Coleridge’s Poetic Sensibility

The Samuel Taylor Coleridge who went down from Jesus Col­lege in the spring weather of 1794 – thinking no doubt that he would return, though he never seriously did – was the same young man that Dorothy Wordsworth first saw at Racedown two years later when he jumped over the gate because it would take too long to open it, and ran up across the broad lawn to the house.

At first I thought him very plain, that is, for about three minutes: he is pale and thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish loose-growing half-curling rough black hair.  But if you hear him speak for five minutes you think no more of them.  His eye is large and full, not dark but grey; such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind; it has more the ‘poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling’ than I ever witnessed. (WLR (1787-1805) 188-9)

Whether or not Dorothy in that instant also meant by this that Coleridge had – in Humphry House’s words – ‘Exceedingly acute senses and great sensitivity to all sense-experiences’,[i] Coleridge immediately noticed those qualities in Dorothy: ‘She is a woman indeed – in mind, I mean, and heart ... Her informa­tion various – her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature – and her taste a perfect electrometer – it bends, protrudes, and draws in, at subtlest beauties and most recondite faults.’[ii]  There is record, during the Alfoxden days, of that grave lyrical sensibility of hers – any example can be chosen at random.

[23 Jan 1798] Bright sunshine, went out at 3 o’clock.  The sea perfectly calm blue, streaked with deeper colour by the clouds, and tongues or points of sand; on our return of a gloomy red.  The sun gone down.  The crescent moon, Jupiter, and Venus.  The sound of the sea distinctly heard on the tops of the hills, which we could never hear in summer. We attri­bute this partly to the bareness of the trees, but chiefly to the absence of the   singing of birds, the hum of insects, that noise­less noise which lives in the summer air. The villages marked out by beautiful beds of smoke.  The turf fading into the moun­tain road.  The scarlet flowers of the moss. (DWJ I 2)

The phrase ‘poetic sensibility’ is at first sight quite plain and unproblematic: it means presumably the sensibility of a poet, or the sensibility exhibited in poems.  If we endorse what Coleridge called ‘the sandy Sophisms of Locke, and the Mechanic Dog­matists’[iii] we should expect the question of Coleridge’s ‘poetic sensibility’ to resolve itself into a demonstration that he was an abnormally sensitive receiver of impressions, a fine reactor to stimuli, an acute recorder of whatever presented itself to his senses; and we should expect to find the evidence particularly in his poems, in the precise rendering there of perceptual experi­ence.  Given that evidence, however, would it tell us much either in general about the quality we call ‘poetic’ or in particular about sensibility?  Coleridge’s later writings would suggest not.  He said that he wished to demonstrate ‘that the senses were living growths and developments of the Mind & spirit in a much juster as well as higher sense, than the mind can be said to be formed by the Senses.’[iv]  And in a well-known section of Biographia Literaria he was to maintain that ‘The primary imagination ... [is] the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.’[v]  Nevertheless, those statements are of late date, and most of Coleridge’s poems are a young man’s poems.  Evidence of early date should be examined.

‘Thought,’ Coleridge said, ‘is a laborious breaking through the law of association.’[vi]  Our minds habitually move from the par­ticular to the general, from the less to the more.  If we simply accept Coleridge’s own statements of later date – critical state­ments the power of which comes from his own reflection upon his own poetic experience – we may lose the illumination of discovery that his statements embody.  To move from the more to the less, however, from poetry, or a single poem, to single symbolic events and images – that is what the habit of our minds resists; yet that is what reflection is for.  I should like therefore to trace a little the path in experience ­– in poetic experience and practice – along which Coleridge approached his uncanny understanding of perception and the work of percep­tion in imagination, in poetic making, in the whole ambit of the mind’s possible activities.  To take such a course is also to ask whether indeed ‘the shaping spirit of imagination’ left Coleridge when he said it had – whether indeed it ever left him, even when poems were infrequent and many of them seem like ‘the hard and thorny rind and shell within which the rich fruit was elaborating’.[vii]

Let us begin then by supposing that there is some poetic virtue in a refined sensibility – the ‘more than usual organic sensibility’ that Wordsworth postulated for the poet – and that there is some virtue in rendering such a sensibility in poems.  At least that gives us the comfortable illusion that, having ourselves eyes and ears and nostrils and fingertips, we can judge how well Coleridge sees and hears and feels.

In looking through the early poems I am struck by the general absence of vivid sensory images until the annus mirabilis and the conversation poems.  Coleridge’s literary perception was subtle enough to catch, even at Christ’s Hospital, a glimpse of his own poetic destiny in the bloodless languor of William Lisle Bowles’s Sonnets, and while he was still at Cambridge to rejoice in ‘an original poetic genius’ as soon as he read Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches.  Here and there in the Bristol poems we catch occasionally a turn of phrase, a rhythm, a fragmentary inkling of the fine poems that were soon to come.  But in the poems before 1796 it is clear – now that we have his best poems – what a long hard pull Coleridge had in verse against the rhetorical formality and sententiousness ingrained in his youth and reinforced by his precocious facility, his impetuous self-abandonment, his need for approval.  Very little evidence of an exceptional sensibility breaks the opaque surface of a multifarious but received poetic manner until ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’; and even there, in the first version of July 1797, the recom­mended coomb that was to achieve opulent specificity in Sibylline Leaves is a ‘rifted dell’ where he promises that ‘ferny rock’ will be found, and ‘plumy ferns’.  The poeticising habit encumbers much else, yet the poem opens with a stride that presages the opening of ‘Dejection: An Ode’ –

                        Well, they are gone, and here must I remain –

and whatever the tradition of his training it did not prevent him from being faithful to eye, ear and nostrils in choosing words which had not yet been canonised by poetic use.

                                    I watch’d

                        The sunshine of each broad transparent Leaf
                        Broke by the shadows of the Leaf or Stem,
                        Which hung above it: and that Wall-nut Tree
                        Was richly ting’d: and a deep radiance lay
                        Full on the ancient ivy ...             (CL I 335)

The ‘solitary humble-bee / Sings in the bean flower’ and ‘the last Rook’ that ‘Beat it’s straight path along the dusky air’, ‘Flew creaking o’er your heads’.  But altogether the evidence for an exceptional sensibility is not overwhelming if it is sought in the wording of the early poems – until the end of 1797 if not later.

