Coleridge's "Dejection": The Earliest Manuscripts and the Earliest Printings 9781501742903

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
A Note on Editorial Procedure
Introduction
Reading Texts
Photographs
Transcriptions

Citation preview

COLERIDGE’S

Dejection The Earliest Manuscripts and the Earliest Printings

EDITED BY

Stephen Maxfield Parrish

Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON

Coleridge’s Dejection

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN PUBLISHED WITH THE AID OF A GRANT FROM THE HULL MEMORIAL PUBLICATION FUND OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY.

Copyright © 1988 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 1988 by Cornell University Press.

International Standard Book Number 0-8014-1255-2 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 87-24393 Printed in the United States of America Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book

The paper in this book is acid-free and meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources

CONTENTS

viii

Preface A Note on Editorial Procedure

xi 1

Introduction Reading Texts A Letter to-. The Cornell Manuscript, with an apparatus criticus of verbal variants in the Dove Cottage

Manuscript

21

Excerpts from A Letter to-in Coleridge’s letter to William Sotheby, 19 July 1802, with an apparatus criticus of variants in Coleridge’s letter to Robert

Southey, 29 July 1802

35

Dejection: An Ode. The Morning Post text, 4 October

1802, with an apparatus criticus of variants in Coleridge’s letter to the Beaumonts, 13 October 1803, and in Sarah Stoddard’s transcript of 1805

48

facing The Sibylline Leaves text (1817), with an apparatus criticus of variants in Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 10 September 1814, and in Coleridge’s Poetical Works, 1828, 1829, and 1834

49

The Day-Dream. The Cornell Manuscript facing the Morning Post text, 19 October 1802

65

[v]

A

[Vl]

Contents

Photographs Cornell Manuscripts of A Letter to- and The DayDream

73

Dove Cottage Manuscript of A Letter to-

77

Coleridge’s letter to Sotheby, 19 July 1802

94

Dejection: An Ode in The Morning Post, 4 October 1802

98

Coleridge’s letter to the Beaumonts, 13 August 1803

101

Transcriptions A Letter to-. The Cornell Manuscript facing the

Dove Cottage Manuscript

105

Dejection: An Ode, from Coleridge’s letter to the

Beaumonts, 13 October 1803 The Day-Dream, from the Cornell Manuscript

133 141

PREFACE

This volume presents the original versions of three poems that Coleridge wrote in 1802, together with photographs and transcrip¬ tions of the principal early manuscripts and a record of variant readings in other contemporary manuscripts and in the versions of the poems which Coleridge published during his lifetime. The three poems are A Letter to-, Dejection: An Ode, and The Day-Dream. One of the early manuscripts, containing A Letter to-and The Day-Dream in the hand of Mary Hutchinson (later Mary Wordsworth)—both are love poems that Coleridge wrote for her sister Sara—came to light in the summer of 1977, when, as “The Property of a Gentleman,” it was offered for sale at Sotheby’s, together with a mass of Wordsworth family letters and papers. The whole of this material was bought by Cornell University, held for seven months in London, then resold at the purchase price to the Dove Cottage Trust in Grasmere, where it now rests. The manuscript’s history and its whereabouts for the past century re¬ main unknown, but to commemorate its rescue and its brief season in Cornell custody, it is here designated the “Cornell Manuscript,” to distinguish it from the “Dove Cottage Manuscript” of one of the poems, A Letter to-. Because the Cornell Manuscript has not hitherto been made public, its version of A Letter to- is presented first in the volume in the form of a reading text from which miswritings, overwritings, and scribal idiosyncrasies have been cleared away.

[viii]

Preface

To permit easy comparison, an apparatus criticus of the principal variants in the other manuscript is also provided, and at the end of the volume, following photographs of the manuscripts, transcrip¬ tions of the two texts are arrayed facing each other. Coleridge wrote A Letter to-, he tells us in the subtitle, in April 1802, and he later so shortened and reshaped it as to make it an altogether different poem, which he published in The Morning Post, 4 October 1802, as Dejection: An Ode. This poem is here reproduced in full, with a photograph of the Morning Post text, of which only a few copies survive. Between April and July, Cole¬ ridge copied out extracts of the Letter, with some revisions and additions, to a total of 138 lines, and sent them to William Sotheby, 19 July. These extracts, too, are presented here in full, by way of showing the verse-letter in a transitional stage, on its way to becoming Dejection; and a brief apparatus shows the variants that appear in another letter, of 29 July, in which Coleridge copied out eighteen lines of his poem for Robert Southey. After publishing Dejection, Coleridge continued to quote, and to print, extracts from his manuscripts of it and its parent poem, A Letter to-. The partial text that he sent to the Beaumonts on 13 August 1803, joined to a copy of Wordsworth’s Resolution and Independence, is here presented in full transcription with accom¬ panying photographs. No complete copy of Dejection survives from these years; the earliest is a transcription made in Malta by Sarah Stoddard, probably in 1805, presumably copied from the version Coleridge had with him there. All verbal variants in the Stoddard text, which is fairly corrupt, are here incorporated in an apparatus to the Morning Post text. They show Coleridge already working toward the version he published in Sibylline Leaves in 1817—the first published text without omissions. Three years be¬ fore Sibylline Leaves appeared, however, Coleridge picked up two pieces of his poem, totaling forty-six lines, and put them into a prose essay, “On the Principles of Genial Criticism,” which he published on 10 September 1814 in Felix Farley's Bristol Journal. The Sibylline Leaves text, which constitutes the final stage of the poem, is presented in full, facing the Morning Post text, and an apparatus records variants in the extracts in Felix Farley's Bristol

Preface

[ix]

Journal, as well as variants in later (lifetime) editions of Coleridge’s Poetical Works, 1828, 1829, and 1834. After Mary Hutchinson had copied A Letter to - in the Cornell Manuscript, she added another Coleridge poem of thirty lines, untitled, like the first. This poem was published in the Morn¬ ing Post on 19 October 1802 as The Day-Dream (not to be confused with another “Asra” poem, A Day-Dream); it was never re¬ published by Coleridge, and no other manuscript of it is known. It is presented here first as a clean reading text, then in full transcrip¬ tion, with a photograph. To permit easy comparison of the two texts, the Morning Post version is presented facing the reading text. The Introduction sets forth the context in which these Coleridge poems were composed, tracing events out of which they grew and some of their consequences. Before A Letter to-was known, Thomas Raysor ventured an astute guess as to its existence (Studies in Philology, July 1919), and when Ernest de Selincourt published it for the first time, he gave a perceptive account of its origins (in Essays and Studies, 1936). Some twenty years later George Whalley, in Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson and the Asra Poems (London, 1955), told the story of Coleridge’s passion for Sara and reprinted the poems he wrote to her. William Heath, in Wordsworth and Cole¬ ridge: A Study of Their Literary Relations in 1801-1802 (Oxford, 1970), followed some of the later progress of the partnership that had been formed in Lyrical Ballads. In 1978 George Dekker, com¬ mitted to the view that Dejection is incomparably greater than A Letter, advanced in Coleridge and the Literature of Sensibility (Lon¬ don) a supposition that parts of the ode may actually antedate the longer poem, and wrote with tact and learning about the genre and the antecedents of Dejection. Finally, Jared Curtis, who had pre¬ sented a critical history of Wordsworth’s great spring of 1802 in Wordsworth's Experiments with Tradition (Ithaca, 1971), published in 1983 scrupulously edited and authoritative texts of the pertinent poems in his Cornell Wordsworth edition of Poems, in Two Vol¬ umes. The definitive record of Coleridge’s spring, with all subse¬ quent variant readings, will appear in J. C. C. Mays’s forthcoming edition of Coleridge’s poems for the monumental Bollingen Coleridge.

M

Preface

Permission to reproduce manuscripts has been generously given by the Dove Cottage Trust (for whom this volume was originally designed, as a companion volume to Beth Darlington’s edition of the love letters of William and Mary Wordsworth, My Dearest Love), the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Newberry Library of Chicago, and the Department of Special Collections of Boston University Libraries. S. M. Ithaca, New York

Parrish

A NOTE ON EDITORIAL PROCEDURE

Quotations from Wordsworth’s poems are taken from Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800-1807, edited by Jared Curtis (Ithaca, 1983); quotations from Coleridge’s letters are from Col¬ lected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Earl Leslie Griggs (6 vols.; Oxford,

1956-1971); and quotations from Dorothy

Wordsworth’s journals are from Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, edited by Mary Moorman (Oxford, 1971). In transcriptions of manuscripts, a deletion is shown by a line drawn through the word or words, an overwriting by a vertical brace connecting the superimposed letters with those beneath, and an illegible passage by a question mark within brackets. Empty brackets signify a tear or a worn place where writing has been lost. Revisions and additions to the base text are set in reduced type. In the apparatus criticus, “deleted to” indicates a changed reading; the original reading has been deleted and another substituted.

[xi]

Coleridge’s Dejection

INTRODUCTION

Over the course of six weeks in the spring of 1802, three of the most celebrated poems of the century were composed—or begun: Wordsworth’s “Intimations” Ode, Coleridge’s Letter to (soon shortened to Dejection), and Wordsworth’s Resolution and Independence. The echoes of theme and language which ring through these poems reveal something of the shared experiences out of which they grew. On the evening of 26 March, just at bedtime, as Dorothy Wordsworth noted in her Grasmere journal, William wrote “the Rainbow”— My heart leaps up when I behold A Rainbow in the sky ... — and the next day, before spreading a load of dung in the garden, he “wrote part of an ode.” This part would have been the first four stanzas of the ode later titled “Intimations of Immortality,” which Wordsworth said were written “two years at least” before the rest of the poem, completed in March 1804. We cannot be certain of the original shape of these stanzas, for the earliest version of them we have describes a radiant morning in May, not March, and Wordsworth seems to have worked intermittently at his ode until the middle of June before breaking off. But they undoubtedly gave voice to the mingled feelings of celebration (“My heart is at your

[1]

Coleridge’s Dejection

[2]

festival, / My head hath its coronal ... I hear, I hear, with joy I hear”), of sorrow (“To me alone there came a thought of grief’), and of loss (“The things which I have seen I see them now no more”) which culminate in the haunting questions at the end of stanza 4: Whither is fled the visionary gleam Where is it gone the glory and the dream. The sources of these mingled contradictory feelings lie out of reach, buried in the complex and private sensibility of a great poet, but certain determining events in the poet’s more public life can be recited. For more than fourteen months Wordsworth and his sister had been “home at Grasmere,” settled in the “calmest, fairest, purest spot on earth.” Here, after one splendidly creative year, Wordsworth had fallen relatively silent, the charge that Coleridge had laid upon him, of writing the “first and finest philosophical Poem,” resting heavy on his mind. During the fall and winter of 1801—2 he labored obsessively over old poems (Peter Bell, The Ruined Cottage, Ruth,

The Pedlar, and others), read widely in

Spenser, Milton, and Ben Jonson, made ready the third edition of Lyrical Ballads, and wrote some “modernizations” of Chaucer, but he composed no more than a handful of new pieces, and he failed to get on with the philosophical poem, The Recluse. During this long fallow period he was working out plans for a fundamental alteration in his life—marriage to Mary Hutchinson, who passed a portion of the winter in Dove Cottage (she arrived in early November and left in late January). Throughout the winter there ran a persistent undercurrent of concern about “poor Coleridge,” who left the Lakes for the south shortly after Mary arrived. Dorothy marked his departure by a moving entry in her journal, November 10: “Every sight and every sound reminded me of him—dear, dear fellow, of his many walks to us, by day and by night, of all dear things. I was melan¬ choly, and could not talk, but at last I eased my heart by weep¬ ing—nervous blubbering, says William. It is not so. O! how many, many reasons have I to be anxious for him.” Coleridge’s

