on their “georgo-episcopal Meanderings” (a combination of Virgilian nature-rambling and stately pilgrimage) which were so slow and digressive under Poole’s guidance, stopping at every field-gate and hill-top, that Coleridge claimed they would avoid Purgatory because “the Last Day will have come” before they arrived anywhere. Their circuitous routes would require “a new road Map of the country” between Stowey and the sea.102
Coleridge even imagined settling in some perfect farmhouse in the Quantocks, which would contain among other things “two Staircases” at each end of the building to aid domestic harmony, and a brewhouse, a dairy, a cellar, a pigsty, and a “Palace of meditation” for his poetry.103 “We set Spies and Watches on the Sun,” he wrote thoughtfully. “We make Time give an account of itself, & shall we not give an account of Time?”104
All this while the opium struggle continued. Coleridge listed medical compounds for enema injections, and invented a new dilute laudanum solution using five pounds of quince juice to a quarter of a pound of opium, infused with a spice cocktail of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and saffron to aid digestion. “When in Malta, I might easily have tried it with Lemon Juice, instead of Quinces.”105
There were of course moments of strain, even with Tom Poole: on one occasion a row about Coleridge’s “unreasonable expectation” of being supplied with pen and ink; on another a “warm conversation” about miracles.106 No doubt opium lay behind these. When urged by Poole to “exert himself”, Coleridge replied with his old image of the eagle bidding the “Tortoise sunward soar”, which Poole meticulously noted and filed without comment.107
But in fact Coleridge was secretly writing poetry again. One fragment, “A Dark Sky” (Coeali Ennarant) suggests agonizing religious doubts, as he sat one night in Poole’s garden watching the stars overcome by racing storm-clouds. Those stars, once so friendly and companionable in the days of “Frost at Midnight”, now seemed like a “conven’d conspiracy of spies” winking out some message of doubt and betrayal. The book of Heaven, in which he had promised Hartley one could read God’s message of comfort and benevolence, now seemed blank and cruel:
No constellations alphabet the sky:
The Heavens one large Black Letter only shew,
And as a child beneath its master’s blow
Shrills out at once its task and its affright –
The groaning world now learns to read aright,
And with its Voice of Voices cries out, O!”108
The harsh, metaphysical nature of this poem (drawing its image from the old Black Letter Bible which Coleridge recalled from his own painful schooldays under Bowyer) set the tone for much confessional poetry to come. But another more tender piece, “Recollections of Love” also took Coleridge back to more soothing memories of the early Quantock days, now infused with thoughts of Asra which haunted him like half-heard music.
Eight springs have flown, since last I lay
On Quantock’s healthy hills,
Where quiet sounds from hidden rills
Float here and there, like things astray,
And high o’er head the sky-lark shrills.
No voice as yet had made the air
Be music with your name; yet why
That asking look? that yearning sigh?
That sense of promise every where?
Belovéd! flew your spirit by?109
The song-like beauty and simplicity of this poem also hides a complex metaphysical speculation about the nature of time in matters of the heart. It is entitled “Recollections”, but it is equally about anticipations of love. For Coleridge, Asra’s “spirit” already inhabited the hills and streams of the Quantocks in 1799. Emotional time stretched and flowed and doubled-back, fluid like a river, linking spots of happiness in a mysterious present-tense of place and season. “My Felicity”, Coleridge wrote in another Notebook fragment, was “Like Milk that…in its easy stream Flows ever…in the Babe’s murmuring Mouth”.110
In returning to his old rambles over the Quantocks, crossing and recrossing the familiar tracks and combs, he was almost physically re-weaving the network of his youthful happiness, like a spider re-making a web of sights, sounds and associations:
…Time drew out his subtle
Threads so quick, That the long
Summer’s Eve was one whole web,
A Space on which I lay commensurate –
For Memory & all undoubting Hope
Sang the same note & in the selfsame
Voice…111
The richness of the Quantocks’ earth at harvest-time made him grateful to “magna mater, Diana multimammalia” – the great Mother, Diana the many-breasted.112 Yet Time was still fleeting, a perilous river on which all human achievements of outward form were swept away. The counter-speculation, as old as Heraclitus, produced a series of “Kubla Khan”-like prose fragments which answered the lyric poetry in a grander, more openly philosophical manner. “Our mortal existence a stoppage in the blood of Life – a brief eddy in the everflowing Ocean of pure Activity…who beholds Pyramids, yea, Alps and Andes (giant Pyramids the work of Fire) raising monuments like a generous Victor, o’er its own conquests, tombstones of a world destroyed – yet, these too float adown the Sea of Time, & melt away, Mountains of floating ice.”113
Lying on his back in the Quantocks’ heather, gazing up at the English sky, Coleridge recalled his Malta meditations on the eternal blue of the Mediterranean, and reached towards some answering impulse in himself. “O I could annihilate in a deep moment all possibility of the needlepoint pinshead System of the Atomists by one submissive Gaze!…Thought formed not fixed, – the molten Being never cooled into a Thing, tho’ begotten into the vast adequate Thought.”114 All these meditations on Time and Form, Love and Perception, would gradually be brought to bear on the nature of the poet’s Imagination – “whose essence is passionate order” – which he would explore in the long-planned lectures of 1808.
If Poole thought Coleridge was not “exerting” himself this summer, one might ask how much hard work a writer may do lying on a hill in the sun.