The evidence of the notebooks is much less uncertain than the poems, even though at the beginning, in the ‘Gutch Memoran­dum Book’, Coleridge often had the uses of poetry in the front of his mind.  He would sometimes record a sharp sensory flash in epigrammatic form, or put it into a fine phrase for a poem not yet written; and indeed several of these little scraps, circumveilloped in his mind no doubt with much that was not written down in those early trenchant notes, did find their way into poems.  A sequence of entries, almost unbroken, written apparently from late 1796 to perhaps September 1797, begins with what appears to be material for the never-written poem ‘The Brook’ and end with a draft of a passage for ‘The Nightin­gale’.

            The swallows interweaving there mid the paired

            Sea-mews, at distance wildly-wailing. –

            The brook runs over Sea-weeds. –

            Sabbath day – from the Miller’s mossy wheel

            the waterdrops dripp’d leisurely –

               On the broad mountain-top

            The neighing wild-colt races with the wind

            O’er fern & heath-flowers –

            A long deep Lane

            So overshadow’d, it might seem one bower –

            The damp Clay banks were furr’d with mouldy moss

[Is this the coomb recommended for the walk in ‘This Lime-tree Bower?]

            Broad-breasted Pollards with broad-branching head.

            And one or two poor melancholy Joys

            Pass by on flimsy wing in Hope’s cold gleam,

            Moths in the Moonlight. –

            ‘Twas sweet to know it only possible –

            Some wishes cross’d my mind & dimly cheer’d it –

            And one or two poor melancholy Pleasures

            In these, the pale unwarming light of Hope

            Silvring their flimsy wing flew silent by,

            Moths in the moonlight –

               Behind the thin

            Grey cloud that cover’d but not hid the sky

            The round full moon look’d small. –

            The subtle snow in every breeze rose curling from the

            Grove, like pillars of cottage smoke.

Hartley fell down & hurt himself – I caught him up crying & screaming – & ran out of doors with him – The Moon caught his eye – he ceased crying immediately – & his eyes & the tears in them, how they glittered in the Moonlight!

            – Some wilderness-plot, green & fountainous & unviolated by Man.

            The Infant playing with its mother’s Shadow – Rocking its little sister’s cradle & singing to her with inarticulate voice. –

            The flat pink-colour’d stone painted over in jagged circles & strange parallelograms with the greenish black-spotted lichens. –

            The Sun-shine lies on the cottage-wall

            Ashining thro’ the snow –

            – The merry nightingale

            That crowds & hurries & precipitates

            With fast thick warble his delicious notes;

            As he were fearful, that an April Night

            Would be too short for him to utter forth

            His love-chant, and disburden his full soul

            Of all its music! –[viii]

What happened to these fragments?  In April 1798 the last fragment made its way into ‘The Nightingale’ without a syllable changed, and when he was writing the poem he was able to extend even further his virtuoso rendering of the bird’s song.

            But never elsewhere in one place I knew

            So many nightingales; and far and near,

            In wood and thicket, over the wide grove,

            They answer and provoke each other’s song,

            With skirmish and capricious passagings,

            And murmurs musical and swift jug jug,

            And one low piping sound more sweet than all ­–

            Stirring the air with such a harmony,

            That should you close your eyes, you might almost

            Forget it was not day!                         (PW I 265-6)

The surprising detail of the nightingales sitting ‘on moonlight bushes’ and their eyes glistening in the moonlight is not so sharply rendered.  Is that why it was omitted from Lyrical Ballads (1800)? – yet it was later restored.  And the poetical version (in the same poem) of the baby Hartley silenced by the moonlight shows how difficult it is to assimilate into poetry a vivid record of heightened perception, how like a Deianeira’s shirt the singing robes can be. –

                        and once, when he awoke

            In most distressful mood (some inward pain

            Had made up that strange thing, an infant’s dream –)

            I hurried with him to our orchard-plot,

            And he beheld the moon, and, hushed at once,

            Suspends his sobs, and laughs most silently,

            While his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears,

            Did glitter in the yellow moon-beam!          (PW I 266)

That note turned up again in more sententious form in the Conclusion to Part I of Christabel –

                                    and tears she sheds –

                        Large tears that leave the lashes bright!

                        And oft the while she seems to smile

                        As infants at a sudden light![ix]

The ‘Moths in the Moonlight’ never found a home, but ‘the thin / Grey cloud that cover’d but not hid the sky’ appears with only slight change in the opening lines of Christabel.  The ‘wilderness-plot, green & fountainous & unviolated by Man’ had its origin – like other material interspersed through these entries – in Bartram’s Travels and feels like a glimpse of the mental landscape that was to be realised in Kubla Khan.

One must admit that the hiatus between the actual perceptual experience and the wording of it in a notebook jotting, and between the notebook jotting (when it exists) and the rendering of it in verse, are both of them unfathomable.  These notebook entries are presumably personal and trenchant mnemonics that can evoke in the writer of them a far more complex and ex­tended state of mind than the notes themselves delineate or define; each note could indeed call back a whole event of experi­ence.  A poet can never get very far from words.  As long as the writer is concerned – as Coleridge evidently was in those months – to embody his primary perceptual experience in verse, the projection is consistently towards poetic rendering in language; and in Coleridge’s case, as we can see from the first versions of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’, there could be a wide gap between the acuity of his perceptions and a wording subtle and flexible enough to catch the symbolic cutting edge of the original perception.  The miracles of ‘Frost at Midnight’ are poetic miracles, not miracles of perception; here, perceptions so merged and complex that they elude descriptive notation have been transfigured into shapely words.  That Coleridge’s sensibility was in fact, like Dorothy’s, ‘a perfect [goldleaf] electrometer’ there can be no question.  His senses – all of them – were exquisitely responsive, subtle, discriminating, and they in­duced joyous meditative activity.  Even though (in the notebooks), if we are to see in detail his full capacity for ‘armed vision’, we have to wait for the records of the voyage to Hamburg, the Harzreise, and the several walks through the Lakes before leaving for Malta, there are clear enough evidences of earlier date.  Yet if we look forward to the triumphs of perceptual rendering in his poems – in The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, with Christabel in an intermediate position – here the perceptions are often fictions, images transformed through the evocative written witness of others and fused both with his own direct observations and with the inward turning of his attention upon the very substantial landscape of his own mind.  And his mind, being a poet’s mind, is populated not simply with vivid perceptual frag­ments – perceptual raw material (so to speak), visual, auditory, tactual, olfactory – but with the words and rhythms that body forth the acts themselves of perceiving, and ideas and mental events apprehended in what Whitehead would call the perceptual mode.

Looking back at Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal we find no discontinuity of manner, it seems; no tension between observing and wording, but a grave, naive, sustained musicality, per­petually sure-footed, tinged with a marvellous delicacy of feeling.