Introduction

[3]

letters, full of misery, became deeply disturbing to read. “A sad melancholy letter . . . prevented us all from sleeping,” wrote Dorothy on 6 December; on 22 December “we had a melancholy letter from C., for he had been very ill. . . . We walked home almost without speaking”; on Christmas Day came a letter that made them “uneasy about him,” so uneasy that Dorothy con¬ fessed she was glad she was not by herself when she received it; on 29 January they got “a heart-rending letter from Coleridge—we were as sad as we could be.” Coleridge was writing from London, where he had fled from his family, his life (as he confided to his brother-in-law, Robert Southey) “gangrened ... in it’s very vi¬ tals—domestic Tranquillity.” Out of these currents of concern and these preoccupations, the genial spirit unaccountably stirred, and Wordsworth began to write again. By the middle of March he had started to pour out the ballad-lyrics that help mark this spring as one of the intensely creative periods of his life. Dorothy’s journal records the titles: on 11 and 12 March “The Singing Bird” (The Sailor's Mother), on 12 and 13 March Alice Fell, on 13 and 14 March The Beggars, on 14 March To a Butterfly, on 17 March the “Silver How” poem (it has not been identified). On 19 March Coleridge showed up at Dove Cottage, in mid-afternoon, acting on one of his periodic resolves to try to live once more with his wife and children. His appearance shocked Dorothy, who was alone when he came to the door: “his eyes were a little swollen with the wind ... he seemed half stu¬ pefied.” Coleridge stayed for two days, walking with the Words¬ worths, sitting up late and lying late abed, disputing about Ben Jonson, listening to William read the much-revised Pedlar, and almost certainly talking about the woman Wordsworth expected to marry and her sister, Sara Hutchinson. The days following Coleridge’s departure for Keswick were days of resolution for Wordsworth. After lengthy and “tender” talks with her brother, some of them concerning Coleridge, and after reading letters from Sara Hutchinson and “poor Annette” and writing to Mary and Sara, Dorothy reported laconically: “We resolved to see Annette, and that Wm should go to Mary.” To see Annette Vallon and their daughter, Caroline, now nine years old,

Coleridge’s Dejection

[4]

William would have to go to France; Mary Hutchinson was at her home in Gallow Hill, Sockburn-on-Tees, Durham. The following day, 23 March, the lyrical poems resumed, with The Cuckoo; on 24 March “Wm altered the Butterfly”; on 26 March he wrote “the Rainbow,” and the next morning, 27 March, the early stanzas of the “Intimations” Ode. The opening lines of the Ode startlingly echo one stanza of a poem that Coleridge had published in The Morning Post a year and a half earlier, under the title The Mad Monk: There was a time when earth, and sea, and skies, The bright green vale, and forest’s dark recess, With all things, lay before mine eyes In steady loveliness: But now I feel, on earth’s uneasy scene, Such sorrows as will never cease;— I only ask for peace; If I must live to know that such a time has been! Compare the “Intimations” Ode in its earliest surviving copy (from the spring of 1804): There was a time when meadow grove and stream The earth and every common sight To me did seem Apparrel’d in celestial light The glory and the freshness of a dream It is not now as it has been of yore Turn whereso’er I may By night or day The things which I have seen I see them now no more. f It has been held that Coleridge’s poem wasjij^aroHy, makiy^f ofcharacteristic phrases andTmages to mock the Gothic sentimen¬ tality of Wordsworth at his worst. It can equally be held that The Mad Monk was basically Wordsworth’s poem—in its original form perhaps a Lucy poem, resembling ’Tis Said, that Some have Died for

Introduction

[5]

Love—touched up by Coleridge and sent off (like Lewd, The Old Man of the Alps, and other pieces published toward the end of 1800) to fulfill his obligations to The Morning Post. (These views were first aired in a debate titled “Who Wrote the Mad Monk?" in the Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 64 [April i960], 224-237). The lines were never acknowledged by either poet, and we thus have a choice. We can choose to believe that on 27 March 1802 Wordsworth composed some lines that echoed a parody of his verse which Coleridge had written in mockery and published in a newspaper, or that Wordsworth, following old habits, echoed some earlier lines of his own, written with tenderness and pas¬ sion—much as he did in the opening lines of Tintern Abbey, which echo a scrap of his earlier verse found on the back of The Old Cumberland Beggar and published by Ernest de Selincourt and Hel¬ en Darbishire in Volume V of Wordsworth’s Poetical Works (Oxford, 1949), page 240:

Yet once again do I behold the forms Of these huge mountains, and yet once again, Standing beneath these elms, I hear thy voice, Beloved Derwent, that peculiar voice Heard in the stillness of the evening air, Half-heard and half-created.

In any event, with the beginning of the Ode fresh in his mind, on 28 March Wordsworth walked with Dorothy from Dove Cottage up to Keswick to stay for a week with the Coleridges. Coleridge walked down to meet them in the rain, and they arrived together at Greta Hall, “wet to skin.” During their week together the two poets rambled about a good deal, climbed Skiddaw, doubtless talked of William’s developing plans for marriage, and once again read or talked about William’s recent verse, this time including the opening stanzas of the Ode. The Wordsworths’ last day in Keswick was Sunday, 4 April, and that evening, after they had all sat to¬ gether “pleasantly enough” following supper (in Dorothy’s muted phrase), then retired, Coleridge began his melancholy response, A

Coleridge’s Dejection

[6]

Letter to-, the second of the three great poems to come out of this spring season. How much of the poem he wrote that night is uncertain. As early as the autumn of 1800 he had scribbled entries in his note¬ book about sounds made by the night wind: “A trembling Oo! Oo! like a wounded man on a field of battle whose wounds smarted with the cold” (compare 11. 202-203 of A Letter); and four months later (1 February 1801) he spoke in a letter to Thomas Poole of “this Night Wind that pipes its thin doleful climbing sinking Notes like a child that has lost it’s way and is crying aloud, half in grief and half in the hope to be heard by its Mother” (compare 11. 211-215). In March 1802 he made a little notebook entry about the way “the Larches in spring push out their separate bundles of Leaves first into green Brushes or Pencils . . . which soon then are only small tassels” (compare 11. 26—27 of A Letter). Such verbal echoes have suggested that parts of A Letter—or even of Dejection—may already have been written by the beginning of April. In December 1801 Coleridge had set down in his notebooks a proposal for a poem which sounds strikingly close to the design of the verse letter: “A lively picture of a man, disappointed in marriage, & endeavouring to make a compensation to himself by virtuous & tender & brotherly friendship with an amiable Wom¬ an—the obstacles—the jealousies—the impossiblity of it.—Best advice that he should as much as possible withdraw himself from pursuits of morals &c—& devote himself to abstract sciences—” All we can be certain of is that by the middle of July Coleridge was able to describe his poem to William Sotheby as “a very long one.” Of the 138 lines he copied out for Sotheby, all but 3 are found in the verse Letter; 16 are not present in Dejection. It has thus seemed plausible to suppose that whatever the early history, the longer, more personal poem was completed first, and the shorter, more formal one put together from it. The sources of Coleridge’s melancholy—his “grief,” his “heart¬ less mood” (the word “dejection” does not appear in his verse letter)—are easier to trace than Wordsworth’s moods, owing to Coleridge’s compulsive habit of self-analysis. The summary por-

Introduction

[7]

trait that he had offered to William Godwin on 22 January 1802 touches some of the roots of his problems:

Partly from ill-health & partly from an unhealthy & reverie¬ like vividness of Thoughts, & (pardon the pedantry of the phrase) a diminished Impressibility from Things, my ideas, wishes, & feelings are to a diseased degree disconnected from motion & ac¬ tion. In plain & natural English, I am a dreaming & therefore an indolent man.— I am a Starling self-incaged, & always in the Moult, & my whole Note is, Tomorrow, & tomorrow, & tomorrow.

Coleridge’s

ill health

had

taken

unpleasant

and humiliating

forms—boils, grotesquely swollen knees, swollen testicles, de¬ ranged bowels, frightful neuralgic pains—all of which he tried to ease with heavy draughts of laudanum. The other disease that Coleridge here percipiently diagnosed took more menacing shapes than indolence or incapacity: as he well knew, it could bring about erosion of creative power by the habit of abstract speculation, “austerest reasonings,” as he had once earlier put it to Godwin. When Coleridge renounced the writing of poetry at the end of 1800, intimidated by Wordsworth’s superior genius and superior powers of execution, he wretchedly declared himself no poet, but “only a kind of Metaphysician.” Three months later he confessed to Godwin that he had been undergoing a process of “intellectual exsiccationhaving “compelled into hours of Delight many a sleepless, painful hour of Darkness by chasing down metaphysical Game.” This destructive growth of the metaphysical temper in a creative soul, which Coleridge recognized as a major source of his “heart¬ less mood,” is the subject of the paragraph with which he intro¬ duced his poem when he sent parts of it to William Sotheby in July 1802, and it is the subject of the seven lines from the poem which Coleridge quoted more than any others over the next few years in letters to his friends. The very personal nature of these lines is suggested by the fact that he left them out of the shortened version

Coleridge’s Dejection

[8]

of the poem which he published in The Morning Post as Dejection; they were not re-inserted until Sibylline Leaves appeared in 1817: For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still & patient all I can; And haply by abstruse Research to steal From my own Nature all the Natural Man; This was my sole Resource, my wisest Plan! And that, which suits a part, infects the whole, And now is almost grown the temper of my Soul! But a deeper, more persistent source of Coleridge’s grief was the one to which he pointed farther on in his summary self-analysis of 22 January 1802—“domestic Discord, & the heart-withering Con¬ viction—that I could not be happy without my children, & could not but be miserable with the mother of them.” The discord must have dated almost from the beginning, Coleridge having pre¬ cipitously married the sister of Southey’s wife in order to have a wife of his own to help him found a Pantisocratic Society. The discord is easy enough to understand: Coleridge must have been uncommonly difficult to live with; Sarah Coleridge was not ideally fitted to be the wife of a genius (“Her radical fault is want of sensibility,” Dorothy Wordsworth once cruelly put it). Hints of her distress come through in her letters to Thomas Poole, but her story remained untold until Molly Lefebure told it with sympathy and tact in her admirable biography, The Bondage of Love (London, 1986). Coleridge’s story is told and retold in his letters and note¬ books. Probably the bluntest and harshest account of his wife he ever set down is the one he communicated to Thomas Wedgwood on 20 October 1802: Ill tempered Speeches sent after me when I went out of the House, ill-tempered Speeches on my return, my friends received with freezing looks, the least opposition or contradiction occa¬ sioning screams of passion, & the sentiments, which I held most base, ostentatiously avowed—all this added to the utter negation of all, which a Husband expects from a Wife—especially, living

Introduction

[9]

in retirement—& the consciousness, that I was myself growing a worse man / O dear Sir! no one can tell what I have suffered. I can say with strict truth, that the happiest half-hours I have had, were when all of a sudden, as I have been sitting alone in my Study, I have burst into Tears.— Alone, in that study, six months earlier, with William and Doro¬ thy asleep in other rooms of his house, Coleridge had started to compose the moving and powerful verse-letter that speaks of his “coarse domestic life” and defines his own “peculiar lot” as being to suffer “those habitual Ills” That wear out Life, when two unequal minds Meet in one House, & two discordant Wills.— While domestic discord forms a strong and bitter theme in this verse-letter, Sara Hutchinson stands more in view there than Sarah Fricker Coleridge (the h in her first name was her husband’s addi¬ tion). For the Letter to-is, of course, a love poem, addressed in longing and hopelessness and guilt to the woman who had infatuated Coleridge for more than two years. He had met Sara late in 1799, and was wounded almost instantaneously (as he con¬ fided to his notebook on 24 November) by love’s poisoned and incurable sting (“levi spiculo, venenato eheu et insanabili”) while he stood by the fire joking with one of her brothers, discreetly holding Sara’s hand behind her back. A month afterward Col¬ eridge was moved to celebrate the wound by publishing in The Morning Post (21 December) a tender ballad called Love: All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love And feed his sacred flame . . . The love took firm hold during Sara’s winter stay at Dove Cottage, 1800-1801, and Coleridge’s month-long visit to her fam¬ ily in the summer of 1801. During these visits they shared mo-

[io]

