331.

ODE ON THE DEPARTING YEAR

This poem, in a shorter form, was first entitled Ode for the Last Day of the Year 1796. In the early version, the first stanza was called Strophe I; the second, Strophe II; the third, Epode; the fourth, Antistrophe I; the fifth, Antistrophe II; the remaining stanzas, Epode II. In the 1797 edition Coleridge prefixed the following Argument, which in the 1803 edition was distributed in notes:

The Ode commences with an address to the Divine Providence that regulates into one vast harmony all the events of time, however calamitous some of them may appear to mortals. The second strophe calls on men to suspend their private joys and sorrows, and devote them for a while to the cause of human nature in general. The first epode speaks of the Empress of Russia, who died of an apoplexy on the 17th of November, 1796; having just concluded a subsidiary treaty with the kings combined against France. The first and second antistrophe describe the Image of the Departing Year., etc., as in a vision. The second epode prophesies, in anguish of spirit, the downfall of this country.

332. 40. "A subsidiary Treaty had been just concluded; and Russia was to have furnished more effectual aid than that of pious manifestoes to the Powers combined against France. I rejoice-not over the deceased Woman (I never dared figure the Russian Sovereign to my imagination under the dear and venerable Character of WOMAN-WOMAN, that complex term for Mother, Sister, Wife!) I rejoice, as at the disenshrining of a Daemon! I rejoice, as at the extinction of the evil Principle impersonated! This very day, six years ago, the massacre of Ismail was perpetrated. THIRTY THOUSAND HUMAN BEINGS, MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN, murdered in cold blood, for no other crime than that their gar rison had defended the place with perseverance and bravery. Why should I recall the polsoning of her husband, her iniquities in Poland, or her late unmotived attack on Persia, the desolating ambition of her public life, or the libidinous excesses of her private hours! I have no wish to qualify myself for the office of Historiographer to the King of Hell!"Coleridge.

333. 135. Abandon'd of Heaven.-"The poet from

having considered the peculiar advantages, which this country has enjoyed, passes in rapid transition to the uses, which we have made of these advantages. We have been preserved by our insular situation, from suffering the actual horrors of war ourselves, and we have shown our gratitude to Providence for this immunity by our eagerness to spread those horrors, over nations less happily situated. In the midst of plenty and safety we have raised or joined the yell for famine and blood. Of the one hundred and seven last years, fifty have been years of war. Such wickedness cannot pass unpunished. We have

334.

335.

ers.

been proud and confident in our alliances and our fleets-but God has prepared the cankerworm, and will smite the gourds of our pride. 'Art thou better than populous No, that was situate among the rivers, that had the waters round about it, whose rampart was the Sea? Ethiopia and Egypt were her strength and it was infinite: Put and Lubim were her helpYet she was carried away, she went into captivity: and they cast lots for her honorable men, and all her great men were bound in chains. Thou also shalt be drunken: all thy strongholds shall be like fig trees with the first ripe figs; if they be shaken, they shall even fall into the mouth of the eater. Thou hast multiplied thy merchants above the stars of heaven. Thy crowned are as the locusts; and thy captains as the great grasshoppers which camp in the hedges in the coolday; but when the sun ariseth they flee away, and their place is not known where they are. There is no healing of thy bruise; thy wound is grievous: all, that hear the report of thee, shall clap hands over thee: for upon whom hath not thy wickedness passed continually? Nahum, chap. iii."-Coleridge.

THIS LIME-TREE BOWER MY PRISON

"In the June of 1797 some long-expected friends paid a visit to the author's cottage; and on the morning of their arrival, he met with an accident, which disabled him from walking during the whole time of their stay. One evening, when they had left him for a few hours, he composed the following lines in the garden-bower."-Coleridge's prefatory note.

The friends referred to were Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, and Lamb. Coleridge wrote Southey in July about the visit, as follows: "Charles Lamb has been with me for a week. He left me Friday morning. The second day after Wordsworth came to me dear Sara accidentally emptied a skillet of boiling milk on my foot, which confined me during the whole of C. Lamb's stay and still prevents me from all walks longer than a furlong."

8-20. The spot here described was a favorite meeting place of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and their Alfoxden friends. See Wordsworth's Lines Written in Early Spring (p. 231), and note, p. 1360b.

THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

This poem was first printed anonymously in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798). Many archaisms intended to make it resemble the old popular ballads were removed in the second edition (1800). It was first published under the author's name in Sibylline Leaves (1817), where it appeared with a marginal gloss (printed in this text in footnotes) and a Latin motto from T. Burnet's Archæologia Philosophica (1692), of which the following is a translation:

"I readily believe that there are more invisible beings in the universe than visible. But who shall explain to us the nature, the rank and kinship, the distinguishing marks and graces of each? What do they do? Where do they dwell? The human mind has circled round this knowledge, but never attained to it. Yet there is profit, I do not doubt, in sometimes contemplating in the mind, as in a picture, the image of a greater and better world: lest the intellect, habituated to the petty details of daily life, should be contracted within too narrow limits and settle down wholly on trifles. But, meanwhile, a watchful eye must be kept on truth, and proportion observed, that we may distinguish the certain from the uncertain, day from night."

For the origin of the poem, see Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, 14 (pp. 372-73), and Wordsworth's note on We Are Seven (p. 1357b). The following additional statement by Wordsworth was reported to H. N. Coleridge by the Rev. Alexander Dyce: "The Ancient Mariner was founded on a strange dream, which a friend of Coleridge had, who fancied he saw a skeleton ship, with figures in it. We had both determined to write some poetry for a monthly magazine, the profits of which were to defray the expenses of a little excursion we were to make together. The Ancient Mariner was intended for this periodical, but was too long. I had very little share in the composition of it, for I soon found that the style of Coleridge and myself would not assimilate. Besides the lines (in the fourth part):

'And thou art long, and lank, and brown, As is the ribbed sea-sand'

I wrote the stanza (in the first part):

'He holds him with his glittering eye-
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three-years' child:
The Mariner hath his will'

and four or five lines more in different parts of the poem, which I could not now point out. The idea of 'shooting an albatross' was mine; for I had been reading Shelvocke's Voyages, which probably Coleridge never saw. I also suggested the reanimation of the dead bodies, to work the ship." (Note printed in Campbell's ed. of The Works of Coleridge [1893], S. T. C. ed. 1852.) See Lamb's comment on Wordsworth's note on the poem, published in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (p. 919a, 49 ff.).

It has been suggested that Coleridge took some hints for his poem from Capt. T. James's Strange and Dangerous Voyage (1633) and from The Letter of Saint Paulinus to Macarius (1618). The letter tells the story of a wonderful voyage, on which a sole survivor was aided in the navigation of the ship by Christ and angels. Borrowings from these sources,

however, are too slight to lessen the glory of Coleridge's inventive genius.

Regarding the probability of the poem, and its moral, Coleridge remarked as follows (Table Talk, May 31, 1800): "Mrs. Barbauld once told me that she admired The Ancient Mariner very much, but that there were two faults in it, it was improbable, and had no moral. As for the probability, I owned that that might admit some question; but as to the want of a moral, I told her that in my own judgment the poem had too much; and that the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of pure imagination. It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well and throwing the shells aside, and lo a genie starts up and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son." Mrs. Barbauld (1743-1825) was an English poet and essayist.

"It is enough for us here that he has written some of the most poetical poetry in the language, and one poem, The Ancient Mariner, not only unparalleled, but unapproached in its kind, and that kind of the rarest. It is marvellous in its mastery over that delightfully fortuitous inconsequence that is the adamantine logic of dreamland. Coleridge has taken the old ballad measure and given to it by an indefinable charm, wholly his own, all the sweetness, all the melody and compass of a symphony. And how picturesque it is in the proper sense of the word. I know nothing like it. There is not a description in it. It is all picture."-J. R. Lowell, in "Address on Unveiling the Bust of Coleridge in Westminster Abbey, 7 May, 1885," Democ racy and Other Addresses (1887).

The poem is here printed in the revised text of 1829.

337. 164. "I took the thought of "grinning for 'joy" from poor Burnett's remark to me, when we had climbed to the top of Plinlimmon, and were nearly dead with thirst. We could not speak for the constriction, till we found a little puddle under a stone. He said to me, 'You grinned like an idiot! He had done the same."-Coleridge, in Table Talk, May 31, 1830. George Burnett (c1766-1811) was a miscellaneous writer, interested with Coleridge and Southey in the scheme of Pantisocracy. Plinlimmon is a mountain in Wales.

