No More Learning

In the life and art of Coleridge, the hours of sleep seem to have been
almost more important than the waking hours. "My dreams became the
substance of my life," he writes, just after the composition of that
terrible poem on "The Pains of Sleep," which is at once an outcry of agony,
and a yet more disturbing vision of the sufferer with his fingers on his
own pulse, his eyes fixed on his own hardly awakened eyes in the mirror. In
an earlier letter, written at a time when he is trying to solve the problem
of the five senses, he notes: "The sleep which I have is made up of ideas
so connected, and so little different from the operations of reason, that
it does not afford me the due refreshment. " To Coleridge, with the help of
opium, hardly required, indeed, there was no conscious division between day
and night, between not only dreams and intuitions, but dreams and pure
reason. And we find him, in almost all his great poems, frankly taking not
only his substance but his manner from dreams, as he dramatizes them after
a logic and a passion of their own. His technique is the transposition into
his waking hours of the unconscious technique of dreams. It is a kind of
verified inspiration, something which came and went, and was as little to
be relied upon as the inspiration itself. On one side it was an exact
science, but on the other a heavenly visitation. Count and balance
syllables, work out an addition of the feet in the verse by the foot-rule,
and you will seem to have traced every miracle back to its root in a
natural product. Only, something, that is, everything, will have escaped
you. As well dissect a corpse to find out the principle of life. That
elusive something, that spirit, will be what distinguishes Coleridge's
finest verse from the verse of, well, perhaps of every conscious artist in
our language. For it is not, as in Blake, literally unconscious, and
wavering on every breath of that unseen wind on which it floats to us; it
is faultless; it is itself the wind which directs it, it steers its way on
the wind, like a seagull poised between sky and sea, and turning on its
wings as upon shifted sails.

This inspiration comes upon Coleridge suddenly, without warning, in the
first uncertain sketch of "Lewti," written at twenty-two; and then it
leaves him, without warning, until the great year 1797, three years later,
when "Christabel" and "The Ancient Mariner" are begun. Before and after,
Coleridge is seen trying to write like Bowles, like Wordsworth, like
Southey, perhaps, to attain "that impetuosity of transition and that
precipitancy of fancy and feeling, which are the _essential_ qualities
of the sublimer Ode," and which he fondly fancies that he has attained in
the "Ode on the Departing Year," with its one good line, taken out of his
note-book.
But here, in "Lewti," he has his style, his lucid and liquid
melody, his imagery of moving light and the faintly veiled transparency of
air, his vague, wildly romantic subject matter, coming from no one knows
where, meaning one hardly knows what; but already a magic, an incantation.
"Lewti" is a sort of preliminary study for "Kubla Khan"; it, too, has all
the imagery of a dream, with a breathlessness and awed hush, as of one not
yet accustomed to be at home in dreams.

"Kubla Khan," which was literally composed in sleep, comes nearer than any
other existing poem to that ideal of lyric poetry which has only lately
been systematized by theorists like Mallarme. It has just enough meaning to
give it bodily existence; otherwise it would be disembodied music. It seems
to hover in the air, like one of the island enchantments of Prospero. It is
music not made with hands, and the words seem, as they literally were,
remembered. "All the images," said Coleridge, "rose up before me as
_things_, with a parallel production of the correspondent
expressions. " Lamb, who tells us how Coleridge repeated it "so enchantingly
that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into my parlour
when he says or sings it to me," doubted whether it would "bear daylight. "
It seemed to him that such witchcraft could hardly outlast the night. It
has outlasted the century, and may still be used as a touchstone; it will
determine the poetic value of any lyric poem which you place beside it.
Take as many poems as you please, and let them have all the merits you
please, their ultimate merit as poetry will lie in the degree of their
approach to the exact, unconscious, inevitable balance of qualities in the
poetic art of "Kubla Khan. "

In "The Ancient Mariner," which it seems probable was composed before, and
not after "Kubla Khan," as Coleridge's date would have us suppose, a new
supernaturalism comes into poetry, which, for the first time, accepted the
whole responsibility of dreams. The impossible, frankly accepted, with its
own strict, inverted logic; the creation of a new atmosphere, outside the
known world, which becomes as real as the air about us, and yet never loses
its strangeness; the shiver that comes to us, as it came to the wedding-
guest, from the simple good faith of the teller; here is a whole new
creation, in subject, mood, and technique. Here, as in "Kubla Khan,"
Coleridge saw the images "as _things_"; only a mind so overshadowed by
dreams, and so easily able to carry on his sleep awake, could have done so;
and, with such a mind, "that willing suspension of disbelief for a moment,
which constitutes poetic faith," was literally forced upon him. "The
excellence aimed at," says Coleridge, "was to consist in the interesting of
the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally
accompany such situations," those produced by supernatural agency,
"supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human
being who, from whatever sense of delusion, has at any time believed
himself under supernatural agency.