Coleridge’s Dejection

ments of chaste tenderness, one of them movingly commemorated in the love letter as “the happy night” When Mary, thou & I, together were, The low-decaying Fire our only light, Dear Mary!—on her lap my Head she lay’d— Her hand was on my Brow, Even as my own is now; And on my cheek I felt thy Eye-lash play—. Coleridge celebrated the same happy summer night in another poem, A Day-Dream, addressed (in its last line) to “two beloved women”: in the dream the lovers lie with “Mary’s gentle lap” their pillow, in front of a flickering fire, in a quiet room, and once again Thine eyelash on my cheek doth play— ’Tis Mary’s hand upon my brow! There were also, inevitably, moments of loneliness and anguish, also commemorated in the love letter, as for instance “the fretting Hour” . . . when I wrote thee that complaining Scroll Which even to bodily sickness bruis’d thy Soul! The tones of this love poem, sung, as Coleridge wretchedly put it, “with my breast against a Thorn,” like “the Poet’s Night¬ ingale,” are richly various, and the intimations of self-pity that have drawn the notice of some readers should not obscure the fervent, reiterated statements of an altruistic wish for Sara’s hap¬ piness. Only Sara’s installation in a quiet home, with those she loved, in “calm well-being & a heart at rest,” could move Col¬ eridge to crown himself with his own “Coronal.” No less than Dejection, the shorter and better-known recasting of the poem, A Letter to-ends in generous affirmation. Moreover, the self¬ concern is artfully modulated by the use of metaphors that pick up and develop the controlling metaphors of Wordsworth’s Ode—or

Introduction

[n]

the portion of it thus far written—that is, metaphors of apparel and of light. Coleridge’s own statement of loss is no less poignant than Wordsworth’s: These Mountains, too, these Vales, these Woods, these Lakes Scenes full of Beauty & of Loftiness Where all my Life I fondly hope to live— I were sunk low indeed, did they no solace give But oft I feel, & evermore to fear, They are not to me now the things, which once they were. His explanation answers Wordsworth’s haunting question: Where has it gone, the gleam, the glory, the radiance that used to dress the landscape of childhood memory? It was projected from inside the soul, and therefore it dies unless inner joy is sustained: . . . we receive but what we give And in our Life alone does Nature live— Our’s is her Wedding-garment, our’s her Shroud! And Coleridge went on to add a characteristic image of sound to parallel the images of light: Ah! from the Soul itself must issue forth A light, a Glory, & a luminous Cloud, Envelloping the Earth! And from the Soul itself must there be sent A sweet and Potent Voice of its own Birth, Of all sweet sounds the Life & Element. Wordsworth’s own answers to his question, composed two years later, in stanzas 5 to 11 of his Ode, are rendered largely in terms of the same metaphors. But long before then, Wordsworth had made an independent response to Coleridge’s poem. The chronology of events can again be traced through Dorothy’s jour¬ nal. On his birthday, 7 April 1802, two days after coming home from Keswick, Wordsworth carried out one of the resolves he had formed on 22 March and left for Durham to see Mary; he returned

Coleridge’s Dejection

[12]

a week later. Coleridge came down to Dove Cottage on 20 April and the next day recited “the verses he wrote to Sara.” Dorothy found herself so “affected” by them that “the sunshine—the green fields and the fair sky made me sadder; even the little happy sport¬ ing lambs seemed but sorrowful to me.” What William thought is not recorded, though the flow of his lyrical verses ran almost uninterrupted up to, through, and following Coleridge’s five-day visit. The flow even spilled over into semicomic doggerel in The Tinker, begun on 27 April, probably in answer to Coleridge’s Mad Moon in a Passion, which mocks his own obsessive melancholy. But a week after Coleridge had departed—on the evening of 3 May—Wordsworth began to write the third great poem of this extraordinary spring, The Leech-gatherer, later called Resolution and Independence. The poem had its distant origin in a meeting on the road with a very old man, bent almost double, a coat thrown over his shoul¬ ders, who had lived by gathering and selling leeches. “He had been hurt in driving a cart,” Dorothy had written on 3 October 1800, “his leg broke his body driven over his skull fractured.” This emblem of misery and fortitude hung in Wordsworth’s imagina¬ tion for nineteen months, and when it took poetic shape it served in part to answer Coleridge’s somber portrayal of his “heartless mood,” his lover’s grief, as revealed not only in the verse-letter to Sara but in the other moving and poignant poem contained in the Cornell Manuscript, The Day-Dream, which Coleridge had sent in a letter while Wordsworth was working on his poem. On Sunday morning, 9 May, The Leech-gatherer was finished and copied out for Coleridge. In it occurs for the first time the word that Col¬ eridge used for the title of the shortened version of his verse-letter: ... as it sometimes chanceth from the might Of joy in minds that can no farther go As high as we have mounted in delight In our dejection do we sink as low. Two brilliant lines in Wordsworth’s poem reflect on the fates of “mighty Poets in their misery dead.”

Introduction I thought of Chatterton the marvellous Boy The sleepless soul who perished in his pride. And when Wordsworth turned from the melancholy examples of Chatterton and Bums to think, fearfully and prophetically, of Col¬ eridge and himself— We Poets in our youth begin in gladness But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness— we hear a thematic echo of Coleridge’s sorrowful lament: . . . Hope grew round me, like the climbing Vine, And Leaves & Fruitage not my own, seem’d mine! But now Ill-tidings bow me down to Earth— . . . It seems improbable that Coleridge could have found consola¬ tion or resolution in Wordsworth’s emblematic figure of the leechgatherer on the lonely moor. The very week Wordsworth finished the poem, Coleridge was obliged to report to Thomas Poole a fresh occasion for despondency: “Mrs. Coleridge is indisposed, & I have too much reason to suspect that she is breeding again / an event, which was to have been deprecated. ...” The wry suspi¬ cion was soon confirmed, and probably communicated to the Wordsworths on Coleridge’s next visit to Grasmere: “We sate a long time under the Wall of a sheep-fold,” Dorothy noted on 22 May. “Had some interesting melancholy talk about his private affairs.” During this visit Wordsworth would have read to Coleridge the affectionately jocular portrait of him which he composed directly after finishing The Leech-gatherer. The portrait, joined to four stanzas of self-portraiture in Stanzas Written in my Pocket-copy of Thomson's Castle of Indolence, makes up a low-keyed epilogue to the three great searching, philosophical poems the two partners had exchanged that spring. Wordsworth presented himself as ec¬ centrically nomadic and withdrawn: Some thought he was a lover and did woo; Some thought far worse of him, & did him wrong

Coleridge’s Dejection

[14]

But verse was what he had been wedded to; And his own mind did, like a tempest strong, Come to him thus; and drove the weary Man along. Coleridge was A noticeable Man with large dark eyes And a pale face, that seem’d undoubtedly As if a blooming face it ought to be: Heavy his low-hung lip did oft appear, A face divine of heaven-born idiotcy! The closing stanza presents the two in idyllic partnership, as though dejection, despondency, the anguish of a hopeless love, the fading of the visionary gleam, and all the other reverberating themes of the two great odes and The Leech-gatherer had never sounded: He would entice that other man to hear His music, & to view his imagery: And sooth, these two did love each other dear, As far as love in such a place could be: There did they lie from earthly labour free, Most happy livers as were ever seen! “Happy” Coleridge’s essential nature undoubtedly was, as he himself had often testified—“made for Joy”—but he could also testify knowingly to his crushing disability: “I never could yield to it.” The verse-letter to Sara and its companion poem, The DayDream, remain the truest and most authentic portraits of his inner mood, written with the intensity that constitutes for some readers the highest mark of poetic quality. Just when he sent A Letter to Sara Hutchinson is impossible to determine. Their correspondence survives only in scraps, and nei¬ ther Mary Hutchinson’s transcript of the poem (the Cornell Manu¬ script) nor Coleridge’s autograph copy (the Dove Cottage Manu¬ script) can be dated with much precision. Both are clearly earlier than mid-July, for when Coleridge quoted the poem to Sotheby

Introduction

[15]

on 19 July, he had already developed some of the readings toward the version he adopted when he published pieces of the poem in October as Dejection. Neither manuscript seems to have been cop¬ ied from the other, for they show a number of wholly different readings. Coleridge’s revisions in the Dove Cottage Manuscript, some made in the course of transcription, some possibly a little later, yield ambiguous evidence about priority. At the end of the poem Coleridge left out, then inserted, two lines that are found in the base text of Mary’s copy (11. 334-335), from which one might conclude that his text was the earlier. At the same time, two of his revisions point the other way: at line 10 he crossed out “all suf¬ fus’d,” the reading of the Cornell Manuscript, and wrote in “over¬ spread,” the reading adopted in the Sotheby letter, The Morning Post, and Sibylline Leaves; and at line 187 he deleted “howl’d,” the reading of the Cornell Manuscript, in favor of “rav’d,” which appears in all the later versions. One has to suppose that Coleridge could shift his readings arbitrarily from one version to another, perhaps relying on memory, perhaps wavering in his preferences; it is hard otherwise to account for “dear old Ballad” in one of the manuscripts and the Sotheby letter, “grand old Ballad” in the other manuscript and The Morning Post. But apart from revisions, a fair number of variant readings be¬ tween the two manuscripts—substantive variants, not just acci¬ dentals—point to the Cornell Manuscript as earlier. The most interesting of these variants appears at line 231, where the Cornell text has a reading hitherto unknown. Instead of the two familiar lines that survive in other versions of the poem—

Yes, dearest Sara! Yes! There was a time when tho’ my path was rough—

there is only one:

’Ere I was wedded, tho’ my path was rough,

Unique, and therefore likely to be early, readings are also found in the Cornell text at line 197 (“The Blooms & Buds” for “The

[16]

Coleridge’s Dejection

Blossoms, Buds”) and line 308 (“strange” for “strong”). More¬ over, what looks like the progress of revision can occasionally be seen. Line 203, for example, reads: That groan at once from Smart . . . [Cornell] At once they groan with Smart . . . [Dove Cottage] At once they groan with Pain . . . [Sotheby] At once they groan with pain . . . [Dejection] And line 205: . . . that dread sound . . . [Cornell] ... all that sound . . . [Dove Cottage] ... all that Noise . . . [Sotheby] ... all that noise . . . [Dejection] For these reasons, Mary’s transcription of A Letter for her sister is taken to be earlier than Coleridge’s—to be based, that is, on a copy that antedates the careful fair copy in Coleridge’s hand which has been for years at Dove Cottage, doubtless sent there as a gift from its author. Coleridge shortly made Wordsworth another sort of gift of his poem by publishing a cut-down and reshaped version of it in The Morning Post on Wordsworth’s wedding day (and Coleridge’s wedding anniversary), 4 October, with Sara’s name changed to what de Selincourt called the “transparent soubriquet” of Ed¬ mund. What he did to cut and recast the poem can be followed in the line numbers provided here in the margin of the Morning Post text. These numbers reveal that of the 139 lines that make up Dejection, only 12 were newly written (4 near the beginning, 8 at the end), all the rest being taken over in blocks from A Letter to -. The opening three stanzas remained about the same, with the excision of eight lines and the insertion of four, elaborating on the poet’s wish for a change in the weather to “startle this dull pain, and make it move and live!” Coleridge then jumped to the final stanza of A Letter and used most of it to fill stanza IV of Dejection. For stanza V he turned back to the middle of the longer

Introduction

[17]

poem and picked up the powerful lines that record the sapping of his creative powers. At this point the Morning Post text breaks off into rows of asterisks, with a note: “The sixth and seventh Stanzas omitted.” There is no textual evidence to support the note. What Coleridge did was drop from line 241 back to line 184 of the Letter text, then use 32 consecutive lines to fill up his stanza VIII—the lines that describe the tales (of Wordsworth’s) imaginatively heard in the raving of the night wind, now risen. His final stanza, stanza IX, is compounded of six lines from the middle of A Letter, six lines from the very end, and eight lines freshly written, though two of these fresh lines were in fact picked up from the long excerpts from A Letter—with a few modifications and three added lines—which Coleridge had copied out for Sotheby in July. Converting a love letter in verse into a poem of tribute to a fellow poet was thus not a matter of great difficulty. From the beginning Coleridge seemed to regard his poem as adaptable. No more than a month after writing it, he told Poole that it was addressed to him: “on the 4th of April last I wrote you a letter in verse, but I thought it dull and doleful—& did not send it.” Two months later he told Sotheby that it was addressed to Words¬ worth, and this time copied out the blocks of extracts that totaled 138 lines, with “William” or “Poet” or “Wordsworth” inserted where “Sara” had stood in the original. In Sibylline Leaves, pub¬ lished after the estrangement from Wordsworth, the address shift¬ ed again, this time to the neutral “Lady” who has since graced the poem in collections of Coleridge’s verse. These tactics have left us five versions of a single line (1. 295 of A Letter, 48 of Dejection):

