RA Benthall on Coleridge

Boston University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Studies in Romanticism.

http://www.jstor.org

New Moons, Old Ballads, and Prophetic Dialogues in Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" Author(s): R. A. Benthall Source: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 591-614Published by: Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25601360Accessed: 02-03-2015 19:03 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of contentin a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Mon, 02 Mar 2015 19:03:08 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.orghttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=bostonhttp://www.jstor.org/stable/25601360http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

R. A. BENTHALL

New Moons, Old Ballads,

and Prophetic Dialogues in Coleridge's "Dejection:

An Ode"

Out there came

A moon made like a face with certain spots Multiform, manifold, and menacing: Then a wind rose behind me.

?Browning, An Epistle Containing the

Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician

i. "The vivid, florid, turgid sky"

Coleridge's

"dejection: an ode is a poem about uncontainable

forces, and the attempt to write about them. The ode begins with an

epigraph, quoted from "The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens," where a sailor refers to "The new Moon / With the old Moon in her arms" as an omen of a "deadly storm" approaching. In "Dejection," another new moon has

appeared, and the epigraph serves to reiterate its promise that another storm

is on the way. As the storm breaks at the end of the ode, however, the

fulfillment of the speaker's prediction is itself unpredictable. A torrent of wind blowing through an olian harp in the window becomes a "Mad Lutanist" as it resonates with "all tragic sounds" in the mind of the speaker, who struggles to distinguish and interpret what the wind says. The voice that prophesies the storm in the epigraph to "Dejection" therefore consti tutes an authority that Coleridge both emulates and complicates in the course of the poem.

In his application of Bhaktinian dialogism to Wordsworth's poems, Don

Bialostosky has analyzed the tensions in Wordsworth's poems between what the narrator reveals about the characters he describes, and what the

narrator's description reveals about himself. Similar tensions exist in many of Coleridge's poems, including "Dejection," although the dramatic and

SiR, 37 (Winter 1998)

591


http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

592 R. A. BENTHALL

narrative elements are not as clearly delineated. In 1993, Mark Jones argued in a review of Bialostosky's Wordsworth, dialogics, and the practice of criticism

(1992), that "Bakhtin's own 'dialogics' emphasizes the promiscuity of

competing voices within a single utterance"1 saying that poems may be

dialogical even in the absence of clearly defined Wordsworthian characters or narrators. In this particular extension of Bhaktin's theories, what begins as a private or lyrical expression may end up taking on more ironic or

impersonal aspects as the poet distances himself from his own utterance,

gaining insight into the forces that produced both his thoughts and his

poetry at a given point, or points, in time. Revisions can thus become

moments of dialogue with the poet's "second self," moments which may resurface in the completed poem.

In "Dejection," Coleridge leaves traces of just such a revisionary dia

logue. While Wordsworth's dramatic dialogues are often so subtly con

ceived that readers have mistaken, and still mistake, Wordsworth himself for his narrators, Coleridge's conversation poems are at once simplified and

complicated by what Edward Said has called his "addiction to quotation."2 As A. C. Goodson points out in Verbal Imagination: Coleridge and the Lan

guage of Modern Criticism (1988), Coleridge typically begins his conversation

poems by responding not to "natural impulse," but to words:

After "Frost at Midnight," the conversation poems do in fact typically begin from words, from a line of Milton or a poem of Wordsworth's or an odd bit of "Sir Patrick Spence." For the word was the agent of

thinking as sensation could not be, leading to a discourse of the self in its integral relations, and not only in relation to objects seen,

or

unseen.3

Whereas Wordsworth's "poetics of speech" responds to and attempts to

reproduce spoken words, Coleridge's poems often take written texts as

their points of departure, either through quotation or through epigraphs, as in "The Nightingale," "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and "Dejec tion." Coleridge's dramatic account of how "Kubla Khan" originated in

a

single written sentence in Purchas's Pilgrimage testifies to this habit of

building poems based explicitly on other writing, and explains his frequent use of strategic quotation. While these allusions openly call attention to

intertextual relations, the dialogues that emerge may be complicated by the

fact that Coleridge as narrator often objectifies himself as a character by dramatizing his mind's response to written words, which places the speaker

1. Mark Jones, "Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Posses

sion," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 92 (1993): 558. 2. Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975) 21.

3. A. C. Goodson, Verbal Imagination: Coleridge and the Language of Modern Criticism (New York: Oxford UP, 1988) 138.



COLERIDGE'S "DEJECTION: AN ODE" 593

in dialogue not only with himself, but with himself reading another text, which then enters the dialogue as a third voice.

Jack Stillinger has recently argued in Coleridge and Textual Instability (1995) that in "Dejection," Coleridge "acted the roles of both Eliot and

Pound, first creating and then excavating from the mass the much trimmer

'essential' poem that (in the 1950s way of thinking) one always knew was

there."4 While Coleridge played this dual poetic role with many of his other poems as well, he also performed excavations on texts that were not

his own. In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," for example, Coleridge omits a sentence from the paragraph of Thomas Burnette's text quoted in

the epigraph. One other such instance involves the epigraph to "Dejec tion," which differs substantially from the text of "Sir Patrick Spens" that

Coleridge would have been most likely to quote, further complicating the

relationship between the new moon, the impending storm, and the poem

that attempts to construct a metaphor through their conjunction.

2. Ballads and Bards

The epigraph to "Dejection: An Ode" refers the reader to the 14th century Scottish ballad, where the shipmate who has seen a lunar ill-omen warns Sir Patrick Spens not to set sail on the following morning:

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 Spence5

Most readers have assumed that Coleridge's epigraph, quoted above, comes

directly from Bishop Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, first published in 1765.6 His epigraph, however, would seem to conflate two of Percy's quatrains:

Mak haste, mak haste my mirry men all,

Our guid schip sails the morne, O say na sae, my master deir,

For I fear a deadlie storme.

4. Jack Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems

(New York: Oxford UP, 1994) 97-98. 5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge: Poetical Works, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Oxford:

Oxford UP, 1912). 6. That Coleridge owned a copy of the Reliques at least as early as 1800 is verified by a

letter sent from Charles Lamb to Coleridge, in which Lamb mentions the fact that he is

enclosing a copy of "Percy's Ancient Poetry," Edwin W. Marrs, Jr., ed. The Letters of Charles and Mary Ann Lamb, 3 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975) 1: 217.



