Coleridge's Dejection Ode

286 Pages·2019·2.5 MB·English

by  J.C.C. Mays

NINETEENTH-CENTURY MAJOR LIVES AND LETTERS
IMAGE
COLERIDGE’S
DEJECTION ODE
J. C. C. MAYS
Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters
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J. C. C. Mays
Coleridge’s Dejection
Ode
J. C. C. Mays
University College Dublin
Dublin, Ireland
Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters
ISBN 978-3-030-04130-4 ISBN 978-3-030-04131-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04131-1
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I. M.
Christopher Koenig, 1948–2016
“pivotal”
P
reface
This book was more difficult to write than my two earlier monographs on
Coleridge’s poems, whose argument in one sense it completes. “Dejection:
An Ode” stands alone in Coleridge’s oeuvre in the way it reaches so far
back and deeply into his thinking about himself. The “Ancient Mariner”
brought a good deal to the surface, but accidentally, and that poem,
despite fundamental revisions, left many troubling thoughts unresolved.
“Dejection” by contrast was an attempt to range more deeply and at the
same time more widely and, most important of all at a time when personal
circumstances had reached a critical stage, to work through to a poematic
solution. The word “poematic” is crucial here. The solution rests on it
because, in Coleridge’s understanding, the test had to be fundamental and
all-encompassing: a test of whether deep, barely understood instincts, and
his thinking about them, were self-deceiving or rang true. The Ode, then,
is not only a poem of discovery but also a test of veracity. It stands with
little modification behind the remainder of Coleridge’s writing, in prose
as well as verse. It underwrites what came afterwards as well as before,
and in many ways occupies the same position in the development of his
career as “Lycidas” at the beginning of Milton’s. Of course, Coleridge did
not go on to write epics: he happily left that task to Wordsworth. But at a
moment of similar personal crisis, the Ode took stock of what there was to
do and his ability to do it. He, like Milton, invented new technical means
and expanded—exploded—the literary form he inherited. Both poems are
enormously complex and searching: perhaps excessively for poems rela-
tively short in length.
vii
viii PREFACE
The present book also took longer to write because Dejection Ode
is, more than most of Coleridge’s poems, an inseparable whole. Its parts
were mulled over in his head for up to a year, maybe longer, waiting
for the spark that would unite them in the way he wanted. To discuss
matters like metrics or language or structure, one must take them sepa-
rately, but why any one of these is as it is involves the others. This poem
whose parts interact so nicely and are balanced with such finesse con-
tains its own kind of obscurity. Its argument includes uncertain lines of
enquiry that took many more years to clarify and complete, which is a
trap for readers who know the whole story and interpret the beginning
in light of the end. I refer in particular to the themes of perception and
Imagination, where too much hindsight can blind one to the way diverse
preliminary thoughts could productively coexist. I repeat the point:
while one can learn from what came before and after the poem—on the
one hand, from the Letter to Sara, on the other hand, from what the
Biographia Literaria says about Imagination—one can also be seriously
misled by it. In terms of an adage used by Yeats, if Coleridge’s poem is
like a bowl that does not contain all the wine poured into it, it is no less
a bowl for that. Indeed, such is the bowl and such the wine, one would
have it no other way.
To be specific, stanza VI is absolutely central to the structural balance
achieved by the Ode and yet it leaves behind unfinished business—as
Coleridge was well aware. I choose to discuss such “business” in terms of
feelings (“I see, not feel” etc.) in relation to the Ode and other poems.
I might have instead chosen the word nature, which is repeated six times
in different forms (half of them in stanza VI). Its meanings range from
an overall “Romantic” animating spirit (as in stanzas IV and V), to innate
as opposed to acquired, and physical as opposed to spiritual. In addition,
natural does not exist for Coleridge separately from super-natural, or
from his awkward awareness of the power of the un-natural. In short, the
range of subjective meanings encompassed by the word “feel” is played
out in objective terms by the word “nature”; and a deep instability in the
verbal spectrum is both a distraction and the deep life of the poem.
I am obliged to many previous commentators on Coleridge, not
least to those I disagree with. The argument has been shaped most of
all by a number of contemporary writers in Ireland, America and the
United Kingdom who have shown that poetry, though always chang-
ing the rules, is at its best when it is after the same old thing. Among
others, I am particularly lucky to have enjoyed the friendship of Peter
PREFACE ix
Cheyne, Graham Davidson, James Engell and Gerald Janzen at the time
I was sorting out my thoughts. Marianne Mays read several drafts, made
many corrections and suggested many improvements, for all of which I
am most grateful. Marilyn Gaull accepted the book in her groundbreak-
ing series on Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters and at every
stage gave further welcome advice. And once again, I thank the team
led by Allie Troyanos at Palgrave New York for producing another such
good-looking book.
County Wicklow, Ireland J. C. C. Mays
c
ontents
1 The Case to Be Made 1
1.1 The Case 1
1.2 Obstacles 7
1.3 The Heart of the Matter 12
1.4 Values 17
2 How We Got Where We Are as We Cease to Be There 25
2.1 Lame Start 25
2.2 Lopsided Recovery 32
2.3 In Our Time 38
3 Editorial Excursion 47
3.1 A Question of Filiation 47
3.2 Comparable Instance 51
3.3 The Fruits of Error 54
3.4 The Letter Done with 59
3.5 Stumbling Block 62
3.6 Recursion 65
4 The Sweet New Style 71
4.1 Befitting an Ode 71
4.2 Metric 74
xi