O Sara! we receive but what we give [manuscripts, April 1802] O Wordsworth! we receive but what we give [Sotheby, July 1802] O Edmund! we receive but what we give [Morning Post, October 1802] O William! we receive but what we give [Beaumont, August 1803] O Lady! we receive but what we give, [Sibylline Leaves, 1817]

The reason that Coleridge could carry out these shifts of address without writing many fresh lines was, of course, that the original

Coleridge’s Dejection

[18]

poem was more about Coleridge than about Sara—as much a psychological self-analysis as a love letter. De Selincourt went even further, defining the “root idea” of the poem as the unhappy “contrast” between Wordsworth and Coleridge, both as lovers and as poets. Hence Coleridge could remove the tender testaments of his love without disturbing most of the expressions of his anguish. Nonetheless, the effects of alteration were profound, not only because the change from private to public utterance required a tightening of control and the dropping of the most intimate and personal passages, but because the order of the parts of the poem was changed. The most important effect of reordering was to transform the character of the “dark distressful Dream” (1. 184) from which the speaker turns in something like relief at one of the climaxes of the poem. In A Letter this dream had been the dream, or nightmare, that Sara might fall into illness or pain, of body or mind, with Coleridge absent, knowing but incapable of helping. In Dejection the dream became enigmatic, as it was in the Sotheby letter, because it was detached from its context; the reader had to suppose that it related to something in the missing portion of the text. Sarah Stoddard’s transcript simply closes the gap and begins a new stanza, without making much sense: Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around Reality’s dark dream! When Coleridge recast the poem once more for Sibylline Leaves, he reinserted here the lines about his debilitating retreat into meta¬ physics, by way of pointing up the loss of his “shaping spirit of Imagination,” and alluded to this process as “Reality’s dark dream.” By this means, what he had earlier delineated as a lover’s fear he deftly converted into a poet’s fear. The other major effect of reordering was to place the soaring resolution of the original poem ahead of, instead of behind, the full statement of the problem: the lines that communicate the answers to Wordsworth’s question come before the lines that elaborate on the speaker’s anguish. Yet here again Coleridge achieved a logical

Introduction

[19]

movement, by dropping out most of the long elaboration, so that the statement of his incapacity to “feel” in response to Nature leads directly into the assertion that Nature only wears the colors of the mind. In carrying out the revisions, Coleridge accomplished one of the most remarkable transformations in the history of poetic art. If some readers may prefer the Letter on the grounds of its confes¬ sional power, its personal intensity, no reader can fail to recognize the artistry by which Coleridge converted a diffuse, sometimes embarrassingly candid, sometimes self-pitying private effusion into a tightly organized and brilliantly shaped example of that public form so rarely mastered, a formal post-Pindaric ode. The final effects of shifting the poem’s address come into view in the closing lines, which had to undergo a change of tone and a change of sex. Sister and Friend of my devoutest Choice! Thou being innocent and full of Love, And nested with the Darlings of thy Love, became O simple spirit guided from above, O lofty Poet, full of light and love, Brother and friend of my devoutest choice. Furthermore, the tender wish for Sara’s happiness had to be turned into a wish for Wordsworth’s prosperity, and in making this con¬ version Coleridge introduced a wistful, personal plea for the future of the relationship that had nourished and inspired him: With light heart may he rise, Gay fancy, cheerful eyes, And sing his lofty song, and teach me to rejoice! The plea was removed in 1817, but even in 1802 it must have rung with a hollow sound. Wordsworth’s marriage gave him the

Coleridge’s Dejection

[20]

joy Coleridge longed for and envied, but his loftiest song, The Recluse, remained a series of fragments, and Coleridge’s capacity to rejoice had been permanently drained. Over the summer, more¬ over, while Wordsworth completed extensive revisions to his Preface for the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads, the two poets had recognized

some fundamental

critical disagreements

between

them, as Coleridge revealed in two letters of July. In the first (13 July), to Sotheby, he compared some of his own views of meter, passion, and the dramatic voice with Wordsworth’s, and finished by remarking that they had “had lately some little controversy on this subject—” and “begin to suspect, that there is, somewhere or other, a radical Difference” in their opinions. The second letter, the one in which Coleridge copied out for Southey eighteen lines of his verse-letter to Sara, specified what the controversy was about: I am far from going all lengths with Wordsworth. / He has written lately a number of Poems (32 in all) some of them of considerable Length / (the longest 160 Lines) the greater number of these to my feelings very excellent Compositions / but here & there a daring Humblness of Language & Versification, and a strict adherence to matter of fact, even to prolixity, that startled me his alterations likewise in Ruth perplexed me / and I have thought & thought again & have not had my doubts solved by Wordsworth / On the contrary, I rather suspect that some where or other there is a radical Difference in our theoretical Opinions respecting Poetry— It is hard to believe that Coleridge meant to include Words¬ worth’s great Ode or The Leech-gatherer in this censure. These poems thus remain, together with Coleridge’s verse-letter and the ode that evolved from it, as unforeseen late fruits of the creative partnership that started five years earlier, in the marvelous year that led up to Lyrical Ballads.

READING TEXT A Letter toThe Cornell Manuscript, with apparatus criticus of verbal variants in the Dove Cottage Manuscript The text that follows represents the new version of A Letter to -in the form it would have taken had it been published—that is, with ampersands expanded, lines doubled back for want of room restored, and scribal errors and idiosyncrasies cleared away. Mary Hutchinson’s transcript is an exceptionally careful one; she neatly mended most of her miswritings, sometimes altered her capitaliza¬ tion, and tried to preserve Coleridge’s distinctive apostrophes (as in “it’s,” “our’s,” etc.). Only a few emendations have had to be made: four obvious miswritings survive (at 11. 217, 233, 297, and 320) and four misspellings (11. 18, 160, 229, and 243). Mary’s readings at lines 63, 166, and 308 are accepted, though all could represent misreadings. In seven places (11. 21, 81, 129, 253, 289, 315, and 322) obviously faulty punctuation or capitalization has had to be changed, in all but one case to accord with that in the Dove Cottage Manuscript; similar emendation has been carried out in nine places where an apostrophe appears to be misplaced, perhaps owing to Mary’s inability to read Coleridge’s intention (11. 21, 56, 78, 93, 148, 171, 192, 297, and 305). Line numbers in the right-hand margins, which are those of the shortened poem Coleridge published in The Morning Post on 4 Oc¬ tober 1802, show at a glance just how Coleridge put Dejection together from A Letter to-. The apparatus criticus, by showing substantive variants in the Dove Cottage Manuscript of A Letter (accidental vari¬ ants can be looked up in the full transcription of that manuscript), provides a rapid and easy way to compare the two early texts of A Letter. [21]

1

Morning Post lines

5

io

15

Well! if the Bard was weather-wise who made

1

The dear old Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,

2

This Night, so tranquil now, will not go hence

3

Unrous’d by Winds, that ply a busier trade

4

Than that, which moulds yon clouds in lazy flakes,

5

Or the dull sobbing Draft, that drones and rakes

6

Upon the strings of this Eolian Lute,

7

Which better far were mute.

8

For lo! the New-Moon, winter-bright!

9

And all suffus’d with phantom Light

10

(With swimming phantom Light o’erspread,

11

But rimm’d and circled with a silver Thread)

12

I see the Old Moon in her Lap foretelling

13

The coming-on of Rain and squally Blast.—

14

Ah Sara! That the gust ev’n now were swelling

15

And the slant Night-shower driving loud and fast.

16

2 A Grief without a Pang, void, dark, and drear,

21

A stifling, drowsy, unimpassioned Grief,

22

That finds no natural Outlet, no Relief

23

title A Letter with to-added / April 4, 1802.— stanzas are unnumbered in Dove Cottage MS 2 dear] grand 10 suffus’d] all suffus’d deleted to overspread

15

Ah] O!

[23]

Sunday Evening.

[24] 20

A Letter to-, Cornell Manuscript

In word or sigh, or tear-

24

This, Sara! well thou know’st, Is that sore Evil which I dread the most And oft’nest suffer. In this heartless Mood, To other Thoughts by yonder Throstle woo’d, 25

26

That pipes within the Larch-tree not unseen (The Larch which pushes out in Tassels green It’s bundled Leafits) woo’d to mild Delights By all the tender Sounds and gentle Sights Of this sweet Primrose-month—and vainly woo’d!

30

O dearest Sara! in this heartless mood

25

3

35

40

All this long Eve so balmy and serene

27

Have I been gazing on the Western Sky

28

And it’s peculiar Tint of yellow Green:

29

And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye!

30

And those thin Clouds above, in flakes and bars,

31

That give away their motion to the Stars;

32

Those Stars, that glide behind them and between,

33

Now sparkling, now bedimm’d, but always seen;

34

Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew

35

In it’s own cloudless, starless Lake of Blue,

36

A Boat becalm’d! dear William’s Sky-Canoe!

37

I see them all, so excellently fair,

38

I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!

39

4

45

50

My genial Spirits fail—

40

And what can these avail

41

To lift the smoth’ring weight from off my breast?

42

It were a vain Endeavour,

43

Tho’ I should gaze for ever

44

On that green Light, that lingers in the West—

45

I may not hope from outward Forms to win

46

30/31

no stanza break

37

and] or

49

that lingers] which lingers

Reading Text

[25]

The Passion and the Life, whose Fountains are within!

47

Those lifeless Shapes, around, below, above, O dearest Sara! what can they impart? Even when the gentle Thought, that thou, my Love, Art gazing now, like me And see’st the Heaven, I see, Sweet Thought it is—yet feebly stirs my Heart. r - /

5

Feebly, o! feebly!—Yet (I well remember it) In my first dawn of Youth, that Fancy stole, With many gentle Yearnings, on my Soul! At eve, Sky-gazing in “ecstatic fit” (Alas! far-cloister’d in a city school The Sky was all I knew of Beautiful) 9

At the barr’d window often did I sit,

^

And often on the leaded School-roof lay And to myself would say— There does not live the Man so stripp’d of good Affections As not to love to see a Maiden’s quiet Eyes Uprais’d and linking on sweet dreams by dim Connexions To Moon, or Evening Star, or glorious Western Skies! While yet a Boy, this thought would so pursue me, That often it became a kind of Vision to me! 6 Sweet Thought! and dear of old To Hearts of finer Mould! Ten thousand times by Friends and Lovers blest! I spake with rash Despair And ’ere I was aware, The weight was somewhat lifted from my Breast.

52

Those] These

53

dearest Sara!] omitted

54

Even when] When even

61

gentle] gentle deleted to secret

63

far-cloister’d] for cloister’d

66

often on] oft upon

A Letter to

[26]

, Cornell Manuscript

Dear Sara! in the weather-fended wood, Thy lov’d Haunt, where the stock-doves coo at Noon, I guess that thou hast stood And watch’d yon Crescent and that ghost-like Moon! And yet far rather, in my present mood, I would that thou’dst been sitting all this while Upon the sod-built seat of Camomile— And tho’ thy Robin may have ceas’d to sing, Yet needs for my sake must thou love to hear —The Bee-hive murmuring near, That ever-busy and most quiet Thing Which I have heard at Midnight murmuring!

7

I feel my Spirit moved— And, wheresoe’er thou be, O Sister! O beloved! Thy dear mild Eyes, that see The very Heaven, I see, There is a Prayer in them! It is for me! And I dear Sara! I am blessing thee! 8 It was as calm as this,—the happy Night When Mary, Thou and I, together were, The low-decaying Fire our only Light, And listen’d to the stillness of the Air! O that affectionate and blameless Maid, Dear Mary!—on her Lap my Head she lay’d— Her Hand was on my Brow, Even as my own is now; And on my Cheek I felt thy Eye-lash play— Such joy I had that I may truly say,

8o

Dear] O

83

that] it’s

95

Thy] Those

96

The very] Even now the

99

the] that

Reading Text

[27]

My Spirit was awe-stricken with the Excess no

And trance-like depth of its brief Happiness.