[1 Feb 1798] About two hours before dinner, set forward towards Mr Bartholomew’s. The wind blew so keen in our faces that we felt ourselves inclined to seek the covert of the wood. There we had a warm shelter, gathered a burthen of large rotten boughs blown down by the wind of the preceding night.  The sun shone clear, but all at once a heavy blackness hung over the sea.  The trees almost roared, and the ground seemed in motion with the multitude of dancing leaves, which made a rustling sound, distinct from that of    the trees.  Still the asses pastured in quietness under the hollies, undisturbed by these forerunners of the storm.  The wind beat furiously against us as we returned.  Full moon. She rose in uncommon majesty over the sea, slowly ascending through the clouds.  Sat with the window open an hour in the moonlight. (DWJ I 6)

To take Dorothy’s writing as a naïve datum for sensory acuity is itself to adopt a naïve assumption: it leaves out of account her skill at writing.  But at least it was spontaneous writing, for her eye and William’s only, not intended for publication.  If Cole­ridge’s impulse towards verse in the early years prevented his perceptual notation in verse from reaching consistently the sensitive and muted instrumentation of Dorothy’s journal, it was before long to take him much farther than she could go, simply because of his superior sense of language, his insistence that language can and must be taken where it had not been before, his conviction that whatever seized his attention in the outer world and held it imperiously was in a vivid sense – at times, in an ominous sense – a symbol in a language that he was on the verge of being able to interpret.[x]

The lichened stone noticed in the Gutch Memorandum Book is an instance.  It falls into resonance with an even more curious stone which he found at the Oderteich in the Harz mountains in May 1799 – noted in a letter to his wife but not in his note­book.

Here & else where we found large rocks of violet Stone which when rubbed or when the Sun shines strong on them, emit a scent which I could not [have] distinguished from   violet.  It is yellow-red in colou[r.]  (CL I 503)

In the Biographia, where he spoke of ‘the perfect truth of nature in [Wordsworth’s] images and descriptions as taken immedi­ately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy with the very spirit which gives the physiognomic expression to all the works of nature’, he remarked: ‘Like the moisture or the polish on a pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colours its objects; but on the contrary brings out many a vein and many a tint, which escapes the eye of common observation, thus rais­ing to the rank of gems, what had been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the traveller on the dusty high road of custom.’[xi]  It turns up again many years later in a grimly jocular letter about the conflict between the Mind and Nature in youth and age.  ‘For a while the Mind seems to have the better in the contest, and makes of Nature what it likes; takes her Lichens and Weather-stains for Types & Printer’s Ink and prints Maps & Fac Similes of Arabic and Sanscrit Mss. on her rocks.’[xii]

To take another instance.  In January 1802 Coleridge wrote to Godwin:

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 & action.  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. (CL II 782)

This might call to mind the many occasions, later, when he was to see himself in the emblem of a bird encaged, bird-limed, moult­ing, even self-encaged; and in that setting the word ‘starling’ might recall the passage in the Inferno (V 40-98) where the movement of the carnal sinners is described in the figure of a flight of starlings.  But, whether or not Coleridge knew and remembered the Dante passage, the germ of his use of the word starling here is an actual observation made as he approached London by coach at dawn on 27 November 1799.

Awoke from the uneasy Doze-dream of the Coach / a rich orange sky like that of a winter Evening save that the fleecy dark Blue that rippled above showed it to be morning / – soon became a glowing Brass colour, fleeces of Brass like sand – convolves high up in to the Sky – the Sun rose o’er the plain like a Kite / rose wholly, & a column in the waters, and soon after, a Hill meeting with it, rose thro’ other clouds – with a different Glory – Starlings –

Starlings in vast flights drove along like smoke, mist, or any thing misty [without]  volition – now a circular area inclined [in an] arc – now a globe – [now from a complete orb into an] elipse & oblong – [now] a balloon with the [car suspend]ed, now a concaved [sem]icircle & [still] it expands & condenses, some [moments] glimmering & shivering, dim & shadowy, now thickening, deepening, blackening! – (CN I 581, 582)

In October 1803 he included this among a series of observations entitled ‘Images’, and reworked it a little – the flight was ‘like a body unindued with voluntary Power’, and he revised the clos­ing phrase to read: ‘still expanding, or contracting, thinning or condensing, now glimmering and shivering, now thickening, deepening, blackening!’[xiii]  But he had already used the image of the starlings in telling Sara Hutchinson of a hazardous because uncircumspect descent from Sca Fell on 5 August 1802.  He was in the situation that all rock-climbers have experienced at some time or another; he was committed to going down, the slightest slip would mean death, and his ‘limbs were all in a tremble’ from exertion.  He was able to stop on a ledge and lay on his back to rest, looking up at the crags he had come down, at the rapidly moving clouds, laughed at himself ‘for a Madman’, and ‘lay in a state of almost prophetic Trance and Delight and blessed God aloud for the powers of Reason and the Will, which remaining no Danger can overpower us!’  ‘If this Reality were a Dream,’ he said to himself, ‘if I were asleep, what agonies had I suffered!  what screams!

When the Reason and the Will are away, what remain to us but Darkness and Dimness and a bewildering Shame, and Pain that is utterly Lord over us, or fantastic Pleasure that draws the Soul along swimming through the air in many shapes, even as a Flight of Starlings in a wind. –   (IS 235-6)

Dwelling for a little in the memory, the image of coherent indirection had found the body it was looking for.  At a certain point it ceases to describe; it defines and affirms the ‘aimless activity and unregulated accumulation’ of the heuristic mind,[xiv] as in December 1803 in a fragment of verse that bears the con­text of the initial imprinting, yet never found a home for itself.

            My Spirit with a fixed yet leisurely gaze

            Following its ever yet quietly changing Clusters of Thoughts,

            As the outward Eye of a happy Traveller a flock of Starlings. (CN I 1779)

‘How doth the old instinct bring back the old names.’  The invocation is sometimes in thematic and verbal echoes as from The Ancient Mariner to ‘Dejection’, when the Mariner’s crisis of grace is transformed into a crisis of sensibility.  Sometimes it appears in the reiteration of a rhythmic pattern, a syntax turned liturgical in catching the anguish of regret.

                        Alas! they had been friends in youth;

                        But whispering tongues can poison truth;

                        And constancy lives in realms above;

                        And life is thorny; and youth is vain;

                        And to be wroth with one we love

                        Doth work like madness in the brain.  (PW I 229)

This ritual tread, greatly varied and intrinsicated – distantly echoing, it may be, a similar ravelling-out in ‘Tintern Abbey’ – returns in the poem ‘To William Wordsworth’.

            Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn,

            The pulses of my being beat anew:

            And even as Life returns upon the drowned,

            Life’s joys rekindling roused a throng of pains –

            Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe

            Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart;

            And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of Hope;

            And Hope that scarce would know itself from Fear;

            Sense of past Youth, and Manhood come in vain,

            And Genius given, and Knowledge won in vain;

            And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild,

            And all which patient toil had reared, and all,

            Commune with thee had opened out – but flowers

            Strewed on my corse, and borne upon my bier,

            In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!  (PW I 407)

The fascination with birds that singled out the flight of starlings and earlier in Bristol had induced him to set down (from the not very reliable authority of Theophrastus at second remove by way of Nicholson’s Journal) ‘Prognostics of the Weather from the Flight of Birds’, played its part in the composition of ‘The Nightingale’; and it was the poet’s eye – an instant apprehension of possibilities dropping into a void that hungered to be filled – that recognised at a glance the albatross he needed for The Ancient Mariner when Wordsworth reported it from Shelvocke’s Voyage round the World.  The nightingales that haunted the Quantocks of his youth, and were to delight him and trouble his sleep in Highgate in advanced age – these he was to catch up in a vivid but not conventionally ‘poetic’ record of a May evening in Göttingen when he was a student there.

The nightingales in a <cluster or little wood of> blossomed Trees singing – and a bat wheeling incessantly round & round.  – The noise of the Frogs not unpleasant – resemble the hum­ming of spinning wheels in a large manufactury, now & then a distinct sound, sometimes like a Duck, & sometimes like the shrill note of Sea-fowls. – (CN I 421)

And when, in Highgate, at 10 o’clock on Wednesday morning, 10 September 1823, he set down the first tentative draft of ‘Youth and Age’ it was the tune of the verse that haunted him, a tune still to be given body; the haunting calls back the nightin­gales and the Quantocks, and the exuberant delight he had surely felt in rendering the bird’s song in ‘The Nightingale’; and the way he locates the source of the skylark’s song has the same excruciating tactual specificity as Keats’s tracing of a bird’s flight at the close of his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.

An Air that whizzed δία ὲγκεφάλου (right across the diameter of my Brain) exactly like a Hummel Bee, alias Dumbeldore, the gentleman with Rappee Spenser, with bands of Red, and Orange Plush Breeches, close by my ear, at once sharp and burry, right over the summit of Quantock at earliest Dawn just between the Nightingale that I stopt to hear in the Copse at the Foot of Quantock, and the first Sky-Lark that was a Song-Fountain, dashing up and sparkling to the Ear’s eye, in full column, or ornamented Shaft of sound in the order of Gothic Extravaganza, out of Sight, over the Cornfields on the Descent of   the Mountain on the other side – out of sight, tho’ twice I beheld its mute shoot downward in the sunshine like a falling star of silver:

And the “Air” begins –

                        Flowers are lovely, Love is flower-like,

                        Friendship is a shelt’ring tree –   (PW II 1084-5)

Like Gerard Manley Hopkins impelled to compose The Wreck of the Deutschland,[xv] Coleridge was haunted by an ‘Air’, a tune.  He was no trained musician, but his ear was good enough to choose for him as favourite composers Purcell, Cimarosa, Mozart, Handel, Beethoven.  And although his power of visual observa­tion was refined and acute, one cannot reckon it superior to his auditory sense, whether in the shaping of a cadence in words or in recording with the most exact refinement particularities of sound.

In the Lawn by the Wilderness of Rocks an Oak bush with oblong carrotty Leaves – heard as I came near it, a noise like a spinning wheel or grasshopper – observed one leaf in brisk motion, from whence this noise proceeded – only one of all the bush – thought it must be some bird, woodpecker peck­ing, but no! – this one Leaf was by the bending of its sides a complete scollop shell, & so placed as to catch the wind – hence the upheaval. (CN I 856)

In many parts of The Ancient Mariner, and particularly in Kubla Khan, the appeal is not to any one sense but to an inter-inanimation of all the senses combined into a tactual impression of great power – a condition that psychologists call synaesthesia.  This may well be a prime characteristic of all poetic perception, of the poetic sense of language, and perhaps of all our refined and developed sensory experience.  Synaesthesia is a state, not a process; it is not what David Hartley popularised as ‘Association of Ideas’.  But a remarkable instance of Coleridge’s sustained process of association shows how much it is like the dreaming in which we construct for an intrusive physical sensation a compelling rationale in the form of images or words – a mental process intrinsic to poetry altogether.

[10 Mar 1810] I had been talking of the association of Ideas, and endeavoring to convince an Idolater of Hume & Hartley, that this was strictly speaking a law only of the memory & imagination, of the Stuff out of which we make our concep­tions & perceptions, not of the thinking faculty, by which we make them – that it was as the force of gravitation to leaping to any given point – without gravitation this would be impossible, and yet equally impossible to leap except by a power counteracting first, and then using the force of  gravita­tion. ... And yet to shew him that I was neither ignorant, nor idle in observing, the vast extent and multifold activity of the Associative Force I entered into a curious and tho fanciful yet strictly true and actual, exemplification.  Many of my Instances recalled to my mind my little poem on Lewti, the Circassian (and as by this same force joined with the assent of the will most often, tho’ often too vainly because weakly opposed by it, I inevitably by some link or other return to you, or (say rather) bring some fuel of thought   to the ceaseless Yearning for you at my Inmost, which like a steady fire attracts constantly the air which constantly feeds it) I began strictly and as matter of fact to examine that subtle Vulcanian Spider-web Net of Steel – strong as Steel yet subtle as the Ether, in which my soul flutters inclosed with the Idea of your’s – to pass rapidly as in a catalogue thro’ the Images only, exclusive of the thousand Thoughts that possess the same force, which never fail instantly to awake into vivider flame the for ever and ever Feeling of you / – The fire / Mary, you, and I at Gallow-Hill / – or if flamy, reflected in children’s round faces – ah whose children? – a dog – that dog whose restless eyes oft catching the light of the fire used to watch your face, as you leaned with your head on your hand and arm, & your feet on the fender / the fender thence / – Fowls at Table – the last dinner at Gallow Hill, when you drest the two fowls in that delicious white Sauce which when very ill is the only idea of food that does not make me sicker / all natural Scenery – ten thousand links, and if it please me, the very spasm & drawing-back of a pleasure which is half-pain, you not being there – Cheese – at Middleham, too salt / horses, my ride to Scarborough – asses, to that large living 2 or 3 miles from Middleham     / All Books – my Study at Keswick / – the Ceiling or Head of a Bed – the green watered Mazarine! – a Candle in its socket, with its alternate fits & dying flashes of lingering Light – O God! O God! – Books of abstruse Know­ledge – the Thomas Aquinas & Suarez from the Durham Library / – a peony faced cottage Girl – little Jane / all articles of female dress – music – the opening of a Street door – when you first came to Keswick – ... Letters, year, the very paper on which one might be written – or from the habit of half    unconsciously writing your name or its Symbol invented by me to express it – all Travels  / my yearning Absence / all books of natural History – ... the Heavens / your name in    those bright Stars, or an M or W recalling those Stars –Aurora borealis – at Keswick by    the corner parlour window / ... any eye fixed kindly on me when I am talking – ...[xvi]

