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New Moons, Old Ballads, and Prophetic Dialogues in Coleridge's
"Dejection: An Ode" Author(s): R. A. Benthall Source: Studies in
Romanticism, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 591-614Published
by: Boston UniversityStable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/25601360Accessed: 02-03-2015 19:03
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R. A. BENTHALL
New Moons, Old Ballads,
and Prophetic Dialogues in Coleridge's "Dejection:
An Ode"
Out there came
A moon made like a face with certain spots Multiform, manifold,
and menacing: Then a wind rose behind me.
?Browning, An Epistle Containing the
Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician
i. "The vivid, florid, turgid sky"
Coleridge's
"dejection: an ode is a poem about uncontainable
forces, and the attempt to write about them. The ode begins with
an
epigraph, quoted from "The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens," where a
sailor refers to "The new Moon / With the old Moon in her arms" as
an omen of a "deadly storm" approaching. In "Dejection," another
new moon has
appeared, and the epigraph serves to reiterate its promise that
another storm
is on the way. As the storm breaks at the end of the ode,
however, the
fulfillment of the speaker's prediction is itself unpredictable.
A torrent of wind blowing through an olian harp in the window
becomes a "Mad Lutanist" as it resonates with "all tragic sounds"
in the mind of the speaker, who struggles to distinguish and
interpret what the wind says. The voice that prophesies the storm
in the epigraph to "Dejection" therefore consti tutes an authority
that Coleridge both emulates and complicates in the course of the
poem.
In his application of Bhaktinian dialogism to Wordsworth's
poems, Don
Bialostosky has analyzed the tensions in Wordsworth's poems
between what the narrator reveals about the characters he
describes, and what the
narrator's description reveals about himself. Similar tensions
exist in many of Coleridge's poems, including "Dejection," although
the dramatic and
SiR, 37 (Winter 1998)
591
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592 R. A. BENTHALL
narrative elements are not as clearly delineated. In 1993, Mark
Jones argued in a review of Bialostosky's Wordsworth, dialogics,
and the practice of criticism
(1992), that "Bakhtin's own 'dialogics' emphasizes the
promiscuity of
competing voices within a single utterance"1 saying that poems
may be
dialogical even in the absence of clearly defined Wordsworthian
characters or narrators. In this particular extension of Bhaktin's
theories, what begins as a private or lyrical expression may end up
taking on more ironic or
impersonal aspects as the poet distances himself from his own
utterance,
gaining insight into the forces that produced both his thoughts
and his
poetry at a given point, or points, in time. Revisions can thus
become
moments of dialogue with the poet's "second self," moments which
may resurface in the completed poem.
In "Dejection," Coleridge leaves traces of just such a
revisionary dia
logue. While Wordsworth's dramatic dialogues are often so subtly
con
ceived that readers have mistaken, and still mistake, Wordsworth
himself for his narrators, Coleridge's conversation poems are at
once simplified and
complicated by what Edward Said has called his "addiction to
quotation."2 As A. C. Goodson points out in Verbal Imagination:
Coleridge and the Lan
guage of Modern Criticism (1988), Coleridge typically begins his
conversation
poems by responding not to "natural impulse," but to words:
After "Frost at Midnight," the conversation poems do in fact
typically begin from words, from a line of Milton or a poem of
Wordsworth's or an odd bit of "Sir Patrick Spence." For the word
was the agent of
thinking as sensation could not be, leading to a discourse of
the self in its integral relations, and not only in relation to
objects seen,
or
unseen.3
Whereas Wordsworth's "poetics of speech" responds to and
attempts to
reproduce spoken words, Coleridge's poems often take written
texts as
their points of departure, either through quotation or through
epigraphs, as in "The Nightingale," "Rime of the Ancient Mariner,"
and "Dejec tion." Coleridge's dramatic account of how "Kubla Khan"
originated in
a
single written sentence in Purchas's Pilgrimage testifies to
this habit of
building poems based explicitly on other writing, and explains
his frequent use of strategic quotation. While these allusions
openly call attention to
intertextual relations, the dialogues that emerge may be
complicated by the
fact that Coleridge as narrator often objectifies himself as a
character by dramatizing his mind's response to written words,
which places the speaker
1. Mark Jones, "Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge,
and Literary Posses
sion," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 92 (1993): 558.
2. Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic
Books, 1975) 21.
3. A. C. Goodson, Verbal Imagination: Coleridge and the Language
of Modern Criticism (New York: Oxford UP, 1988) 138.
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COLERIDGE'S "DEJECTION: AN ODE" 593
in dialogue not only with himself, but with himself reading
another text, which then enters the dialogue as a third voice.
Jack Stillinger has recently argued in Coleridge and Textual
Instability (1995) that in "Dejection," Coleridge "acted the roles
of both Eliot and
Pound, first creating and then excavating from the mass the much
trimmer
'essential' poem that (in the 1950s way of thinking) one always
knew was
there."4 While Coleridge played this dual poetic role with many
of his other poems as well, he also performed excavations on texts
that were not
his own. In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," for example,
Coleridge omits a sentence from the paragraph of Thomas Burnette's
text quoted in
the epigraph. One other such instance involves the epigraph to
"Dejec tion," which differs substantially from the text of "Sir
Patrick Spens" that
Coleridge would have been most likely to quote, further
complicating the
relationship between the new moon, the impending storm, and the
poem
that attempts to construct a metaphor through their
conjunction.
2. Ballads and Bards
The epigraph to "Dejection: An Ode" refers the reader to the
14th century Scottish ballad, where the shipmate who has seen a
lunar ill-omen warns Sir Patrick Spens not to set sail on the
following morning:
Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon,
With the old Moon in her arms; And I fear, I fear, my Master
dear! We shall have a deadly storm.
?Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence5
Most readers have assumed that Coleridge's epigraph, quoted
above, comes
directly from Bishop Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English
Poetry, first published in 1765.6 His epigraph, however, would seem
to conflate two of Percy's quatrains:
Mak haste, mak haste my mirry men all,
Our guid schip sails the morne, O say na sae, my master
deir,
For I fear a deadlie storme.
4. Jack Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability: The
Multiple Versions of the Major Poems
(New York: Oxford UP, 1994) 97-98. 5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Coleridge: Poetical Works, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1912). 6. That Coleridge owned a copy of the Reliques
at least as early as 1800 is verified by a
letter sent from Charles Lamb to Coleridge, in which Lamb
mentions the fact that he is
enclosing a copy of "Percy's Ancient Poetry," Edwin W. Marrs,
Jr., ed. The Letters of Charles and Mary Ann Lamb, 3 vols. (Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1975) 1: 217.
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594 R. A. BENTHALL
Late late yestreen I saw the new moone
Wi' the auld moone in her arme; And I feir, I feir, my deir
master,
That we will cum to harme.