9

Ah fair Remembrances, that so revive My Heart, and fill it with a living power, Where were they Sara?—or did I not strive To win them to me?—on the fretting Hour, 115

Then when I wrote thee that complaining Scroll Which even to bodily sickness bruis’d thy Soul! And yet thou blam’st thyself alone! and yet Forbidd’st me all Regret! 10 And must I not regret, that I distrest

120

Thee, Best-beloved! who lovest me the Best! My better mind had fled, I know not whither— For o! was this an absent Friend’s Employ To send from far both Pain and Sorrow thither, Where still his Blessings should have call’d down Joy?

125

I read thy guileless Letter o’er again— I hear thee of thy blameless Self complain— And only this I learn—and this, alas! 1 know, That thou art weak and pale with Sickness, Grief, and Pain, And I—I made thee so!

_

i

11

130

O for my own sake, I regret, perforce, Whatever turns thee, Sara! from the course Of calm well-being and a heart at rest. When thou, and with thee those, whom thou lov’sd best Shall dwell together in one quiet Home,

135

One Home the sure Abiding Home of All! I too will crown me with a Coronal,

112

My] The

134

quiet] happy

135

One Home] One House

sure] dear

[28]

A Letter to- , Cornell Manuscript

Nor shall this Heart in idle wishes roam, Morbidly soft! No! let me trust, that I shall wear away 140

In no inglorious Toils the manly Day; And only now and then, and not too oft, Some dear and memorable Eve shall bless, Dreaming of all your Love and Happiness. 12 Be happy, and I need thee not in sight!

145

Peace in thy Heart and Quiet in thy dwelling, Health in thy Limbs, and in thy Eyes the Light Of Love, and Hope, and honourable Feeling, Wheree’er I am, I needs must be content! Not near thee, haply shall be more content!

150

To all things I prefer the Permanent; And better seems it for a Heart like mine, Always to know than sometimes to behold, Their Happiness and thine: For change doth trouble me with Pangs untold!

155

To see thee, hear thee, feel thee, then to part— O! it weighs down the Heart! To visit those, I love, as I love thee, Mary, William and dear Dorothy, It is but a temptation to repine!

160

The Transientness is Poison in the Wine, Eats out the Pith of Joy, makes all Joy hollow! All Pleasure a dim dream of Pain to follow! My own peculiar Lot, my household Life It is, and will remain Indifference or Strife—

165

While ye are well and happy, ’twould but wrong you, If I should fondly yearn to be among you—

142

shall] will

143

Love and Happiness] Loves & Quietness

146

thy Eyes] thine Eyes

148

needs must be] shall be well

158

Mary,] Mary, &

166

fondly] idly, fondly

Reading Text

[29]

Wherefore, O! wherefore, should I wish to be A wither’d Branch upon a blossoming Tree? 13 But,—(let me say it—for I vainly strive

170

To beat away the Thought) but if thou pin’d, Whate’er the cause, in body or in mind, I were the miserablest Man alive To know it, and be absent! Thy Delights Far off, or near, alike shall I partake—

175

But O! to mourn for thee, and to forsake All power, all hope of giving comfort to thee! To know that thou art weak and worn with pain, And not to hear thee, Sara! not to view thee— Not sit beside thy Bed,

180

Not press thy aking Head— Not bring thee Health again— (At least to hope, to try,) By this Voice, which thou lov’st, and by this earnest Eye—

14

Nay—wherefore did I let it haunt my Mind, 185

190

195

This dark distressful Dream!

88 89

I turn from it, and listen to the Wind,

90

Which long has howl’d unnoticed! What a Scream

91

Of Agony by Torture lengthen’d out

92

That Lute sent forth! O thou wild storm without!

93

Or Crag, or Tairn, or lightning-blasted Tree,

94

Or Pinegrove, whither Woodman never clomb,

95

Or lonely House long held the Witches’ Home,

96

Methinks were fitter Instruments for thee,

97

Mad Lutanist! That in this Month of Showers,

98

Or dark-brown Gardens, and of peeping Flowers

99

174

shall I] I may

185

This] The

187 'howl’d] howl’d deleted to rav’d 190

Steep Crag, or mountain Pond, or blasted Tree with Steep Crag, then deleted

to Jagg’d Rock,

A Letter to

[3°]

Mak’st Devil’s Yule, with worse than wintry song

100

The blooms and Buds and timorous Leaves among!

101

Thou Actor perfect in all Tragic Sounds!

102

Thou mighty Poet, even to frenzy bold!

103

200

205

210

, Cornell Manuscript

What tell’st thou now about? Tis of a rushing of an Host in rout,

105

And many Groans from Men with smarting wounds

106

That groan at once from Smart, and shudder with the cold!

107

But hush: there is a break of deepest silence—

108

Again!—but that dread sound as of a rushing Crowd,

109

With Groans and tremulous Shuddering, all are over—

110

And it has other Sounds, and all less deep, less loud!

Ill

A Tale of less Affright,

112

And tempered with delight,

113

As William’s self had made the tender lay! Tis of a little Child

114 115

Upon a heathy wild

215

104

116

Not far from home; but it has lost its way!

117

And now moans low in utter grief and fear,

118

And now screams loud and hopes to make its Mother hear!

119

15

Tis midnight! and small thought have I of sleep!

120

Full seldom may my Friend such Vigils keep!

121

O breathe she softly in her gentle Sleep! 220

Cover her, gentle Sleep! with wings of Healing,

122

And be this Tempest but a mountain Birth!

123

May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling

124

Silent as tho’ they watch’d the sleeping Earth,

125

Like elder Sisters, with love-twinkling Eyes! Healthful, and light my Darling! may’st thou rise, 197

blooms and] Blossoms,

201

a] the

203

That groan at once from] At once they groan with

204

But hush:] Tis hush’d!

205

that dread] all that

206

Shuddering] Shudderings

216

thought] Hope deleted to Thoughts

223-224

break] Trance

Healthful & light, my Darling! may’st thou rise With clear & cheerful Eyes—

Reading Text

225

[31]

And of the same good Tidings to me send! For O! beloved Friend! I am not the buoyant Thing, I was of yore, When like an own Child, I to Joy belong’d, For others mourning oft, myself oft sorely wrong’d,

230

Yet bearing all things then, as if I nothing bore. 16

235

E’er I was wedded, tho’ my path was rough,

77

The joy within me dallied with distress.

78

And all misfortunes were but as the Stuff

79

Whence Fancy made me Dreams of Happiness:

80

For Hope grew round me, like the climbing Vine,

81

And Leaves and Fruitage, not my own, seem’d mine!

82

But now Ill-tidings bow me down to Earth—

83

Nor care I, that they rob me of my Mirth;

84

But O! each Visitation 240

85

Suspends, what Nature gave me at my Birth,

86

My shaping Spirit of Imagination!

87

I speak not now of those habitual Ills, That wear out Life, when two unequal minds Meet in one House, and two discordant Wills— 245

This leaves me, where it finds, Past cure and past Complaint! A fate Austere, Too fixed and hopeless to partake of Fear!

17

But thou,

dear

Sara! (Dear indeed thou art)

My Comforter! A Heart within my Heart! 250

Thou and the Few, we love, tho’ Few ye be, Make up a world of Hopes and Fears for me. And when Affliction, or distempering Pain, Or wayward Chance befall you, I complain.

228

squeezed in between lines

231

Yes, dearest Sara! Yes! There was a time when tho’ my path was rough,

237

Ill-tidings] Misfortunes deleted to Ill Tidings

no stanza break when] when deleted to if

247/248 252

[32]

A Letter to

, Cornell Manuscript

Not that I mourn—O Friends, most dear, most true, 255

Methinks to weep with you Were better far than to rejoice aloneBut that my coarse domestic life has known No Griefs, but such as dull and deaden me, No Habits of heart-nursing Sympathy,

260

No mutual mild enjoyments of it’s own, No Hopes of it’s own Vintage, none, o! none— Whence, when I mourn for you, my heart must borrow Fair forms and living motions for it’s Sorrow, For not to think of what I needs must feel,

265

But to be still and patient all I can; And haply by abstruse Research to steal From my own Nature all the Natural Man; This was my sole Resource, my wisest Plan! And that, which suits a part, infects the whole,

270

And now is almost grown the temper of my Soul! 18 My little children are a Joy, a Love, A good Gift from above! But what is Bliss, that ever calls up Woe, And makes it doubly keen?

275

Compelling me to feel what well I know, What a most blessed Lot mine might have been! Those little Angel children (woe is me!) There have been hours, when feeling how they bind And pluck out the wing-feathers of my mind,

280

Turning my Error to Necessity, I have half-wished, they never had been born. That—seldom; but sad Thought they always bring,

258-259 order of lines reversed 260 entered afier l. 257, then deleted and squeezed in between lines here 262

266 273 275 282

mourn] mourn’d must] might And] Or deleted to And ever calls up] still calls up a what well I] as well as Thought] Thoughts

Reading Text

[33]

And like the Poet’s Nightingale, I sing My Love-song with my breast against a Thorn.

19

285

With no unthankful Spirit I confess, This clinging Grief too in it’s turn awakes, That Love and Father’s Joy; but O! it makes The Love the greater, and the Joy far less! These Mountains too, these Vales, these Woods, these Lakes,

290

Scenes full of Beauty and of Loftiness Where all my Life I fondly hope to live— I were sunk low indeed, did they no solace give! But oft I seem to feel, and evermore to fear, They are not to me now the Things, which once they were. 20

295

300

O Sara! we receive but what we give

48

And in our Life alone does Nature live—

49

Our’s is her Wedding-garment, our’s her Shroud!

50

And would we aught behold of higher worth

51

Than that inanimate cold World allow’d

52

To the poor loveless, ever-anxious Crowd,

53

Ah! from the Soul itself must issue forth

54

A Light, a Glory, and a luminous Cloud,

55

Envelloping the Earth! 305

3io

56

And from the Soul itself must there be sent

57

A sweet and potent Voice of it’s own Birth,

58

Of all sweet sounds the Life and Element.

59

O pure of Heart! thou need’st not ask of me,

60

What this strange music in the Soul may be,

61

What and wherein it doth exist,

62

This Light, this Glory, this fair luminous Mist,

63

This beautiful and beauty-making Power!

64

Joy, innocent Sara! Joy, that ne’er was given

65

283 291 293 308

Nightingale] Philomel hope] hop’d to fear] I fear strange] strong

A Letter to

[34]

315

, Cornell Manuscript

Save to the pure and in their purest Hour,

66

Joy, Sara! is the Spirit and the Power

67

That wedding Nature to us gives in dower,

68

A new Earth and new Heaven, Undreamt of by the Sensual and the Proud!

70

Joy is that sweet Voice, Joy that luminous cloud!

71

We, we ourselves rejoice— 320

69

72

And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,

73

All Melodies the Echoes of that Voice,

74

All Colors a Suffusion from that Light.

75

Sister and Friend of my devoutest Choice! Thou being innocent and full of Love, 325

And nested with the Darlings of thy Love, And feeling in thy Soul, Heart, Lips, and Arms Even what the conjugal and Mother Dove That borrows genial warmth from these, she warms, Feels in her thrill’d wings, blessedly outspread!

330

Thou, free’d awhile from Cares and human Dread

130

By the immenseness of the Good and Fair,

131

Which thou see’st every where—

132

Thus, thus would’st thou rejoice!

335

To thee would all things live from pole to pole,

134

Their Life the Eddying of thy living Soul.

135

O dear! O Innocent! O full of Love! Sara! thou Friend of my devoutest Choice!

138

As dear as Light and Impulse from above! So may’st thou ever, evermore rejoice!

318 sweet] strong 322 from] of 322/323 stanza break 328 these] those 333 would’st] should’st 334—33 5 omitted, then entered at bottom of page, following signature, with marks to signal insertion

337 [ ] gentle Friend! [?] Sisters of my Choice— then gentle deleted to A very and A inserted before Sisters from which final s deleted 338 As] O following illegible short word deleted 339 So] Thus signature S. T. C.