594 R. A. BENTHALL

Late late yestreen I saw the new moone

Wi' the auld moone in her arme; And I feir, I feir, my deir master,

That we will cum to harme.

(21-29)7

In Coleridge's epigraph, the line "That we will cum to harme" has been

replaced by the line about the storm, which has been changed from "For I fear a deadlie storme" to "We shall have a deadly storm." This apparent conflation may or may not have occurred intentionally, if indeed Percy is

Coleridge's only source. Few readers, however, have asked if Percy's was

the only text of the ballad that Coleridge knew. The opening lines of Coleridge's new Ode dramatically question the

source of the wisdom supposedly held in the old ballad:

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

Upon the strings of this dorian 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 their wonted impulse give, Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live!

(1-20)

These lines echo and invoke the epigraph in what might be either a

superstitious appeal to the Bard's wisdom or a parodic gesture of skepticism. This initial emphasis on the epigraph has often been read as evidence of

Coleridge's morbidity, as he reads this particular new moon as an ill-omen

7. Thomas Percy, ed., Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads,

Songs, and other Pieces of our earlier Poets (Chiefly of the Lyric kind.) Together with some few of later Date, 2 vols. (London: J. Dodsley, 1765) 1: 72-73.




through the frame of the remembered epigraph. Given the circumstances in which the poem was written and its autobiographical cast, many have also assumed that the poem is primarily confessional, voicing the philo sophical depression into which Coleridge had fallen on one April evening.8 Through such a reading, "Dejection" becomes an example of lyrical self-diagnosis, instigated by failed personal relationships, which gives way to philosophical rumination and the composition of a poem.9

The bard whose wisdom made the grand old ballad, however, is anony mous. To what extent is the notion of the unknown bard as a fount of wisdom integral to the speaker's surmise, serious

or skeptical, of the ballad's

prophetic power? The speaker's eventual conviction of the single ballad eer's trustworthiness, contrasted with the ambiguous attitudes expressed in

"Dejection's" opening lines, may suggest that the voice speaking in the ode is someone other than that of a plainly confessional Coleridge. Evi dence that the text of the epigraph has been tampered with, so as to raise doubts about the origin of the epigraph and identity or integrity of the

bard, would complicate the usual assertion that the speaker is Coleridge, and might also make the epigraph part of a larger problem about the origin of poetic voices which the poem confronts.

In The Road to Xanadu (1927), John Livingston Lowes faintly suggests that there may be a problem with the text of the epigraph, saying that it is "a stanza recalled from Percy's version of 'the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence.'"10 He acknowledges the possibility that Coleridge may also have been influenced by other ballad collections, saying that "it is

highly probable . . . that he knew other ballad-collections besides the

8. The Dove Cottage MS, Coleridge's holograph, is dated "April 4, 1802.?Sunday

Evening." The development of "Dejection: An Ode" is presented by Stephen M. Parrish in

Coleridge's "Dejection": The Earliest Manuscripts and the Earliest Printings (1988). Unless other wise noted, all quotations from "Dejection: An Ode" are taken from the 1817 version in

Parrish. All other quotations of Coleridge's poetry are taken from E. H. Coleridge, Coleridge: Poetical Works (1912). The earliest (and longest) version of the poem, consisting of 339 lines, is "A Letter to -," the deleted name thought by most scholars to be that of Sara

Hutchinson. It exists in two manuscripts, which Stephen M. Parrish denotes as the Cornell MS and the Dove Cottage MS. The former, which Parrish believes to be the slightly older

copy, is an undated transcription made by Mary Hutchinson from a letter Coleridge sent to

her sister Sara. Coleridge published neither of these versions. In the Dove Cottage MS, the

opening lines refer familiarly to "the grand old Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence," whereas the

Cornell MS calls it the "the dear old Ballad," but no epigraph appears in either manuscript. 9. "Dejection: An Ode" first appeared in the Morning Post on October 4, 1802, the day

of Wordsworth's wedding to Mary Hutchinson, and consists of 139 lines. The 200 lines

omitted were mosdy expressions of Coleridge's love for Sara Hutchinson, accentuated by lamentations over his unhappy marriage to Sara Flicker. This shorter form of the ode has

survived with some revisions, notably in the seven lines added to the end of Stanza vi. This

version, the one usually anthologized, was published in Coleridge's Sibylline Leaves (1817). 10. John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination

(Cambridge: Riverside P, 1927) 332.



596 R. A. BENTHALL

Reliques. The number in print by 1797 was fairly large, and Coleridge was an omnivorous reader . . ." (332). He declines to pursue this road, how

ever, saying that "the Reliques we know that he knew, and for our purpose we need go no farther" (332).

George Dekker, however, notes in Coleridge and the Literature of Sensibility (1978) that the epigraph does not correspond directly to Percy's text,

asserting that Coleridge simply "conflated" two stanzas from Percy.11 Simi

larly, Marshall Suther, in Coleridge's Dark Night (i960), says that "it would

appear that . . . Coleridge doctored the ballad as he found it in Percy's Reliques/' and that it is "more likely that Coleridge made the transposition unconsciously in recalling the ballad from memory than that he made it

deliberately, with the Percy version in front of him." He continues:

. . . but the alteration is none the less significant in the indication it

gives of the importance [Coleridge] attached to the juxtaposition of the two images. There is little doubt that Coleridge was using Percy's version, since no other known version available at the time corre

sponds at all closely with the stanza as Coleridge presents it.12

Suther thus reasons that the juxtaposition of lines in the "doctored"

epigraph may reveal attitudes in the poem concerning the ominous rela

tionship between these two images of the moon and the storm.

His speculation, however, that the epigraph probably derived from Percy alone, based on the supposition that "no other known version available at

the time corresponds at all closely with the stanza as Coleridge presents it," is misleading. In The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882), which Suther cites, Francis J. Child lists nine versions of "The Ballad of Sir Patrick

Spence," all of which contain some form of the lines used in the epigraph to "Dejection." Out of these nine, five refer to the "deadly storm" in the

fourth line of the stanza containing the "new moon." The version in the

Harris MS at Harvard is typical:

For I saw the new mune late yestreen, Wi the auld mune in her arms;

An ever an alake, my father dear,

It's a token o diedly storms.13

Coleridge, in placing the storm in line four of his epigraph, actually comes

closer to this popular version of "Sir Patrick Spence," which "Miss Harris's

ii. George Dekker, Coleridge and the Literature of Sensibility (London: Vision P, 1978) 245. 12. Marshall Suther, The Dark Night of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Columbia

UP, i960) 120.

