Poems of Coleridge | Page 9

of
the correspondent
expressions." Lamb, who tells us how Coleridge
repeated it "so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and
elysian bowers into my parlour when he says or sings it to me,"
doubted whether it would "bear daylight." It seemed to him that such
witchcraft could hardly outlast the night. It has outlasted the century,
and may still be used as a touchstone; it will determine the poetic value
of any lyric poem which you place beside it. Take as many poems as
you please, and let them have all the merits you please, their ultimate
merit as poetry will lie in the degree of their approach to the exact,
unconscious, inevitable balance of qualities in the poetic art of "Kubla
Khan."
In "The Ancient Mariner," which it seems probable was composed
before, and not after "Kubla Khan," as Coleridge's date would have us
suppose, a new supernaturalism comes into poetry, which, for the first
time, accepted the whole responsibility of dreams. The impossible,
frankly accepted, with its own strict, inverted logic; the creation of a
new atmosphere, outside the known world, which becomes as real as
the air about us, and yet never loses its strangeness; the shiver that
comes to us, as it came to the weddingguest, from the simple good faith
of the teller; here is a whole new creation, in subject, mood, and
technique. Here, as in "Kubla Khan," Coleridge saw the images "as
things"; only a mind so overshadowed by dreams, and so easily able to
carry on his sleep awake, could have done so; and, with such a mind,
"that willing suspension of disbelief for a moment, which constitutes
poetic faith," was literally forced upon him. "The excellence aimed at,"
says Coleridge, "was to consist in the interesting of the affections by
the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany
such situations," those produced by supernatural agency, "supposing
them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being
who, from whatever sense of delusion, has at any time believed himself
under supernatural agency." To Coleridge, whatever appealed vitally to

his imagination was real; and he defended his belief philosophically,
disbelieving from conviction in that sharp marking off of real from
imaginary which is part of the ordinary attitude of man in the presence
of mystery.
It must not be forgotten that Coleridge is never fantastic. The fantastic
is a playing with the imagination, and Coleridge respects it. His
intellect goes always easily as far as his imagination will carry it, and
does not stop by the way to play tricks upon its bearer. Hence the
conviction which he brings with him when he tells us the impossible.
And then his style, in its ardent and luminous simplicity, flexible to
every bend of the spirit which it clothes with flesh, helps him in the
idiomatic translation of dreams. The visions of Swedenborg are literal
translations of the imagination, and need to be retranslated. Coleridge is
equally faithful to the thing seen and to the laws of that new world into
which he has transposed it.
"The Ancient Mariner" is the most sustained piece of imagination in the
whole of English poetry; and it has almost every definable merit of
imaginative narrative. It is the only poem I know which is all point and
yet all poetry; because, I suppose, the point is really a point of mystery.
It is full of simple, daily emotion, transported, by an awful power of
sight, to which the limits of reality are no barrier, into an unknown sea
and air; it is realized throughout the whole of its ghastly and marvellous
happenings; and there is in the narrative an ease, a buoyancy almost,
which I can only compare with the music of Mozart, extracting its
sweetness from the stuff of tragedy; it presents to us the utmost
physical and spiritual horror, not only without disgust, but with an
alluring beauty. But in "Christabel," in the first part especially, we find
a quality which goes almost beyond these definable merits. There is in
it a literal spell, not acting along any logical lines, not attacking the
nerves, not terrifying, not intoxicating, but like a slow, enveloping mist,
which blots out the real world, and leaves us unchilled by any "airs
from heaven or blasts from hell," but in the native air of some middle
region. In these two or three brief hours of his power out of a lifetime,
Coleridge is literally a wizard. People have wanted to know what
"Christabel" means, and how it was to have ended, and whether

Geraldine was a vampire (as I am inclined to think) or had eyes in her
breasts (as Shelley thought). They have wondered that a poem so
transparent in every line should be, as a