139

READING TEXT Excerpts from A Letter toin Coleridge’s letter to William Sotheby, 19 July 1802 with an apparatus criticus of variants in Coleridge’s letter to Robert Southey, 29 July 1802

This text is drawn from the manuscript of Coleridge’s letter to William Sotheby of 19 July 1802, now in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. The apparatus shows all vari¬ ants in the eighteen lines that Coleridge sent (written out as prose) to Robert Southey on 29 July 1802 (11. 231-241 and 264-270); this letter is now in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. Line numbers in the margins of the text reveal where the lines that Coleridge quoted to Sotheby and to Southey came from, and where they finished up in the Morning Post text of Dejection.

[35]

Coleridge to William Sotheby, 19 July 1802: . . . I

translated

the

Poem

[Gessner’s

Der erste

Schiffer],

part¬

ly, .. . because I wished to force myself out of metaphysical trains of Thought—which, when I trusted myself to my own Ideas, came upon me uncalled—& when I wished to write a poem, beat up Game of far other kind—instead of a Covey of poetic Partridges with whirring wings of music, or wild Ducks shaping their rapid flight in forms always regular (a still better image of Verse) up came a metaphysical Bustard, urging its’ slow, heavy, laborious, earth-skimming Flight, over dreary & level Wastes. To have done with poetical Prose (which is a very vile Olio) Sickness & some other & worse Afflictions, first forced me into downright metaphysics / for I believe that by nature I have more of the Poet in me / in a poem written during that dejection to Wordsworth, & the greater part of a private nature—I thus ex¬ pressed the thought—in language more forcible than harmonious.

heading

when Coleridge sent ll. 231-241 and 264-270 to Robert Southey on 2g July

1802, he introduced them with the following remarks: As to myself, all my poetic Genius

Talent, if ever I really possessed any Genius, & it was not rather a mere general aptitude of Talent, & quickness in Imitation / is gone—and I have been fool enough to suffer deeply in my mind, regretting the loss—which I attribute to my long & exceedingly severe Metaphysical Investigations—& these partly to Ill-health, and partly to private afflictions which rendered any subject, immedi¬ ately connected with Feeling, a source of pain & disquiet to me /

[37]

A Letter to

[38]

, Coleridge to Sotheby, 19 July 1802

Cornell

Mowing

MS lines

Post

[230a]-Yes,

dearest Poet, yes!

76

231

There was a time when tho’ my Path was rough,

77

232

The Joy within me dallied with Distress,

78

233

And all Misfortunes were but as the Stuff

79

234

Whence Fancy made me Dreams of Happiness:

80

235

For Hope grew round me, like the climbing Vine,

81

236

And Fruit and Foliage, not my own, seem’d mine,

82

237

But now Afflictions bow me down to Earth—

83

238

Nor car’d I, that they rob me of my mirth

84

239

But O! each Visitation

85

240

Suspends what Nature gave me at my Birth,

86

241

My shaping Spirit of Imagination!

87

264

For not to think of what I needs must feel,

265

But to be still & patient all I can;

266

And haply by abstruse research to steal

267

From my own Nature all the natural Man;

268

This was my sole Resource, my wisest Plan—

269

And that which suits a part infects the whole,

270

And now is almost grown the Temper of my Soul! 231

Time when,

232

I had a heart that dallied with distress;

233

Stuff,

234

dreams

236

Fruits . . . mine!

238

robb’d . . . Mirth /

in the text of the Sotheby letter, care was revised to car’d

and strip to rob 239

O] oh

240

Suspends,

264-270

these lines Coleridge introduced with this remark having broken off after l. 241:

(Here follow a dozen Lines that would give you no pleasure & then what follows—) 264

think . . . feel;

265

&] and

266

Research

267

Man /

268

Plan!

269

part, . . . Whole,

270

Soul.—

all, I can

Reading Text

[39]

Thank Heaven! my better mind has returned to me—and I trust, I shall go on rejoicing.—as I have nothing better to fill the blank space of this Sheet with, I will transcribe the introduction of that Poem to you, that being of a sufficiently general nature to be interesting to you.—The first lines allude to a stanza in the Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence—“Late, late Yestreen, I saw the new Moon With the old Moon in her arms; and I fear, I fear, my master dear, There will be a deadly Storm.”— Letter written Sunday Evening, April 4. 1

1

Well! if the Bard was weatherwise who made

1

2

The dear old Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,

2

3

This Night, so tranquil now, will not go hence

3

4

Unrous’d by Winds, that ply a busier Trade

4

5

Than that, which moulds yon Clouds in lazy Flakes,

5

6

Or the dull sobbing Draft, that drones and rakes

6

7

Upon the Strings of this Eolian Lute,

7

8

Which better far were mute.

8

9

For lo! the New-moon, winter-bright;

9

10

And overspread with phantom Light;

10

11

(With swimming phantom Light o’erspread,

11

12

But rimm’d and circled with a silver Thread;)

12

13

I see the old Moon in her Lap, foretelling

13

14

The coming on of Rain & squally Blast!

14

15

And O! that even now the Gust were swelling,

15

16

And the slant Night-shower driving loud & fast!

16

17

A Grief without a Pang, void, dark, & drear!

21

18

A stifling, drowsy, unimpassioned Grief,

22

19

That finds no natural Outlet, no Relief

23

20

In word, or Sigh, or Tear!

24

21

This, William! well thou know’st,

22

Is that sore Evil which I dread the most,

23

And oft’nest suffer. In this heartless Mood,

24

To other Thoughts by yonder Throstle woo’d

25

That pipes within the Larch-tree, not unseen—

26

[40]

A Letter to

, Coleridge to Sotheby,

19

July

1802

26

(The Larch, that pushes out in Tassels green

27

It’s bundled Leafits) woo’d to mild Delights

28

By all the tender Sounds & gentle Sights

29

Of this sweet Primrose-month—& vainly woo’d!

30

O dearest Poet, in this heartless Mood

25

31

All this long Eve so balmy & serene

27

32

Have I been gazing on the western Sky

28

33

And it’s peculiar Tint of Yellow-green—

29

34

And still I gaze—& with how blank an eye!

30

35

And those thin Clouds above, in flakes & Bars,

31

36

That give away their Motion to the Stars;

32

37

Those Stars, that glide behind them or between,

33

38

Now sparkling, now bedimm’d, but always seen;

34

39

Yon Crescent Moon, as fix’d as if it grew

35

40

In it’s own cloudless starless Lake of Blue—

36

41

A Boat becalm’d! thy own sweet Sky-Canoe!

37

42

I see them all, so excellently fair!

38

43

I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!

39

44

My genial Spirits fail,

40

45

And what can these avail

41

46

To lift the smoth’ring Weight from off my Breast?

42

47

It were a vain Endeavor,

43

48

Though I should gaze for ever

44

49

On that green Light, that lingers in the West.

45

50

I may not hope from outward Forms to win

46

51

The Passion & the Life, whose Fountains are within.

47

295

O Wordsworth! we receive but what we give,

48

296

And in our Life alone does Nature live:

49

297

Our’s is her Wedding-garment, our’s her Shroud!

50

298

And would we aught behold of higher Worth

51

299

Than that inanimate cold World allow’d

52

Reading Text

[41]

300

To the poor loveless ever-anxious Crowd,

53

301

Ah! from the Soul itself must issue forth

54

302

A Light, a Glory, a fair luminous Cloud

55

303

Enveloping the Earth!

56

304

And from the Soul itself must there be sent

57

305

A sweet and pow’rful Voice, of it’s own Birth,

58

306

Of all sweet Sounds the Life and Element!

59

307

O pure of Heart! thou need’st not ask of me

60

308

What this strong Music in the Soul may be—

61

309

What and wherein it doth exist,

62

310

This Light, this Glory, this fair luminous Mist,

63

311

This beautiful and beauty-making Power!

64

312

Joy,

313

Save to the Pure, and in their purest Hour,

66

314

Joy, William! is the Spirit & the Power

67

315

That wedding Nature to us gives in Dower[

68

316

blameless Poet!

Joy,

that ne’er was given

A new Earth and new Heaven

317

Undreamt of by the Sensual and the Proud!

318

Joy

319

is that sweet Voice, Joy that luminous cloud—

We, we ourselves rejoice!

65

69 70 71 72

320

And thence comes all that charms or ear or sight,

73

321

All Melodies an Echo of that Voice,

74

322

All colors a suffusion from that Light!

75

337

Calm stedfast Spirit, guided from above,

136

O Wordsworth friend of my devoutest Choice

129

Great Son of Genius! full of Light & Love!

127

Thus, thus dost thou rejoice. 334

To thee do all things live from pole to pole,

134

335

Their Life the Eddying of thy living Soul!

135

323

Brother & Friend of my devoutest Choice,

138

339

Thus may’st thou ever, ever more rejoice!

139

317

in the Sotheby text or was revised to and

322/337

in the Sotheby text Stedfast was altered to stedfast

337/334

in the Sotheby text must was revised to dost

[42]

A Letter to

, Coleridge to Sotheby,

19

July

1802

I have selected from the Poem which was a very long one, & truly written only for “the solace of sweet Song”, all that could be interest¬ ing or even pleasing to you—except indeed, perhaps, I may annex as a fragment a few Lines on the Eolian Lute, it having been introduced in it’s Dronings in the 1st Stanza I have used “Yule” for Christmas. 184 185

-Nay, wherefore did I let it haunt my mind This dark distressful Dream?

88

89

186

I turn from it, & listen to the Wind

90

187

Which long has rav’d unnotic’d! What a Scream

91

188

Of Agony by Torture lengthen’d out

92

189

That Lute sent forth! O thou wild Storm without,

93

190

Bare Crag, or mountain Tairn, or blasted Tree,

94

191

Or Pine-grove, whither Woodman never clomb

95

192

Or lonely House long held the Witches’ Home,

96

193

Methinks, were fitter Instruments for Thee,

97

194

Mad Lutanist! that in this month of Showers,

98

195

Of dark-brown Gardens & of peeping Flowers

99

196

Mak’st Devil’s Yule, with worse than wintry Song

100

197

The Blossoms, Buds, & timorous Leaves among!

101

198

Thou Actor, perfect in all tragic Sounds!

102

199

Thou mighty Poet, even to Frenzy bold!

103

200

What tell’st thou now about?

104

201

Tis of the rushing of an Host in Rout

105

202

With many Groans from men with smarting Wounds—

106

203

At once they groan with Pain, & shudder with the Cold!

107

204

But hush! there is a Pause of deepest Silence!

108

205

Again!—but all that Noise, as of a rushing crowd,

109

206

With Groans, & tremulous Shudderings, all is over;

110

207

And it has other Sounds, less fearful & less loud.

111

208

A Tale of less affright

112

209

And temper’d with delight,

113

210

As thou thyself had’st fram’d the tender Lay— ’Tis of a little Child

211

185

in the Sotheby text Distressful was altered to distressful

187

in the Sotheby text That was revised to Which

114 115

Reading Text 212

[43]

Upon a heathy Wild

116

213

Not far from home—but she has lost her way;

117

214

And now moans low in utter Grief & Fear,

118

215

And now screams loud & hopes to make her Mother hear.—

119

My dear Sir! ought I to make an apology for troubling you with such a long verse-cramm’d Letter?— . . . truly, your’s, S. T. Coleridge

READING TEXTS Dejection: An Ode The Morning Post text, 4 October 1802, with an apparatus criticus of variants in Coleridge’s letter to the Beaumonts, 13 October 1803, and in Sarah Stoddard’s transcript of 1805

facing The Sibylline Leaves text (1817), with an apparatus criticus of variants in

Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, 10 September 1814, and in Coleridge’s Poetical Works, 1828, 1829, and 1834

Dejection was published in The Morning Post on

4

October

1802

(Wordsworth’s wedding day and Coleridge’s wedding anniversary), under the heading original poetry. It is printed here, on the left-hand pages, exactly as it appeared, with the misprint in line

73.

