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Filistovitch Alena
EN 3428 – Romanticism
Spring 2001
Dr. A. Sakellari

The issue of discrepancy between the beginnings and the endings in Coleridge’s major
poems.
Coleridge was adept at starting poems but had serious difficulties
with endings, so that all his poems can be seen as unfinished or as
inapproprietely finished.

J.L.Lowers, The Road to Xanadu: A Study of the

Ways of Imagination.

There is an on-going discussion concerning the endings of Coleridge’s poems and

more specifically whether they subtract something, even among the best of his poems,

from the overall poetic achievement. While it is true that in most of his poems there

seems to be something problematic about the closing, what really needs to be

discussed is whether this so-called incompleteness does not make the poems, at least

his most successful, more interesting. What is more, it needs to be examined whether

this unfinishedness does not conform better to the notion of Romantic Imagination

and the spontaneous outpouring of emotions. J. Beer claims that this incompleteness

makes the work, in essence, more accomplished, which embodies the vast potential of

a theme and the inability to its being fully fulfilled (Beer, 34). This essay will try to

examine the above issues discussing a variety of poems ranging from the

“Conversation Poems” to the “Visionary” ones.

This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, for example, has all the basic characteristics of

the Conversation Poems like the “tripartite rondo structure” where the initial

description of a specific place or incident is followed by a flight of the imagination

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which engulfs the cosmos so that it returns to the starting place having acquired new

insight into the “life of things” like the poet in Tintern Abbey. In this specific case the

confined poet, due to some accident, laments his inability to wander through his

beloved countryside with his friends – the Wordsworhs and Charles Lamb - and the

first lines are dominated by the poet’s bitterness, which makes him regard the bower,

where he has been confined, as a prison. Slowly, however, his imagination takes him

to his friends as he sees them in his mind walking through his familiar dell.

Interestingly enough, there is, in this first part, the ambivalent symbolism of the dell,

which, being dark, narrow, and deep, depicts the poet’s inner emotional state, which

has not been completely released from his emotional confinement (Abrams,118).

It is in the second part when he sees his friends emerging in “the wide wide

Heaven” that a kind of radiance is effected in his imagination that allows him to

forego his egoism and filled with friendship and a warm altruistic feeling he expresses

his joy for Charles Lamb, who has been pent up in London. Sharing his friend’s “deep

joy” as he is “gazing round / on the wide landscape ... till all doth seem / less gross”

he acquires a spiritual insight which makes him perceive the “Almighty Spirit”.

In the final part the liberating force of the imagination transforms the bower from a

prison to a soothing place. The poet has abandoned his egoism and his renewed

insight has taught him that “Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure” and that the

diversity of nature can “keep the heart” responsive to “Love and Beauty”. It is this

insight that makes him bless the homeward-bound rook, which is reminiscent of the

Mariner’s blessing of the slimy sea creatures in The Rhime of the Ancient Mariner,

since “no sound is dissonant which tells of Life”.

This poem, which is believed to be one of the most successful of the

Conversation Poems, seems to possess a unified structure where the three parts of the
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rondo are smoothly intertwined producing a balanced poetic whole. Some critics

could claim, of course, that there is a sort of didactism creeping in the last lines of the

poem that could have been left out. On the whole, however, the poem should be seen

as celebrating the power of imagination, which cannot be confined in physical

boundaries.

In poems like the The Eolian Harp, the presence of the reproving Sarah, who

draws the poet’s imaginative flight to the ground, can be seen as making the poem

seem inappropriately finished. It is true that the Eolian harp on the window casement

which produces “such a soft witchery of sound” with melodies “hovering on untamed

wing”, makes his imagination soar to such heights that he communes with the

universal spirit of the One Life that permeates everything “within us and abroad”.

What is more, his “flitting phantasies … uncalled and undetained” make his

imagination fly precariously beyond Christianity to a visionary dimension where “all

of animated nature” can be seen as “organic Harps diversely framed”. Seen in this

light, Sara’s reproof can be considered as undercutting the poem’s strength making the

poem resort to a sort of compromise. On the other hand, Sarah’s presence could be

considered as another aspect of Coleridge’s personality related to his more down-to-

earth Christian morality that is in stark contrast to metaphysical wanderings of his

imaginative mind (Hill, 163). Seen from such a perspective, the poem can be seen as

depicting Coleridge’s personality divided in opposing strings of thought that needs the

psychological presence of Sara to check the extremity of his thoughts.

