Fifteen in Fifteen: Coleridge

2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge may not be the best poet I’ve ever read, but of all the poets I have read, he is certainly my favourite.

This may take a little explaining. In brief, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a Romantic poet writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He was a contemporary and close friend (at least initially) of William Wordsworth, and spent a number of years living with the Wordsworths in the Lake District. Unhappily married, he was in love with Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, Sara Hutchinson, who did not apparently return the sentiment. He was often troubled with ill-health, which only became worse once he became addicted to laudanum, the opium-based painkiller prescribed to cure this. He loved the countryside, whether the Lakes or the Quantocks in Somerset (where he lived initially with his wife), and in youth often walked ridiculous distances (40 miles in one day from Stowey to Bristol, and back again the next day, what’s more). He had an interest in politics, studied philosophy as a hobby, and authored articles, books and lectures. He was a poet throughout his life.

Much of what I know about Coleridge comes from reading Richard Holmes’ excellent two-volume biography about his life. It’s certainly true that once you’ve spent 925 pages getting to know a person, they will always hold a special place in your heart, and undoubtedly the context I got from Richard Holmes helps me to understand Coleridge’s work better. Yet this is not the reason I feel oddly as if this poet who died almost two hundred years before I was born is one of my much-loved friends. Read his poetry, and I defy you not to feel the same. His work comes across as personal and immediate – read his Letter to Sara Hutchinson, the original poem from which the more well-known Dejection: An Ode was then written. Read Frost at Midnight. Read This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, read Constancy to an Ideal Object, read An Ode To The Rain. Read, even, the famous preface to Kubla Khan. Coleridge was unafraid to put himself into his work in a way that seems honest and uncrafted, but which belies the effort and poetic skill which these poems must have taken.

These more personal poems are less well-known than Coleridge’s epic poetry – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel – and perhaps deservedly so, as these ballads show Coleridge working at the height of his poetic powers, despite the fact that two of them are unfinished. They are poems I admire Coleridge for. But it’s outside of these poems that I feel I really meet him. Whenever I read Coleridge, I will find something new – maybe an acute observation that makes me laugh, as in The Nightingale when he accuses the poet who first called the nightingale’s song “melancholy” of being miserable about something else, “and so, poor wretch! filled all things with himself, / And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale / Of his own sorrow”. Or maybe my own conflicted feelings about returning briefly to a place I have loved dearly (“The Transientness is poison in the wine!”). Coleridge lived and loved and thought and suffered, and the words he wrote to talk about it let me share my own experience of life with him.

I owe Coleridge a great deal – his poetry was some of the first I read when my interest revived several years after English Literature GCSE, and it was partly through Coleridge that I discovered that reading poetry could be quite good fun. I’m now less of a fan of Romantic poetry – I’ve never got on with Wordsworth, I have trouble seeing the point of Keats, and even with Coleridge I find the style and phrasing overblown in some places, impenetrable in others. His poetry might not be my favourite poetry, but nevertheless, he is still my favourite poet. When I’m travelling with Coleridge, I can never quite feel alone.

Incidentally, if anyone else wants The Rime of the Ancient Mariner thoroughly ruined for them, try reading Hunt Emerson’s cartoon version. Featuring an alcoholic Hermit and a rather cute albatross, I would highly recommend it to anyone tempted to take poetry too seriously.

Fifteen in Fifteen: A blogger’s defence of English literature

Part 1. Wendell Berry

The rules of the game are very simple. Give yourself fifteen minutes. In no order of preference, write down fifteen authors whose work has affected you and which will always stay with you. In my case, the sight of the resulting list makes me smile almost as much as my (two) well-stocked bookcases do. The omissions glare at me more than the occasional inclusions whose presence on the list may not be entirely merited – where is Jostein Gaarder? CS Lewis? Liza Picard and her wonderful social histories? Have Richard Holmes’ biographies in fact had more influence on my opinion of Coleridge than Coleridge’s work itself? On the opposite side of the equation, what influence has George Herbert really had on my life? But on the whole, a desert island library stocked with these authors would contain for me many pathways into being human. And with the recession tightening and the government busy reducing funding to everything that makes life worthwhile – as well as in order to do my bit for National Novel Writing Month - maybe now’s the time to celebrate those authors who have a special place in my life.

Wendell Berry feels like an odd place to start, because all I know of him is a single poem. It’s called “How To Be A Poet”, although to me it reads like a guide not only to how to be a poet, but how to be a Christian and, in many respects, how to be a person. It’s easily available online, and I’d advise everyone to take a look. I was introduced to it six months ago by a dear friend and fellow poet – he read it out to me over a cup of tea, and it was the first (and thus far only) time a poem has left me speechless. Once I’d recovered, we quoted back to one another all the best phrases from the list of instructions Berry gives, and in so doing repeated much of the poem.