In the

margin the line numbers of the Cornell Manuscript of A Letter to— allow rapid and easy assessment of the steps Coleridge took to cut and reshape his poem for publication. The apparatus shows all verbal variants in two later manuscript copies of the poem: the partial text copied out by Coleridge for the Beaumonts on

13

August

1803

(marked B) and the full transcription probably made by Sarah Stod[45]

Reading Text

[46] dard in Malta in

1805 (marked

5). Nonverbal variants in the Beau¬

mont letter can be looked up in a full transcription of the letter, below. The Stoddard transcript is one of three poems entered in a notebook of twenty-four leaves (the last a stub) now in the Department of Special Collections, Boston University Libraries. The leaves measure 18.7

by

15.8

centimeters with chain lines

2.8

centimeters apart, and are

watermarked with an emblem of Britannia and countermarked

1804.

Christabel, unsigned, is followed by Dejection, signed “STC,” and by Wordsworth’s sonnet “I griev’d for Bonaparte,” signed “WW.” The text of Dejection contains a scattering of misspellings and obvious copyist’s errors, and its numerous accidental variants are not recorded. On the cover of the notebook is inscribed: “Mr Coleridge’s Gift / at Parndom, Winter of /

1806—”

(Coleridge paid several visits to

William Smith at Parndom, in Essex, after his return from Malta). On the right-hand pages the Sibylline Leaves text of

is re¬

1817

produced, and the apparatus records all variants in the extracts that Coleridge had published in Felix Farley's Bristol Journal 1814)—marked

(10

September

FF—together with corrections made in lifetime edi¬

tions of Coleridge’s collected Poetical Works,

1828,

1829,

and

1834.

The Felix Farley extracts contain one new line, “Life of our life, the parent and the birth” (following 1.

65),

not found in any other version

of Dejection or of A Letter to-. When Joseph Cottle published Coleridge’s Bristol essays in an appendix to his Early Recollections; Chiefly Relating to the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1837),

(2

vols.; London,

he scrambled the parts of the poem so that lines

Sibylline Leaves version) followed right after lines

29-38

47-75,

(of the

producing a

bizarre juncture: All colours a suffusion from that light, And its celestial tint of yellow green. Cottle’s error would not be worth remarking were it not for its replication in what has for eighty years been the standard edition of the Biographia Literaria, edited by J. Shawcross, with Coleridge’s Aesthetical Essays attached

(2

vols.; Oxford,

1907).

Having spoken

patronizingly of Cottle’s “passion for garbling his materials,” Shawcross reproduced Cottle’s garbled version of the ode. The Sibylline Leaves version of Dejection includes for the first

Dejection: An Ode time the seven lines of A Letter (11.

[47] 87-93)

which Coleridge had

quoted more often than any others to his friends: For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient, all I can; And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural Man— This was my sole resource, my only plan: Till that which suits a part infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my Soul.

Dejection: An Ode, in Morning Post,

[48]

4

October

1802

“LATE, late yestreen I saw the New Moon, “With the Old Moon in her arms; “And I fear, I fear, my master dear, “We shall have a deadly storm.” Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence.

DEJECTION. AN ODE, WRITTEN APRIL 4,

l802. Cornell MS lines

WELL! if the Bard was weather-wise, who made The grand Old Ballad of Sir

1

Patrick Spence,

2

This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence 5

3

Unrous’d by winds, that ply a busier trade

4

Than those, which mould yon clouds in lazy flakes,

5

Or this dull sobbing draft, that drones and rakes

6

epigraph

follows title B, S

[2]

Arm, B

[3]

master dear,] dear Master, B

title

Dejection, an Ode.—(Imperfect) April 4th, 1802 B Dejection written April

4. 1802. 5

S

those, . . . mould] that . . . moulds B

torn S 6

this] the B

flakes] miswritten flashe[

] paper

Dejection: An Ode, in Sibylline Leaves (1817)

DEJECTION: An Ode. Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon, With the old Moon in her arms; And I fear, I fear, my Master dear! We shall have a deadly storm.

Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence.

I. Well!

If the Bard was weather-wise, who made

The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence, This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence Unrous’d by winds, that ply a busier trade Than those which mould yon clouds in lazy flakes, Or the dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes

epigraph and title 1-20

omitted FF; no italics 1828-1834

omitted FF

4

Unrous’d] Unroused 1828-1834

5

clouds] cloud 1828-1834

[49]

Dejection: An Ode, in Morning Post,

[50]

10

4

October

Upon the strings of this CEolian lute,

7

Which better far were mute.

8

For lo! the New Moon, winter-bright!

9

And overspread with phantom light,

10

(With swimming phantom light o’erspread,

11

But rimm’d and circled by a silver thread)

12

I see the Old Moon in her lap, foretelling

13

The coming on of rain and squally blast: 15

1802

And O! that even now the gust were swelling, And the slant night-show’r driving loud and fast!

14 15 16

Those sounds which oft have rais’d me, while they aw’d, And sent my soul abroad, Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give, 20

Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live! II. A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,

25

17

A stifled, drowsy, unimpassion’d grief,

18

Which finds no nat’ral outlet, no relief

19

In word, or sigh, or tear-

20

O Edmund! in this wan and heartless mood,

30

To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo’d,

24

All this long eve, so balmy and serene,

31

7

Upon] Amid B

8

were] was 5

12

by] with B

15

O] oh 5

16—17

ends of lines torn away S

17

rais’d] rous’d 5

19

impulse] Influence B

19-20

ends of lines torn away S

21

dark] dull S

23

Which] That B

25

O dearest William! in this heartless Mood B

Dejection: An Ode, in Sibylline Leaves (1817)

[51]

Upon the strings of this yEolian lute, Which better far were mute. For lo! the New-moon winter-bright! And overspread with phantom-light, (With swimming phantom-light o’erspread But rimm’d and circled by a silver thread) I see the old Moon in her lap, foretelling The coming on of rain and squally blast. And oh! that even now the gust were swelling, And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast! Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed, And sent my soul abroad, Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give, Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live! II. A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassion’d grief, Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, In word, or sigh, or tear— O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood, To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo’d, All this long eve, so balmy and serene,

7

TEolian] Eolian 1834

10,

11

12

rimm’d] rimmed 1828-1834

21-38

phantom-light] phantom light 1828-1834 introduced in

FF by prose distinction

between

“beautijul” and

“agree¬

able. . . when we find an object agreeable, the sensation of pleasure always precedes the judgement, and is its determining cause. We find it agreeable. But when we declare an object beautiful, the contemplation or intuition of its beauty precedes the feeling of complacency, in order of nature at least: nay, in great depression of spirits may even exist without sensibly producing it.— 21

drear,] dear! FF

22

unimpassion’d] unempassion’d FF unimpassioned 1828-1834

23

Which] That FF

24

tear—] tear! FF

25

O dearest lady! in this heartless mood, FF

26

yonder] yon sweet FF

relief,] relief FF

woo’d,] woo’d! FF

Dejection: An Ode, in Morning Post, 4 October 1802

[52]

Have I been gazing on the Western sky, And its peculiar tint of yellow-green:

33

And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye!

34

And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,

35

That give away their motion to the stars;

36

Those stars, that glide behind them, or between,

37

Now sparkling, now bedimm’d, but always seen;

38

Yon crescent moon, as fix’d as if it grew,

39

In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue,

40

A boat becalm’d! a lovely sky-canoe!

41

I see them all, so excellently fair—

42

I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!

43

30

35

32

III. 40

My genial spirits fail,

44

And what can these avail,

45

To lift the smoth’ring weight from off my breast!

45

46

It were a vain endeavour,

47

Tho’ I should gaze for ever

48

On that green light that lingers in the west:

49

I may not hope from outward forms to win

50

The passion and the life, whose fountains are within!

51

29

peculiar] celestial B

33

or] & overwritten or 5

36

cloudless. Starless] starless cloudless B

37

omitted B

42

end of line torn away S

45

that lingers] which lingers B

46-50

ends of lines torn away S

Dejection: An Ode, in Sibylline Leaves (1817)

[53]

Have I been gazing on the western sky, And it’s peculiar tint of yellow green: 30

And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye! And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, That give away their motion to the stars; Those stars, that glide behind them or between, Now sparkling, now bedimm’d, but always seen;

35

Yon crescent Moon, as fix’d as if it grew In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel how beautiful they are! III. My genial spirits fail, And what can these avail,

40

To lift the smoth’ring weight from off my breast? It were a vain endeavor, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west: 45

I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

28

on] at FF

29

it’s] its 1828-1834

34

bedimm’d . . . seen;] bedimmed . . . seen: 1828-1834

35

Moon,] moon FF Moon 1829-1834

peculiar] celestial FF as fix’d] that seems FF as fixed

1828-1834 36

cloudless, starless] starless, cloudless FF

37

all . . . fair,] all, . . . fair! FF

38

I see, not feel, how beautiful they are. FF; FF breaks off with signature S. T. C.

MS. Poem. 39-46

omitted FF

39

fail,] fail; 1834

40

avail,] avail 1828-1834

41

smoth’ring] smothering 1828-1834

42

endeavor,] endeavour,

1828-1834

blue;] blue! FF

Dejection: An Ode, in Morning Post, 4 October 1802

[54]

IV.

50

55

60

65

O Edmund! we receive but what we give,

295

And in our life alone does Nature live:

296

Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!

297

And would we aught behold, of higher worth,

298

Than that inanimate cold world, allow'd

299

To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,

300

Ah from the soul itself must issue forth,

301

A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud

302

Enveloping the earth—

303

And from the soul itself must there be sent

304

A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,

305

Of all sweet sounds the life and element!

306

O pure of heart! Thou need’st not ask of me

307

What this strong music in the soul may be?

308

What, and wherein it doth exist,

309

This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,

310

This beautiful and beauty-making pow’r?

311

Joy, virtuous Edmund! joy, that ne’er was given,

312

47/48

no stanza break B, S

48

Edmund]

51

aught miswritten ought 5

57

there] that S

60-61

William B

ends of lines torn away S

62

it doth] doth it B

63

end of line torn away S

65

joy,

dearest Bard! but such as ne’er was given B

Dejection: An Ode, in Sibylline Leaves (1817)

[55]

IV. O Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live: Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allow’d To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth, A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth— And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element! V. O pure of heart! thou need’st not ask of me What this strong music in the soul may be! What, and wherein it doth exist, This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, This beautiful, and beauty-making power. Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne’er was given,

47-75

introduced in FF by prose note, following Greek quotation from Plotinus: A

divine passage faintly represented in the following lines, written many years ago by the writer, though without reference to or recollection of the above. 47

Lady! . . . receive . . . give,] lady! . . . receive, . . . give FF

48

our . . . live:] our . . . live! FF

49

Ours . . . ours] Ours’ . . . ours’ FF

50

not indented FF

51

allow’d] allowed 1828-1834

52

not indented FF

53

forth,] forth FF

54

cloud] cloud, FF

55

Earth—] earth! FF

57

not indented FF

58

indented FF

58/59

behold,] behold FF poor . . . crowd,] poor, . . . crowd: FF

potent] powerful FF

its] it’s FF

life] life, FF

space but no part number FF

59

me] me, FF

60

be!] be; FF

61

indented FF

What,] What FF

63

indented FF

beautiful,] beautiful 1828-1834

64

not indented FF

FF

exist,] subsist, FF power.] power! FF

virtuous Lady! Joy] O beloved! joy, FF

given,] given

Dejection: An Ode, in Morning Post, 4 October 1802

[56]

Save to the pure, and in their purest hour,

313

Joy,

314

is the spirit and the pow’r,

Edmund!

Which wedding Nature to us gives in dow’r A new earth and new Heaven, 70

Undream’d of by the sensual and the proud— Joy

is the sweet voice,

Joy

the luminous cloud—

We, we ourselves rejoice!

75

315 316 317 318 319

And thence flows all that charms or ear or light,

320

All melodies the echoes of that voice

321

All colours a suffusion from that light.

322

V. Yes, dearest

Edmund,

yes!

There was a time when, tho’ my path was rough, This joy within me dallied with distress, And all misfortunes were but as the stuff Whence fancy made me dreams of happiness:

80

85

231 232 233 234

For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,

235

And fruits and foliage, not my own, seem’d mine.

236

But now afflictions bow me down to earth:

237

Nor care I, that they rob me of my mirth,

238

But O! each visitation Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, My shaping spirit of imagination.

