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Coleridge's Conversation Poems Frederick Burwick Coleridge’s Conversation Poems: Thinking the Thinker Although Coleridge himself identified only ‘Reflections on having left a Place of ‘The Nightingale’ as ‘A Conversation Poem’, Retirement’, but also lurking in ‘Frost at the assumption that it possessed certain generic Midnight’ and some of the other or thematic characteristics in common with ‘Conversations.’8 Many critics have observed other poems has prompted critics for the past strong dialectical tensions: aesthetics vs. ethics, eighty years to group them together. ‘The idealism vs. materialism, isolation vs. Æolian Harp’, ‘Reflections on having left a engagement, idleness vs. industry, loss vs. Place of Retirement’, ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’, desire, indolence vs. creativity.9 My own ‘Frost at Midnight’, ‘The Nightingale’, reading of the ‘Conversation Poems’ is also ‘Dejection: An Ode’, ‘To William Wordsworth’ concerned with dialectical tensions, those were the seven poems said to share basic derived from Coleridge’s effort to reconcile features.1 The first to set forth these shared subject and object, thinker and thing perceived. characteristics, George Harper emphasised a In his distinction between the Primary and structure which began in a pleasant sanctuary, the Secondary Imagination, Coleridge launched a metaphorical flight of fancy, then addressed the mental act necessary to returned with altered perspective to the apperception and the volitional act necessary to sanctuary.2 Richard Fogle noted recurrent creative expression.10 The peculiarity of image patterns in the seven poems.3 M. H. Coleridge’s definition is that he has divided the Abrams called attention to the poetic expression Imagination into two modes, a receptive phase of Coleridge’s key metaphysical ideas.4 Other of perception followed by an expressive phase critics saw the poems as meditations and of recreation. The Primary is ‘the living Power religious reflections inspired by a revelatory and prime Agent of all human Perception [...] experience or harmony in nature.5 With a focus a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act on the presumed interlocutor in the of creation in the infinite Iam’. The Secondary ‘Conversation’, critics have also made a case for is ‘an echo of the former, co-existing with the the conjured presence in these poems of Sara conscious will, yet still as identical with former Fricker Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Hartley in the kind of its agency, and different only Coleridge, Sara Hutchinson, and William and in degree, and in the mode of its operation’ Dorothy Wordsworth.6 Others have examined (BL, i. 304). There is a parallel in the two phases the stylistic presumptions of conversational that Wordsworth attributes to the generation of language.7 Still other critics have attended to poetry: ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful political concerns, perhaps most prominent in feelings’ and ‘emotions recollected in Coleridge’s Conversation Poems: Thinking the Thinker 169 tranquillity’. It is in the latter phase, own sentient activity must witness the motion Wordsworth explains, that ‘successful it gives away to the things beheld. Coleridge, it composition generally begins.’11 For will be recalled, described this giving away of Wordsworth the inspirational moment is motion in his dynamic metaphor of the clouds emotional, for Coleridge it is an epiphany of and the stars in ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (lines perception. In spite of the differences, these 31–32). descriptions of the creative process are similar In Chapter 5 of the Biographia Literaria, in positing two distinct stages: the first based in Coleridge commenced his account of the law of response, the second involving the active work association with the fundamental principle that of composition. ‘Co-existing with conscious in proposing their ‘own nature as a problem’, will’, the second phase for Coleridge ‘dissolves, philosophers constructed ‘a table of distinctions’ diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate’. based on ‘the absence or presence of the will’. Wordsworth does not make an act of will The difficulty in discriminating ‘between the decisive for the transition from the first phase voluntary and the spontaneous’, is that ‘we to the second; he merely observes that if the seem to ourselves merely passive to an external ‘passions[...]arevoluntarilydescribed, the power’. Coleridge was reluctant to concede that mind will, upon the whole, be in a state of in the act of perception the mind is merely enjoyment.’ ‘a mirror reflecting the landscape’. Granting Wordsworth, in ‘Lines written a few miles that ‘sometimes our nature seemed to act by a above Tintern Abbey’, described a dreamlike mechanism of its own, without any conscious stateinwhich effort of the will’, Coleridge nevertheless endeavored to identify deliberative choices we are laid asleep informing any act of seeing (BL, i. 89–91). In In body, and become a living soul: this same chapter, he introduced from Juan Luis While with an eye made quiet by the power (Ludovicus Vives) the distinction between Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, active and passive perception, the former We see into the life of things (lines 45–49) involving ‘the mental power of comprehension’ In his gloss on these lines in March 1801, and the latter the mere ‘receptivity of Coleridge cited Fichte in elucidating his own impressions’ (BL, i. 99).15 Coleridge’s counter sense of how inspired perception depends on argument is that choices are made with such perception as apperception. To see ‘into the Life frequency and rapidity, that we are not fully of things’, Coleridge asserted, we must see into aware of our split-second decisions. In addition, ourselves, that is, we must recognise ourselves we forget our volitional determination of the as ‘the thinking Being’ in the act of beholding.12 act, because our attention is focused on the This act of double consciousness, thinking the object of the action. Some modes of perception, thinker, provides a crucial turn in the however, are volitionally directed by fully alert Conversation poems. On 23 March 1801, and conscious mental engagement. This, he Coleridge rejected the philosophical asserts in Chapter 12, is the prerequisite for materialism of Locke or Newton for describing ‘the philosophic imagination, the sacred power the mind as ‘always passive – a lazy of self-intuition’ (BL, i. 241).16 Looker-on.’13 Just a month earlier, on 24 The act of the will was pivotal of Coleridge, February 1801, Coleridge had taken up the and it had become so long before he identified same question of the apparent presence or its necessary role in the transition from the absence of the will in acts of perception.14 If the Primary to the Secondary Imagination. Indeed, world is not to appear blank and static, then our one can trace the increasing importance of the 170 Romanticism will from the first to the last of the When the Soul seeks to hear; when all is Conversation Poems, from 1795 to 1807. With hush’d, the wind-swept Æolian harp as his metaphor And the Heart listens!’ for inspiration, Coleridge describes the One year later, in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my essentially passive role of the mind: Prison’(June 1797), Coleridge again makes it as on the midway slope evident that, no matter how glorious the scene, Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon, the revelation occurs only with a committed act Whilst thro’ my half-clos’d eye-lids I behold of perception. The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the So my friend main, Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have And tranquil muse upon tranquility; stood, Full many a thought uncall’d and Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing undetain’d, round And many idle flitting phantasies, On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem Traverse my indolent and passive brain, Less gross than bodily; and of such hues As wild and various, as the random gales As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he That swell and flutter on this subject Lute! makes In these lines composed between August and Spirits perceive his presence. October, 1795, there is no need for an effort of At this juncture in Coleridge’s development of will. The wind blows, the harp sings. This the idea of an external source of inspiration, he passive receptivity is expanded into an ideal of still credits the apparently irresistible coercive universal accord: power of the influence: ‘the Almighty Spirit And what if all of animated nature [...]makes/Spirits perceive his presence’. Be but organic Harps diversly fram’d, In the next Conversation poem, ‘Frost at That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Midnight’ (February 1798), another year has Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, passed and Coleridge has again reformulated At once the Soul of each, and God of all? his sense of the relationship between the external stimuli and the internal response: The utter passivity of the mind as organic harp is already modified just five to six months so shalt thou see and hear later in ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Retirement’ (March-April 1796). In order to Of that eternal language, which thy God attain receptivity, one must discipline the Utters, who from eternity doth teach senses. The effect of the wind upon the harp is Himself in all, and all things in himself. spontaneous. The effect of the sky-lark’s song Great universal Teacher! he shall mould requires patient, attentive listening, Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask. Oft with patient ear The ‘Great universal Teacher’ may, of course, Long-listening to the viewless sky-lark’s note have a few recalcitrant students. There is a significant difference between making the spirit The auditor must not listen passively, but with ‘perceive’ and making it ‘ask’. Asking is not a desire to hear; indeed, that desire must be followed inevitably by answers.
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