Coleridge's Mighty Alphabet

By C. B. COX

MANY children associate a distinct colour with each letter of the alphabet. In my own case the habit persists, and for obvious reasons I still see' `g' as green and 'y' as yellow, 'b' as bright red and 'd' as dark blue. These associations can affect emotional reactions to words in a quite irrational manner. For me Norwich seems more attractive than York because I'm comparing rich blues and greys with a nondescript yellow. There's no doubt that such associations play a large part in our responses to poetry. In 'Kubla Khan,' a remarkable, ex- hilarating change of tempo occurs after the first thirty-six lines:

A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora.

I associate 'damsel' and 'dulcimer' with mys- terious dark blue colours, and in my mind this contributes to the unworldly glamour of the image. Professor Wilson Knight finds that for him the very names in the poem are so lettered as to suggest first and last things: `Xanadu, Kubla Khan, Alph, Abyssinian, Abora. "A" is emphatic; Xanadu, which starts the poem, is enclosed in letters that might well be called eschatological; while Kubla Khan himself sits alphabetically central with his alliterating "k"s.'

Most recent critics take no interest in idiosyn- cratic, subjective responses, but I suspect that they are more prejudiced by such emotional factors than they realise. Too often descriptions of poetry ignore the complexity of our responses to art, the multitude of impressions, confusing and mysterious, that compose an aesthetic ex- perience. I've emphasised colour associations, because these very much affect my own reactions, but the music of verse is even more influential. During the last forty years, little useful has been said about verbal music, and many writers vir- tually ignore its existence. The aim of much poetry—and this is certainly true of Coleridge's symbolic poems—is to use music, colour and other forms of association to resist rational identification with any set of clear ideas. When we try to describe the effect of poetry in the language of discursive reason, we take away much of its magic. Coleridge himself wrote: 'I could half suspect that what are deemed fine descriptions, produce their effects almost purely by a charm of words, with which and with whose combinations, we associate feelings indeed, but no distinct Images.'

Fascinated by the nature of the mind, he believed that many of its fundamental experi- ences are in their essential nature indistinct, and that a poem exists in some obscure fashion between mind and nature, a thought and a thing. When the Ancient Mariner's ship reaches the South Pole, the language produces effects beyond-- rational analysis:

And through the drifts the snowy clifts Did send a dismal sheen: Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken— The ice was all between.

This picture—like Blake's illustrations of Dante's

Inferno—arouses wonder and dread, but cannot be fitted into any simple moral or allegorical in- terpretation. Coleridge held that veneration for the Supreme Being is 'not to be profaned by the intrusion of clear notions.' The image of Christ as the Son of God, for example (quite apart from its theological meanings), holds its power over our minds only as long as we don't try to clarify its precise meaning. The images of romantic poetry offer a totally unique kind of experience, a sense of the mysterious and the Vast. For Coleridge, God created in the world a mighty alphabet to speak to men of love and beauty; the language of the poet imitates this divine act, and declares the oneness of man.

In his stimulating new book on Coleridge's poetry,* George Watson particularly stresses how a poet's language and forms derive from previous poetic usage. The associative field of words includes not only colours and music, but also a wealth of past literary recollections. Coleridge believed a poet must be a plagiarist; the Eighth Commandment, he said, Was not made for Bards. The romantic period was full of parodies and translations (Watson admires Cole- ridge's translation of Schiller's Wallenstein) and the romantic achievement depended as much as the Augustan on literary models. Today Horace Walpole's imitation Gothic at Strawberry Hill or the orientalism of Brighton Pavilion seem faintly absurd, but for romantic artists these innovations introduced exciting new fashions; so Coleridge adapts Gothic extravaganza to evoke the morbid horror of Geraldine's mys- terious sexual assault on Christabel, or re-creates the exotic splendours of Kubla Khan. It was the idea of new aesthetic forms that interested Coleridge, rather than mediaeval churches them- selves.

