Poems of Coleridge | Page 8

infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul."
Elsewhere, in personal poems like "Frost at Midnight," and "Fears in
Solitude," all the value of the poem comes from the delicate sensations
of natural things which mean so much more to us, whether or not they
did to him, than the strictly personal part of the matter. You feel that
there he is only using the quite awake part of himself, which is not the
essential one. He requires, first of all, to be disinterested, or at least not
overcome by emotion; to be without passion but that of abstract beauty,
in Nature, or in idea; and then to sink into a quiet lucid sleep, in which
his genius came to him like some attendant spirit.
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 Mallarmé. 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