youth sliding into the past. Now the news was of blockades, war shortages, conscription, unrest in the country. Like all exiles, he felt he had come back to a changed world which had moved on without him. Should he stay in London, go north to Keswick and his wife, agree to meet the Wordsworths in Leicestershire, or even return to his old family haunts in the West Country?
In the event he would try all these over the next twelve months. For the moment he needed work, money and advice. The one thing he could not face was an immediate confrontation with Sara Coleridge, and he did not write to her directly for a month. Instead he sent messages round to his old editor Daniel Stuart at the Courier offices, and to Charles Lamb at India House, and dashed off letters to Southey and Wordsworth announcing his return to England rather like a piece of flotsam washed up by a lucky tide.
‘I am now going to Lamb’s – Stuart is at Margate; all are out of town; I have no one to advise me – I am shirtless & almost penniless…My MSS are all – excepting two pocket-books – either in the Sea or…carried back to Malta.” He had not settled “any rational plan”, but he could write “more tranquilly” to them than to Mrs Coleridge (but they should pass on his news).1
It was Stuart who replied immediately with a credit for £50, kind enquiries about his health, and a businesslike suggestion for articles about the careers of Pitt and Fox, the Mediterranean war, the Continental blockade, or anything else Coleridge liked to turn his hand to. He also invited him to Margate, simply to talk about his life and his future.
2
Stuart was not an intimate friend, but he was a man of the world, and a newspaperman who understood writers, even writers like Coleridge. They would talk of his marriage, of his career, of his prospects. Over the next two years, Coleridge would try to reestablish himself as a professional man of letters, with a steady determination that was often disguised by the lurid chaos of his emotional entanglements and the regular descents into opium. His struggles to separate from his wife, to look after his children, to resolve his relationship with Asra, and above all to find a way of living, or not living, within the overpowering sphere of Wordsworth’s magnetic influence, would consume much of his energies. Frequently they would appear to reduce him to a kind of passive despair, a mere hulk upon the stream of circumstance, “rudderless and hopeless” as he so often said himself, washed from one temporary harbour to the next. But in reality the struggle and the determination always continued. The record of it still bursts out of his Notebooks, letters and poetry.
He was living out what many people experience, in the dark disorder of their hidden lives, but living it on the surface and with astonishing, even alarming candour that many of his friends found unendurable or simply ludicrous. Moreover he continued to write about it, to witness it, in a way that makes him irreplaceable among the great Romantic visionaries. His greatness lies in the understanding of these struggles, not (like Wordsworth perhaps) in their solution. So it was, talking to Stuart in these first weeks back in England (as he later recalled), that he first glimpsed the crisis that would close round him in these middle years. With his peculiar mixture of comedy and pathos, he projected out of his private chaos an universal dilemma. He was only thirty-four that October, but he felt that somewhere in the Mediterranean he had imperceptibly crossed a shadowline into darker waters.
Stuart had made the “important remark” that there was a middle period in a man’s life, “varying in various men, from 35 to 45”, when for no evident reason he began to feel the “vanity of his pursuits” and to ask “what is all this for?”. Coleridge felt this sudden undermining of the self, this panicky self-questioning of the grounds of life, was especially acute in lonely men – in bachelors, widowers or “Unhappy Husbands”. Such a man “becomes half-melancholy, gives in to wild dissipation, or self-regardless Drinking” and might even deliberately destroy himself. He would leave his “ingenious female, or female-minded friends, to fish out some motive for an act which…would have acted even without a motive even as the Terror in Nightmairs”.2
Such a crisis would burst upon a man from whatever casual cause, as surely as “gunpowder in a Smithy” would eventually be ignited by some chance spark or other. “I had felt this Truth; but never saw it before so clearly; it came upon me at Malta, under the melancholy dreadful feeling of finding myself to be a Man, by a distinct division from Boyhood, Youth, and ‘Young Man’ – Dreadful was the feeling – before that Life had flown on so that I had always been a Boy, as it were – and this sensation had blended in all my conduct…” If men survived this period, “they commonly become cheerful again – that is a comfort – for mankind – not for me!”3 It was this sense of crisis, the entry into Dante’s “dark wood” of middle age, that haunted Coleridge quite as much as opium in these restless years.
