me, his side above the forepaw throbbing with a visible pulse”, becomes an emblem of Nature’s mysterious and fragile beauty. One “pretty fellow” lying frozen under Coleridge’s gaze in a network of sun and shade, seems to summon up a protective power to save him from all human interference: “…then turned his Head to me, depressed it, & looked up half-watching, half-imploring; at length taking advantage of a brisk breeze that made all the Network dance & toss, & darted off as if an Angel of Nature had spoken in the breeze: – Off! I’ll take care, he shall not hurt you.”69
9
On 10 August Coleridge set sail for Sicily, in the company of Major Adye who had now arrived from Gibraltar. Sir Alexander Ball generously retained him on his Private Secretary’s salary of £25 per month, and supplied him with a letter of introduction to the honorary consul at Syracuse, G. F. Leckie. But first Coleridge and Adye struck out for Catania along the coast, and made a strenuous ascent of Mount Etna, with local guides. They camped at one of the casina or shelters just above the tree-line, where the ground “scorched” their feet, and dined off meat barbecued over an open fire and drank the local wine, chatting in bad Italian to some beautiful local peasant girls: “voices shrill but melodious, especially the 21 years old wheedler & talker, who could not reconcile to herself that I did not understand her: yet in how short a time a man living so would understand a language”.70 Around them stretched the desolate lava field, purple in the shadows, with a “smoke-white Bloom upon it”.71
Coleridge seems to have made two ascents to the crater itself, though curiously there is no description in his Notebooks of the bleak, ashy lip or of his impressions from the top. Yet he seems to have reached it, for ten years later the image came surging back to him in the time of his worst opium struggles when his religious faith was threatened by a dark pit of despair.72 “I recollect when I stood on the summit of Etna, and darted my gaze down the crater; the immediate vicinity was discernible, till lower down, obscurity gradually terminated in total darkness. Such figures exemplify many truths revealed in the Bible. We pursue them until, from the imperfection of our faculties, we are lost in impenetrable night.”73
At the time he recalled only the blessed cool of the Benedictine monastery at Nicolsai as they returned, and the next day the sun on Etna rising “behind Calabria out of the midst of the Sea…deep crimson…skies coloured with yellow a sort of Dandelion”.74 On the way down he copied a Latin inscription from the monastery gardens. “Here under Black Earth, Ashes of Holy Monks lie Hid. Marvel not. Sterile sand of Sacred Bones, everywhere becomes Fruit, And loads the fruit-Tree Branches…Go on your road, All things will be well.”75
At the ancient port of Syracuse, made famous by Thucydides’s account of the Greek Expedition and its catastrophic defeat, Coleridge was given rooms by Leckie in his idyllic villa on the site of the Timoleon antiquities overlooking the bay. For two months it was his base for a series of rambles round the island, with Leckie often acting as his guide. Leckie was a formidable figure. A classical scholar and adventurer, he had farmed in India, knocked about the Mediterranean, and finally settled with a beautiful wife in Sicily, where his money and fluency in Italian and French set him on equal terms with the local aristocracy. His hospitality, his pungent views, and the flirtatiousness of his glamorous wife, made the Villa Timoleon a popular port of call among numerous English travellers and naval officers, and he remained in regular contact with Sir Alexander. Coleridge’s admiration of Mrs Leckie was expressed in a subtle appreciation of her jewellery: “Mrs Leckie’s opal surrounded with small brilliants: grey blue & the wandering fire that moves about it; and often usurps the whole.”76
The air of voluptuous enchantment which descended over this Sicilian sojourn was oddly disturbing to Coleridge. As he walked and rode between the classical ruins, he was haunted by the discovery that the fields were full of poppies cultivated for opium. Leckie described to him the process in expert detail. “The white poppy seed, sown in the months of October & November, the plants weeded to 8 inches distance, & well watered till the plants are about 1/2 a foot high, when a compost of dung, without Earth, & Ashes is spread over the beds – a little before the flowers appear, again watered profusely, till the capsules are half-grown, at which time the opium is collected.”77
Leckie showed him how each pod was incised with a knife, and Coleridge pulled out the grains with his thumb. Later he learnt that Indian hemp was also grown extensively, and that the whole island was a paradise of narcotics. Leckie, an experienced farmer, reckoned the opium crop was worth over £50 a square foot. The place where Coleridge had once dreamed of settling with Asra and the Wordsworths in an ideal Mediterranean Pantisocracy, was in reality for him one of the most dangerous places on earth.
Sicily held other temptations. On 26 September the opera season opened at Syracuse, and Coleridge first saw the young Italian prima donna Anna-Cecilia Bertozzi.78 He was immediately captivated by her singing of Metastasio’s aria, “Amo Te Solo” (“I love none but Thee”). He was swept by “a phantom of memory”, and experienced the “meeting soul” of music, for Cecilia (named after the patron saint of music) fatally reminded him of a younger version of Asra.79
By 11 October he had met her backstage, and had made the first of a series of secret assignations, though “the voice of Conscience whispered to me, concerning myself & my intent of visiting la P[rima] D[onna] tomorrow”.80 These assignations continued through October and early November, becoming a source of both guilt and delight, so that the green lane with its long line of softly swaying trees up to the Opera House began to haunt him with its “aromatic Smell of Poplars”. His “cruelly unlike Thoughts” would come upon him at each return, with gathered force: “What recollections, if I were worthy of indulging them.”81
Cecilia’s singing could be heard outside in the Opera House yard and the street, and the “ragged boys & girls” would learn her songs after a couple of performances, so that even during the day the back-alleys of Syracuse rang with the sound of urchins mimicking her “with wonderful accuracy & agility of Voice”.82 He also saw Cecilia dancing at the public balls, and perhaps danced with her, at least in imagination: “Dancing, when poor human Nature lets itself loose from bondage & circumstances of anxious selfish care: it is Madness.”83
He was invited to her dressing-rooms, and on at least one occasion to her bedroom. A single tiny fragment of verse about Cecilia survives in his Notebooks, though almost obliterated by a later hand: “…the Breeze, And let me float & think on Asra/Thee, And…Body…myself in suffering…applied spiritually.”84 Perhaps he was also thinking of Cecilia when he described the quintet singing at the Syracuse Opera, with voices that “leave, seek, pursue, oppose…and embrace each other again”, as the sweet image of “wayward yet fond lovers” who quarrel and make up and achieve “the total melting union”.85
It would not be surprising if, after five months alone in the Mediterranean,
