Sara Coleridge (1802-1852)

Poet, editor, translator, author of children's literature and fairy tales, Sara Coleridge, born on 22 December 1802 in Keswick, in the Lake District, was the only daughter and youngest child of Sara Fricker and Samuel Taylor Cole ridge. Because her parents were estranged for almost all of her childhood, she never lived with her father for much more than a few weeks at a time, and he sometimes allowed years to elapse between letters. While he lived in London, she lived with her mother in Greta Hall, in Keswick, the home of her uncle, Robert Southey. She would later admit that she had known both William Wordsworth and Southey better than she had known her father. Although her father was hardly an attentive parent, Sara did impress him; after his final visit to Keswick, in February 1812, he wrote of her: "Little Sara [then nine years old] ... reads French tolerably & Italian fluently, and I was astonished at her acquaintance with her native Language. The word 'hostile' occurring in what she read to me, I asked her what 'hostile' meant? And she answered at once-Why! inimical: only that inimical is more often used for things and measures, and not, as hostile is, to persons & nations.... [S]he is such a sweet-tempered, meek, blue-eyed Fairy, & so affectionate, trust worthy, & really serviceable!" 1 Before long, she was also learning Latin and Spanish (she would later learn Greek and German), continuing her voracious reading in the Southeys' extensive library, and becoming a talented musician. John Murray published her first book when she was nineteen, a three-volume translation from the Latin of Martin Dobrizhoffer's An Account of the Abi phones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay. Most of the money Murray gave her for the project went to help send her brother Derwent to Cambridge University. At the end of 1822, Sara's mother took her to London, where she spent three weeks of an eight-month trip in Highgate, getting to know her father.

1. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford, r956-7r), 3 :315. Sara Coleridge

It was the first time she had seen him in a decade. On this same trip, in Janu ary 1823, she met her first cousin Henry Nelson Coleridge. Four years older than Sara and a graduate of King's College, Cambridge, he had just begun reading for the law. Before she left London the two had become secretly en gaged. The engagement was to last six and a half years, while he established himself in his profession; in the meantime, she translated for John Murray the memoirs of Chevalier Bayard from the sixteenth-century French. It was probably in this period, during a bout with depression, that she first began experimenting with opium as a sedative for sleep; she was certainly using it by October 1825. A month later she told her brother Derwent, "It has done me much good & no harm-and I might exclaim with Mrs O'Neil, 'Hail lovely blossom that can' st ease the wretched victims of disease.' " 2 When Sara and Henry married, on 3 September 1829, they moved to 21 Downshire Place, Hampstead, not far from her father's home at the Grove. Despite precarious health, including several serious physical and men tal breakdowns, she would spend nearly all of the next decade pregnant, depending upon opium increasingly heavily. Her son Herbert was born in October 1830 and her daughter Edith in July 1832. InJanuary 1834, after giving birth to twins who lived only a few days, she was overcome by severe depres sion; by the spring her opium use had become so heavy that she could not break herself of the habit. Even so, intellectual and literary pursuits became her haven, and she became increasingly interested in literary controversies, theological debates, and the works of women writers. She would eventually include in her circle of friends Joanna Baillie, Maria Jane Jewsbury, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anna Jameson, William Gladstone, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Macaulay, and Henry Crabb Robinson. In the spring and summer of 1834 Sara Coleridge began writing short poems for the instruction of her children; they were published by J. W. Parker the following September as Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children. The book sold well, going through five editions in five years. "Poppies," printed below, appeared in that volume, a decision the poet came to regret because of family sensitivities on the subject. In July of that year her father died, and his death, ironically, gave her new purpose as a writer and editor. She assisted her hus band, his literary executor, in his edition of Coleridge's Table Talk (1835), edited her father's Literary Remains (4 vols., 1836-39) and became the driving but invisible force behind his eventual canonization. She began editing his Aids to Refl-ection and transcribing his marginalia.