13. Francis James Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols. (New York:

Dover, 1965) 2: 29.




MS" reproduces, according to Child, "from the singing of her mother"

(28). That this version could have been popular in Coleridge's time is

suggested by MacEdward Leach in The Ballad Book, who says that this version of "Sir Patrick Spence" contained in the Harris MS was "traditional in Scotland in the 18th century."14

The earliest written version of Coleridge's epigraph occurs in a letter he wrote to William Sotheby on July 19, 1802. In transcribing lines from his

"poem written during that dejection to Wordsworth," Coleridge quotes from "Sir Patrick Spence:"

?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."?15

Coleridge may be consciously substituting the line containing "storm" for the fourth line in Percy's version, which ends with "harme." While the fourth line of the stanza here begins with "There will be," instead of "We shall have" which appears in all published versions, it should be noted that the same third person is also used in one of the popular forms recorded by Child: "It's a token maister, or ye were born / It will be a deadly storm"

(24). These speculations about the Child MS versions of "Sir Patrick Spens" serve as a reminder of the protean nature of ballads as they evolve over

time, and of the anonymous and composite authority of the many "bards"

who make and remake each poem. Coleridge may have encountered

numerous versions of the ballad, both in oral and written form, and his

epigraph may be a synthesis not merely of two stanzas from Percy, but a conflation of other versions of "Sir Patrick Spens" as well.

Who then does the speaker refer to in the opening lines as "the Bard who made / The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens?" The unsettled nature of the quoted text may serve to aggravate the speaker's anxiety, as

he attempts to shore up the weakness of his own genius by invoking the words of another poet, who turns out to be anonymous and whose text,

it seems, has been altered. If considering these different English versions of the ballad helps to clarify the dramatic situation in "Dejection," it may be useful to consider still another version?a translation?of "Sir Patrick

Spens" which Coleridge had almost certainly read and which I have not

yet seen discussed.

14. MacEdward Leach, ed., The Ballad Book (New York: A. S. Barnes and Company, 1955) 179.

15. Earl Leslie Griggs, ed., Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966) 2: 815.



598 R. A. BENTHALL

Coleridge had written to Sotheby for the first time on July 13, 1802,

nearly one week before the letter quoted above. He discusses Salomon Gessner's Der Erste Schiffer, which he was beginning to translate, and he

complains that Gessner's personifications of JEolus and Cupid are ill

adapted to his story. Coleridge's complaints lead him into a comparison of

English and German poetry; "I read a great deal of German," he confesses, "but I do dearly dearly dearly love my own Countrymen of old times, and those of my contemporaries who write in their Spirit" (Griggs 2: 811). That this preference should have been stated one week before the epigraph first appeared in writing may be significant. Coleridge stopped in Hamburg, Germany on his way to Gottingen in the fall of 1798. On September 28, he purchased Herder's Volkslieder (1778), which contained poems not only of German origin but also German translations of English, Scottish, and

Spanish poems. Herder had translated a number of English and Scottish

pieces directly from the second edition of Percy's Reliques (1767), one of which was "Sir Patrick Spence," which he entitled "Der Schiffer." His translation follows Percy very closely, as the opening lines show:

The king sits in Dumferling toune,

Drinking the blude-reid wine: O quhar will I get guid sailor,

To sail this schip of mine ?

(1-4)

Der Konig sitz in DumferlingschloB Er trinkt blutroten Wein

?0 wo treff ich ein'n Segler an

Dies Schiffzu segeln mein ?

(1-4)16

When he translates those forboding stanzas involving the new moon and

the storm, however, Herder makes a noticeable change:

Mak haste, mak haste my mirry men all,

Our guid schip sails the morne, O say na sae, my master deir,

For I fear a deadlie storme.

Late late yestreen I saw the new moone

Wi' the auld moone in her arme; And I feir, I feir, my deir master,

That we will cum to harme.

(21-29)

16. Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, 8 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker

Verlag, 1990) 3: 110-11.




Macht fort, macht fort, mein' wackre Leut

Unser gut Schiff segelt morgen. ?0 sprecht nicht so, mein lieber Herr, Da sind wir sehr in Sorgen.

Gestern Abend sah ich den neuen Mond, Ein Hof war urn ihn her.

Ich fiircht', ich furcht, mein lieber Herr, Ein Sturm uns wartet schwer.?

(21-29)

In Herder's version, the fourth line of the "neuen Mond" stanza now

includes "Ein Sturm uns wartet schwer," which can be translated literally as "A storm awaits us grave." The line might also be translated as "We

shall have a deadly storm," the form used in Coleridge's epigraph. Herder may have had several reasons for inverting the lines. By including

the new moon and the storm in one stanza, he increases the dramatic tension

between the portent and its consummation, a motive which may have

impelled some of the Scottish variants discussed in Child. Suther, as we have

seen, attributes such a motive to Coleridge's "doctoring" of the ballad. In

addition, Herder may have been concerned with rhyme. His version alters two imperfect rhymes in Percy's version, one being in the last stanza:

Have owre, have owre to Aberdour,

It's fiftie fadom deip: And thair lies guid Sir Patrick Spence,

Wi' the Scots lords at his feit.

(41-44)

Dort liber, hinuber nach Aberdour!

Tief funfzig Fad'n im Meer, Da leigt der gute Sir Patrik Spence,

Sein' Edlen um ihn her.

(41-44)

According to William Harmon, deficient assonance rhymes such as "feit"

and "deip" occur more often in ballads than in other verse forms.17 In this

case, however, the imperfect rhyme also creates a cross-alliterative pattern between the dentals and labials d-p and f-t. The consonants are reversed

in much same way that the ranks of Sir Patrick and the Scots nobles are

visually inverted, a nuance which the translation loses. As Herder perfects the rhyme, he also divests the final visual image of its irony by describing the Scots lords as lying merely scattered around Sir Patrick; the English

17- William Harmon, "Rhyme in English Verse," Studies in Philology 84 (1987): 375.



