came to possess him.
3
By the second day he had found his sea-legs, and with hair flying and double-waistcoats flapping, he patrolled the deck agog with excitement, questioning and noting. Nothing seemed to escape his attention. If a merchantman lagged behind or failed to obey signals, the seventy-four-gun Leviathan fired warning shots at her – “Commodore’s strengthening Pills for the Memory”, and a fine of five shillings.8 Down in the first hold, a sheep abandoned its hay, “kneeling its poor face to the Deck, its knees black, worn and sore…alas! it came from flat peaceable meadows”.9 At victuals, a ship’s boy ran up the rigging to the main top “with a large Leg of Mutton swung, Albatross-fashion about his neck”.10
Always there was “great sea-Savannah” rolling unpastured about them, in all its changing lights and sounds. “The beautiful bright Slate, & the Soap stone colour by the Vessel’s side, in a brisk gale, immediately under the mast in a froth-cream, that throws itself into network, with its brisk sound, which the word brisk itself may be made to imitate by hissing on the ‘isk’…”11 These observations went on constantly, by day and night, and several were later incorporated into the 1817 edition of the “Mariner”, such as the eerie light of the compass and rudder-man’s lamp “reflected with forms on the Main Sail”.12
Along with the crated ducks, three pigs, the melancholy sheep and a ship’s cat with kittens, Coleridge had two fellow passengers. They shared the cabin in increasingly pungent intimacy as the voyage progressed. One was a purple-faced lieutenant on half pay, who largely restricted his attentions to the ship’s claret; the other was a plump and garrulous merry widow, a Mrs Ireland, “who would have wanted elbow-room on Salisbury Plain”.13 Mrs Ireland’s conversation was confined to food, and she dwelt lovingly on the roast potatoes, pickles and apricot tart to be expected in Malta.14
The cabin conditions were extremely cramped, and probably not improved by Coleridge’s tendency “in very gusty weather” to vomit up his food without warning. The process intrigued him, as it was never accompanied by seasickness: “it was an action as mechanical seemingly as that by which one’s glass or teacup is emptied by a thwart blow of the Sea”.15 Surprisingly, the merry “Mrs Carnosity” accepted this with good grace, and much worse which was to follow, after Gibraltar, when the mephitic stench from the bilge became overpowering.
Coleridge drew up a daily schedule for work in “a perseverant Spirit of industry”: it began with ginger tea and journal-writing, proceeded with a study of Wordsworth’s precious manuscript of the Prelude before dinner, and in the afternoon relaxed into Italian lessons and Dante; finally the night-watch was assigned to poetry and the completion of “Christabel”. But after the ginger tea and journal, Coleridge usually found that he flagged and spent his time up on deck,16 or dozing uneasily on his bunk under a pile of books. These included, besides Dante and a portable Italian dictionary, a technical work on mineralogy, the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and the complete works of Sir Thomas Browne, together with a mutinous crew of fresh lemons that he chewed to protect against scurvy.
He has much exercised by the bunk, which his large frame swaddled in double coats and double trousers, reduced to a precarious “mantel”. On inspection it measured five and a half feet long by twenty inches wide. It was fine for sitting, eating, drinking, writing, even shaving: “it fails only in its original purpose, that of lying & sleeping: like a great Genius apprenticed to a wrong Trade”.17 But above it was the brass porthole upon which he lavished all his ingenuity. Finding it edged with small iron rings he laced these with cords to form a net, and stacked the bottom half with books to make a flat shelf for his kit. Inside this seamanlike cupboard he carefully arranged his shaving things, teacup and soup plate, supply of lemons and portable inkstand, whose unmoving pool of black ink seemed a suggestive contrast to the ceaseless lurching of the ship. ‘By charm and talismanic privilege: one of those Smooth places in the Mediterranean, where the breakers foam in a circle around, yet send in no wrinkles upon the mirror-bright, mirror-smooth Lacus in mare.”
Like the charmed pool of the imagination, the steady inkwell amidst the churning sea was “Imperium in Imperio”, a realm within a realm.18 This is what he hoped to become himself. To get all ship-shape, he also opened up the little escritoire that Lady Beaumont had given him, and found each drawer packed with comforts, which seized him “by a hundred Tentacula of Love and affection & pleasurable Remembrances”.19
4
Up on deck, he chatted to the sailors he always admired – “a neat handed Fellow who could shave himself in a storm without drawing blood”20 – and recorded sextant readings, compass-bearings, cloud formations, star patterns and semaphore messages through the squadron. Above all he recorded the huge, beautiful complexity of the ship’s sails. They were constantly re-set throughout the fleet to form an endless series of visual harmonies. On Saturday, 14 April, he made no less than eleven pages of notes on these sail shapes. What interested him was their aesthetic values, their painterly suggestions of form and function, of energy transferred between curve and straight line. “The harmony of the Lines – the ellipses & semicircles of the bellying Sails of the Hull, with the variety of the one and the contingency of the other.”
He puzzled over their “obscure resemblance” to human shapes, to gestures of mental alertness, determination and attention. “The height of the naked mast above the sails, connected however with them by Pennant & Vane, associated I think, with the human form on a watch-tower: a general feeling – e.g. the Men on the tops of conical mountains…in Cumberland and Westmoreland.”21 This idea of the symbolic “watch-tower” haunted Coleridge. He later found that Nelson had described the navy in Malta as “the watch-tower of the Mediterranean”. Later still he used the image to describe Wordsworth’s dominance of the poetic horizon: “From the dread watch-tower of man’s absolute self”.22 Wordsworth indeed, as a man-o’-war, in full sail.
But Coleridge’s notes press further. “Every one of these sails is known by the Intellect to have a strict & necessary action & reaction on all the rest, and the whole is made up of parts…” This technical knowledge of the complementary function of the sails produces the sense of unity which we call beauty: “this phantom of complete visual wholeness in an object, which visually does not form a whole, by the influence ab intra of the sense of its perfect Intellectual Beauty or Wholeness”.23 This subtle aesthetic emerged on the deck of the Speedwell in the Bay of Biscay. From it Coleridge dashed into a bracket a formulation which would become central to his Biographia Literaria: “all Passion unifies as it were by natural Fusion”.
It is evident from such notes that Coleridge was recovering fast from the mood of helpless despondency that had beset him in past months. At night, down in the cabin, he still had his “Dreams of Terror & obscure forms”,
