THE Samuel Taylor GREAT Coleridge POETS Includes The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel POETRY Read by Michael Sheen, John Moffatt, Sarah Woodward NA135212D 1 Kubla Khan 0 3:33 2 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 0 3:59 3 The sun now rose upon the right… 2:35 4 There passed a weary time… 3:37 5 ‘I fear thee, ancient mariner…’ 3:07 6 O, sleep! It is a gentle thing… 5:04 7 ‘But tell me, tell me, speak again…’ 4:28 8 This hermit good lives in that wood… 5:47 9 Love 7 4:30 10 Frost at Midnight z 5;10 11 This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison = 5:17 d 12 Christabel 5:05 13 Then Christabel stretched forth her hand… 5:29 14 And thus the lofty lady spake… 5:27 15 Each matin bell, the baron sayeth… 4:45 16 O then the baron forgot his age… 6:20 17 The baron, the while, half listening… 5:04 Total time: 79:28 0 = Michael Sheen 7 = Benjamin Soames z = Anton Lesser = = David Timson d = John Moffatt and Sarah Woodward 2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born at Ottery Southey was also responsible for intro- St Mary in Devon in 1772, the youngest ducing Coleridge to Wordsworth. Despite of 10 children. A sickly child, he was given being temperamentally incompatible, regular doses of laudanum, an opium- Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated based painkiller which was freely dispensed successfully on a collection of poems at this time for a variety of complaints, with published in 1798 under the title Lyrical little understanding of its addictive nature. Ballads. Together, the two poets walked for In 1791 Coleridge went to Cambridge, miles, discussing and planning the poems. accruing debts and increasing his reliance Wordsworth would write simple ballads of on drugs (including alcohol), and women. everyday life, using the ‘language of men’, During his Cambridge years Coleridge met while Coleridge considered an epic on the Robert Southey, who encouraged him to theme of Cain’s guilt for the murder of his take an interest in radical politics. Together brother Abel, which eventually evolved into they dreamed of a Utopian society they his masterpiece The Rime of the Ancient called ‘Pantisocracy’, an early socialist Mariner. vision of a commune built on shared The Ancient Mariner is written in responsibilities, and they believed that the metre of the old English ballads, and America would be an ideal country in which Coleridge utilises their characteristic to set it up. Coleridge and Southey became alliteration and repetition, adding the closer after they married two sisters, Sara occasional archaic word to lend authenticity. and Edith Fricker. Naturally independent, The poem is a metaphor for life, as the Coleridge found marriage difficult, and he Mariner is driven through ice and drought separated from his wife in 1804. at the mercy of the spirit world after 3 his mindless act of killing one of God’s It was while he was in Gillman’s house- creatures. He experiences deprivation and hold that he wrote Christabel, which, undergoes suffering both physical and although influenced by Chatterton and mental before being granted redemption by the medieval ballads found in Bishop after his spontaneous outburst of love Percy’s Reliques, is not strictly a ballad itself. for the unattractive snakes of the sea. Its chilling Gothic tone is an example of His penance is to repeat his tale for ever Coleridge’s mastery of creating atmosphere: as a moral lesson to mankind. In later life the poem exudes fear and horror and an Coleridge came to identify himself with the anticipation of evil. The beautiful Geraldine Mariner’s plight – the outsider, alone and seems to challenge the heroine, Christabel, prey to supernatural sensations. to choose between good, represented by The poem’s meaning has been hotly the memory of her dead mother, and evil. A debated since it first appeared, some critics dark sexual liaison between the two women at the time finding it meaningless, others is more than hinted at, and the imagery of seeing it as a powerful religious poem. For the serpent and the forest further increases the 21st-century reader, the poem’s ‘green’ the overall mood of anxiety and terror. It is message, that man has his place in nature a fragment, and how Coleridge would have and that wanton destruction of the natural developed it is anyone’s guess. Its intensity world will have its consequences, has of mood and Gothic fairy-tale setting is a perhaps the strongest resonance. forerunner of Keats’s excursion into the After 1804 Coleridge’s friendship genre with La Belle Dame sans merci. with Wordsworth cooled. This led to his The poem Love, again influenced deeper reliance