600 R. A. BENTHALL

ballad casts down the "Scots nobles," who "wer richt laith / To weet their cork-heild schoone," enthroning "guid Sir Patrick Spence / Wi' the Scots lords at his feit."

Herder's translation of the stanza containing the new moon has a similar

divesting effect, since it cleans up imperfect rhymes while altering the stanza's range of nuances. The German word "Sturm" is after all not much

easier to rhyme than the English "Storm," a problem which Herder circumvents by discretely removing the word from the end of the line.

Herder's emendation, however, fails to capture the tonal implications of

the English version, where the word "storm," which suggests an uncon

tainable force, is itself not contained by the rhyme scheme. Coleridge may also have been bothered by the fact that Herder's translation alters "the new moone / Wi' the auld moone in her arme" to "Ein Hof war um ihn

her," or "A courtyard was round about it," an idiomatic German expres

sion for saying that the moon is encircled by a halo or corona. Lost are

the complex associations involved in being "held" in the arms of a feminine

personification, which may suggest anything from an embrace to a death

grip. That Coleridge was particularly attracted by this personification is

suggested by the description of the moon in the opening lines of "Dejec tion," where he refers to "the new moon with the old moon in her lap." In years immediately following the writing of "Dejection," Coleridge also uses this metaphor at least twice in notebook entries.18

The epigraph to "Dejection" may then have been in part Coleridge's response to Herder's alterations of the stanzas involving the new moon,

which seem to mute certain nuances in the English version in deference

to perfect rhyme. The imperfect rhyme in Coleridge's epigraph is striking when one considers that he might have used the consonance rhyme

"storms" and "arms," as in the Harris MS quoted earlier. Coleridge not

only restores "storm" to its acoustically troubling position at the end of the

line, but seems to go out of his way to render an already imperfect rhyme even more so by the disjunction of plural "arms" and the singular "storm."

It would be easy enough to say that Coleridge simply read both versions of "Sir Patrick Spence" (and possibly heard others) and then, as Lowes says, conflated them in "recalling" the stanza. This in fact could be what

happened initially. Even so, Coleridge seems at one point consciously to

have preferred his version to Percy's, which is suggested by the form of the epigraph he used in a letter to Sir George and Lady Beaumont on Aug. 13, 1803, where he transcribed part of "Dejection:"

18. Kathleen Coburn, ed., The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 3 vols. (New York:

Foundation, 1957) #2009, #2610. Coburn's edition gives no page numbers, listing entries

by letter number instead.




'Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon

'With the old Moon in her Arm, 'And I fear, I fear, my dear Master,

'We shall have a deadly Storm ['] ?Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence

(Griggs 2: 970)

In the original epigraph, the sailor speaks of the "new Moon / With the old Moon in her arms" and admonishes his "Master dear." Here, Coleridge reverts to the singular "arme" and to the "deir master" of Percy's Reliques, the accent over the e in "Master" giving particularly strong evidence that

Coleridge may have recalled or recently reread the version of "Sir Patrick

Spence" found in Percy, and revised some of the epigraph accordingly. In

spite of this, he retains "Storm" in the fourth line where Herder and others had placed it, for

reasons which become more apparent as the poem

progresses.

3. New Moons

In his book But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (1988), John Lennard discusses the relationship between the epigraph and the new moon in "Dejection," saying that Coleridge's epigraph reflects

"profoundly controlled shaping."19 In describing the two stanzas in Percy's version of "Sir Patrick Spens," he says that "the relation of the phenomenal moon to the impending storm is implicit ..." and he follows Dekker in

construing Coleridge's "conflation" as a direct allusion to Percy's Reliques:

By fusing the last lines of the quatrains into "We shall have a deadly storm," Coleridge made [this relationship] explicit, and made the

epigraph apply more compactly and cogently to his own opening lines.

(131)

If, as Lennard says, Coleridge's epigraph does in fact show evidence of

"profoundly controlled shaping," one might ask why Coleridge took such

pains to present the epigraph just so, given the other ballads besides Percy from which he may have drawn. Considering the epigraph's relation to the opening lines of the poem may shed light on the matter. At least one effect of the quotation is that of evoking a visual image of the new moon,

which Coleridge may have seen shortly before writing the initial draft of

"Dejection." Dorothy Wordsworth's journal entry for Friday, March 8, describes the following spectacle:

19- John Lennard, But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse

(Oxford: Clarendon, 1991) 28 m.



602 R. A. BENTHALL

On Friday evening the moon hung over the northern side of the

highest point of Silver How, like a gold ring snapped in two, and shaven off at the ends, it was so narrow. Within this ring lay the circle of the round moon, as distinctly to be seen as ever the enlightened moon is. William had observed the same appearance at Keswick,

perhaps at the very same moment, hanging over the Newland Fells. Sent off a letter to Mary H., also to Coleridge and Sara

. . .20

Since Coleridge was also at Keswick at the time, there is a good chance that he too saw this moon. Lowes makes much of Dorothy's account,

suggesting that she could not have failed to mention such a strange vision in the letter she sent to Coleridge. He goes on to argue that her letters,

along with her visits, probably contributed to the conversation between

Coleridge and Wordsworth which "Dejection: An Ode" in part recon structs.

This conjecture may be even better founded than Lowes claimed.

Dorothy recorded on October i, 1798, that she "bought Percy's ancient

poetry, 14 marks" (1: 31). Thus, when on May 4, 1802, she describes another new moon as "the crescent moon with the 'auld moon in her

arms,'" she may be quoting Percy, and not Coleridge, as Lowes thinks. It

is true that two weeks earlier, on April 21, Coleridge had "repeated the verses he wrote to Sara" (1: 136) to Dorothy, probably from the Dove

Cottage MS, where mention of the "the grand old ballad" is made in the

opening lines. However, as I have already noted, this version had no

epigraph. If Coleridge had added the epigraph by this point, Dorothy's archaic spelling of "auld" is still probably not derived from Coleridge, since he always modernized it in his quotations. Dorothy may have discussed "Sir Patrick Spence" with Coleridge and may therefore have contributed to his decision to include the epigraph.