(21-29)7
In Coleridge's epigraph, the line "That we will cum to harme"
has been
replaced by the line about the storm, which has been changed
from "For I fear a deadlie storme" to "We shall have a deadly
storm." This apparent conflation may or may not have occurred
intentionally, if indeed Percy is
Coleridge's only source. Few readers, however, have asked if
Percy's was
the only text of the ballad that Coleridge knew. The opening
lines of Coleridge's new Ode dramatically question the
source of the wisdom supposedly held in the old ballad:
well! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made
The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence, This night, so
tranquil now, will not go hence
Unrous'd by winds, that ply a busier trade Than those which
mould yon clouds in lazy flakes, Or the dull sobbing draft, that
moans and rakes
Upon the strings of this dorian lute Which better far were
mute.
For lo! the New-moon, winter-bright! And overspread with
phantom-light, (With swimming phantom-light o'erspread
But rimm'd and circled by a silver thread) I see the old Moon in
her lap foretelling
The coming on of rain and squally blast. And oh! that even now
the gust were swelling,
And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast! Those sounds
which oft have raised me, whilst they awed,
And sent my soul abroad,
Might now their wonted impulse give, Might startle this dull
pain, and make it move and live!
(1-20)
These lines echo and invoke the epigraph in what might be either
a
superstitious appeal to the Bard's wisdom or a parodic gesture
of skepticism. This initial emphasis on the epigraph has often been
read as evidence of
Coleridge's morbidity, as he reads this particular new moon as
an ill-omen
7. Thomas Percy, ed., Reliques of Ancient English Poetry:
Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads,
Songs, and other Pieces of our earlier Poets (Chiefly of the
Lyric kind.) Together with some few of later Date, 2 vols. (London:
J. Dodsley, 1765) 1: 72-73.
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COLERIDGE'S "DEJECTION: AN ODE" 595
through the frame of the remembered epigraph. Given the
circumstances in which the poem was written and its
autobiographical cast, many have also assumed that the poem is
primarily confessional, voicing the philo sophical depression into
which Coleridge had fallen on one April evening.8 Through such a
reading, "Dejection" becomes an example of lyrical self-diagnosis,
instigated by failed personal relationships, which gives way to
philosophical rumination and the composition of a poem.9
The bard whose wisdom made the grand old ballad, however, is
anony mous. To what extent is the notion of the unknown bard as a
fount of wisdom integral to the speaker's surmise, serious
or skeptical, of the ballad's
prophetic power? The speaker's eventual conviction of the single
ballad eer's trustworthiness, contrasted with the ambiguous
attitudes expressed in
"Dejection's" opening lines, may suggest that the voice speaking
in the ode is someone other than that of a plainly confessional
Coleridge. Evi dence that the text of the epigraph has been
tampered with, so as to raise doubts about the origin of the
epigraph and identity or integrity of the
bard, would complicate the usual assertion that the speaker is
Coleridge, and might also make the epigraph part of a larger
problem about the origin of poetic voices which the poem
confronts.
In The Road to Xanadu (1927), John Livingston Lowes faintly
suggests that there may be a problem with the text of the epigraph,
saying that it is "a stanza recalled from Percy's version of 'the
grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence.'"10 He acknowledges the
possibility that Coleridge may also have been influenced by other
ballad collections, saying that "it is
highly probable . . . that he knew other ballad-collections
besides the
8. The Dove Cottage MS, Coleridge's holograph, is dated "April
4, 1802.?Sunday
Evening." The development of "Dejection: An Ode" is presented by
Stephen M. Parrish in
Coleridge's "Dejection": The Earliest Manuscripts and the
Earliest Printings (1988). Unless other wise noted, all quotations
from "Dejection: An Ode" are taken from the 1817 version in
Parrish. All other quotations of Coleridge's poetry are taken
from E. H. Coleridge, Coleridge: Poetical Works (1912). The
earliest (and longest) version of the poem, consisting of 339
lines, is "A Letter to -," the deleted name thought by most
scholars to be that of Sara
Hutchinson. It exists in two manuscripts, which Stephen M.
Parrish denotes as the Cornell MS and the Dove Cottage MS. The
former, which Parrish believes to be the slightly older
copy, is an undated transcription made by Mary Hutchinson from a
letter Coleridge sent to
her sister Sara. Coleridge published neither of these versions.
In the Dove Cottage MS, the
opening lines refer familiarly to "the grand old Ballad of Sir
Patrick Spence," whereas the
Cornell MS calls it the "the dear old Ballad," but no epigraph
appears in either manuscript. 9. "Dejection: An Ode" first appeared
in the Morning Post on October 4, 1802, the day
of Wordsworth's wedding to Mary Hutchinson, and consists of 139
lines. The 200 lines
omitted were mosdy expressions of Coleridge's love for Sara
Hutchinson, accentuated by lamentations over his unhappy marriage
to Sara Flicker. This shorter form of the ode has
survived with some revisions, notably in the seven lines added
to the end of Stanza vi. This
version, the one usually anthologized, was published in
Coleridge's Sibylline Leaves (1817). 10. John Livingston Lowes, The
Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination
(Cambridge: Riverside P, 1927) 332.
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596 R. A. BENTHALL
Reliques. The number in print by 1797 was fairly large, and
Coleridge was an omnivorous reader . . ." (332). He declines to
pursue this road, how
ever, saying that "the Reliques we know that he knew, and for
our purpose we need go no farther" (332).
George Dekker, however, notes in Coleridge and the Literature of
Sensibility (1978) that the epigraph does not correspond directly
to Percy's text,
asserting that Coleridge simply "conflated" two stanzas from
Percy.11 Simi
larly, Marshall Suther, in Coleridge's Dark Night (i960), says
that "it would
appear that . . . Coleridge doctored the ballad as he found it
in Percy's Reliques/' and that it is "more likely that Coleridge
made the transposition unconsciously in recalling the ballad from
memory than that he made it
deliberately, with the Percy version in front of him." He
continues:
. . . but the alteration is none the less significant in the
indication it
gives of the importance [Coleridge] attached to the
juxtaposition of the two images. There is little doubt that
Coleridge was using Percy's version, since no other known version
available at the time corre
sponds at all closely with the stanza as Coleridge presents
it.12
Suther thus reasons that the juxtaposition of lines in the
"doctored"
epigraph may reveal attitudes in the poem concerning the ominous
rela
tionship between these two images of the moon and the storm.