on opium, producing by Percy’s collection, is a pastiche of the bouts of paranoia and erratic mood swings medieval poems of courtly love. It was that affected his poetic output. In 1816 written shortly after Coleridge met Sarah Coleridge became, in effect, a resident Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, in patient with Dr Gillman in Highgate, 1799. Despite his being married, Coleridge becoming known as the Sage of Highgate. saw her as an ideal woman, at once 4 unattainable yet desired. And in Love there surrounds him there, seeing it with fresh is an air of eroticism – the narrator’s tale of a eyes. The poet is confined physically, but his doomed love, with its repetitive rhythms, is imagination is free to rove and through this interrupted by the maiden Genevieve, who he experiences a sense of freedom. It is a clasps him in a sensuous embrace, vowing poem of catharsis. that she will not reject him as the maiden in This same overpowering influence of his tale rejects her love. Another unfulfilled natural forces is felt in another conversation Coleridge dream. poem: Frost at Midnight. In the silence of Coleridge’s ‘conversation’ poems were a dark night, the poet muses on education perhaps his most original contribution to and how that of his child (sleeping in his poetry. In these he developed an intimate cradle) will differ from his own. With joy conversational tone – quiet, reflective and he imagines how his son shall have a more confiding. Set in a solitary, often domestic, fulfilled education through his association environment, these poems are dramatic with nature, seeing and hearing God in monologues, in a relaxed style. The poet all things. The silence of the night leads is indulging in a subjective conversation. to further musings on how, once the day’s In This Lime-tree Bower my Prison, for occupations are over, the life-force continues instance, Coleridge is unable to accompany to exert its influence almost imperceptibly, his friends the Wordsworths and Charles just as the frost ‘performs its secret ministry’. Lamb on a country walk, after his wife Sara Both these conversation poems are poems has accidentally spilt boiling milk on his foot. of friendship and – although they were not His disappointment created one of his most written for the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 – they congenial poems, in which he imagines and reflect the spirit of that collection. shares in the joy that his friend Lamb, ‘long in As Coleridge’s poetic output dwindled, the great city pent’, discovers in the natural his skills as a lecturer and conversationalist wonders of the local landscape, while the increased. The public, however, would poet, ‘imprisoned’ in his lime-tree bower, always remember him as the author of in turn rediscovers a joy in the nature that Kubla Khan. Coleridge claimed that he 5 only published this poem at the request of the uncharted and unfathomable human Lord Byron who thought it ‘a psychological mind. Many books have been written on curiosity’. The poem’s history is well-known. the meaning of this poem but in the end Coleridge explained that he wrote it in 1797 its power lies in its strange, surreal and while suffering from dysentery for which he bewitching atmosphere. Charles Lamb, was taking opium. Falling asleep from its perceptive as ever, described it ‘as an owl effects, having just read about the great that won’t bear daylight’. It is a dream and palace of Kubla Khan, he dreamt for three maybe that is all we should consider it to hours of the mighty Khan and envisaged be. the whole poem in about two to three Coleridge’s unique genius was captured hundred lines. On waking he hurried to get by Lamb, in his description of him as ‘an those lines on paper, but, being interrupted Archangel, a little damaged’. by ‘a person on business from Porlock’ who kept him talking for an hour, he found Notes by David Timson on his return to the poem that ‘with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away.’ As a ‘fragment’ of the product of his fertile imagination, stimulated by opium, Kubla Khan is full of vivid exotic imagery and sensation in a series of impressions, rather than being a coherent narrative. It is a sketch for a poem, a work in progress, possibly the beginning of an Ode, that might be in praise of human invention and the richness of the imagination – Alph, the sacred river, representing the life-force, and the ‘caverns measureless to man’ being 6 Michael Sheen’s major theatrical roles include Henry V (Royal Shakespeare Company), Peer Gynt (directed by Ninagawa), Jimmy Porter in Look Back In Anger as well as appearances in Pinter’s Moonlight and The Homecoming.