Lennard points out that Dorothy's description of the new moon on

March 8 corresponds closely with Coleridge's description in lines 8?14 of

"Dejection:"

For lo! the New-moon winter-bright! And overspread with phantom light (With swimming phantom light o'erspread

But rimmed and circled by a sliver thread) I see the old Moon in her lap, foretelling

The coming-on of rain and squally blast.

(9-H)

20. Ernest de Selincourt, ed., Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, 2 vols. (New York: MacMil

lan, 1941) 1: 121.




Both passages seem to describe not merely a new crescent moon with the

old moon still visible, which is rare enough. Dorothy's description is

ambiguous, and may suggest two crescents, "like a gold ring snapped in two and shaven off at the ends," which enclose the old moon in lunulae, or "little moons," the name Erasmus used for "parentheses," according to

Lennard (131-33). Coleridge has not only described this appearance, but illustrated it as well, enclosing the "swimming phantom light" of the old

moon in graphic lunulae. The astronomical cause of this "doubled moon" has baffled scientists at

least since the Renaissance, and was still being discussed at the end of the

eighteenth century. Astronomers speculated on the cause of this "silver thread" around the new moon as early as Galileo, who wrote in The Starry

Messenger:

When the moon is not far from the sun, just before or after the new

moon, its globe offers itself to view not only on the side where it is adorned with shining horns, but a certain faint light is also seen to

mark out the periphery of the dark part which faces away from the

sun, separating the darker background of the aether. Now, if we

examine the matter more closely, we shall see that not only does the extreme limb of the shaded side glow with this uncertain light, but the entire face of the moon (including the side which does not receive the glare of the sun) is whitened by a not inconsiderable gleam.

. . .

This remarkable gleam has afforded no small perplexity to the phi losophers.21

Galileo himself offers no solution, speculating that the gleaming rim must be in some way connected with sunlight reflected from the earth.

In Coleridge's Minor Poems (i960), I. A. Richards noted that the relation between the new moon and the "Earthlight" pictured in the epigraph, applies particularly well to Coleridge's metaphors for language and imagi nation in "Dejection:"

That "phantom light" which illuminates the old moon in the young moon's arms is, of course, Earthlight. We are here reflecting the light we receive from the sun onto the moon. . . . When we perceive that

light we are having returned to us what we have given.22

21. Stillman Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (New York: Doubleday, 1957) 42. 22. I. A. Richards, Coleridge's Minor Poems: A Lecture at Montana State University on April

8, ig6o: 16.



604 R. A. BENTHALL

He then goes on to cite from stanza iv of the ode what many critics have

taken to be Coleridge's own reflections on the power of imagination to

project itself onto the world:

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!

(47-58)

"Nature," Richards then says, "when 'apparelled in celestial light' in 'the

glory and freshness of a dream' is?this ode replies to Wordsworth?

receiving 'but what we give'" (16). Richards goes on to ask "whence do we get all this that we can give: this light, this glory

. . . this sweet and

potent voice which can create ..." answering himself that "much of

Coleridge's prose is his answer to this question" since "somehow, no

answer gets into the poem" (17). While Coleridge's prose is no doubt his

attempt to answer this question, among others, the poem itself may also

contain answers, which in turn raise new questions. That Coleridge used the phenomenon of the new moon lit by earthshine

to construct such a complex metaphor should come as no surprise, given

Coleridge's fascination with astronomy, especially during the months in which "Dejection" was composed. In a letter he wrote to Sara Hutchinson,

dated July 27, 1802, Coleridge describes the appearance of clouds after a

rainy day as "white & fleecy" and "without motion, forming an appearance

not very unlike the Moon as seen thro' a telescope" (Griggs 2: 825). This

spectacle of Coleridge squinting through a telescope at the moon during the summer in which "Dejection" was revised and the epigraph added

gives insight into Coleridge's habit of mind. The dramatic arc of "Dejec tion" in large part dramatizes

an attempt to see clearly how verbal and

phenomenal worlds relate, collide, or whether they interact at all. In this

sense, many of Coleridge's questions were at least as scientific as they were

philosophical or poetical, and his astronomical observations and readings probably framed "Dejection" as much as "The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens."

In The Starry Messenger, Galileo had suggested, prior to the quotation




given above, that the appearance of the moon's perfect roundness, whose

surface is obviously uneven when examined with a telescope, could be

explained by positing that "there exists around the body of the moon, just as around the earth, a globe of some substance denser than the rest of the

aether," which "may serve to receive and reflect the sun's radiations

without being sufficiently opaque to prevent our seeing through it, espe

cially when it is not illuminated" (39). This theory that the moon has an

atmosphere was later abandoned by Galileo, and many scientists followed suit. As Lowes points out (32), Coleridge was aware of this theory and had

loosely transcribed a passage from Erasmus Darwin's Botanic Garden in a

1796 notebook entry:

Moon at present uninhabited owing to its little or no atmosphere but

may in time?An Atheistic Romance might be formed?A Theistic one too.?Mem? (#9)

What could atmosphere, or lack thereof, around the moon have to do with Atheism or Theism? Given its high metaphorical yield for Coleridge, this notion of lunar atmosphere may also have been incorporated into "Dejec tion."

In 1788, Johann Hieronymous Schroter, an astronomer and fellow of the Royal Society of Gottingen, published a work called Selenotopographische

Fragmente, in which he undertook to account for the cause of new moon's

luminous rim by making telescopic observations and drawings. His con

clusions revived the theory abandoned by Galileo:

Referring to my Selenotopographical Fragments for the proofs, I there adduced of the real existence of a lunar atmosphere, which had been so frequently doubted . . . from which proofs of a refracting atmo

sphere, I also deduced the probability of the existence of a faint

twilight, which, however, my long series of observations had not yet adduced."23

His theories regarding this "lunar twilight" were published in the Philo

sophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1792, along with plates of his drawings. Coleridge could have encountered Schroter's theories either at Gottingen, or through the Philosophical Transactions, which he is known to have read as early as 1798.

Modern astronomers have in large part corroborated Schroter's observa

tions and speculations. The phenomenon of horizon glow on the dark side

23. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (London: Royal Society of

London, 1792).