This is an exceptionally sustained instance, not a special instance; it is the heart of the matter at a curious, even unique, pitch.  Here the individual sharply apprehended images intrinsicate and resolve, each bearing no less physically than the sensory detail itself the imprint of distinct and complex feeling; they dispose themselves in a psychic matrix as inscrutable in the mind as the symbolic language that alphabets the sky.  This note­book entry is not in any accepted sense a poem, or even a poem in the making; it is ‘The Stuff out of which we make our conceptions & perceptions’, a lucid delineation of the activity of mind that produced it, its tracings as abstract as glass, its momentum ineluctable.  All Coleridge’s major poems, and most of his prose, bear witness to this process of the definitive self-exposition of the mind.  ‘What is a Thought but another word for “I-thinking”?’ he asked in a marginal note.[xvii]  Yet, of ‘the greater & perhaps nobler certainly all the subtler parts of one’s nature’ he could say: ‘how much lies below his own Consciousness.’[xviii]

What we thought we were at first looking for was instances of poetic sensibility – the picking out, isolating, giving identity to, and rendering into words moments of heightened sensibility that could be tested for reliability because of the identifiable natural objects, sources of impressions, or remembered images at the heart of them.  But recognition of a more complex process has supervened; we were obliged to notice a certain enriching and cumulative activity in the personal history of particular images that – by extension into time, as it were – provided the intensity of epiphany.  In short, that the more intensely perceived the image – and with that intensity the stronger and more complex the feeling – the more the rendering of the intense image be­came not so much a symbol of something as a generative symbol acting as its own expository definition.  Eventually Coleridge was to say in the Statesman’s Manual – at the very time that he almost stopped saying anything much in public about poetry – that ‘a symbol [which is always self-declarative] ... always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative.’[1] Symbols, then, are neither distinguishable items nor conventional marks in a denotative system, but centres rather of finely disposed shaping energy that command a wider or narrower field of poetic activity.  By partaking of the reality that they render intelligible they are patient of very detailed analogical exploration – as the image of the flight of starlings is – and this is the delight and duty of critical inquiry.  Yet they transcend the abstract parallelism of analogy because they are active in a field where the centrifugal force of recognition is opposed by the centripetal activity of evocation or ‘association’; and this in itself ensures that inter­pretation will normally be peripheral to critical inquiry.  It is better to ask of a symbolic event, not ‘What does it mean?’ but ‘What is it doing?’  We expect (if our poetic experience has any depth) that a symbol will not be single but manifold – that its true simplicity will disclose an astonishing complexity.  It is in symbolic process that the data of perception (if there are such things) are transformed into the données of poems.

Images achieve symbolic character only under certain condi­tions.  Acute observation is not in itself enough, partly because the observation has to be worded in order to become poetry at all, partly because a peculiar interinanimation of the senses is needed to achieve the functional richness and power that invests symbolic events.  Coleridge had noticed this as early as September 1801, as can be seen in a much-obliterated analysis of his wife’s coldness.

... The cant phrase, ‘tangible sensation’ – which ought to be tactual – is not a mere moment of sensation – but it is the blending & unifying of the sensations that inhere in the manifold goings on of the Life of the whole man. ... All appetites that do not diffuse themselves & evidence their existence in all diversities of gradation & combination, have no effect on the Tactual – Why? they are always local in the body itself – an object of sight or visual idea – not to mention the immediateness of their application to some distinct separate, visible part of some other Body external to theirs. (CN I 979)

Much later, in the Biographia Literaria, he was to say that

Images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature ... do not of themselves characterize the poet.  They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modi­fied by a predominant passion ... or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity ... or when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet’s own spirit.  (BL II 16)

If there is one word – one sensory word – by which Coleridge tends to identify that transformation, either in the poet or in the reader, it is the word tact – the sense of touch.

... a great Poet must be, implicitè if not explicitè, a pro­found Metaphysician.  He may not have it in logical coherence, in his Brain & Tongue; but he must have it by Tact / for all
sounds, & forms of human nature he must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent Desart, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an Enemy upon the Leaves that strew the Forest –; the Touch of a Blind Man feeling the face of a darling Child –  (CL II 810)

Fortunately we can to some extent watch the actual process of symbolising through the records of the notebooks – the cumulative patterns of sensory impressions, the flux and reflux of feeling, the thinking that occurs when ‘a succession of per­ceptions [is] accompanied by a sense of nisus & purpose’,[xix] the thinking that is held firmly in the perceptual mode, ‘the images of Memory flowing in on the impulses of immediate Impression’[xx] in progressive emotional enrichment and definition, as clarity of apprehension gathers impressions into a luminous focus.  The following notebook entries are taken in sequence (with omission of other matter intervening) from 25 October to 2 November 1803, in those last days of restless and dismayed waiting at Greta Hall before he set off for the Mediterranean.  Here can be clearly seen the distinction too often ignored in considerations of perception and sensibility – the shift from seeing and hearing to gazing and listening.