As with all the best poems, I’m not sure I understood it all right away, nor do I think I understand it all now. Many of the lines contain a wealth of treasure, of possible meaning, which will need a lot of living with before I feel I’ve got to the bottom of them. “Accept what comes from silence” is a line I’ve spent the past month trying to live out – accepting what comes from the silence of prayer, of unemployment, the silence of waiting, the silence of no place you have to be and nobody needing you around. Other lines are more straightforward, although making a place to sit down can be remarkably time-consuming, and staying away from screens (or “anything which obscures the place it is in”) is great advice, but something I signally fail to do. Maybe I should pay attention, since most my poetry comes from my “three-dimensioned life”. Places I have seen, people I have met, feelings I have experienced first-hand – these all seem to translate more easily into verse than things I’ve only read about in books.

I don’t want to read any more of Wendell Berry’s work. “How To Be A Poet” is, for me, such an extraordinary poem that to know anything more about the author or his work would be to break the spell. And it’s a poem I fully intend to carry on living with, exploring what it might mean for there to be no unsacred places, or to depend upon more affection, knowledge and skill than I have, in the hopes that I might yet be able to “make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came”.

The other end of autumn

Autumn (n.) - conkers, Cambridge, drifts of leaves, foreign places. Homesickness and excitement, dark nights and bonfires. Here's a poem (untitled) from last year's autumn.

At the other end of autumn, with the pigeons flocking

on the roofs across the street from where I now live.

Pegging out the winter washing to the sound

of muffled bass-beats, or next-door’s kids yelling,

The smoke-smell of bonfires tinting the air,

like these cold November days – not letting go – lingering –

And, like I didn’t know before, I’m over again learning

That sorrow is a place I’ve got to live.

At the other end of autumn, with the summer still ringing

in my ears, like dead leaves still clinging

to the back-garden chestnut tree – the ones the wind couldn’t shake.

Fingers frozen, but I keep on pegging,

a little lower than the pigeons, learning now to pray,

Reminding myself that I am sworn to give

all that I can to this foreign place

and wishing that someone could tell that I’m dreaming

of the other end of autumn, where you still live.

On singing Faure

Three things a choir reunion weekend is almost guaranteed to provide: deja vu, sore throats, and music of a quality which makes not being able to talk for a day after entirely worthwhile. It is very difficult to find the words to express the feeling of knowing you're singing right at the top of your game, that you've awed your audience with every piece, or even the shiver down the spine when you hit that beautiful harmony with the sopranos in Rossini's Kyrie dead on. This poem doesn't even try. :)

Christ have mercy. Kyrie.
A little faster this time, and live in hope
That the sopranos don’t go sharp again,
That the altos actually find their note.
Pie Jesu. If only Fauré knew
how difficult it is to sing that D forte,
But he’s requiem-ing peacefully and hasn’t a clue.
Bar 44. Libera me.

Song

Writing about singing - or any other form of art - is always an interesting challenge, and one that's on my mind thanks to Elizabeth Kostova's "The Swan Thieves" (excellent novel) and the prospect of a weekend singing Faure's Requiem. This is from a couple of years ago - either my first or second effort at doing so. It can hardly be called understated, but I think it still manages to convey something of why I want to sing Elgar's "The Snow" just one more time.
Incidentally, the formatting was once a little more exciting, but Blogger does not appear to believe in either poetic off-setting or the tab key. And I'm not arguing.

Song

Pianissimo

We begin.

A long sustained note; a perfect third;

Each of us with our own concerns.

I’ve lost my keys; I’ve lost my way;

I’ve had my chance – I have no more –

I’m waiting on tomorrow’s world;

I’m ill; I’m hurt; I’m tired; I’m bored;

I’ve loved and now I’m torn apart…

These whispers of our unquiet hearts

I wonder what he’s going to say?

We are but notes the piano plays.

Crescendo – jump a major fifth –

And down the tone I never can hear –

And rise again –

And don’t go sharp –

And onwards, forwards, into the heart,

And now we let our voices rise

And let the music now hold sway

In harmony, it shows the way

To reach beyond – to touch the light

And now the song bursts from our throats

And now our hearts are opened wide

To hear the Word which sings of life

To hear the Song, beyond the notes

Oh onwards, onwards, draw us on

Into the ever-flowing flow

And let us fall, and let us grow,

One thought, one heart, one voice, one song.

Diminuendo –

soft soft, come down -

The ebb and flow of melody

Ends on a heartfelt sigh.

As the violin plays triplets

The final note is sung

Diminuendo – soft, my love,

We end where we begun.