His speculation, however, that the epigraph probably derived
from Percy alone, based on the supposition that "no other known
version available at
the time corresponds at all closely with the stanza as Coleridge
presents it," is misleading. In The English and Scottish Popular
Ballads (1882), which Suther cites, Francis J. Child lists nine
versions of "The Ballad of Sir Patrick
Spence," all of which contain some form of the lines used in the
epigraph to "Dejection." Out of these nine, five refer to the
"deadly storm" in the
fourth line of the stanza containing the "new moon." The version
in the
Harris MS at Harvard is typical:
For I saw the new mune late yestreen, Wi the auld mune in her
arms;
An ever an alake, my father dear,
It's a token o diedly storms.13
Coleridge, in placing the storm in line four of his epigraph,
actually comes
closer to this popular version of "Sir Patrick Spence," which
"Miss Harris's
ii. George Dekker, Coleridge and the Literature of Sensibility
(London: Vision P, 1978) 245. 12. Marshall Suther, The Dark Night
of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Columbia
UP, i960) 120.
13. Francis James Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular
Ballads, 5 vols. (New York:
Dover, 1965) 2: 29.
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COLERIDGE'S "DEJECTION: AN ODE" 597
MS" reproduces, according to Child, "from the singing of her
mother"
(28). That this version could have been popular in Coleridge's
time is
suggested by MacEdward Leach in The Ballad Book, who says that
this version of "Sir Patrick Spence" contained in the Harris MS was
"traditional in Scotland in the 18th century."14
The earliest written version of Coleridge's epigraph occurs in a
letter he wrote to William Sotheby on July 19, 1802. In
transcribing lines from his
"poem written during that dejection to Wordsworth," Coleridge
quotes from "Sir Patrick Spence:"
?as I have nothing better to fill the blank space of this Sheet
with, I will transcribe the introduction of that Poem to you, that
being of a sufficiently general nature to be interesting to
you.?The first lines allude to a stanza in the Ballad of Sir
Patrick Spence?"Late, late
Yestreen, I saw the new Moon With the old Moon in her arms; and
I fear, I fear, my master Dear, There will be a deadly
Storm."?15
Coleridge may be consciously substituting the line containing
"storm" for the fourth line in Percy's version, which ends with
"harme." While the fourth line of the stanza here begins with
"There will be," instead of "We shall have" which appears in all
published versions, it should be noted that the same third person
is also used in one of the popular forms recorded by Child: "It's a
token maister, or ye were born / It will be a deadly storm"
(24). These speculations about the Child MS versions of "Sir
Patrick Spens" serve as a reminder of the protean nature of ballads
as they evolve over
time, and of the anonymous and composite authority of the many
"bards"
who make and remake each poem. Coleridge may have
encountered
numerous versions of the ballad, both in oral and written form,
and his
epigraph may be a synthesis not merely of two stanzas from
Percy, but a conflation of other versions of "Sir Patrick Spens" as
well.
Who then does the speaker refer to in the opening lines as "the
Bard who made / The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens?" The
unsettled nature of the quoted text may serve to aggravate the
speaker's anxiety, as
he attempts to shore up the weakness of his own genius by
invoking the words of another poet, who turns out to be anonymous
and whose text,
it seems, has been altered. If considering these different
English versions of the ballad helps to clarify the dramatic
situation in "Dejection," it may be useful to consider still
another version?a translation?of "Sir Patrick
Spens" which Coleridge had almost certainly read and which I
have not
yet seen discussed.
14. MacEdward Leach, ed., The Ballad Book (New York: A. S.
Barnes and Company, 1955) 179.
15. Earl Leslie Griggs, ed., Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966) 2: 815.
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598 R. A. BENTHALL
Coleridge had written to Sotheby for the first time on July 13,
1802,
nearly one week before the letter quoted above. He discusses
Salomon Gessner's Der Erste Schiffer, which he was beginning to
translate, and he
complains that Gessner's personifications of JEolus and Cupid
are ill
adapted to his story. Coleridge's complaints lead him into a
comparison of
English and German poetry; "I read a great deal of German," he
confesses, "but I do dearly dearly dearly love my own Countrymen of
old times, and those of my contemporaries who write in their
Spirit" (Griggs 2: 811). That this preference should have been
stated one week before the epigraph first appeared in writing may
be significant. Coleridge stopped in Hamburg, Germany on his way to
Gottingen in the fall of 1798. On September 28, he purchased
Herder's Volkslieder (1778), which contained poems not only of
German origin but also German translations of English, Scottish,
and
Spanish poems. Herder had translated a number of English and
Scottish
pieces directly from the second edition of Percy's Reliques
(1767), one of which was "Sir Patrick Spence," which he entitled
"Der Schiffer." His translation follows Percy very closely, as the
opening lines show:
The king sits in Dumferling toune,
Drinking the blude-reid wine: O quhar will I get guid
sailor,
To sail this schip of mine ?
(1-4)
Der Konig sitz in DumferlingschloB Er trinkt blutroten Wein
?0 wo treff ich ein'n Segler an
Dies Schiffzu segeln mein ?
(1-4)16
When he translates those forboding stanzas involving the new
moon and
the storm, however, Herder makes a noticeable change:
Mak haste, mak haste my mirry men all,
Our guid schip sails the morne, O say na sae, my master
deir,
For I fear a deadlie storme.
Late late yestreen I saw the new moone
Wi' the auld moone in her arme; And I feir, I feir, my deir
master,
That we will cum to harme.
(21-29)
16. Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, 8 vols. (Frankfurt am Main:
Deutscher Klassiker
Verlag, 1990) 3: 110-11.
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COLERIDGE'S "DEJECTION: AN ODE" 599
Macht fort, macht fort, mein' wackre Leut
Unser gut Schiff segelt morgen. ?0 sprecht nicht so, mein lieber
Herr, Da sind wir sehr in Sorgen.
Gestern Abend sah ich den neuen Mond, Ein Hof war urn ihn
her.
Ich fiircht', ich furcht, mein lieber Herr, Ein Sturm uns wartet
schwer.?
(21-29)
In Herder's version, the fourth line of the "neuen Mond" stanza
now
includes "Ein Sturm uns wartet schwer," which can be translated
literally as "A storm awaits us grave." The line might also be
translated as "We
shall have a deadly storm," the form used in Coleridge's
epigraph. Herder may have had several reasons for inverting the
lines. By including
the new moon and the storm in one stanza, he increases the
dramatic tension
between the portent and its consummation, a motive which may
have
impelled some of the Scottish variants discussed in Child.
Suther, as we have
seen, attributes such a motive to Coleridge's "doctoring" of the
ballad. In
addition, Herder may have been concerned with rhyme. His version
alters two imperfect rhymes in Percy's version, one being in the
last stanza:
Have owre, have owre to Aberdour,
It's fiftie fadom deip: And thair lies guid Sir Patrick
Spence,
Wi' the Scots lords at his feit.
(41-44)
Dort liber, hinuber nach Aberdour!
Tief funfzig Fad'n im Meer, Da leigt der gute Sir Patrik
Spence,
Sein' Edlen um ihn her.