(a) The moon setting over the Mountain pale – the Sky very dim & marbled or water stained as blue Ma[za]rine Canopy – and in the blue Interspaces the Stars all dim & lustreless <& until I looked steadily at them, one only of all the Stars twinkled.> – the Water between me & it, & the few Houseroofs are bright.  The water is the only Sound /the Moon is more than a half moon / it sank to a rude [half-disc] – then to a crescent, its bow stiffly & imperfect & still keeping this shape, thinned & thinned & thinned, till once it became a star, at its vanishing – but immediately after sent up a throb of Light in its former Shape & dimension – & so for several Seconds it throbbed & heaved, a soft Boiling up or restlessness of a Fluid in carrying – / and now all is alike thro’ the vale, the vast Ellipse of mountain suffused with dim Hoariness, & the Sky where white & where blue, still dim are both / save only that the whole range of mountains behind which the Moon sate, from Bonitas under Grisedale Pile to Rowling End under Causey Pike are blacker & more definite than all the rest, the white Clouds stains, or Cloud-Inlays, brighter, the blue more genuinely blue.  Tuesday Midnight – it wants 15 minutes of One o’clock.  Oct. 25. (CN I 1614)

(b) Thursday Morning, 40 minutes past One o’clock – a perfect calm – now & then a breeze shakes the heads of the two Poplars, <& disturbs> the murmur of the moonlight Greta, that in almost a direct Line from the moon to me is all silver – Motion and Wrinkle & Light – & under the arch of the Bridge a wave ever & anon leaps up in Light.  – & the evergreens are bright, under my window /.  The Moon now hangs midway over Cowdale Halse – in a line, & resting on each of the divergent Legs of its Triangle a fish-head-shaped Cloud – the whole area of the Triangle blue Sky – but above the cloud, & <in> the interspaces between it and the Moon little cloudlets, scarcely larger than large Stars –    Wrinkles / – long roundish floating Braids of Hair floating & making its single Hairs distinguishable as it wantons on some regular Breeze / ... black smooth Space of Shade –   silver mirror / gleaming of moonlight Reeds beyond – as the moon sets the water from Silver becomes a rich yellow.  – Sadly do I need to have my Imagination enriched with    appropriate Images for Shapes – / Read Architecture, & Ichthyology –          (CN I 1616)

(At a quarter past two he watched the moon set – ‘so barred & cross-barred, over its whole face, as I never before saw – ’.  At three he was ‘not yet asleep’ and thought a little about Hartley’s education; and went over at some length ‘A most unpleasant Dispute with W. & Hazlitt’ that had occurred that afternoon; then added: ‘This is the Day, quo primum illam vidi! [when I first saw her]! – Let me try for a Song.’  But he did not achieve a song; and at forty minutes past three he wrote after a long reflection on the source of vice and misery in the world:)

(c) ... the Sky covered with one Cloud, that yet lies in dark & light Shades, & tho’ one smooth Cloud, by the Dark Colour it appears to be steppy.  – A sad night – went to bed after Tea– & in about 2 hours absolutely summoned the whole House­hold to me by my Screams, from all the chambers – & I continued screaming even after Mrs. Coleridge was sitting & speaking to me! – O me! O me! – (CN I 1619)

(d) Sat. Morn. Oct. 29. 1803.  Three o’clock.  The Moon hangs high over Greta, & the Bridge, on the first step of her Descent, & three hours at least from the Mountains, behind which she is to sink: nearly full – not a Cloud in Heaven, the Sky deep sable blue, the Stars many & white in the height of the Sky, but above, around, & beneath the Moon, not a Star; she is starless as the Sun.  Yet there is no gleam, much less silver whiteness, on the Lake: simply it is easily seen; & even the Greta stretching strait in an oblique line underneath is not <silver>-bright, or any where brilliant; but rather the gleam of some baser Composition imitating Silver, it is a grey brightness like the colour of an ash grove in keenest December Moonlight.  The Mountains are dark, low, all compact to­gether, quiet, silent, asleep – the white Houses are bright throughout the vale, & the evergreens in the garden.  The only Sound is the murmur of the Greta, perpetual Voice of the Vale – (CN I 1624)

(e) Oct. 31. 1803. The full moon glided behind a black cloud / & what then? & who cared? – It was past 7 ^oclock in the morning – There is a small Cloud in the East, not larger than the Moon, & ten times brighter than she! So passes Night & all her favors vanish in our minds, ungrateful! – (CN I 1625)

(f) Wednesday Morning, 20 minutes past 2 °clock.  November 2nd, 1803.  The Voice of   the Greta, and the Cock-crowing: the Voice seems to grow, like a Flower on or about the water beyond the Bridge, while the Cock crowing is nowhere parti­cular, it is at any place I imagine & do not distinctly see.  A most remarkable Sky!  The Moon, now waned to a perfect Ostrich’s Eggs, hangs over our House almost – only so much beyond it, garden-ward, that I can see it, holding my Head out of the smaller Study window.  The Sky is covered with whitish, & with dingy Cloudage, thin dingiest Scud close under the moon & one side of it moving, all else moveless: but there are two great Breaks of Blue Sky – the one stretching over our House, & away toward Castlerigg, & this is speckled & blotched with white Cloud – the other hangs over the road, in the line of the Road in the shape of a ... I do not know what to call [it] ... this is unspeckled, all blue – 3 Stars in it / more in the former Break – all unmoving.  The water leaden white, even as the grey gleam of Water   is in latest Twilight.  – Now while I have been writing this & gazing between whiles (it is 40 M. past Two) the Break over the road is swallowed up, & the Stars gone, the Break over the House is narrowed into a rude Circle, & on the edge of its circumference one   very bright Star – see! already the white mass thinning at its edge fights with its Brilliance – see! it has bedimmed it – & now it is gone – & the Moon is gone.  The Cock- crowing too has ceased.  The Greta sounds on, for ever.  But I hear only the Ticking of my Watch, in the Pen-place of my Writing Desk, & the far lower note of the noise of the Fire – perpetual, yet seeming uncertain / it is the low voice of quiet change, of Destruction doing its work by little & little.  (CN I 1635)

Coleridge was ten days past his thirty-first birthday when he wrote that last entry.  Although many poems were still to be written and published, and many drafted and abandoned, there were to be no more poems that could encompass such material as this.  Where did it go, the gradual gathering and concentrating of power closing on the commanding rhythms of that last entry? Unlike the distinct figures of the lichened stone and the flight of starlings, nowhere identifiable – unless we could believe that that last note did later inform the Moon-gloss to The Ancient Mariner.  When the Mariner was at the crisis of his desolation, and for seven days and nights had seen the curse of the dead men’s eyes yet could not die, the poem reads:

                        The moving Moon went up the sky,

                        And no where did abide:

                        Softly she was going up,

                        And a star or two beside –

At this place in Sibylline Leaves Coleridge caused to be printed in the margin these words:

In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which    they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival. (PW I 197)

