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Travel, Homecoming and Wavering Minds in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems

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Travel, Homecoming and Wavering Minds in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems TRAVEL, HOMECOMING AND WAVERING MINDS IN LYRICAL BALLADS AND OTHER POEMS JACQUELINE SCHOEMAKER In his “Preface” to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth ascribes what he saw as the deterioration of the “discriminating powers of the mind” of his generation mostly to “the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities”.1 His generation was subjected to political turmoil caused by the French Revolution and its aftermath and often by the increasing migration caused by changes in agriculture and growing industrialism. Lyrical Ballads echoes this sense of turmoil and movement: there is not one poem in the whole work that does not deal with travel, migration or dislocation in some way. The themes in the volume range from the pleasure of rambling to the necessity of leaving home. This pervading sense of motion is not only felt in travel but also, importantly, in homecoming. The characters in the poems are extreme, either in their feelings of belonging and clinging to their possessions or the familiar, or in their feelings of alienation and loss or seeking the unknown. Though “alienation” is a term perhaps more immediately associated with Coleridge than with Wordsworth, the extreme opposites referred to here were not the result of the one poet’s concern with loss and the other’s concern with the familiar. Coleridge’s “The Nightingale” is a cheerful celebration of nature and home, while Wordsworth’s “The Female Vagrant” expresses total alienation. During the 1790s both poets experienced the variety of feelings expressed in Lyrical Ballads, but they experienced them differently. Coleridge’s sense of dislocation as part of his nature found an outlet in imaginary processes but led to estrangement. Wordsworth’s feelings of dislocation were caused by external factors (early family disruptions and later political disturbances) but he managed, unlike Coleridge, to get a grip on them towards the end of the decade, which coincided with his taking the lead in the preparations for the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. Although in a poem written in Germany in May 1799 Coleridge felt that 1 “Preface” to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 5 Vols, Oxford, 1940-49, 2nd edn, 1952, II, 389. 68 Jacqueline Schoemaker “Home-sickness is a wasting pang” and he longed for “healing”,2 he had not gone home when, a month earlier, news of his son Berkeley’s death reached him from England. Despite his wife’s pleading letters from Nether Stowey and William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s urging (the Wordsworths were on their may back to England from Germany and wanted Coleridge to go with them), he made no move to return. He wrote to Thomas Poole, his neighbour and friend at Nether Stowey, “I have a strange sort of sensation, as if while I was present, none could die whom I intensely loved”.3 Despite these words, which testify to a naive belief in an ideal family situation, Coleridge did not go home. We cannot easily judge a man’s reaction to the death of his son, nor should we underestimate the enormous scholarly pleasure Coleridge gained from his stay at Göttingen University, though apparently intellectual pursuit was not his only reason for lingering in Germany: in May he went on a walking tour through the Hartz Mountains, accompanied by a group of English students. By so doing, he possibly attempted to escape from dealing directly with his sad family circumstances. Finally, While giving the impression of tremendous speed, Coleridge successfully loitered all the way back to England. Having left Göttingen on 24 June, he arrived breathlessly at Stowey more than a month later at the end of July 1799 ....4 Coleridge’s youth seems to have been a mixture of escapism, alienation from and desperate longing for home. Early on in life Coleridge felt he disappointed his mother and at the same time he felt rejected by her. The often mentioned quarrel with his brother Frank, after which the seven year-old Samuel ran away from home and hid outside during a whole autumn night, was a cry for attention rather than an act of rejection. As would be the case for any child who finds himself in competition with his brother and feels (whether rightly or wrongly) rejected by his mother, the important thing was to be found and reassured. There is nothing unusual about this demonstration of insecurity as an experience in childhood, but when Coleridge was a student at Cambridge a similar event occurred. After a desperate month of drinking, wasting money and growing fear of letting his friends and family down, in December 1793 Coleridge suddenly joined the army. At first nobody knew his whereabouts. A few months later he was discharged under the protection of his elder brother George. Richard Holmes points out that Coleridge’s sense of alienation and longing was to 2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Home-Sick”, in The Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, London, 1912, 314. 3 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, Oxford, 6 vols, 1956-71, I, 490. 4 Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions, London, 1989, 238 (the source from which much of the biographical information in this essay is derived)..
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