606 R. A. BENTHALL

of the moon was observed by astronauts in 1972, as Ron Cowan explains in an article from the March 26, 1994 issue of Science News:

Astronauts orbiting the moon aboard Apollo 17 in 1972 viewed two features of our solar system normally washed out by the sun's glare. Each time the solar disk rose from behind the moon, the crew witnessed the faint illumination from the sun's outer atmosphere, or

corona, as well as the dim glow of zodiacal light?sunlight scattered

by interplanetary dust.

Using sketchpads, the crew drew what they saw just before the sun

began poking out from behind the cratered lunar surface. Their

drawings, researchers later realized, show more than just the corona

and zodiacal light. Near the limb of the moon, the sketches reveal the

strange phenomenon of horizon glow, caused by the scattering of light from gas or dust suspended several kilometers above the moon. This

puzzled researchers because they thought the moon's negligible atmo

sphere lacked the material to create a glow.24

According to Cowan, Herbert A. Zook of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston says that the glow may occur when "sunlight striking the moon

strips atoms of their electrons." Cowan continues:

Both the ionized atoms and the electrons would then impart a charge to lunar dust particles. The charged dust would rise several kilometers above the moon, creating the horizon glow by scattering light. But Zook adds that the glow remains a mystery "that researchers don't

pretend to fully understand." (197)

In his recent article in Astronomy, Alan Stern also describes the phenomenon of horizon glow:

If you stood on the Moon just after sunset, you might notice a faint, almost orange glow on the sunward horizon and overhead. Such

twilight glows are familiar to everyone on Earth?but on the Moon? Yet your eyes would not be deceiving you. The glow comes from a

trillion trillion sodium atoms fluorescing in the tenuous lunar atmo

sphere overhead.25

Stern's tone becomes almost Coleridgean as he describes the implications of lunar atmosphere:

24. Ron Cowan, "On the Horizon: Clementine Probes Moon Glow," Science News 26

(1994): 197.

25. Alan Stern, "Where the Lunar Winds Blow Free," Astronomy Nov. (1993): 36.




What scientists know about the lunar atmosphere today has been hard-won. The first few clues came from the Apollo orbiters and surface instrument stations in the early 1970s. Then through the

diligent work of a handful of planetary astronomers with high-tech spectrometers and imagers, the late 1980s saw a host of fascinating new

discoveries. Among these was the realization that the lunar atmosphere is in a real sense the voice of the lunar interior. It is also the divining rod through which mankind may one day determine if there really is

water at the lunar poles. (36)

The "voice of the lunar interior," made up of atmospheric gasses escaping from inside the moon and ionized by solar wind, may tell scientists whether there ever was water on the moon, and may illuminate the moon's role

in the formation of life. While it may be that speculations of this sort impelled Coleridge's

notebook entries on theism, atheism, and the moon, his awareness of the

lunar atmosphere seems evident in numerous passages throughout "Dejec

tion." The odd disjunction in Coleridge's description of the new moon

"With swimming phantom light o'erspread / But rimmed and circled by a silver thread" (my emphasis) may imply a curiosity about the failure of the "phantom light" projected from the earth to account for the new

moon's arms. The speaker says that "from the soul itself must issue forth

/ A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud / Enveloping the Earth" while

looking at a fair luminous cloud enveloping the moon, lit by the sun, not the earth. When the speaker says that "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," he emphasizes the autonomy of the imagination and the need for self-reliance. The hypothetical presence of a lunar atmosphere, however, glowing independently of projected earthshine, would make the

speaker's claim seem slightly ironic, and such a suggestion may be Cole

ridge's way of examining the limits of imagination as an autonomous and

self-sustaining force.

4. "That Dejection to Wordsworth"

One might argue that "Dejection" is primarily Coleridge's attempt to

capture and represent a visceral feeling, and that these allusions to ballads and scientific writings are secondary. The bluntness of the ode's title itself

conveys a sense of emotional immediacy. Even so, the title probably emitted multiple signals to Wordsworth, and possibly to others. The word

"dejection" had entered the written poetic dialogue between Coleridge and Wordsworth in "The Leech Gatherer" (later "Resolution and Inde

pendence"), composed between May 3 and 7, probably in response to



608 R. A. BENTHALL

Coleridge's reading of "A Letter to -," which later became "Dejec tion," to William and Dorothy on April 21. In "The Leech Gatherer"

appear the lines, "As high as we have mounted in delight / In our dejection do we sink as low." Wordsworth may have read parts of this poem to

Coleridge as early as May 4, and Dorothy records that on July 5, she

"copied out the L.-G. for Coleridge" (Journals 1: 106). In Coleridge's letters

during the summer of 1802, the word "dejection" is used repeatedly to describe his bouts of sickness and despondency, whereas this word seldom

appears in earlier letters and apparently has appeared nowhere else in his

poetry.26

"Dejection," in addition to the popularly received meaning, "depression of spirits," may have had other implications in the early 19th century, linked to astronomical themes in the ode. Towards the end of the eight eenth century astronomers still drew heavily on astrological terminology, even though fewer and fewer of them placed credence in horoscopes.

Newton's interest in astrology, for example, is well-documented. Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia (1721-1751) contains the following entry for "de

jection:"

dejection, in astrology, is applied to the planets, when in their

detriment, i. e. when they have lost their force, or influence, as is

pretended, by reason of their being in opposition to some others, which check and counteract them.27

The image at the ode's beginning of the departing old moon, replaced by the new, seems appropriate in a poem about waning forces and poetic

displacement. As for those other forces "which check and counteract"

them, these may also be suggested by the title. The entry for "dejection" in Chambers continues:

Or, [dejection] is used when a planet is in a sign opposite to that wherein it has its greatest effect, or influence, which is called its exaltation. Thus, the sign Aries being the exaltation of the sun, the

sign Libra is its dejection.

Interestingly, Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, under the sign of Aries. Coleridge, born October 21, 1772, was a Libra. "Dejection: An

Ode" was first written under the sign of Aries on April 2, and was published under the sign of Libra on Oct 4, Wordsworth's wedding day. Marrying

26. Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Middle Years: 1800-1815 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1975).

27. Ephraim Chambers, ed., Cyclopaedia: or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences

(London: W. Collins, 1786).




