Wordsworth nor Dorothy left any record of their reactions to Coleridge’s poem, though four years later Wordsworth would try to prevent its publication. What made him uneasy was not Coleridge’s praise, but the extremely emotional nature of Coleridge’s description of their friendship. Rightly, perhaps, he felt that it left him vulnerable. Coleridge himself had no such qualms, regarding it as leaving a great deal unsaid, as his Notebooks would show.
But Wordsworth did measure the transformation that was coming over their friendship in a short, cruelly effective, lyric entitled “A Complaint”. In it, he uses the image of the fountain of love, which Coleridge had originally addressed to Asra in his sonnet of 1804. But now it is the love directed towards Wordsworth which is in question.
There is a change – and I am poor;
Your Love hath been, nor long ago,
A Fountain at my fond Heart’s Door,
Whose only business was to flow…
Now for this consecrated Fount
Of murmuring, sparkling, living Love,
What have I? Shall I dare to tell?
A comfortless and hidden WELL.53
Wordsworth did not hesitate to publish his poem only four months later. Indeed this was a highly productive time for him at Coleorton, during which he prepared the most important collection of his lifetime, the Poems in Two Volumes, issued by Longman in May 1807. Coleridge encouraged him with this, also writing detailed notes and editorial suggestions for Book VI of The Prelude, and stiffening Wordsworth’s resolve against anticipated criticism. When he received destructive reviews later in the summer, Wordsworth was able to write with lofty confidence to Lady Beaumont: “never forget what I believe was observed to you by Coleridge, that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished. My flesh is as insensible as iron to these petty stings.”54
But Coleridge, driven by opium and unhappiness, was as sensitive as water. “If I appear little (fretful and sullen concerning Trifles),” he confided to his Notebook, “O! consider Asra that this is only, because my intense Love makes even Trifles that relate to Wordsworth (= the Tree that fixes its root even deeper than the grave) so great to me, that Wealth & Reputation, become trifles compared to it.”55
In a series of short poems written during January and February, most of them not published until after his death, Coleridge agonized over his feelings for Wordsworth and Asra, which were now inextricably involved. One, composed in Latin, “Ad Vilmum Axilogum”, asked bitterly why Wordsworth should command him to endure Asra’s neglect. “Why do you not also command me, William, to suffer my bowels to be pierced with a sword and then to pretend that it does not hurt?”56
In another, “The Tropic Tree”, he appears to use the image of Wordsworth as the rooted tree by a river bank to summon up some nameless act of submission and worship:
As some vast Tropic tree, itself a wood,
That crests its head with clouds, beneath the flood
Feeds its deep roots, and with the bulging flank
Of its wide base controls the fronting bank –
(By the slant current’s pressure scoop’d away
The fronting bank becomes a foam-piled bay)
High in the Fork the uncouth Idol knits
His channel’d brow; low murmurs stir by fits
And dark below the horrid Faquir sits…57
But there were also several pure love-lyrics to Asra, which suggest moments of great tenderness and intimacy in the gardens at Coleorton. One, “An Angel Visitant”, describes them sitting together within the “circling hollies woodbine-clad” on the estate. Another, “You mould my Hopes”, evokes her as the “love-throb” in his heart and the revivifying light of dawn. In these poems he “blessed” the destiny that had made him fall in love with her.58
…You lie in all my thoughts like Light,
Like the fair Light of Dawn, or summer Eve,
On rippling stream, or cloud-reflecting lake;
And looking to the Heaven that bends above you,
How oft! I bless the lot that made me love you.59
Listening to the hesitant birdsong of early spring, he found an image for these precious fragments of poetry.
The spruce and limber Yellow Hammer
In dawn of Spring, in the sultry Summer,
In hedge, or tree his hours beguiling
With notes, as of one that Brass is filing.60
When snow fell in mid-February he stood by the gate on the Ashby road, looking back at Coleorton Farm, and noted the icicles in the hedge, “the cavernlets of Snow”, and the marks of the wind like “eagle’s claws” brushed across the white fields. “Can even the Eagle soar without Wings? And the wings given by thee to my soul – what are they, but the Love and Society of that Beloved?” In a long meditation on Asra’s power to inspire his work, as he hoped, he summoned up a memory from his West Country days, to produce a beautiful image of psycho-sexual potency. “I have, like the Exeter Cathedral Organ, a pipe of far-sounding Music in its construction, yet it is dumb, a gilded Tube, till the Sister pipe be placed in correspondence. O Beloved! Beloved! – ah! what are Words but air? & impulses of air?”61
At night, he fell asleep dreaming of Asra; or sometimes went out to wander through the moonlit grounds, to look back at her window. On one occasion, plunging into the pitch blackness under some low trees, a “sudden flash of Light darted down as it were, upon the path close before me, with such rapid and indescribable effect, that my whole life seem snatched away from me”. For a moment it seemed as if the moon itself had struck him “a Violent Blow” of admonition. But glancing up he found it was caused by “some very large Bird, who, scared by my noise, had suddenly flown upwards, and by the spring of his feet or body had driven down the branch on which he was a-perch,” so letting in the terrifying semaphore of admonitory light.62
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To the outside world, the old Lake District circle had reestablished itself and Coleridge was being successfully “managed”. Dorothy wrote at length to Mrs Clarkson of country walks and fireside study. Wordsworth wrote meticulous pages of horticultural advice to Sir George Beaumont. Even Coleridge wrote to Southey: “I am considerably better in health;