Watson claims to be publishing the first study of Coleridge's poetry as such to appear in this country. In his view we should not continue harping about Coleridge's wasted talents, but acknowledge his extraordinary achievements: `There is really nothing to be said for the view that philosophy replaced poetry in Coleridge's career'; much of the later verse 'is too good to be dismissed on any score.' An opening section explores Coleridge's genius and the importance in his work of literary models; the remainder of the book is given up to detailed examination of the poems. Watson stresses that vagueness, dim- ness, are essential elements in romantic poetry, and that the inconclusive, tentative quality of Coleridge's work precisely reflects the movements of his own mind. The besetting sin of recent criticism has been to try to solve the puzzles of his three symbolic poems. Students are taught that 'The Ancient Mariner' is a Christian poem, describing sin (the killing of the albatross), punishment (the becalming of the boat and the curse of Life-in-Death) and expiation (follow- ing the blessing of the water-snakes). But this kind of allegorical interpretation not only ignores many later parts of the poem, but also takes away the essential uncertainty and fear we ex-

• COLERIDGE THE Pont. By George Watson. (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 21s.) perience when the mariner is condemned for the trivial act of killing the albatross (presumably to make soup, William Empson has pointed out).

Watson's discussions of the literary antecedents of the poem offer a most original contribution to the controversy. In the 1798 Lyrical Ballads the poem appeared in mock mediaeval spelling, which Coleridge modernised in the 1800 edition. In Sibylline Leaves (1817) he introduced the 800-word prose gloss with its beautiful imita- tion of seventeenth-century Neoplatonic prose: 'In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth to- wards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter un- announced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.' In Watson's view the story's elaborate mediaeval and Catholic details and the extravagant Jacobean/Caroline quality of the prose gloss are a deliberate and brilliant device to make us feel the gap of centuries: 'The action, by a device scarcely to be paralleled in literature, is seen through a double historical lens.' This intensifies the historical, dramatic, 'as-if' element in the poem. Coleridge's aim is not to write a modern morality tale, but to impress us with the dramatic truth of the Mariner's response to the supernaturaL

Watson writes so sensibly about the obscurities of Coleridge's art that his treatment of 'Kubla Khan' comes as a shock. Excessively dogmatic, he sweeps aside the opinions of most other commentators. For him 'Kubla Khan' is about poetry. The first thirty-six lines are deliberately factual, detailed, matter-of-fact, a product of fancy, in contrast to the concluding imaginative vision, a creation of divine fury. Kubla Khan himself is 'something of a barbarous fop,' whose pleasure dome epitomises artificiality, and whose `miracle of rare device' has been 'despotically willed into existence as a tyrant's toy.' This is a long way from Wilson Knight's Kubla, a kind of 'God,' or Humphry House's 'Representative Man.' For me the associative qualities of the opening lines make it impossible to accept Watson's interpretation : In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

The rhythm to my ear asserts magnificence and glory; the exotic language is savoured in a mood of exhilaration.

Watson's treatment of 'Kubla Khan' is annoy- ingly brief, and this applies to the whole book. A short chapter on the last poems does little to substantiate the claims made for Coleridge's later achievements. Watson's book, only 142 pages in length, is a patchwork-quilt essay— perceptive on Coleridge's attitudes to poetry, ex- cellent on 'The Ancient Mariner,' indecisive on `Christabel,' wrong on 'Kubla Khan,' and too brief on everything. But he is surely right to stress that Coleridge's best poems are achieved, complete works. In conversation poems such as 'Frost at Midnight' or the Dejection Ode, as well as in the three symbolic poems, Coleridge satisfies his own concept of imaginative art. The poems hover between an exquisite response to the physical universe and a proper evocation of the greatest feelings of the. mind—its reaching out towards love and vision. He himself wrote that the poet 'must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent Desart, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an Enemy Upon the Leaves that strew the Forest—; the Touch of a Blind Man feeling the face of a darling Child.