(41-44)
According to William Harmon, deficient assonance rhymes such as
"feit"
and "deip" occur more often in ballads than in other verse
forms.17 In this
case, however, the imperfect rhyme also creates a
cross-alliterative pattern between the dentals and labials d-p and
f-t. The consonants are reversed
in much same way that the ranks of Sir Patrick and the Scots
nobles are
visually inverted, a nuance which the translation loses. As
Herder perfects the rhyme, he also divests the final visual image
of its irony by describing the Scots lords as lying merely
scattered around Sir Patrick; the English
17- William Harmon, "Rhyme in English Verse," Studies in
Philology 84 (1987): 375.
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-
600 R. A. BENTHALL
ballad casts down the "Scots nobles," who "wer richt laith / To
weet their cork-heild schoone," enthroning "guid Sir Patrick Spence
/ Wi' the Scots lords at his feit."
Herder's translation of the stanza containing the new moon has a
similar
divesting effect, since it cleans up imperfect rhymes while
altering the stanza's range of nuances. The German word "Sturm" is
after all not much
easier to rhyme than the English "Storm," a problem which Herder
circumvents by discretely removing the word from the end of the
line.
Herder's emendation, however, fails to capture the tonal
implications of
the English version, where the word "storm," which suggests an
uncon
tainable force, is itself not contained by the rhyme scheme.
Coleridge may also have been bothered by the fact that Herder's
translation alters "the new moone / Wi' the auld moone in her arme"
to "Ein Hof war um ihn
her," or "A courtyard was round about it," an idiomatic German
expres
sion for saying that the moon is encircled by a halo or corona.
Lost are
the complex associations involved in being "held" in the arms of
a feminine
personification, which may suggest anything from an embrace to a
death
grip. That Coleridge was particularly attracted by this
personification is
suggested by the description of the moon in the opening lines of
"Dejec tion," where he refers to "the new moon with the old moon in
her lap." In years immediately following the writing of
"Dejection," Coleridge also uses this metaphor at least twice in
notebook entries.18
The epigraph to "Dejection" may then have been in part
Coleridge's response to Herder's alterations of the stanzas
involving the new moon,
which seem to mute certain nuances in the English version in
deference
to perfect rhyme. The imperfect rhyme in Coleridge's epigraph is
striking when one considers that he might have used the consonance
rhyme
"storms" and "arms," as in the Harris MS quoted earlier.
Coleridge not
only restores "storm" to its acoustically troubling position at
the end of the
line, but seems to go out of his way to render an already
imperfect rhyme even more so by the disjunction of plural "arms"
and the singular "storm."
It would be easy enough to say that Coleridge simply read both
versions of "Sir Patrick Spence" (and possibly heard others) and
then, as Lowes says, conflated them in "recalling" the stanza. This
in fact could be what
happened initially. Even so, Coleridge seems at one point
consciously to
have preferred his version to Percy's, which is suggested by the
form of the epigraph he used in a letter to Sir George and Lady
Beaumont on Aug. 13, 1803, where he transcribed part of
"Dejection:"
18. Kathleen Coburn, ed., The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, 3 vols. (New York:
Foundation, 1957) #2009, #2610. Coburn's edition gives no page
numbers, listing entries
by letter number instead.
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COLERIDGE'S "DEJECTION: AN ODE" 601
'Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon
'With the old Moon in her Arm, 'And I fear, I fear, my dear
Master,
'We shall have a deadly Storm ['] ?Ballad of Sir Patrick
Spence
(Griggs 2: 970)
In the original epigraph, the sailor speaks of the "new Moon /
With the old Moon in her arms" and admonishes his "Master dear."
Here, Coleridge reverts to the singular "arme" and to the "deir
master" of Percy's Reliques, the accent over the e in "Master"
giving particularly strong evidence that
Coleridge may have recalled or recently reread the version of
"Sir Patrick
Spence" found in Percy, and revised some of the epigraph
accordingly. In
spite of this, he retains "Storm" in the fourth line where
Herder and others had placed it, for
reasons which become more apparent as the poem
progresses.
3. New Moons
In his book But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in
English Printed Verse (1988), John Lennard discusses the
relationship between the epigraph and the new moon in "Dejection,"
saying that Coleridge's epigraph reflects
"profoundly controlled shaping."19 In describing the two stanzas
in Percy's version of "Sir Patrick Spens," he says that "the
relation of the phenomenal moon to the impending storm is implicit
..." and he follows Dekker in
construing Coleridge's "conflation" as a direct allusion to
Percy's Reliques:
By fusing the last lines of the quatrains into "We shall have a
deadly storm," Coleridge made [this relationship] explicit, and
made the
epigraph apply more compactly and cogently to his own opening
lines.
(131)
If, as Lennard says, Coleridge's epigraph does in fact show
evidence of
"profoundly controlled shaping," one might ask why Coleridge
took such
pains to present the epigraph just so, given the other ballads
besides Percy from which he may have drawn. Considering the
epigraph's relation to the opening lines of the poem may shed light
on the matter. At least one effect of the quotation is that of
evoking a visual image of the new moon,
which Coleridge may have seen shortly before writing the initial
draft of
"Dejection." Dorothy Wordsworth's journal entry for Friday,
March 8, describes the following spectacle:
19- John Lennard, But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses
in English Printed Verse
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1991) 28 m.
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602 R. A. BENTHALL
On Friday evening the moon hung over the northern side of
the
highest point of Silver How, like a gold ring snapped in two,
and shaven off at the ends, it was so narrow. Within this ring lay
the circle of the round moon, as distinctly to be seen as ever the
enlightened moon is. William had observed the same appearance at
Keswick,
perhaps at the very same moment, hanging over the Newland Fells.
Sent off a letter to Mary H., also to Coleridge and Sara
. . .20
Since Coleridge was also at Keswick at the time, there is a good
chance that he too saw this moon. Lowes makes much of Dorothy's
account,
suggesting that she could not have failed to mention such a
strange vision in the letter she sent to Coleridge. He goes on to
argue that her letters,
along with her visits, probably contributed to the conversation
between
Coleridge and Wordsworth which "Dejection: An Ode" in part recon
structs.
This conjecture may be even better founded than Lowes
claimed.
Dorothy recorded on October i, 1798, that she "bought Percy's
ancient
poetry, 14 marks" (1: 31). Thus, when on May 4, 1802, she
describes another new moon as "the crescent moon with the 'auld
moon in her
arms,'" she may be quoting Percy, and not Coleridge, as Lowes
thinks. It
is true that two weeks earlier, on April 21, Coleridge had
"repeated the verses he wrote to Sara" (1: 136) to Dorothy,
probably from the Dove
Cottage MS, where mention of the "the grand old ballad" is made
in the
opening lines. However, as I have already noted, this version
had no
epigraph. If Coleridge had added the epigraph by this point,
Dorothy's archaic spelling of "auld" is still probably not derived
from Coleridge, since he always modernized it in his quotations.
Dorothy may have discussed "Sir Patrick Spence" with Coleridge and
may therefore have contributed to his decision to include the
epigraph.