67

Joy, effluent, & mysterious, is the Power B

71

This is the sweet Voice, This the luminous Cloud, B

72

Our hidden Selves rejoice! B

73

light,] Sight, B sight S

75/76

V] IV s

76

Edmund,]

William! B; line omitted S

79

stuff miswritten staff S

81

twining] climbing B

following l. 87 Coleridge ceased with: I am so weary of thi must leave off / B

239 240 241

Dejection: An Ode, in Sibylline Leaves (1817) 65

[57]

Save to the pure, and in their purest hour, Life, and life’s effulgence, cloud at once and shower, Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power, Which wedding Nature to us gives in dow’r A new Earth and new Heaven,

70

Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud— Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud— We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voice,

75

All colours a suffusion from that light. VI. There was a time when, though my path was rough, This joy within me dallied with distress, And all misfortunes were but as the stuff Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:

80

For hope grew round me, like the twining vine, And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seem’d mine. But now afflictions bow me down to earth: Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth, But oh! each visitation

85

Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, My shaping spirit of Imagination.

65 pure,] pure FF 66 Life, and Life’s Effluence, Cloud at once and Shower. Sibylline Leaves errata, 1828-1834, but effluence, cloud 1834 Shower, 1828-1829 shower, 1834 66-67 Life of our life, the parent and the birth, FF 68 Nature] nature FF dow’r] dower FF, 1828-1834 69 A new heaven and new earth FF 70 sensual,] sensual FF 71-72 This is the strong voice, this the luminous cloud! Our inmost selves rejoice: FF 73 charms] glads FF 74 not indented FF 75 colours] colors FF 76-139 omitted FF 77 distress,] distress. 1828 81 seem’d] seemed 1828-1834

Dejection: An Ode, in Morning Post, 4 October 1802

[58]

*

[The sixth and seventh Stanzas omitted. ] * * * *

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

VIII. O wherefore did I let it haunt my mind, This dark distressful dream? 90

I turn from it and listen to the wind Which long has rav’d unnotic’d. What a scream

95

100

184 185 186 187

Of agony, by torture, lengthen’d out,

188

That lute sent forth! O wind, that rav’st without,

189

Bare crag, or mountain tairn,* or blasted tree,

190

Or pine-grove, whither woodman never clomb,

191

Or lonely house, long held the witches’ home,

192

Methinks were fitter instruments for thee,

193

Mad Lutanist! who, in this month of show’rs,

194

Of dark-brown gardens, and of peeping flow’rs,

195

Mak’st devil’s yule, with worse than wintry song,

196

The blossoms, buds, and tim’rous leaves among.

197

87/88

VIII] V S, with no asterisks to indicate omission

88-89

Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around Reality’s dark dream! S

90

it] you

5

wind] sound

5

ends of lines torn away S O] Thou S tairn miswritten tain S

91, 93 93 94 100

yule] yell

100, 102

5

ends of lines torn away S

*Taim, a small lake, generally, if not always, applied to the lakes up in the mountains, and which are the feeders of those in the vallies. This address to the wind will not appear extravagant to those who have heard it at night, in a moun¬ tainous country.

Dejection: An Ode, in Sibylline Leaves (1817)

[59]

For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient, all I can; And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural Man— This was my sole resource, my only plan: Till that which suits a part infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my Soul. VII. Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, Reality’s dark dream! I turn from you, and listen to the wind, Which long has rav’d unnotic’d. What a scream Of agony by torture lengthen’d out That lute sent forth! Thou Wind, that rav’st without, Bare crag, or mountain-tairn, * or blasted tree, Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb, Or lonely house, long held the witches’ home, Methinks were fitter instruments for thee, Mad Lutanist! who in this month of show’rs, Of dark brown gardens, and of peeping flow’rs, Mak’st Devils’ yule, with worse than wint’ry song, The blossoms, buds, and tim’rous leaves among.

90

Man] man 1834

94

Soul] soul 1834

97

rav’d unnotic’d] raved unnoticed 1828-1834

98

lengthen’d] lengthened 1828—1834

99

rav’st] ravest 1828-1834

100 ioon

crag] craig 1834 wind] Storm-wind Sibylline Leaves errata, 1828-1834

104

show’rs] showers 1828-1834

105

flow’rs] flowers 1828—1834

106

wint’ry] wintry 1828-1834

107

tim’rous] timorous 1828-1834

*Taim is a small lake, generally if not always applied to the lakes up in the mountains, and which are the feeders of those in the vallies. This address to the wind will not appear extravagant to those who have heard it at night, and in a mountainous country.

[6o]

Dejection: An Ode, in Morning Post, 4 October 1802

Thou Actor, perfect in all tragic sounds! Thou mighty Poet, ev’n to frenzy bold! 105

200

’Tis of the rushing of an host in rout,

201

At once they groan with pain, and shudder with the cold!

202

203

But hush! there is a pause of deepest silence!

204

And all that noise, as of a rushing crowd,

205

With groans and tremulous shudderings—all is over! It tells another tale, with sounds less deep and loud— A tale of less affright,

206 207 208

And temper’d with delight,

209

As Edmund’s self had fram’d the tender lay— 115

199

What tell’st thou now about? With many groans of men with smarting wounds—

no

198

210

’Tis of a little child,

211

Upon a lonesome wild,

212

Not far from home; but she has lost her way—

213

And now moans low, in utter grief and fear;

214

And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother hear!

215

IX. 120

125

’Tis midnight, and small thoughts have I of sleep;

216

Full seldom may my friend such vigils keep!

217

Visit him, gentle Sleep, with wings of healing,

219

And may this storm be but a mountain birth,

220

May all the stars hang bright above his dwelling,

221

Silent, as tho’ they watch'd the sleeping earth!

222

With light heart may he rise, Gay fancy, cheerful eyes, And sing his lofty song, and teach me to rejoice! O Edmund, friend of my devoutest choice, 130

O rais’d from anxious dread and busy care, By the immenseness of the good and fair

331

Which thou see’st ev’ry where

332

Joy lifts thy spirit, joy attunes thy voice, 106-107 ends of lines torn away S 119/120 IX] VI S 128-132 omitted S 133 Joy lift his spirit, joy attune

his voice

S

Dejection: An Ode, in Sibylline Leaves (1817) Thou Actor, perfect in all tragic sounds! Thou mighty Poet, e’en to Frenzy bold! no

What tell’st thou now about? ’Tis of the Rushing of an Host in rout, With groans of trampled men, with smarting wounds— At once they groan with pain, and shudder with the cold! But hush! there is a pause of deepest silence!

115

And all that noise, as of a rushing crowd, With groans, and tremulous shudderings—all is over— It tells another tale, with sounds less deep and loud! A tale of less affright, And temper’d with delight,

120

As Otway’s self had fram’d the tender lay— ’Tis of a little child Upon a lonesome wild, Not far from home, but she hath lost her way: And now moans low in bitter grief and fear,

125

And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother hear. VIII. ’Tis midnight, but small thoughts have I of sleep: Full seldom may my friend such vigils keep! Visit her, gentle Sleep! with wings of healing, And may this storm be but a mountain-birth,

130

May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling, Silent as though they watch’d the sleeping Earth! With light heart may she rise, Gay fancy, cheerful eyes,

Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice:

no

thou] thou, 1828

in

Host] host 1834

119

temper’d] tempered 1828-1834

120

fram’d] framed 1828-1834

131

watch’d] watched 1828-1834

134

voice:] voice; 1834

lay—] lay, 1829-1834

[61]

[62]

135

Dejection: An Ode, in Morning Post, 4 October 1802

To thee do all things live from pole to pole,

334

Their life the eddying of thy living soul!

335

O simple spirit, guided from above, O lofty Poet, full of light and love, Brother and friend of my devoutest choice,

323

Thus may’st thou ever evermore rejoice!

339 ESTHSE.

134

To thee do] To him may 5

134, 138

ends of lines torn away S

135

thy] his S

138

Brother and] Dear Edmund! S

signature

STC. S, and note omitted

Dejection: An Ode, in Sibylline Leaves (1817) To her may all things live, from Pole to Pole, Their life the eddying of her living soul! O simple spirit, guided from above, Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice, Thus may’st thou ever, evermore rejoice.

135

Pole to Pole,] pole to pole 1834

139

may’st] mayest 1828-1834

[63]

READING TEXTS The Day-Dream The Cornell Manuscript

facing the Morning Post text, 19 October 1802

Mary Hutchinson’s transcription of The Day-Dream, like that of A Letter, is exceptionally neat and careful. There is only one miswriting (1. 11) and one overwriting (she capitalized a letter in 1. 21); and what appear to be intrusive double quotes mark the end of line 1. Although punctuation seems sometimes sparse, only one missing mark is abso¬ lutely required (at the close of stanza 4), and it has been drawn from the printed version of the poem. Finally, one misplaced apostrophe has been corrected (1. 17); the missing number has been prefixed to the final stanza; and the letters torn away in line 24 have been conjecturally supplied within brackets. The Morning Post version of the poem, hitherto the only one known, appeared on 19 October 1802 under the heading original poetry on page 2, column 4. Coleridge never republished the poem.

[65]

[66]

The Day-Dream, Cornell Manuscript

1

If Thou wert here, these Tears were Tears of Light! —But from as sweet a day-dream did I start As ever made these Eyes grow idly bright; And tho’ I weep, yet still about the heart 5

A dear and playful Tenderness doth linger Touching my Heart as with a Baby’s finger. 2

My Mouth half-open like a witless Man, I saw the Couch, I saw the quiet Room, The heaving Shadows and the fire-light Gloom; io

And on my Lips, I know not what there ran— On my unmoving Lips a subtile Feeling— I know not what—but had the same been stealing

3

Upon a sleeping Mother’s Lips I guess It would have made the loving Mother dream 15

That she was softly stooping down to kiss Her Babe, that something more than Babe did seem— An obscure Presence of it’s darling Father Yet still it’s own sweet Baby self far rather!

4

Across my chest there liv’d a weight so warm 20

As if some bird had taken shelter there;

The Day-Dream, in Morning Post, 19 October 1802

THE DAY DREAM, FROM AN EMIGRANT TO HIS ABSENT WIFE.

IF thou wert here, these tears were tears of light! But from as sweet a vision did I start As ever made these eyes grow idly bright! And tho’ I weep yet still around my heart A sweet and playful tenderness doth linger, Touching my heart, as with an infant’s finger. My mouth half-open, like a witless man, I saw our couch, I saw our quiet room, Its shadows heaving by the fire-light gloom: And o’er my lips a subtle feeling ran, And o’er my lips a soft and breeze-like feeling— I know not what—but had the same been stealing Upon a sleeping mother’s lips, I guess It would have made the loving mother dream That she was softly bending down to kiss Her babe, that something more than babe did seem, A floating presence of its darling father, And yet its own dear baby self far rather! Across my chest there lay a weight, so warm! As if some bird had taken shelter there:

[68]

The Day-Dream, Cornell Manuscript

And lo! upon the Couch a Woman’s Form! Thine, Sara! thine! O Joy, if thine it were! I gaz’d with anxious hope, and fear’d to stir it— [A deejper Trance ne’er wrapt a yearning Spirit! 5

25

And now when I seem’d

sure

my Love

to

see,

Her very Self in her own quiet Home, There came an elfish Laugh, and waken’d me!— ’Twas Hartley, who behind my Chair had clomb, And with his bright Eyes at my face was peeping— 30

I bless’d him—try’d to laugh—and fell a weeping.

The Day-Dream, in Morning Post, 19 October 1802 And lo! I seem’d to see a woman’s form— Thine, Sara? thine? O joy, if thine it were! I gaz’d with stifled breath, and fear’d to stir it, No deeper trance e’er wrapt a yearning spirit! And now, when I seem’d sure thy face to see, Thy own dear self in our own quiet home; There came an elfish laugh, and waken’d me. ’Twas

Frederic,

who behind my chair had clomb,

And with his bright eyes at my face was peeping— I bless’d him, tried to laugh, and fell a weeping! ESTHSE.

_

PHOTOGRAPHS Cornell Manuscripts of A Letter to-and The DayDream

Dove Cottage Manuscript of A Letter toColeridge’s letter to Sotheby, 19 July 1802 Dejection: An Ode in The Morning Post, 4 October 1802

Coleridge’s letter to the Beaumonts, 13 August 1803

A Letter to-,

Cornell Manuscript

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