338. 210-11. "It is a common superstition among sailors that something evil is about to happen whenever a star dogs the moon.”Coleridge, in a manuscript note. The star within the nether tip of the horned moon, however, exists only in Coleridge's imagination.

339. 314. Possibly a reference to the Northern Lights, or Aurora Borealis.

"The first part of the following poem was written in the year 1797, at Stowey, in the county of Somerset. The second part, after my return from Germany, in the year 1800, at Keswick, Cumberland. Since the latter date, my poetic powers have been, till very lately, in a state of suspended animation. But as, in my very first conception of the tale, I had the whole present to my mind, with the wholeness, no less than the liveliness of a vision, I trust that I shall be able to embody in verse the three parts yet to come, in the course of the present year. It is probable that if the poem had been finished at either of the former periods, or if even the first and second part had been published in the year 1800, the impression of its origi nality would have been much greater than I dare at present expect. But for this I have only my own indolence to blame. The dates are mentioned for the exclusive purpose of precluding charges of plagiarism or servile imitation from myself. For there is amongst us a set of critics, who seem to hold, that every possible thought and image is traditional; who have no notion that there are such things as fountains in the world, small as well as great; and who would therefore charitably derive every rill they behold flowing, from a perforation made in some other man's tank. I am confident, however, that as far as the present poem is concerned, the celebrated poets whose writings I might be suspected of having imitated, either in particular passages, or in the tone and the spirit of the whole, would be among the first to vindicate me from the charge, and who, on any striking coincidence, would permit me to address them in this doggerel version of two monkish Latin hexameters :

'Tis mine and it is likewise yours;
But an if this will not do;
Let it be mine, good friend! for I
Am the poorer of the two.

"I have only to add that the metre of the Christabel is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle: namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four. Nevertheless, this occasional variation in number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of convenience, but in correspondence with some transition in the nature of the imagery or Preface.

passion."-Coleridge's original

The poets referred to above are Scott, who heard the poem read in 1801, and Byron, who heard it in 1811.

The poem was intended for publication in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800);

1237

but Coleridge never completed it. In Table Talk, July 6, 1833, Coleridge said: "I could write as good verses now as ever I did, if I were perfectly free from vexations, and were I in the ad libitum hearing of fine music, which has a sensible effect in harmonizing my thoughts, and in animating and, as it were, lubricating my inventive faculty. The reason of my not finishing Christabel is not that I don't know how to do it-for I have, as I always had, the whole plan entire from beginning to end in my mind; but I fear I could not carry on with equal success the execution of the idea, an extremely subtle and difficult one. The poem was finally published by Murray on the recommendation of Byron. Coleridge's plan for the completion of the story is thus related by Mr. Gillman, who cared for Coleridge during the last years of his life: "The following relation was to have occupied a third and fourth canto, and to have closed the tale. Over the mountains, the Bard, as directed by Sir Leoline, hastes with his disciple; but in consequence of one of those inundations supposed to be common to this country, the spot only where the castle once stood is discovered-the edifice itself being washed away. He determines to return. Geraldine, being acquainted with all that is passing, like the weird sisters in Macbeth, vanishes. Reappearing, however, she awaits the return of the Bard, exciting in the meantime, by her wily arts, all the anger she could rouse in the Baron's breast, as well as that jealousy of which he is described to have been susceptible. The old Bard and the youth at length arrive, and therefore she can no longer personate the character of Geraldine, the daughter of Lord Roland de Vaux, but changes her appearance to that of the accepted though absent lover of Christabel. Now ensues a courtship most distressing to Christabel, who feels, she knows not why, great disgust for her once favored knight. This coldness is very painful to the Baron, who has no more conception than herself of the supernatural transformation. She at last yields to her father's entreaties, and consents to approach the altar with this hated suitor. The real lover, returning, enters at this moment, and produces the ring which she had once given him in sign of her betrothment. Thus defeated, the supernatural being Geraldine disappears. As predicted, the castle bell tolls, the mother's voice is heard, and, to the exceeding great joy of the parties, the rightful marriage takes place, after which follows a reconciliation and explanation between the father and daughter."-Quoted from Gillman's The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1838).

"For my part, I cannot compare Kubla Khan with Christabel. The magical beauty of the latter has been so long canonized in the world's estimate, that to praise it now would be unseemly. It brought into English poetry an atmosphere of wonder and mys