Lennard points out that Dorothy's description of the new moon
on
March 8 corresponds closely with Coleridge's description in
lines 8?14 of
"Dejection:"
For lo! the New-moon winter-bright! And overspread with phantom
light (With swimming phantom light o'erspread
But rimmed and circled by a sliver thread) I see the old Moon in
her lap, foretelling
The coming-on of rain and squally blast.
(9-H)
20. Ernest de Selincourt, ed., Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, 2
vols. (New York: MacMil
lan, 1941) 1: 121.
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COLERIDGE'S "DEJECTION: AN ODE" 603
Both passages seem to describe not merely a new crescent moon
with the
old moon still visible, which is rare enough. Dorothy's
description is
ambiguous, and may suggest two crescents, "like a gold ring
snapped in two and shaven off at the ends," which enclose the old
moon in lunulae, or "little moons," the name Erasmus used for
"parentheses," according to
Lennard (131-33). Coleridge has not only described this
appearance, but illustrated it as well, enclosing the "swimming
phantom light" of the old
moon in graphic lunulae. The astronomical cause of this "doubled
moon" has baffled scientists at
least since the Renaissance, and was still being discussed at
the end of the
eighteenth century. Astronomers speculated on the cause of this
"silver thread" around the new moon as early as Galileo, who wrote
in The Starry
Messenger:
When the moon is not far from the sun, just before or after the
new
moon, its globe offers itself to view not only on the side where
it is adorned with shining horns, but a certain faint light is also
seen to
mark out the periphery of the dark part which faces away from
the
sun, separating the darker background of the aether. Now, if
we
examine the matter more closely, we shall see that not only does
the extreme limb of the shaded side glow with this uncertain light,
but the entire face of the moon (including the side which does not
receive the glare of the sun) is whitened by a not inconsiderable
gleam.
. . .
This remarkable gleam has afforded no small perplexity to the
phi losophers.21
Galileo himself offers no solution, speculating that the
gleaming rim must be in some way connected with sunlight reflected
from the earth.
In Coleridge's Minor Poems (i960), I. A. Richards noted that the
relation between the new moon and the "Earthlight" pictured in the
epigraph, applies particularly well to Coleridge's metaphors for
language and imagi nation in "Dejection:"
That "phantom light" which illuminates the old moon in the young
moon's arms is, of course, Earthlight. We are here reflecting the
light we receive from the sun onto the moon. . . . When we perceive
that
light we are having returned to us what we have given.22
21. Stillman Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (New
York: Doubleday, 1957) 42. 22. I. A. Richards, Coleridge's Minor
Poems: A Lecture at Montana State University on April
8, ig6o: 16.
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604 R. A. BENTHALL
He then goes on to cite from stanza iv of the ode what many
critics have
taken to be Coleridge's own reflections on the power of
imagination to
project itself onto the world:
O lady! we receive but what we give! And in our life alone does
nature live: Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate
cold world allow'd To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth, A light, a glory, a
fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the Earth? And from the soul itself must there be
sent
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds
the life and element!
(47-58)
"Nature," Richards then says, "when 'apparelled in celestial
light' in 'the
glory and freshness of a dream' is?this ode replies to
Wordsworth?
receiving 'but what we give'" (16). Richards goes on to ask
"whence do we get all this that we can give: this light, this
glory
. . . this sweet and
potent voice which can create ..." answering himself that "much
of
Coleridge's prose is his answer to this question" since
"somehow, no
answer gets into the poem" (17). While Coleridge's prose is no
doubt his
attempt to answer this question, among others, the poem itself
may also
contain answers, which in turn raise new questions. That
Coleridge used the phenomenon of the new moon lit by earthshine
to construct such a complex metaphor should come as no surprise,
given
Coleridge's fascination with astronomy, especially during the
months in which "Dejection" was composed. In a letter he wrote to
Sara Hutchinson,
dated July 27, 1802, Coleridge describes the appearance of
clouds after a
rainy day as "white & fleecy" and "without motion, forming
an appearance
not very unlike the Moon as seen thro' a telescope" (Griggs 2:
825). This
spectacle of Coleridge squinting through a telescope at the moon
during the summer in which "Dejection" was revised and the epigraph
added
gives insight into Coleridge's habit of mind. The dramatic arc
of "Dejec tion" in large part dramatizes
an attempt to see clearly how verbal and
phenomenal worlds relate, collide, or whether they interact at
all. In this
sense, many of Coleridge's questions were at least as scientific
as they were
philosophical or poetical, and his astronomical observations and
readings probably framed "Dejection" as much as "The Ballad of Sir
Patrick Spens."
In The Starry Messenger, Galileo had suggested, prior to the
quotation
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COLERIDGE'S "DEJECTION: AN ODE" 605
given above, that the appearance of the moon's perfect
roundness, whose
surface is obviously uneven when examined with a telescope,
could be
explained by positing that "there exists around the body of the
moon, just as around the earth, a globe of some substance denser
than the rest of the
aether," which "may serve to receive and reflect the sun's
radiations
without being sufficiently opaque to prevent our seeing through
it, espe
cially when it is not illuminated" (39). This theory that the
moon has an
atmosphere was later abandoned by Galileo, and many scientists
followed suit. As Lowes points out (32), Coleridge was aware of
this theory and had
loosely transcribed a passage from Erasmus Darwin's Botanic
Garden in a
1796 notebook entry:
Moon at present uninhabited owing to its little or no atmosphere
but
may in time?An Atheistic Romance might be formed?A Theistic one
too.?Mem? (#9)
What could atmosphere, or lack thereof, around the moon have to
do with Atheism or Theism? Given its high metaphorical yield for
Coleridge, this notion of lunar atmosphere may also have been
incorporated into "Dejec tion."
In 1788, Johann Hieronymous Schroter, an astronomer and fellow
of the Royal Society of Gottingen, published a work called
Selenotopographische
Fragmente, in which he undertook to account for the cause of new
moon's
luminous rim by making telescopic observations and drawings. His
con
clusions revived the theory abandoned by Galileo:
Referring to my Selenotopographical Fragments for the proofs, I
there adduced of the real existence of a lunar atmosphere, which
had been so frequently doubted . . . from which proofs of a
refracting atmo
sphere, I also deduced the probability of the existence of a
faint
twilight, which, however, my long series of observations had not
yet adduced."23
His theories regarding this "lunar twilight" were published in
the Philo
sophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1792,
along with plates of his drawings. Coleridge could have encountered
Schroter's theories either at Gottingen, or through the
Philosophical Transactions, which he is known to have read as early
as 1798.
Modern astronomers have in large part corroborated Schroter's
observa
tions and speculations. The phenomenon of horizon glow on the
dark side
23. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London
(London: Royal Society of
London, 1792).
