Poems of Coleridge | Page 4

Of this
vast work only fragments remain, mostly unpublished: two large quarto
volumes on logic, a volume intended as an introduction, a commentary
on the Gospels and some of the Epistles, together with "innumerable
fragments of metaphysical and theological speculation." But out of
those fragments no system was ever to be constructed, though a fervent
disciple, J. H. Green, devoted twenty-eight years to the attempt.
"Christabel" unfinished, the magnum opus unachieved: both were but
parallel symptoms of a mind "thought-bewildered" to the end, and
bewildered by excess of light and by crowding energies always in
conflict, always in escape.
Coleridge's search, throughout his life, was after the absolute, an
absolute not only in thought but in all human relations, in love,
friendship, faith in man, faith in God, faith in beauty; and while it was
this profound dissatisfaction with less than the perfect form of every art,
passion, thought, or circumstance, that set him adrift in life, making
him seem untrue to duty, conviction, and himself, it was this also that
formed in him the double existence of the poet and the philosopher,
each supplementing and interpenetrating the other. The poet and the
philosopher are but two aspects of one reality; or rather, the poetic and
the philosophic attitudes are but two ways of seeing. The poet who is
not also a philosopher is like a flower without a root. Both seek the
same infinitude; one apprehending the idea, the other the image. One
seeks truth for its beauty; the other finds beauty, an abstract,
intellectual beauty, in the innermost home of truth. Poetry and

metaphysics are alike a disengaging, for different ends, of the absolute
element in things.
In Coleridge, metaphysics joined with an unbounded imagination, in
equal flight from reality, from the notions of time and space. Each was
an equal denial of the reality of what we call real things; the one
experimental, searching, reasoning; the other a "shaping spirit of
imagination," an embodying force. His sight was always straining into
the darkness; and he has himself noted that from earliest childhood his
"mind was habituated to the Vast." "I never regarded my senses," he
says, "as the criteria of my belief"; and "those who have been led to the
same truths step by step, through the constant testimony of their senses,
seem to want a sense which I possess." To Coleridge only mind existed,
an eternal and an eternally active thought; and it was as a corollary to
his philosophical conception of the universe that he set his mind to a
conscious rebuilding of the world in space. His magic, that which
makes his poetry, was but the final release in art of a winged thought
fluttering helplessly among speculations and theories; it was the song
of release.
De Quincey has said of Coleridge: "I believe it to be notorious that he
first began the use of opium, not as a relief from any bodily pains or
nervous irritations--for his constitution was strong and excellent--but as
a source of luxurious sensations." Hartley Coleridge, in the
biographical supplement to the "Biographia Literaria," replies with
what we now know to be truth: "If my Father sought more from opium
than the mere absence of pain, I feel assured that it was not luxurious
sensations or the glowing phantasmagoria of passive dreams; but that
the power of the medicine might keep down the agitations of his
nervous system, like a strong hand grasping the strings of some
shattered lyre." In 1795. that is, at the age of twenty-three, we find him
taking laudanum; in 1796, he is taking it in large doses; by the late
spring of 1801 he is under the "fearful slavery," as he was to call it, of
opium. "My sole sensuality," he says of this time, "was not to be in
pain." In a terrible letter addressed to Joseph Cottle in 1814 he declares
that he was "seduced to the accursed habit ignorantly"; and he
describes "the direful moment, when my pulse began to fluctuate, my

heart to palpitate, and such a dreadful falling abroad, as it were, of my
whole frame, such intolerable restlessness, and incipient
bewilderment ... for my case is a species of madness, only that it is a
derangement, an utter impotence of the volition, and not of the
intellectual faculties." And, throughout, it is always the pains, never the
pleasures, of opium that he registers.
Opium took hold of him by what was inert in his animal nature, and not
by any active sensuality. His imagination required no wings, but rather
fetters; and it is evident that opium was more often a sedative than a
spur to his senses.
The effect of opium on the normal man is to bring him into something
like the state in which Coleridge habitually lived. The