and heady clouds of oronoko tobacco, while they exchanged new sonnets and emotional intimacies of their tortured love-lives.
A revealing topic that emerged in common – among all the high talk of philosophy, religion, and Pantisocracy – was a shared attachment for their sisters. Charles talked fondly of Mary, Coleridge reminisced lyrically about the Evans sisters and about his own dear, dead sister Nancy Coleridge. This depth of curious, asexual, but genuinely fraternal feeling tells as much of Coleridge’s struggles between Mary Evans and Sara Fricker (both essentially part of sisterly families) as any of his melodramatic outpourings to Southey.
Moreover, it produced one of Coleridge’s most striking early poems in the “Conversational” mode which was later to become so important in his work: an intimate, low-key, blank verse style very close to his most personal letters. Back in September he had written a touching and unexpected note to Edith Fricker (rather than Sara), in which he fondly recalled Nancy: “I had a Sister – an only Sister. Most tenderly did I love her! Yea, I have woke at midnight, and wept – because she was not…My Sister, like you, was beautiful and accomplished – like you, she was lowly of Heart…I know, and feel, that I am your Brother.”69
He now versified these sentiments to Lamb, finding a new naturalness of phrase and grace of rhythm, which has the startling inevitability of a completely original, spontaneous kind of Romantic self-declaration. It is a landmark in his work.
In Fancy, well I know,
Thou creepest round a dear-lov’d Sister’s Bed
With noiseless step, and watchest the faint Look
Soothing each Pang with fond Solicitudes
And tenderest Tones medicinal of Love.
I too a Sister had – an only Sister –
She loved me dearly – and I doted on her –
On her soft Bosom I repos’d my Cares,
And gaind’ for every wound an healing Tear.
To her I pour’d forth all my puny Sorrows,
(As a sick Patient in his Nurse’s arms)
And of the Heart those hidden Maladies
That shrink asham’d from even Friendship’s Eye.
O! I have woke at midnight, and have wept
Because she was not!…70
Love here expresses itself as tenderness, confidentiality, and – once again – as maternal nursing. Charles Lamb nurses, and Coleridge – in his careful parenthesis – is nursed. Love is a form of healing, for both of them.
The intimacy of the poem is a great advance on most of the public sonnets, and allowed Coleridge even to allude amusingly to Lamb’s fondness for puns, describing Mary’s polished wit “as mild as lambent Glories/That play around an holy Infant’s head”. Coleridge gave him the poem together with an early manuscript draft of “Religious Musings” (dated Christmas Eve, 1794), the long philosophic piece which he here dismissed as “Elaborate & swelling – but the Heart / Not owns it”. This, too, indicates his own sense of breaking through to a more powerful and direct verse form, in which spontaneity of feeling and simplicity of expression become important new values.
Coleridge admired and even envied the relationship between Lamb and his sister (“Her mind is elegantly stored – her Heart feeling”), as he would later be attracted by the relationship between Wordsworth and Dorothy. And it was probably this kind of closeness and love that he wished, above all, from Mary Evans.
But it was not to be. On 24 December he finally received a letter confirming Mary Evans’ engagement. He wrote a short, concluding note in reply, honourably free of all reproach: “To love you Habit has made unalterable. This passion however, divested, as it now is, of all Shadow of Hope, will lose its disquieting power. Far distant from you I shall journey thro’ the vale of Men in calmness…I have burnt your Letters – forget mine – and that I have pained you, forgive me! May God infinitely love you.”71
On 29 December he informed Southey of this outcome. But he was now almost brutally frank about his dilemma over Sara Fricker in a letter which acknowledges the disturbing element of sexual enticement he felt: “to marry a woman whom I do not love – to degrade her, whom I call my Wife, by making her the Instrument of low Desire – and on the removal of a desultory Appetite, to be perhaps not displeased with her Absence! – Enough! These Refinements are the wildering Fires that lead me into Vice. Mark you, Southey! – I will do my Duty.”72
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But what was his duty now? London, Cambridge, Bath, Wales, America – in which direction should he go? How could he best pursue the Pantisocratic dream? Coleridge sat on in the snug at the Salutation & Cat, smoking and drinking and talking with Lamb, in a haze of indecision, into the New Year 1795. Southey, sweeping aside delicacies, insisted that he must come to Bath immediately. Coleridge replied, in a fantastical letter, that he would come down “helter skelter” on a local farm cart, the two-mile-an-hour “Flying Wagon”, wrapped up in hay, “fraternizing” with the calves, and well supplied with gin and oronoko. “I shall be with you by Wednesday [7th January], I suppose.”73
Southey took this proposal literally, and was full of amazed indignation when, having walked to Marlborough with Lovell to intercept the Flying Wagon, it failed to deliver its Pantisocratic contents. By 11 January he was himself in London, “to reclaim his stray”, who even then proved elusive. “I went to the Salutation and Cat – a most foul stye – no Coleridge,” he told Edith Fricker. “I went to Christ’s Hospital…where is Coleridge?” Finally he was located with Lamb in the Unitarian Chapel, seeking divine guidance. They had a difficult dinner together.
“Coleridge objected to Wales and thought it best to find some situation in London till we could prosecute our original plan. He talks of tutorage – a public office – a newspaper one for me. I went to bed in dirty sheets – and tost and turned, cold, weary and heart sick till seven in the morning.”74 It was a low moment for Pantisocracy. Southey’s letter shows how much he counted on Coleridge’s support, increasingly anxious about his own marriage to Edith, his retreating work prospects, and the financial difficulties at Bath. It was this appeal to Coleridge’s generosity and easy good nature, as much as any bullying over Sara Fricker, that finally convinced Coleridge that his Pantisocratic “duty” lay in the West Country. By the end of January 1795 his university degree, his career at the Bar, his London journalism were all abandoned. The three Pantisocrats – Coleridge, Southey and Burnett – were established in their first commune, a cramped apartment at 25 College Green, Bristol.
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The story of the ensuing ten months in Bristol has been