In the Biographia Literaria Coleridge asserted that when things and selves are ‘not only coherent but identical, and one and the same thing with our own immediate self-consciousness’ we discover ‘the truest and most binding realism’.[xxi]  As for Coleridge’s ‘true and original realism’, the dynamic philosophy that he evolved from the starting-point of his own intense experience of making poems, persons more learned and more subtle than I will no doubt be unfolding in its metaphysical, psychological and theological implications later in this series of lectures.  My argument so far has sought to make only three points: (a) that the evidence for the quality of a poet’s sensi­bility is to be seen in his specific wording of it; (b) that the records of a poet’s sensibility, particularly when given final articulation, evince a complexity of ‘poetic perception’ that assails the mechanistic (or behavioural) view that per­ception is simply an upper order of ‘sensation’; and (c) that fully articulated poems force us to consider perception as a shaping, unifying, energetic process; in short, that the poet’s ‘more than usual organic sensibility’ – and peculiarly Cole­ridge’s – is indeed a poetic, a poietic, making activity of mind that flows seamlessly from perception if it is instantly being worded in rhythmic and sonic forms, complex, subtle and stable enough.  One of Coleridge’s axioms for imagination is thoroughly Aristotelian - nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu.  Another set of axioms for the relation between the whole and parts in poetry is no less Aristotelian: the whole is logically prior to the parts, the whole inheres in every part, a poem is unity in mul­teity.  At a single stroke, in discussing Milton’s use of the word ‘sensuous’ in the account of poetry as ‘simple, sensuous, and passionate’, Coleridge identified perception with the ineradicable human nisus of poetry.

... sensuousness insures that framework of objectivity, that definiteness and articulation of imagery, and that modification of the images themselves, without which poetry becomes flattened into mere didactic practice or evaporates into a hazy, unthoughtful, day-dreaming; and ... passion provides that neither thought nor imagery shall be simply objective, but that the passio vera of humanity shall warm and animate both.[2]

            Coleridge’s understanding of these matters, however, goes far beyond a gnomic declaration of them.

The sensitive faculty is the power of being affected and modi­fied by Things, so as to receive impressions from them.  The Quality of these Impressions is determined partly by the nature of the sensitive faculty itself and its organs, and partly by the nature of the Things.  These impressions are in the first instant immediate Sensations: as soon as the attention is directed to them, and they are taken up into the Consciousness, they become Perceptions.  The repetition of past Percep­tions in the Consciousness is Imagination.  The Object of the Attention during Perception may be aptly termed a Presenta­tion, during Imagination a Representation.  All Sensations and their correspondent Objects have doubtless something in common; but it is impossible to abstract it, that is, to discover what that is in Sensation <in general> which causes it to produce perception, or what it is in any given sensation which causes it to produce a certain particular perception.  Equally impossible is it with regard to the Objects of past or present perception – i.e. the presentations or representations of Things, to distinguish by determinate boundaries, what part proceeds from the sensitive faculty itself, and what from the outward Causes or the Things acting on the faculty. ... The cause of this impossibility is that we become conscious both of the one and of the other in one & the same way; namely, as modifications of our own Being.  What precedes the modi­fication as its cause, we can never know; because our conscious­ ness originates in the modification. (CN III 3065)

A marginal note written in Schelling’s Darlegung der wahren Verhältnisse der Naturphilosophie zu der verbesserte Fichte’schen Lehre was carefully considered and seriously intended: ‘All that I read refers me to this desideratum of a Critique on Per­ception.  Idealism & Materialism both are ground[ed] on the assertion, that Perception is but the affection in modification.’  

In dealing with such matters in the field of poetry ‘perhaps the greatest obstacle to the apprehension ... arises in the tendency to look abroad, out of the thing in question, in order by means of some other thing analogous to understand the former.  But this is impossible ­– for the thing in question is the act, we are des­cribing –’[xxii]  And of poetry altogether Coleridge was to say:

Man communicates by articulation of Sounds, and paramountly by the memory in the Ear – ... the Artist must first eloign himself from Nature ... he must out of his own mind create forms according to the several Laws of the Intellect, in order to produce in himself that co-ordination of Freedom & Law, that involution of the Obedience in the Prescript,and of the Prescript in the impulse to obey, which assimilates him to Nature – enables him to understand her – ... Each thing, that lives, has its moment of self-exposition, and    each period of each thing – if we remove the disturbing forces of accident – and this is the business of ideal Art.  (CN III 4397)

Coleridge knew well how we can be repaid ‘by linking our sweetest but of themselves perishable feelings to distinct & vivid Images, which we ourselves at times & which a thousand casual associations will often recall to our memory.’[xxiii]  He spoke from his own experience when he made note that when ‘Speaking of the original unific Consciousness, the primary Perception, & its extreme difficulty’ he would ‘take occasion to draw a lively picture of the energies, self-denials, sacrifices, toils, trembling knees, & sweat-drops on the Brow, of a philosopher who has really been sounding the depths of our being – & to compare it with the greatest & most perseverant Labors of Travellers, Soldiers, and whomever else Men honor & admire – how trifling the latter!’[xxiv]  Thinking ‘what ample materials exist for a true & nobly-minded Psychologist’ in tracing the various stages of self-deception, he added: ‘for in order to make fit use of these materials he must love and honor, as well as understand, human nature – rather, he must love in order to understand it.’[xxv]

In his recently published Introduction to ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ David Jones says that ‘Sensitivity, that first and absolute requirement without which nothing whatever [in art] can be accomplished, is in itself a kind of exactitude’.[xxvi]  Few men would be better entitled to make such a statement than David Jones – or Coleridge.  My last instance of Coleridge’s exactitude shows the tension between the actual and the reality of the imagined in the field of poetic perception.  In the 1809-10 Friend Coleridge published some of the letters he had written home from Germany in 1798-99 under the title of ‘Satyrane’s Letters’.  In the first letter, written some months after completing The Ancient Mariner, he gave a detailed account of the voyage from Yarmouth to Hamburg including this detail:

The Ocean is a noble Thing by night; a beautiful white cloud of foam at momently intervals roars & rushes by the side of the Vessel, and Stars of Flame dance & sparkle & go out in it – & every now and then light Detachments of Foam dart away from the Vessel’s side with their galaxies of stars, & scour out of sight, like a Tartar Troop over a Wilderness! – What these Stars are, I cannot say – the sailors say that they are Fish Spawn which is phosphorescent. –[xxvii]

This was the first time the author of The Ancient Mariner had ever been to sea.  Once the giddiness had passed – for it was a rough passage – he suffered ‘a feverish Inappetence of Food’ (from the stink of the bilge-water, he thought), but he had his eyes very much about him.  He had not expected to encounter in the waters of the cold North Sea a phenomenon that he would have thought occurred only in the tropics; he noted it with absorbed interest.  He also noticed exactly how the wake looked from the deck and in 1815 was to alter the line ‘The furrow followed free’ to ‘The furrow stream’d off free’ with the note:

... I had not been long on board a ship, before I perceived that this was the image as seen by a spectator from the shore, or from another vessel.  From the ship itself, the Wake appears like a brook flowing off from the stern.[3]

Thereafter his ear got the better of verisimilitude; he restored the original version.  The passage of particular interest to us, how­ever, is in the account of the first afternoon at sea.

