No More Learning

WORDSWORTH)

HYMN BEFORE SUN-RISE

FROST AT MIDNIGHT

THE NIGHTINGALE

THE EOLIAN HARP

THE PICTURE

THE GARDEN OF BOCCACCIO

THE TWO FOUNTS

A DAY-DREAM

SONNET

LINES TO W. LINLEY, ESQ.

DOMESTIC PEACE

SONG FROM _ZAPOLYA_

HUNTING SONG FROM _ZAPOLYA_

WESTPHALIAN SONG

YOUTH AND AGE

WORK WITHOUT HOPE

TIME, REAL AND IMAGINARY

LOVE'S APPARITION

LOVE, HOPE, AND PATIENCE

DUTY SURVIVING SELF-LOVE

LOVE'S FIRST HOPE

PHANTOM

TO NATURE

FANCY IN NUBIBUS

CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL OBJECT

PHANTOM OR FACT?

LINES SUGGESTED BY THE LAST WORDS OF BERENGARIUS

FORBEARANCE

_SANCTI DOMINICI PALLIUM_

ON DONNE'S POETRY

ON A BAD SINGER

_NE PLUS ULTRA_

HUMAN LIFE

THE BUTTERFLY

THE PANG MORE SHARP THAN ALL

THE VISIONARY HOPE

THE PAINS OF SLEEP

LOVE'S BURIAL-PLACE

LOVE, A SWORD

THE KISS

NOT AT HOME

NAMES (FROM LESSING)

To LESBIA (FROM CATULLUS)

THE DEATH OF THE STARLING (FROM CATULLUS)

ON A CATARACT (FROM STOLBERG)

HYMN TO THE EARTH (FROM STOLBERG)

THE VISIT OF THE GODS (FROM SCHILLER)

TRANSLATION (FROM OTTFRIED)

THE VIRGIN'S CRADLE-HYMN

EPITAPHS ON AN INFANT

AN ODE TO THE RAIN

ANSWER TO A CHILD'S QUESTION

SOMETHING CHILDISH, BUT VERY NATURAL

LINES ON A CHILD

THE KNIGHT'S TOMB

FIRE, FAMINE, AND SLAUGHTER

THE TWO ROUND SPACES ON THE TOMBSTONE

THE DEVIL'S THOUGHTS

COLOGNE

SONNETS ATTEMPTED IN THE MANNER OF CONTEMPORARY WRITERS

LIMBO

METRICAL FEET

THE HOMERIC HEXAMETER (FROM SCHILLER)

THE OVIDIAN ELEGIAC METRE (FROM SCHILLER)

CATULLIAN HENDECASYLLABLES (FROM MATTHISON)

To ----

EPITAPH ON A BAD MAN

THE SUICIDE'S ARGUMENT

THE GOOD, GREAT MAN

INSCRIPTION FOR A FOUNTAIN ON A HEATH

INSCRIPTION FOR A TIME-PIECE

A TOMBLESS EPITAPH

EPITAPH

NOTES




INTRODUCTION

In one of Rossetti's invaluable notes on poetry, he tells us that to him
"the leading point about Coleridge's work is its human love. " We may
remember Coleridge's own words:


"To be beloved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed. "


Yet love, though it is the word which he uses of himself, is not really
what he himself meant when using it, but rather an affectionate sympathy,
in which there seems to have been little element of passion. Writing to his
wife, during that first absence in Germany, whose solitude tried him so
much, he laments that there is "no one to love. " "Love is the vital air of
my genius," he tells her, and adds: "I am deeply convinced that if I were
to remain a few years among objects for whom I had no affection, I should
wholly lose the powers of intellect. "

With this incessant, passionless sensibility, it was not unnatural that his
thirst for friendship was stronger than his need of love; that to him
friendship was hardly distinguishable from love. Throughout all his letters
there is a series of causeless explosions of emotion, which it is hardly
possible to take seriously, but which, far from being insincere, is really,
no doubt, the dribbling overflow of choked-up feelings, a sort of moral
leakage. It might be said of Coleridge, in the phrase which he used of
Nelson, that he was "heart-starved. " Tied for life to a woman with whom he
had not one essential sympathy, the whole of his nature was put out of
focus; and perhaps nothing but "the joy of grief," and the terrible and
fettering power of luxuriating over his own sorrows, and tracing them to
first principles, outside himself or in the depths of his sub-
consciousness, gave him the courage to support that long, everpresent
divorce.

Both for his good and evil, he had never been able to endure emotion
without either diluting or intensifying it with thought, and with always
self-conscious thought. He uses identically the same words in writing his
last, deeply moved letter to Mary Evans, and in relating the matter to
Southey. He cannot get away from words; coming as near to sincerity as he
can, words are always between him and his emotion.
Hence his over-emphasis,
his rhetoric of humility. In 1794 he writes to his brother George: "Mine
eyes gush out with tears, my heart is sick and languid with the weight of
unmerited kindness. " Nine days later he writes to his brother James: "My
conduct towards you, and towards my other brothers, has displayed a strange
combination of madness, ingratitude, and dishonesty. But you forgive me.
May my Maker forgive me! May the time arrive when I shall have forgiven
myself! " Here we see both what he calls his "gangrened sensibility" and a
complete abandonment to the feelings of the moment. It is always a self-
conscious abandonment, during which he watches himself with approval, and
seems to be saying: "Now that is truly 'feeling'! " He can never concentrate
himself on any emotion; he swims about in floods of his own tears. With so
little sense of reality in anything, he has no sense of the reality of
direct emotion, but is preoccupied, from the moment of the first shock, in
exploring it for its universal principle, and then nourishes it almost in
triumph at what he has discovered. This is not insincerity; it is the
metaphysical, analytical, and parenthetic mind in action. "I have
endeavoured to feel what I ought to feel," he once significantly writes.

Coleridge had many friends, to some of whom, as to Lamb, his friendship was
the most priceless thing in life; but the friendship which meant most to
him, not only as a man, but as a poet, was the friendship with Wordsworth
and with Dorothy Wordsworth. "There is a sense of the word Love," he wrote
to Wordsworth in 1812, "in which I never felt it but to you and one of your
household. " After his quarrel in that year he has "an agony of weeping. "
"After fifteen years of such religious, almost superstitious idolatry and
self-sacrifice!