Mary Hutchinson, Wordsworth was no doubt in "exaltation," leaving

Coleridge to suffer romantic disappointment over her sister Sara in "de

jection." In the letter to Sotheby quoted earlier, the ambiguous phrasing of Coleridge's reference to his "poem written during that dejection to

Wordsworth" may not only mean a sense of despondency, but also an

awareness of stellar reciprocity. Wordsworth may in fact have been the one person to realize during

Coleridge's lifetime that the epigraph to "Dejection: An Ode" did not come directly from Percy's Reliques, and that the ode's insistence on the bard's wisdom constitutes a problem. His poem "Once I could hail

(howe'er serene the sky)," probably written in 1826 and published in 1827, also begins with an epigraph: "Late, late yestreen I saw the new moone /

Wi' the auld moone in her arme" (Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence, Percy's Reliques).28 Wordsworth's omission of the two troublesome lines in Cole

ridge's epigraph, along with his careful quotation of Percy's archaic spellings and his citation of "Percy's Reliques" in the title, may be a way of signalling to Coleridge that he understands the problematic origin of the epigraph to

"Dejection," and its implications. The speaker in Wordsworth's poem says that as a child he saw in the new moon only the silver crescent, "No faculty yet given me to espy / The dusky shape within her arms unbound." As an adult, however, he now sees both the new moon and the old, and grows

melancholic not because of the fading of vision, as in the "Immortality" ode, but because of an excess. The things which once he could not see, he now can see, and it dejects him. The earthlight which proved such an

apt metaphor for the light and voice of projected imagination in "Dejec tion" now reveals a darkness not noticed before. Wordsworth may also be

acknowledging the astrological nuance in the title of "Dejection" by his

description of the new moon rising:

On her I looked whom jocund Fairies love, Cynthia, who puts the little stars to flight, And by that thinning magnifies the great, For exaltation of her sovereign state.

(21-24)

In fact, Wordsworth's two most widely recognized responses to Coleridge's

"Dejection" involve images of "exaltation," showing Wordsworth's re

markable sensitivity to the central images of the ode, both to the celestial

sign and to the earthly storm. Wordsworth's "Immortality" ode, the first

28. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, eds., The Poetical Works of William

Wordsworth, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952-59).



610 R. A. BENTHALL

four stanzas of which were begun in March of 1802 and to which "De

jection" was in large part a response, was begun again, probably in 1804,

with the "exalted" star answering Coleridge's dejected moon:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar. . . .

(58-61)

In a similar manner, the passing of the storm, as it is projected into the

Lady's future at the end of "Dejection" is echoed in the beginning of "Resolution and Independence" to show the easing of one turmoil but not the end of dejection:

There was a roaring in the wind all night; The rain came heavily and fell in floods; But now the sun is rising calm and bright; The birds are singing in the distant woods.

. . .

(1-4)

Each beginning in these two poems comments on one side of Coleridge's conflated epigraph, one in an astronomical image, the other in the passing of the storm. Wordsworth's poems may in fact constitute some of the most

careful criticism and implicit commentary on Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" to date.

5. "The Reason in the Storm"

The tension between the new moon, impending storm, and problematic ballad sets the stage for Coleridge's dramatic attempts at identifying the voice of wisdom from among the whirlwind of anonymous voices by which ballads are made and transmitted. The ballad therefore links "De

jection" with the "grand old" tradition, while the conflated epigraph itself conceals the ground of its origin. As such, misquoting an anonymous ballad

as Coleridge does becomes the perfect vehicle in which to ask questions about origins, especially when the passage quoted seems to contain proph

ecy about one's own fate. Edward Said argues in Beginnings: Intention and Method that writing is always an ambivalent act, since it places the writer in an almost prophetic relationship with the texts by which one's writing is informed:

The greater the anxiety, the more writing appears to be quotation, the more writing thinks of itself as, in some cases even proclaims itself,

rewriting. The utterance sounds like?perhaps even is?a borrowing




from someone else. Prophecy is a type of language around which this issue of originality perpetually lurks in many forms. Is the prophecy absolutely authentic and original? Does it speak to all men at a com

mon level, or only for one, too original (i. e., alienated) man (the prophet)? Yet understanding other writing prophetically is quite another matter for the writer, although most of us would not call under

standing writing a prophetic enterprise. (Said 22)

This sense of anxiety is nowhere more apparent than in the opening lines of "Dejection," where the the speaker presents us with a rewritten pro

phetic text whose predictions are fulfilled by the poet in the course of the

poem. The altered form of the prophecy in the epigraph therefore serves as a commentary on the speaker's desire to wield the deadly efficacy of this

particular prophetic utterance.

It may be this anxiety that warps the speaker's sense of logic, or leads him to exaggerate the claims of the prophecy on purpose. The inference he makes is, after all, fallacious. In the ballad, on the day before the ill-fated

journey, a sailor describes a portent which he saw "late yestreen," foretell

ing a "deadly storm," and he tries to warn Sir Patrick Spence not to sail on the following morning. His "weather-wise" predictions refer not to the same night as the omen, but to two days later. In "Dejection," however,

the speaker's forecast, made while gazing at the "New-moon winter

bright," that "This night, so tranquil now will not go hence / Unrous'd

by winds that ply a busier trade," is obviously not based on the authority of the Bard who wrote the ballad, but on the speaker's own over-anxious

and perhaps morbid mind. Hence the impatient wish, not for a fatal storm two days from now, but now: "And oh! that even now the gust were

swelling / And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast!" If the "wisdom" of the Bard seems to have been misread in these

opening lines, we should also note that, strictly speaking, it has been mis-attributed as well. After all, how "weather-wise" must a bard be in

order to insert a piece of folk-meteorology into a poem? The bard who made "Sir Patrick Spence" had no need of being weather-wise himself; if this proverbial wisdom was not common knowledge, he could have read

Virgil's Georgics, where the moon frequently serves as an index to the

weather. Coleridge had read Virgil's Georgics in Latin by November of

1798, as his notebooks show, and he would also have had access to

Dryden's translation. In addition to these versions, Coleridge had probably read William Sotheby's translation, since notebook entries made in May or June of 1802 contain quotes from a review of Sotheby's version in the British Critic. In Sotheby's translation of Virgil, new moons and storms also

converge:



612 R. A. BENTHALL

If, when the moon renews her refluent beam,

Through the dark air her horns obscurely gleam, Along the wasted earth and stormy main, In torrents drives the congregated rain.