2 . Quoted in Bradford Keyes Mudge, Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays (New Haven, 1989), J7. See also Henrietta O'Neill's "Ode to the Poppy" in this volume. 196 Sara Coleridge

Meanwhile, she was working through her complex feelings about being a mother in the process of drafting her own imaginative work, Phantasmion, from which most of the poems below are taken. The setting is inspired by the wild and beautiful scenery of her childhood in the Lake District. Her protagonist is Phantasmion, the young prince of Palmland, told in a garden of his mother's death; shortly thereafter he witnesses the death of a com panion and then loses his father. A fairy, Potentilla, queen of the insects, grants his requests for wings and suction feet; the tale relates his adventures as he pursues Iarine, beautiful daughter of the king of Rockland. Phantas mion's complex world is filled with good, evil, and capricious spirits who intervene in the military conflicts and love relationships of mortals. The tale treats love, ambition, hatred, fallibility, and madness in a lush and vivid prose style filled with sensuous images of the exotic and fantastic. Poems record the innermost feelings of the characters. In a letter to her husband of 29 Sep tember 1837 Coleridge admits that her chief aim in Phantasmion was not a moral but consisted "in cultivating the imagination, and innocently gratify ing the curiosity of the reader, by exhibiting the general and abstract beauty of things through the vehicle of a story, which, as it treats of human hopes, and fears, and passions, and interests, and of those changeful events and vary ing circumstances to which human life is liable, may lend an animation to the accompanying descriptions, and in return receive a lustre from them." 3 She expresses a similar view in a verse written in her own copy of Phantasmion:

Go, little book, and sing of love and beauty, To tempt the worldling into fairy-land; Tell him that airy dreams are sacred duty, Bring better wealth than aught his toils command, - Toils fraught with mickle harm. But if thou meet some spirit high and tender, On blessed works and noblest love intent. Tell him that airy dreams of nature's splendor, With graver thoughts and hallowed musings blent, Prove no too earthly charm.4

The book was published anonymously in June 1837 to mostly positive notices. The Quarterly Review observed that " 'Phantasmion' is not a poem, but it is poetry from beginning to end, and has many poems within it. It is one of a race that has particularly suffered under the assaults of political economy

3. Quoted in Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, ed. [Edith Coleridge], 2 vols. (London, 1873), l: 191. 4. Written about 1845 and quoted in ibid., I :175. Sara Coleridge and useful knowledge;-a Fairy Tale, the last, we suppose, that will ever be written in England, and unique in its kind. It is neither German nor French. It is what it is-pure as crystal in diction, tinted like an opal with the hues of an everspringing sunlit fancy." 5 But as Sara Coleridge noted, "In these days ... to print a Fairy Tale is the very way to be not read, but shoved aside with contempt. I wish, however, I were only as sure that my fairy-tale is worth printing, as I am that works of this class are wholesome food, by way of variety, for the childish mind." 6 Sara Coleridge continued to write reviews (published anonymously in the Quarterly Review), essays, and poetry, but her major project for the rest of her life was editing her father's works and remaking his image-from that of the dissolute, self-indulgent, plagiarizing poet into the respected philosopher and Victorian sage. She painstakingly assembled a fragmentary and miscel laneous corpus into what Leslie Stephen called the "centre of intellectual life in England." Virginia Woolf said that Sara Coleridge "found her father [by editing his works] as she had not found him in the flesh; and she found that he was herself." 7 Coleridge included with each new work she edited a substantial introduction or appendix defending, explaining, or qualifying her father's theories. An early biographer, Henry Reed, justly observed that she "expended in the desultory form of notes, and appendices, and prefaces, an amount of original thought and an affluence of learning, which, differently and more prominently presented, would have made her famous." 8 Henry Coleridge's· death on 25 January 1843 made Sara's income from writing even more necessary. Within the next few years she would com plete what are now considered her two most significant editing projects-the 1847 edition of the Biographia Literaria and the 1850 edition of Essays on His Own Times. According to Norman Fruman, even though modern editors ac knowledge a debt to Sara Coleridge, her "intelligence, energy, learning, and above all her willingness to lay damaging materials clearly before the reader, have ... never received anything like the praise they deserve." 9 Her edition of the Biographia included a 180-page defense of her father's literary accom plishments and character, persuasively depicting him as a philosopher hero and forever altering the terms of Coleridge criticism and discourse. In her 75-page introduction to her three-volume collection of her father's political