At four o’clock I observed a Wild Duck swimming on the waves, a single solitary wild duck.  It is not easy to conceive, how interesting a Thing it looked in that round objectless Desart of Waters.  <I had associated such a feeling of immen­sity with the Ocean, that I felt exceedingly disappointed, when I was out of sight of all land, at the narrowness and nearness, as it were, of the circle of the Horizon.  So little are images capable of satisfying the obscure feelings connected with words.>   (Friend II 193)

The last two sentences, about the nearness and narrowness of the horizon, do not appear in the original letter, nor in the briefer journal in the Notebooks.  When did he actually first notice the peculiar sensation that sailors know well, of the nearness of the horizon – from the deck of a ship perhaps no more than seven or eight miles away, or less; the sense of stand­ing not at the centre of a limitless expanse of water but rather of being inside the rim of a shallow saucer, the sea a hollow that curves upward to the horizon?  Was it on that first voyage to Hamburg, or on the voyage to Malta six years later, that Cole­ridge first noticed this?  Considering the accuracy of his emotional recall, the chances are that it was on the voyage to Hamburg and that that is why, when it found its way into print on the earliest possible occasion, it appeared in ‘Satyrane’s Letters’.  Is it possible that, if The Rime of the Ancient Mariner had been written from actual experience of seafaring rather than out of a fragmentary but glowing imaginative construct from undesignedly absorbed written accounts, the poem would not have conveyed to us as it does the immensity, the infinitude of the ocean? – ‘We were the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea’ and ‘Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide wide sea!’?  Can the mind know sometimes better than the eye?  Surely these phrases, however achieved, strike us with the frisson of a primordial recognition.

Questions about poetic sensibility, then, are not to be answered simply by an appeal to matter-of-factness or ‘truth to nature’; at least, not as far as Coleridge is concerned, and scrupulous modern Coleridge scholarship endorses this.  The appeal is rather to ‘the truth of nature’ – his phrase in the Biographia.  For Coleridge was acutely aware of the dynamic nature of per­ception and of thinking; of how the eye is reinforced ‘& sup­ported by the images of Memory flowing in on the impulses of immediate Impression -’[4]  He spoke of ‘a succession of percep­tions accompanied by a sense of nisus & purpose’.[xxviii]  Intellectual effort, flowing in upon perception, or in philosophical quest even, had for him the quality of yearning – πόϴος – sexual long­ing; and

Sometimes when I earnestly look at a beautiful Object or Landscape, it seems as if I were on the brink of a Fruition still denied – as if Vision were an appetite: even as a man would feel, who having put forth all his muscular strength in an act of prosilience, is at that very moment held back – he leaps & yet moves not from his place.  (CN III 3767)

Out of such recognitions his conviction grew that ‘Extremes meet’, and the grounds of his whole dynamic philosophy.  When he gave his Philosophical Lectures in 1818-19 he conceived of the history of philosophy as ‘an essential part of the history of man, and as if it were the striving of a single mind’.[xxix]  In The Theory of Life he was to maintain that ‘the power of sensibility’ at its highest level of development achieves in man ‘the highest realization and reconciliation of both her tendencies, that of the most perfect detachment with the greatest possible union. ... In social and political life this acme is inter-dependence; in moral life it is independence; in intellectual life it is genius.[xxx]

In The Friend of 23 November 1809, Coleridge offered an engaging and detailed, if thinly disguised, self-portrait under the name of Satyrane.  Satyrane, made ‘pensive and gloomy’ by disappointment at ‘the state of morals and intellect of his con­temporaries’, ‘as if he sought a refuge from his own sensibility, ... attached himself to the most abstruse researches, and seemed to derive his purest delight from subjects that exercised the strength and subtlety of his understanding without awakening the feelings of his heart’.[xxxi]  This echoes back to ‘Dejection: An Ode’ and April 1802.

                        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.   (PW I 367)

The Satyrane portrait was not included in the 1818 Friend: the disguise had been forsaken in the opening chapter of the Biographia.

Well were it for me perhaps, had I never relapsed into the same mental disease; if I had continued to pluck the flower and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of           delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic depths.  But if in after time I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and subtlety of the understanding without awakening the feelings of the heart; still there was a long and blessed interval, during which my natural faculties were allowed to expand, and my original tendencies to develope themselves: my fancy, and the love of nature, and the sense of beauty in forms   and sounds.    (BL I 10)

Was there in fact such a desolate and desperate drying up of his ‘natural faculties’, in April 1802?  In January 1807 when he heard Wordsworth read aloud the first Prelude?  In the dark middle years in London, Bristol and Calne before life returned upon the drowned and he could put together Sibylline Leaves and Biographia Literaria?  At times he was to feel again ‘that sort of stirring warmth about the Heart, which is with me the robe of incarnation of my [poetic] genius, such as it is.”[xxxii]  Christabel was never to be finished, but much else was; and much else – not in verse – was conceived, unravelled, desynonymised, disintrinsicated, set down, flowing out of a mind marvellously nourished with a sensibility for language, for ideas, for the ways of the mind and the movements of the mind, a sense of the living presence of the minds of men long dead and their work fragmentary; and all with an energy of seeing and thinking that would not let him rest.  For him, intuition – the seeing of the mind – was νοερἀ συναφή, the touch of the intellect;[xxxiii] and lan­guage, tactile as it came to his call, allowed him to frame, shape, give body to the ceaseless heurism of his thinking, his mind achieving the tact of a blind man’s fingers feeling the face of a beloved child.

The ocean of The Ancient Mariner was a poet’s ocean, not a seafarer’s; the peril and grace of that ocean is extended immensely by what he had not yet seen when he wrote the poem.  When he had done some seafaring in the double ordeal of the Malta voyage, his eye turned not to the sea then but to that ocean, even more intense and interior, even more curiously figured, the mind, where through the transfiguration of language pure action can be separated even from the matter that gives it body.  So to construct and reconstruct, within the lyrical forms of the mind’s own working and its self-modifying self-exposition – this is perhaps to transcend even poetry, even though for most of us poetry above all declares and discloses that clarifying and shap­ing energy.  Whether that is to be called ‘philosophy’ I cannot say; it is a most rare preoccupation, and that is perhaps what Coleridge himself meant by philosophy.  Whatever it is to be called, that is what commanded almost the whole of Coleridge’s life, making him – through a most refined sensibility and the exquisite tact of the mind – in all things, a poet.