Or if with virgin blush young Cynthia blaze,

Tempestuous winds succeed the golden rays . . .

(1.475-480)29

In the first letter to Sotheby of July 13, Coleridge quotes from Virgil's Eclogues, perhaps as a friendly gesture. That Coleridge's second letter to

Sotheby should have contained the first version of the epigraph from "Sir Patrick Spence" is especially interesting; Coleridge may have expected Sotheby, a man well-acquainted with the "weather-wise" Virgil, to appre

ciate the ironies in "Dejection's" opening lines.30 If the speaker's jesting appeal to the wise voice of the Bard thus seems

strange in light of the fact that his wisdom is the product of many voices, it seems even stranger when we note that, within the ballad itself, the

wisdom comes not through the narrator's voice, but through the voice of

a weather-wise mariner. The epigraph to "Dejection" is after all a dramatic

utterance; the wisdom belongs at least as much, in the dramatic sense, to

the sailor who reads the new moon as it does to the bard who "made"

him. In this conflation of character and bard, we are presented with initial

signs of the speaker's attempts at a monological reading of the voice of

wisdom. If dialogism involves not only what Bialostosky calls "sensitivity to the otherness of the words of others," but also to the perception of

implicit dialogues competing within the single utterance, "Dejection"

addresses not only the words of Wordsworth, but is also Coleridge's way of addressing the otherness of his

own words.

29. Virgil, The Ecologues Translated by Wrangham, The Georgics by Sotheby, and the Aeneid

by Dry den (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1884). 30. Another source that may have contributed to the conjunction of moon and storm is

William Bartram's Travels Through North and South Carolina (1791) which contains a descrip tion of a violent storm, coming on the morning after a lunar eclipse. Coleridge had read

this book in the months preceding "Dejection," as his notebook entries show. Kathleen

Coburn points out that Bartram's Travels had special significance for Coleridge, since he had

given his copy to Sara Hutchinson a little over one year before writing "Dejection." Coburn

quotes Coleridge's note on the fly-leaf:

Sara Hutchinson from S. T. C. Dec 19, 1801. This is not a Book of Travels, properly

speaking; but a series of poems, chiefly descriptive, occasioned by the objects, which the

Traveller observed.?It is a delicious Book, and like all delicious things, you must take

but a little of it at a Time.?Was it not about this time of the year that I read to you

parts of the 'Introduction' of this Book, when William and Dorothy had gone out to

walk ??I remember the evening well, but not the time of year it was. (Coburn 1,

Notes, #218)




The irony implicit in the fact that Coleridge should write a poem about the inability to create has often been remarked. If he wished at once to

underscore and undermine his sense of artistic barrenness by writing a poem

about it, Coleridge seems to have gone the extra mile in "Dejection: An Ode" and dramatized a monophonic voice speaking in the midst of po

lyphony, characterized by the epigraph and by the arrival of the many voiced storm which the epigraph prophesies. Having had his own suppos

edly failing genius rebuked by the storm, the speaker in "Dejection" identifies the solipsistic implications of his belief that, in every case of

illumination, "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." Voices break forth, not from the olian lute alone, but from winds that rush

through it as the storm breaks:

Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind.

Reality's dark dream! I turn from you, and listen to the wind, Which long has raved unnoticed. What a scream

Of agony by torture lengthened 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,

Methinks were fitter instruments for thee, Mad Lutanist! who in this month of show'rs, Of dark brown gardens, and of peeping flowers, Mak'st Devils' yule, with worse than wint'ry song, The blossoms, buds, and tim'rous leaves among.

Thou Actor, perfect in all tragic sounds! Thou mighty Poet, e'en to Frenzy bold!

What tells't 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!

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 tempered with delight,

As Otway's self had fram'd the tender lay? 'Tis of a little child

Upon a lonesome wild,



614 R. A. BENTHALL

Not far from home, but she hath lost her way: And now moans low in bitter grief and fear, And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother hear.

(94-126)

In framing this metaphor, the speaker makes distinctions he had hitherto not been able to make, and hears voices to which he had previously been deaf. In particular, he now distinguishes the dual voice of the wind as both "Actor" and "Poet," which he failed to do in his initial reading of the

epigraph, where mariner, narrator, and poet are all conflated as "bard."

Wordsworth seems to comment on this distinction in his best known reply to "Dejection," where the second half of the "Immortality" ode construes the fall from innocence as a fall into dramatic roles, as "the little Actor cons another part" (103).

The subsequent metaphors of the host in rout and of the crying child are of course "projected," in some sense, by Coleridge in the act of writing the poem, but the poem also leaves traces of the forces that impel his

solitary voice, at once revealing and concealing their origins. If the Cole

ridge of April 2, 1802 found in "the new Moon / With the old Moon in her arms" a fitting emblem of the new containing the old, the wiser if not

sadder Coleridge of October 4, 1802 dramatized an act of reading and

subsequent writing in which what appears to be the record of a single voice contains many voices, implying that beginnings,

even of dejection, contain

not only their own endings but other beginnings as well.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill



Article Contentsp. 591p. 592p. 593p. 594p. 595p. 596p. 597p. 598p. 599p. 600p. 601p. 602p. 603p. 604p. 605p. 606p. 607p. 608p. 609p. 610p. 611p. 612p. 613p. 614

Issue Table of ContentsStudies in Romanticism, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Winter, 1998) pp. 499-678Volume InformationFront MatterImpersonation and Autobiography in Lamb's Christ's Hospital Essays [pp. 499-521]Cobbett, Coleridge and the Queen Caroline Affair [pp. 523-543]Shelley in Chancery: The Reimagination of the Paternalist State in "The Cenci" [pp. 545-589]New Moons, Old Ballads, and Prophetic Dialogues in Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" [pp. 591-614]The Romantic Calling of Thinking: Stanley Cavell on the Line with Wordsworth [pp. 615-645]Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 647-650]Review: untitled [pp. 650-652]Review: untitled [pp. 652-657]Review: untitled [pp. 657-662]Review: untitled [pp. 662-665]

Back Matter

RA Benthall on Coleridge

Documents

Transcript of RA Benthall on Coleridge