Similar comments have been made for one of Coleridge’s most famous poems,

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where the successful beginning with the Mariner’s

“glittering eye” transfixing the wedding guest as well as the reader, and his

subsequent spellbinding narration of his experience with the supernatural elements is

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said to have been destroyed by the moralistic stanzas. On the one hand, it is true that

the inclusion of these stanzas guides the reader towards a certain reading that the poet

thinks appropriate. This issue becomes more problematic from the fact that Coleridge

himself has admitted the intrusion of the moral didactism in the poem. Replying to

criticisms that there was no moral in the poem he claimed that “in [his] own

judgement the poem had too much”. He even went on to say that its “chief fault …

was the intrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader … in a work of such

pure imagination” (Hill, 203). So, the question that arises from this is why Coleridge

did not alter or even remove the stanzas in the subsequent revisions of the poem. One

possible answer is that the stanzas can be seen as an integral part of the Mariner’s

dramatic monologue and not as the words of the poet himself since the Mariner’s

moral conforms to Coleridge’s belief in the One-Life notion. Nevertheless, despite the

fact that these stanzas tend to point towards this specific reading of the poem, they

have not prevented critics from proposing alternative readings of the poem like the

one that sees the Mariner as Coleridge’s guise symbolising his imaginative insight

into life and his ability to express it in captivating verse.

Probably the one poem that can be called indisputably unfinished is Christabel

since Coleridge never finished it. But even in this case what needs to be examined is

whether the poem is effective or not. The poem employs some of the typical elements

found in Gothic literature in an effective way that manages to build up the tension as

the poem goes on. There is the castle, the wandering lady at midnight looking for the

betrothed knight under a full moon which “yet … looks both small and dull”, and

most of all the enigmatic presence of Geraldine, the suggestive incidents of her

evilness like her reluctance to pray and mainly her snake eyes and the mystery

concerning her bosom. All this, which culminates in putting Christabel under her
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spell, is counteracted at the end of the second part with the commentary on the

estrangement between Sir Lioline and Christabel and of course, as mentioned above,

there is the issue of the poem being unfinished.

However, despite this failing of Coleridge’s to finish the poem, which could be

attributed to his inability or perhaps fear of confronting the images that his

imagination created under the influence of opium, the poem could be characterised as

effective. Geraldine’s presence has raised many discussions over the interpretation of

her inscrutable presence. She has been interpreted as a demon lover, a sort of vampire

or even an erring mortal expiating a past sin. It is no coincidence, for example, that

Shelley is said to have suffered a nightmare of a woman with eyes on her breast after

Byron had read the poem to him( Abrams, 298).

Finally, even the poem that has been considered as the culmination of Coleridge’s

poetic achievement, Kubla Khan, is incomplete. According to Coleridge himself the

poem is only a fragment of a vision he had after having taken opium. Regardless of

the disputable issue whether the poet actually composed the poem in a state of sleep

or reverie, it is the unfinishedness or, better, the vagueness that makes the poem great

and because of this ambiguity there have been an enormous amount of interpretations.

It has been interpreted, for example, as a poem about the creative process where the

subconscious “river” of the imagination surges on the surface of consciousness only

to be lost again in the “sea” of the subconsciousness (Lowes, 86). In this way it could

be said that the poet had a flash of imaginative insight about Kubla Khan’s failed

attempt to construct a sort of earthly paradise and, in the second part, there is his futile

attempt to communicate the essence of a vision he had about an Abyssinian maid. In

other words, the poet has “drunk the milk of Paradise” but it is impossible to convey

the essence of his taste; the reader has to guess or to feel what the taste was. There
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have even been Freudian interpretations like Robert Graves’ who thought that the

poem is Coleridge’s unconscious longing “to shun the mazy complications of life by

retreating to a bower of poetry, solitude and opium” where he would be able to evade

the reproofs of his wife and the gloomy prophecies of addiction uttered by the

“ancestral voices” of Lamb and Charles Lloyd (Hill, 32). All the interpretations,

however, cannot explain every facet of the poem, which, in effect, defies any attempt

at rational analysis. Kublan Khan is the kind of poem that invites the reader to be

carried away by its imaginative, poetic force.

In conclusion, it could be said that, firstly, this incompleteness observed in

Coleridge’s poems does not diminish the effect they have on the reader and, secondly,

it makes them even more interesting in certain ways. There are cases where due to the

unfinishedness opposing tensions concerning Coleridge and his inner life are revealed

or made prominent making us aware of the wider processes that are involved in the

making of poetry and any artistic pursuit in general. His inability to finish poems like

Christabel shows us the fascination we feel in the presence of supernatural, abnormal

phenomena and, of course, the fear or awe which prevents us from delving into these

states of mind in depth. Finally, if the poems are seen from a philosophical point of

view, since Coleridge himself was one of the major philosophers of his time, they

point to the fact that there can never be a last word in the world of ideas.
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Works Cited

Abrams M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp. New York: Oxford Univesity Press, 1971.

Beer, John. Coleridge the Visionary. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Coleridge, S. T. Selected Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Hill, J. S. A Coleridge Companion. London: Macmillan Press, 1983.

Lowes, J.L. The Road to Xandu: A Study in the Ways of Imagination. Boston:

Routledge, 1964.