5. September 1840, 132. 6. Coleridge to Arabella Brooke, 29 July 1837, quoted in Coleridge, Memoir and Letters, l: 175. 7. "Sara Coleridge," in Death of the Moth and Other Essays, by Virginia Woolf (New York, 1970), lII-18; Woolf's essay first appeared in the New Statesman and Nation, 26 October 1940. 8. Henry Reed, "The Daughter of Coleridge," Literary World, January 1853. 9. SiR 24 (1985): 141-42. Sara Coleridge

writings and periodical publications, Essays on His Own Times, she underlined his altruism, his practical thought, and his serious moral and political phi losophy. It was while working on this essay that she confided to a friend that her father seemed "ever at my ear, in his books, more especially his mar ginalia - speaking not personally to me, and yet in a way so natural to my feelings, that finds me so fully, and awakens such a strong echo in my mind and heart, that I seem more intimate with him now than I ever was in life." 10 Yet late in her life she had misgivings about having chosen to devote her talents mainly to editing her father's works. She observed, "It is something to myself to feel that I am putting in order a literary house that otherwise would be open to censure .... But when there is not mere carelessness but a positive coldness in regard to what I have done, I do sometimes feel as if I had been wasting myself a good deal-at least as far as worldly advan tage is concerned." 11 But she persisted. Her last major editorial project was a collection of her father's poetry, which she aptly described as "sensuous and impassioned," a description as true of her own best poetry as it was of his. Sara Coleridge died of untreated breast cancer on 3 May 1852 at home at ro Chester Place, Regent's Park, and was buried in the old Highgate churchyard beside her parents, her husband, and her son. She is said to have left thou sands of pages of unpublished manuscripts-essays, letters, journals, poems, and long theological dialogues. In the family tradition, her daughter Edith published her mother's memoir and letters, which twentieth-century scholars have read mostly as an addendum to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's life.

MAJOR WORKS: Phantasmion (London, 1837; reprint, London, 1874); Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children (London, 1834).

EDITED WORKS: Editions of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's work, including, most im portantly, Biographia Literaria, 2 vols. (London, 1847), and Essays on His Own Times, 3 vols. (London, 1850).

TEXTS USED: Text of "Poppies" from Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children. Texts of "I Was a Brook," "Blest Is the Tarn;' "Milk-White Doe," "I Tremble When with Look Benign," and "The Captive Bird with Ardour Sings" from Phantasmion.

ro. Coleridge to E. Quillinan, 1850, Memoir and Letters, 2:315. rr. Sara Coleridge to Henry Crabb Robinson, 28 October 1848, quoted in Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondences of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Sadler (New York, 1967). Sara Coleridge ------

Poppies

The poppies blooming all around My Herbert loves to see; Some pearly white, some dark as night, Some red as cramasie:

He loves their colours fresh and fine, As fair as fair may be; But little does my darling know How good they are to me.

He views their clust'ring petals gay, And shakes their nut-brown seeds; IO But they to him are nothing more Than other brilliant weeds.

O! how shouldst thou, with beaming brow, With eye and cheek so bright, Know aught of that gay blossom's power, Or sorrows of the night?

When poor Mama long restless lies, She drinks the poppy's juice; That liquor soon can close her eyes, And slumber soft produce: 20

0 then my sweet, my happy boy Will thank the Poppy-flower, Which brings the sleep to dear Mama, At midnight's darksome hour. (1834)

2 Herbert] Coleridge's son. 4 cramasie J Crimson cloth. 200 Sara Coleridge

I Was a Brook

I was a brook in straitest channel pent, Forcing 'mid rocks and stones my toilsome way, A scanty brook in wandering well nigh spent; But now with thee, rich stream, conjoin'd I stray, Through golden meads the river sweeps along, Murmuring its deep full joy in gentlest undersong.

I crept through desert moor and gloomy glade, My waters ever vex'd, yet sad and slow, My waters ever steep'd in baleful shade: 10 But, whilst with thee, rich stream, conjoin'd I flow, E'en in swift course the river seems to rest, Blue sky, bright bloom, and verdure imag'd on its breast.

