_9th
November
1833_.
Coleridge - Poems
O studious Poet, eloquent for truth!
Philosopher! contemning wealth and death,
Yet docile, childlike, full of Life and Love!
Here, rather than on monumental stone,
This record of thy worth thy Friend inscribes,
Thoughtful, with quiet tears upon his cheek.
? 1809.
EPITAPH
Stop, Christian passer-by! --Stop, child of God,
And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod
A poet lies, or that which once seem'd he. --
O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C. ;
That he who many a year with toil of breath
Found death in life, may here find life in death!
Mercy for praise--to be forgiven for fame
He ask'd, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same!
_9th November 1833_.
NOTES
I am indebted to Mr. Heinemann, the owner of the copyright of Dykes
Campbell's edition of Coleridge's Poetical Works (Macmillan & Co. , 1893)
for permission to use that text (one of the most carefully edited texts of
any English poet) in this volume of selections. My aim, in making these
selections, has been to give every poem of Coleridge's that seems to me
really good, and nothing else. Not every poem, none perhaps of those in
blank verse, is equal throughout; but I think readers of Coleridge will be
surprised to find how few of the poems contained in this volume are not of
almost flawless workmanship, as well of incomparable poetic genius.
Scarcely any English poet gains so much as Coleridge by not being read in a
complete edition. The gulf between his best and his worst work is as wide
as the gulf between good and evil. Even Wordsworth, even Byron, is not so
intolerable to read in a complete edition. But Coleridge, much more easily
than Byron or Wordsworth, can be extricated from his own lumber-heaps; it
is rare in his work to find a poem which is really good in parts and not
really good as a whole. I have taken every poem on its own merits as
poetry, its own technical merits as verse; and thus have included equally
the frigid eighteenth-century conceits of "The Kiss" and the modern
burlesque license of the comic fragments. But I have excluded everything
which has an interest merely personal, or indeed any other interest than
that of poetry; and I have thus omitted the famous "Ode on the Departing
Year," in spite of the esteem in which Coleridge held it, and in spite of
its one exquisite line--
"God's image, sister of the Seraphim"--
and I have omitted it because as a whole it is untempered rhetoric,
shapeless in form; and I have also omitted confession pieces such as that
early one which contains, among its otherwise too emphatic utterances, the
most delicate and precise picture which Coleridge ever drew of himself:
"To me hath Heaven with bounteous hand assigned
Energic Reason and a shaping mind,
The daring ken of Truth, the Patriot's part,
And Pity's sigh, that breathes the gentle heart--
Sloth-jaundiced all! and from my graspless hand
Drop Friendship's precious pearls, like hour-glass sand.
I weep, yet stoop not! the faint anguish flows,
A dreamy pang in Morning's feverish doze. "
Every poem that I have given I have given in full, and, without exception,
in the form in which Coleridge left it.