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606 R. A. BENTHALL
of the moon was observed by astronauts in 1972, as Ron Cowan
explains in an article from the March 26, 1994 issue of Science
News:
Astronauts orbiting the moon aboard Apollo 17 in 1972 viewed two
features of our solar system normally washed out by the sun's
glare. Each time the solar disk rose from behind the moon, the crew
witnessed the faint illumination from the sun's outer atmosphere,
or
corona, as well as the dim glow of zodiacal light?sunlight
scattered
by interplanetary dust.
Using sketchpads, the crew drew what they saw just before the
sun
began poking out from behind the cratered lunar surface.
Their
drawings, researchers later realized, show more than just the
corona
and zodiacal light. Near the limb of the moon, the sketches
reveal the
strange phenomenon of horizon glow, caused by the scattering of
light from gas or dust suspended several kilometers above the moon.
This
puzzled researchers because they thought the moon's negligible
atmo
sphere lacked the material to create a glow.24
According to Cowan, Herbert A. Zook of NASA's Johnson Space
Center in Houston says that the glow may occur when "sunlight
striking the moon
strips atoms of their electrons." Cowan continues:
Both the ionized atoms and the electrons would then impart a
charge to lunar dust particles. The charged dust would rise several
kilometers above the moon, creating the horizon glow by scattering
light. But Zook adds that the glow remains a mystery "that
researchers don't
pretend to fully understand." (197)
In his recent article in Astronomy, Alan Stern also describes
the phenomenon of horizon glow:
If you stood on the Moon just after sunset, you might notice a
faint, almost orange glow on the sunward horizon and overhead.
Such
twilight glows are familiar to everyone on Earth?but on the
Moon? Yet your eyes would not be deceiving you. The glow comes from
a
trillion trillion sodium atoms fluorescing in the tenuous lunar
atmo
sphere overhead.25
Stern's tone becomes almost Coleridgean as he describes the
implications of lunar atmosphere:
24. Ron Cowan, "On the Horizon: Clementine Probes Moon Glow,"
Science News 26
(1994): 197.
25. Alan Stern, "Where the Lunar Winds Blow Free," Astronomy
Nov. (1993): 36.
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COLERIDGE'S "DEJECTION: AN ODE" 607
What scientists know about the lunar atmosphere today has been
hard-won. The first few clues came from the Apollo orbiters and
surface instrument stations in the early 1970s. Then through
the
diligent work of a handful of planetary astronomers with
high-tech spectrometers and imagers, the late 1980s saw a host of
fascinating new
discoveries. Among these was the realization that the lunar
atmosphere is in a real sense the voice of the lunar interior. It
is also the divining rod through which mankind may one day
determine if there really is
water at the lunar poles. (36)
The "voice of the lunar interior," made up of atmospheric gasses
escaping from inside the moon and ionized by solar wind, may tell
scientists whether there ever was water on the moon, and may
illuminate the moon's role
in the formation of life. While it may be that speculations of
this sort impelled Coleridge's
notebook entries on theism, atheism, and the moon, his awareness
of the
lunar atmosphere seems evident in numerous passages throughout
"Dejec
tion." The odd disjunction in Coleridge's description of the new
moon
"With swimming phantom light o'erspread / But rimmed and circled
by a silver thread" (my emphasis) may imply a curiosity about the
failure of the "phantom light" projected from the earth to account
for the new
moon's arms. The speaker says that "from the soul itself must
issue forth
/ A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud / Enveloping the
Earth" while
looking at a fair luminous cloud enveloping the moon, lit by the
sun, not the earth. When the speaker says that "from the soul
itself must there be sent / A sweet and potent voice, of its own
birth, / Of all sweet sounds the life and element," he emphasizes
the autonomy of the imagination and the need for self-reliance. The
hypothetical presence of a lunar atmosphere, however, glowing
independently of projected earthshine, would make the
speaker's claim seem slightly ironic, and such a suggestion may
be Cole
ridge's way of examining the limits of imagination as an
autonomous and
self-sustaining force.
4. "That Dejection to Wordsworth"
One might argue that "Dejection" is primarily Coleridge's
attempt to
capture and represent a visceral feeling, and that these
allusions to ballads and scientific writings are secondary. The
bluntness of the ode's title itself
conveys a sense of emotional immediacy. Even so, the title
probably emitted multiple signals to Wordsworth, and possibly to
others. The word
"dejection" had entered the written poetic dialogue between
Coleridge and Wordsworth in "The Leech Gatherer" (later "Resolution
and Inde
pendence"), composed between May 3 and 7, probably in response
to
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608 R. A. BENTHALL
Coleridge's reading of "A Letter to -," which later became
"Dejec tion," to William and Dorothy on April 21. In "The Leech
Gatherer"
appear the lines, "As high as we have mounted in delight / In
our dejection do we sink as low." Wordsworth may have read parts of
this poem to
Coleridge as early as May 4, and Dorothy records that on July 5,
she
"copied out the L.-G. for Coleridge" (Journals 1: 106). In
Coleridge's letters
during the summer of 1802, the word "dejection" is used
repeatedly to describe his bouts of sickness and despondency,
whereas this word seldom
appears in earlier letters and apparently has appeared nowhere
else in his
poetry.26
"Dejection," in addition to the popularly received meaning,
"depression of spirits," may have had other implications in the
early 19th century, linked to astronomical themes in the ode.
Towards the end of the eight eenth century astronomers still drew
heavily on astrological terminology, even though fewer and fewer of
them placed credence in horoscopes.
Newton's interest in astrology, for example, is well-documented.
Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia (1721-1751) contains the following
entry for "de
jection:"
dejection, in astrology, is applied to the planets, when in
their
detriment, i. e. when they have lost their force, or influence,
as is
pretended, by reason of their being in opposition to some
others, which check and counteract them.27
The image at the ode's beginning of the departing old moon,
replaced by the new, seems appropriate in a poem about waning
forces and poetic
displacement. As for those other forces "which check and
counteract"
them, these may also be suggested by the title. The entry for
"dejection" in Chambers continues:
Or, [dejection] is used when a planet is in a sign opposite to
that wherein it has its greatest effect, or influence, which is
called its exaltation. Thus, the sign Aries being the exaltation of
the sun, the
sign Libra is its dejection.
Interestingly, Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, under the
sign of Aries. Coleridge, born October 21, 1772, was a Libra.
"Dejection: An
Ode" was first written under the sign of Aries on April 2, and
was published under the sign of Libra on Oct 4, Wordsworth's
wedding day. Marrying
26. Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Middle
Years: 1800-1815 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1975).
27. Ephraim Chambers, ed., Cyclopaedia: or, An Universal
Dictionary of Arts and Sciences
(London: W. Collins, 1786).