And, whilst with thee I roam through regions bright, Beneath kind love's serene and gladsome sky, A thousand happy things that seek the light, Till now in darkest shadow forc'd to lie, Up through the illumin'd waters nimbly run, To shew their forms and hues in the all revealing sun. (1837)

Blest Is the Tarn

Blest is the tarn which towering cliffs o'ershade, Which, cradled deep within the mountain's breast, Nor voices loud, nor dashing oars invade: Yet e'en the tarn enjoys no perfect rest, For oft the angry skies her peace molest, With them she frowns, gives back the lightning's glare, Then rages wildly in the troubled air.

r tarn] Small mountain lake. Sara Coleridge 201

This calmer lake, which potent spells protect, Lies dimly slumbering through the fires of day, And when yon skies, with chaste resplendence deck'd, IO Shine forth in all their stateliest array, 0 then she wakes to glitter bright as they, And view the face of heaven's benignant queen Still looking down on hers with smile serene!

What cruel cares the maiden's heart assail, Who loves, but fears no deep felt love to gain, Or, having gain'd it, fears that love will fail! My power can soothe to rest her wakeful pain, Till none but calm delicious dreams remain, And, while sweet tears her easy pillow steep, 20 She yields that dream of bliss to ever welcome sleep. (1837)

Milk-White Doe, 'Tis But the Breeze

Milk-white doe, 'tis but the breeze Rustling in the alder trees; Slumber thou while honey-bees Lull thee with their humming; Though the ringdove's plaintive moan Seems to tell of pleasure flown, On thy couch with blossoms sown, Fear no peril coming.

Thou amid the lilies laid, Seem'st in lily vest array'd, IO Fann'd by gales which they have made Sweet with their perfuming; Primrose tufts impearl'd with dew; Bells which heav'n has steep'd in blue Lend the breeze their odours too, All around thee blooming. 202 Sara Coleridge

None shall come to scare thy dreams, Save perchance the playful gleams; Wake to quaff the cooling streams 20 Of the sunlit river; Thou across the faithless tide Needest not for safety glide, Nor thy panting bosom hide Where the grasses shiver.

When the joyous months are past, Roses pine in autumn's blast, When the violets breathe their last, All that's sweet is flying: Then the sylvan deer must fly, 30 'Mid the scatter'd blossoms lie, Fall with falling leaves and die When the flow'rs are dying. (1837)

I Tremble When with Look Benign

I tremble when with look benign Thou tak'st my offer'd hand in thine, Lest passion-breathing words of mine The charm should break: And friendly smiles be forced to fly, Like soft reflections of the sky, Which, when rude gales are sweeping by, Desert the lake.

Of late I saw thee in a dream, IO The day-star pour'd his hottest beam, And thou, a cool refreshing stream, Didst brightly run: The trees where thou wert pleased to flow, Swell'd out their flowers, a glorious show, While I, too distant doom'd to grow, Pined in the sun. Sara Coleridge

By no life-giving moisture fed, A wasted tree, I bow'd my head, My sallow leaves and blossoms shed On earth's green breast: 20 And silent pray'd the slumbering wind, The lake, thy tarrying place, might find, And waft my leaves, with breathings kind, There, there, to rest. (1837)

The Captive Bird with Ardour Sings

The captive bird with ardour sings, Where no fond mate rewards the strain, Yet, sure, to chant some solace brings, Although he chants in vain: But I my thoughts in bondage keep, Lest he should hear who ne'er will heed, And none shall see the tears I weep, With whom 'twere vain to plead.

No glossy breast, no quivering plume, Like fan unfurl'd to tempt the eye, IO Reminds the prisoner of his doom, Apart, yet all too nigh: 0 would that in some shrouded place I too were prisoned fancy free, And ne'er had seen that beaming face, Which ne'er will beam on me!

When kindred birds fleet o'er the wave, From yellow woods to green ones fly, The captive hears the wild winds rave Beneath a wint'ry sky! 20 And, when my loved one hence shall fleet, Bleak, bleak will yonder heav'n appear, The flowers will droop, no longer sweet, And every leaf be sere.