Coleridge and Wales

Sir, – Did Wales influence the writing of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan?  Certainly the mystery of “that deep romantic chasm” deepens.  We know Coleridge toured the Principality twice – in July-August, 1794, with Hucks and in November, 1802, with the Wedgwoods.  Of course, he may have paid an unrecorded visit in May, 1798, as Mr. Grigson has suggested, for travel in Wales in those comfortable days was not as unrewarding an experience as some hasty critics have supposed.  At least we find that he put off his series of lectures at Bristol for a while in 1814 in order to escort a lady friend from Bath to North Wales.

It appears from Hucks’ Pedestrian Tour through North Wales (1795) and Coleridge’s letter to the Dorset clergyman, Martin, that the 1794 journey began at Welshpool and extended through North Wales.  Now Hafod is in Cardiganshire, above the River Ystwyth (Alph I) and Devil’s Bridge, even then reckoned as part of South Wales; and it was here in 1783 that Baldwin of Bath erected a Gothic house in an enclosure of eight (“twice five miles”) square miles for Thomas Johnes.  (Elisabeth Inglis-Jones’ Hafod and Thomas Johnes, Wales, June, 1946, p. 45-54, gives an interesting account of the project.)

Nevertheless, the imaginative background, the “savage, holy and enchanted, dancing rocks, forests ancient as the hills, ancestral voices prophesying war,” cf. Gray’s “Bard,” of Kubla Khan would seem to fit the striking descriptions of Hafod’s natural grandeur rather than Dorothy Wordsworth’s of the Crookham garden, especially when we think of those “Moorish additions,” spires and cupolas at Hafod, which possibly may have had some bearing on the poet’s fancy.  Scholar’s conversant with the romantic interest in Celtic mythology, Druids, in Wales “the home of the Muse” of legend and antiquities which had affected cultured Englishmen since the Tudor dynasty (Wales and the Welsh in English Literature, W. J. Hughes and Ruthven Todd’s recent Tracks in the Snow) will recognize that the language-texture and symbolism of Kubla Khan has affinities with that of other romantic poets when treating Welsh themes.  Perhaps Lowes’ Road to Xanadu has tended to obscure this more than probable influence on his poetry.

Remembering that Johnes’s ideal to build up a centre for the arts flourished for 25 years (until the disastrous fire of 1808), that Hafod was much discussed and attracted “tourists” from all over Britain, I believe this was just the sort of place that would have stirred Coleridge’s imaginative genius.  To me, at least, it opens up a new line of approach, one that recompenses us for the disappointing “Lines written at King’s Arms, Ross,” and “Imitated from the Welsh.”  I am grateful to scholars like Mr. Whalley for reassuring us that Coleridge was an exceptionally acute and sensitive observer of natural phenomena when discussing the probable impression the Welsh Tours made on Coleridge’s mind.  Hitherto critics have tended to regard Biographia Literaria and these influences in a different light.  To them, Coleridge lived “not in time at all, past, present or future – but beside or collaterally.”  (Table Talk, Aug. 4, 1833.)

KEIDRYCH RHYS