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COLERIDGE'S "DEJECTION: AN ODE" 609
Mary Hutchinson, Wordsworth was no doubt in "exaltation,"
leaving
Coleridge to suffer romantic disappointment over her sister Sara
in "de
jection." In the letter to Sotheby quoted earlier, the ambiguous
phrasing of Coleridge's reference to his "poem written during that
dejection to
Wordsworth" may not only mean a sense of despondency, but also
an
awareness of stellar reciprocity. Wordsworth may in fact have
been the one person to realize during
Coleridge's lifetime that the epigraph to "Dejection: An Ode"
did not come directly from Percy's Reliques, and that the ode's
insistence on the bard's wisdom constitutes a problem. His poem
"Once I could hail
(howe'er serene the sky)," probably written in 1826 and
published in 1827, also begins with an epigraph: "Late, late
yestreen I saw the new moone /
Wi' the auld moone in her arme" (Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,
Percy's Reliques).28 Wordsworth's omission of the two troublesome
lines in Cole
ridge's epigraph, along with his careful quotation of Percy's
archaic spellings and his citation of "Percy's Reliques" in the
title, may be a way of signalling to Coleridge that he understands
the problematic origin of the epigraph to
"Dejection," and its implications. The speaker in Wordsworth's
poem says that as a child he saw in the new moon only the silver
crescent, "No faculty yet given me to espy / The dusky shape within
her arms unbound." As an adult, however, he now sees both the new
moon and the old, and grows
melancholic not because of the fading of vision, as in the
"Immortality" ode, but because of an excess. The things which once
he could not see, he now can see, and it dejects him. The
earthlight which proved such an
apt metaphor for the light and voice of projected imagination in
"Dejec tion" now reveals a darkness not noticed before. Wordsworth
may also be
acknowledging the astrological nuance in the title of
"Dejection" by his
description of the new moon rising:
On her I looked whom jocund Fairies love, Cynthia, who puts the
little stars to flight, And by that thinning magnifies the great,
For exaltation of her sovereign state.
(21-24)
In fact, Wordsworth's two most widely recognized responses to
Coleridge's
"Dejection" involve images of "exaltation," showing Wordsworth's
re
markable sensitivity to the central images of the ode, both to
the celestial
sign and to the earthly storm. Wordsworth's "Immortality" ode,
the first
28. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, eds., The
Poetical Works of William
Wordsworth, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952-59).
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610 R. A. BENTHALL
four stanzas of which were begun in March of 1802 and to which
"De
jection" was in large part a response, was begun again, probably
in 1804,
with the "exalted" star answering Coleridge's dejected moon:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises
with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar. . . .
(58-61)
In a similar manner, the passing of the storm, as it is
projected into the
Lady's future at the end of "Dejection" is echoed in the
beginning of "Resolution and Independence" to show the easing of
one turmoil but not the end of dejection:
There was a roaring in the wind all night; The rain came heavily
and fell in floods; But now the sun is rising calm and bright; The
birds are singing in the distant woods.
. . .
(1-4)
Each beginning in these two poems comments on one side of
Coleridge's conflated epigraph, one in an astronomical image, the
other in the passing of the storm. Wordsworth's poems may in fact
constitute some of the most
careful criticism and implicit commentary on Coleridge's
"Dejection: An Ode" to date.
5. "The Reason in the Storm"
The tension between the new moon, impending storm, and
problematic ballad sets the stage for Coleridge's dramatic attempts
at identifying the voice of wisdom from among the whirlwind of
anonymous voices by which ballads are made and transmitted. The
ballad therefore links "De
jection" with the "grand old" tradition, while the conflated
epigraph itself conceals the ground of its origin. As such,
misquoting an anonymous ballad
as Coleridge does becomes the perfect vehicle in which to ask
questions about origins, especially when the passage quoted seems
to contain proph
ecy about one's own fate. Edward Said argues in Beginnings:
Intention and Method that writing is always an ambivalent act,
since it places the writer in an almost prophetic relationship with
the texts by which one's writing is informed:
The greater the anxiety, the more writing appears to be
quotation, the more writing thinks of itself as, in some cases even
proclaims itself,
rewriting. The utterance sounds like?perhaps even is?a
borrowing
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COLERIDGE'S "DEJECTION: AN ODE" 611
from someone else. Prophecy is a type of language around which
this issue of originality perpetually lurks in many forms. Is the
prophecy absolutely authentic and original? Does it speak to all
men at a com
mon level, or only for one, too original (i. e., alienated) man
(the prophet)? Yet understanding other writing prophetically is
quite another matter for the writer, although most of us would not
call under
standing writing a prophetic enterprise. (Said 22)
This sense of anxiety is nowhere more apparent than in the
opening lines of "Dejection," where the the speaker presents us
with a rewritten pro
phetic text whose predictions are fulfilled by the poet in the
course of the
poem. The altered form of the prophecy in the epigraph therefore
serves as a commentary on the speaker's desire to wield the deadly
efficacy of this
particular prophetic utterance.
It may be this anxiety that warps the speaker's sense of logic,
or leads him to exaggerate the claims of the prophecy on purpose.
The inference he makes is, after all, fallacious. In the ballad, on
the day before the ill-fated
journey, a sailor describes a portent which he saw "late
yestreen," foretell
ing a "deadly storm," and he tries to warn Sir Patrick Spence
not to sail on the following morning. His "weather-wise"
predictions refer not to the same night as the omen, but to two
days later. In "Dejection," however,
the speaker's forecast, made while gazing at the "New-moon
winter
bright," that "This night, so tranquil now will not go hence /
Unrous'd
by winds that ply a busier trade," is obviously not based on the
authority of the Bard who wrote the ballad, but on the speaker's
own over-anxious
and perhaps morbid mind. Hence the impatient wish, not for a
fatal storm two days from now, but now: "And oh! that even now the
gust were
swelling / And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast!" If
the "wisdom" of the Bard seems to have been misread in these
opening lines, we should also note that, strictly speaking, it
has been mis-attributed as well. After all, how "weather-wise" must
a bard be in
order to insert a piece of folk-meteorology into a poem? The
bard who made "Sir Patrick Spence" had no need of being
weather-wise himself; if this proverbial wisdom was not common
knowledge, he could have read
Virgil's Georgics, where the moon frequently serves as an index
to the
weather. Coleridge had read Virgil's Georgics in Latin by
November of
1798, as his notebooks show, and he would also have had access
to
Dryden's translation. In addition to these versions, Coleridge
had probably read William Sotheby's translation, since notebook
entries made in May or June of 1802 contain quotes from a review of
Sotheby's version in the British Critic. In Sotheby's translation
of Virgil, new moons and storms also
converge:
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612 R. A. BENTHALL
If, when the moon renews her refluent beam,
Through the dark air her horns obscurely gleam, Along the wasted
earth and stormy main, In torrents drives the congregated rain.
Or if with virgin blush young Cynthia blaze,
Tempestuous winds succeed the golden rays . . .
