Coleridges Ancient Mariner and Select Poems | Page 7

man. "O Poole!" Coleridge wrote to him from
Germany afterwards, "you are a noble heart as ever God made!" Poole had indeed in a
marked degree the genius for friendship. Strength of character, sympathy, and
self-effacing devotion, combined with prudence and sincerity, made this man a tower of
refuge for the unstable spirit of the poet.
No other single relation, however, can compare in importance, for Coleridge's poetic
development, with that which sprang up in the summer of 1797 between him and William
Wordsworth. Just when they first met is not recorded. We have seen that Coleridge was
acquainted with Wordsworth's younger brother in his college days, and discussed with
him Wordsworth's first published poems. In January, 1797, he told Cottle that he wished
to submit his "Visions of the Maid of Arc" to Wordsworth for criticism. The earliest
definite record of their personal acquaintance is a letter Coleridge wrote to Cottle while
on a visit to Wordsworth at Racedown (just over the Somerset border in Dorsetshire)
early in June. About the beginning of July he is again at Racedown; and when he returns
he brings Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy with him for a visit. On the 7th Lamb
arrived for his long-planned reunion with Coleridge. The second week of July, 1797, was
thus a rich and long-remembered time for all of them, despite the fact that Mrs. Coleridge
"accidentally emptied a skillet of boiling milk" on her husband's foot, which confined
him "during the whole time of Charles Lamb's stay." The others took long walks in the
neighborhood, amid such scenery as is described in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,"
a poem that admirably voices the happiness, of those days of spiritual fellowship. The
Wordsworths did not return to Racedown. "By a combination of curious circumstances a
gentleman's seat, with a park and woods, elegantly and completely furnished,... in the
most beautiful and romantic situation by the seaside, four miles from Stowey--this we
have got for Wordsworth at the _rent of twenty-three pounds a year, taxes included_!"
Coleridge triumphantly announced to Southey; and in this house, the Manor of Alfoxden,
the Wordsworths remained for a year, in daily companionship with Coleridge and

surrounded by scenes of natural beauty that have left a lasting mark on the work of both
poets.
What the friendship with Coleridge meant to Wordsworth may best be seen in "The
Prelude: or, Growth of a Poet's Mind," Wordsworth's greatest long poem, written some
years afterwards and addressed throughout to Coleridge.
"There is no grief, no sorrow, no despair,
No languor, no dejection, no dismay,
No
absence scarcely can there be, for those
Who love as we do."
What Wordsworth was to Coleridge is more important for us here. The admiration which
the brilliant child of genius felt for the great preacher-poet is chiefly, one feels, an
admiration for his character. As a matter of fact, Wordsworth had written nothing, up to
his coming to Alfoxden, that would have preserved his name as a poet, nothing so
noteworthy or promising as what Coleridge had already written. But Coleridge felt in this
lean and thoughtful young man a strength of mind, a depth and sureness of heart that
compelled his allegiance and even imparted, for the time, some of that resolution in
which he was by nature so sadly deficient. The character of their friendship is to be seen
not only in the published work of the two poets from this time on (notably in "Dejection"),
but perhaps even more clearly in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal and in Coleridge's letters.
"I speak with heart-felt sincerity," he wrote to Cottle in June, 1797, "and (I think)
unblinded judgment, when I tell you that I feel myself _a little man by his side_, and yet
do not think myself the less man than I formerly thought myself.... T. Poole's opinion of
Wordsworth is that he is the greatest man he ever knew; I coincide." Wordsworth's
influence is evident in a letter from Coleridge to his brother George in April, 1798: "I
love fields and woods and mountains with almost a visionary fondness. And because I
have found benevolence and quietness growing within me as that fondness has increased,
therefore I should wish to be the means of implanting it in others, and to destroy the bad
passions not by combating them but by keeping them in inaction." Under the calming and
clarifying influence of the stronger Northern spirit the fever of his revolutionary dreams
abated, he found happiness in the conscious exercise of his poetic powers, and for one
year in his troubled existence his genius showed itself in all its splendor.
The immediate poetic result of their friendship was the "Lyrical Ballads," published by
Cottle in September, 1798. The origin of the work has been described both by
Wordsworth (in a prefatory