(1.475-480)29
In the first letter to Sotheby of July 13, Coleridge quotes from
Virgil's Eclogues, perhaps as a friendly gesture. That Coleridge's
second letter to
Sotheby should have contained the first version of the epigraph
from "Sir Patrick Spence" is especially interesting; Coleridge may
have expected Sotheby, a man well-acquainted with the
"weather-wise" Virgil, to appre
ciate the ironies in "Dejection's" opening lines.30 If the
speaker's jesting appeal to the wise voice of the Bard thus
seems
strange in light of the fact that his wisdom is the product of
many voices, it seems even stranger when we note that, within the
ballad itself, the
wisdom comes not through the narrator's voice, but through the
voice of
a weather-wise mariner. The epigraph to "Dejection" is after all
a dramatic
utterance; the wisdom belongs at least as much, in the dramatic
sense, to
the sailor who reads the new moon as it does to the bard who
"made"
him. In this conflation of character and bard, we are presented
with initial
signs of the speaker's attempts at a monological reading of the
voice of
wisdom. If dialogism involves not only what Bialostosky calls
"sensitivity to the otherness of the words of others," but also to
the perception of
implicit dialogues competing within the single utterance,
"Dejection"
addresses not only the words of Wordsworth, but is also
Coleridge's way of addressing the otherness of his
own words.
29. Virgil, The Ecologues Translated by Wrangham, The Georgics
by Sotheby, and the Aeneid
by Dry den (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1884). 30. Another
source that may have contributed to the conjunction of moon and
storm is
William Bartram's Travels Through North and South Carolina
(1791) which contains a descrip tion of a violent storm, coming on
the morning after a lunar eclipse. Coleridge had read
this book in the months preceding "Dejection," as his notebook
entries show. Kathleen
Coburn points out that Bartram's Travels had special
significance for Coleridge, since he had
given his copy to Sara Hutchinson a little over one year before
writing "Dejection." Coburn
quotes Coleridge's note on the fly-leaf:
Sara Hutchinson from S. T. C. Dec 19, 1801. This is not a Book
of Travels, properly
speaking; but a series of poems, chiefly descriptive, occasioned
by the objects, which the
Traveller observed.?It is a delicious Book, and like all
delicious things, you must take
but a little of it at a Time.?Was it not about this time of the
year that I read to you
parts of the 'Introduction' of this Book, when William and
Dorothy had gone out to
walk ??I remember the evening well, but not the time of year it
was. (Coburn 1,
Notes, #218)
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COLERIDGE'S "DEJECTION: AN ODE" 613
The irony implicit in the fact that Coleridge should write a
poem about the inability to create has often been remarked. If he
wished at once to
underscore and undermine his sense of artistic barrenness by
writing a poem
about it, Coleridge seems to have gone the extra mile in
"Dejection: An Ode" and dramatized a monophonic voice speaking in
the midst of po
lyphony, characterized by the epigraph and by the arrival of the
many voiced storm which the epigraph prophesies. Having had his own
suppos
edly failing genius rebuked by the storm, the speaker in
"Dejection" identifies the solipsistic implications of his belief
that, in every case of
illumination, "from the soul itself must there be sent / A sweet
and potent voice, of its own birth, / Of all sweet sounds the life
and element." Voices break forth, not from the olian lute alone,
but from winds that rush
through it as the storm breaks:
Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind.
Reality's dark dream! I turn from you, and listen to the wind,
Which long has raved unnoticed. What a scream
Of agony by torture lengthened out That lute sent forth! Thou
wind, that rav'st without
Bare crag, or mountain-tairn, or blasted tree,
Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb,
Methinks were fitter instruments for thee, Mad Lutanist! who in
this month of show'rs, Of dark brown gardens, and of peeping
flowers, Mak'st Devils' yule, with worse than wint'ry song, The
blossoms, buds, and tim'rous leaves among.
Thou Actor, perfect in all tragic sounds! Thou mighty Poet, e'en
to Frenzy bold!
What tells't thou now about?
'Tis of the Rushing of an Host in rout, With groans of trampled
men, with smarting wounds?
At once they groan with pain, and shudder with the cold! But
hush! there is a pause of deepest silence!
And all that noise, as of a rushing crowd,
With groans, and tremulous shudderings?all is over?
It tells another tale, with sounds less deep and loud! A tale of
less affright, And tempered with delight,
As Otway's self had fram'd the tender lay? 'Tis of a little
child
Upon a lonesome wild,
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-
614 R. A. BENTHALL
Not far from home, but she hath lost her way: And now moans low
in bitter grief and fear, And now screams loud, and hopes to make
her mother hear.
(94-126)
In framing this metaphor, the speaker makes distinctions he had
hitherto not been able to make, and hears voices to which he had
previously been deaf. In particular, he now distinguishes the dual
voice of the wind as both "Actor" and "Poet," which he failed to do
in his initial reading of the
epigraph, where mariner, narrator, and poet are all conflated as
"bard."
Wordsworth seems to comment on this distinction in his best
known reply to "Dejection," where the second half of the
"Immortality" ode construes the fall from innocence as a fall into
dramatic roles, as "the little Actor cons another part" (103).
The subsequent metaphors of the host in rout and of the crying
child are of course "projected," in some sense, by Coleridge in the
act of writing the poem, but the poem also leaves traces of the
forces that impel his
solitary voice, at once revealing and concealing their origins.
If the Cole
ridge of April 2, 1802 found in "the new Moon / With the old
Moon in her arms" a fitting emblem of the new containing the old,
the wiser if not
sadder Coleridge of October 4, 1802 dramatized an act of reading
and
subsequent writing in which what appears to be the record of a
single voice contains many voices, implying that beginnings,
even of dejection, contain
not only their own endings but other beginnings as well.
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Article Contentsp. 591p. 592p. 593p. 594p. 595p. 596p. 597p.
598p. 599p. 600p. 601p. 602p. 603p. 604p. 605p. 606p. 607p. 608p.
609p. 610p. 611p. 612p. 613p. 614
Issue Table of ContentsStudies in Romanticism, Vol. 37, No. 4
(Winter, 1998) pp. 499-678Volume InformationFront
MatterImpersonation and Autobiography in Lamb's Christ's Hospital
Essays [pp. 499-521]Cobbett, Coleridge and the Queen Caroline
Affair [pp. 523-543]Shelley in Chancery: The Reimagination of the
Paternalist State in "The Cenci" [pp. 545-589]New Moons, Old
Ballads, and Prophetic Dialogues in Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode"
[pp. 591-614]The Romantic Calling of Thinking: Stanley Cavell on
the Line with Wordsworth [pp. 615-645]Book ReviewsReview: untitled
[pp. 647-650]Review: untitled [pp. 650-652]Review: untitled [pp.
652-657]Review: untitled [pp. 657-662]Review: untitled [pp.
662-665]
Back Matter