Psyche

John Keats, writing to his brothers in 1817, introduced the term ‘negative capability’ to describe a condition wherein a writer “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. This has always been for me a touchstone, not only for writing but also for living. I have also regarded some of the words of S. T. Coleridge, similarly, as points of departure for my thought. But Keats meant his words as a rejoinder to writers such as the older Coleridge who was distracted from the pursuit of writing as an instinctual activity - as in poems such as ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Christabel’ - by an interest in idealist philosophy and literary theory.

Both of those poems, like those of Keats, are of course worked up into a form, unlike, perhaps, Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ which might be cited as an example of visionary experience untrammelled by any “reaching after fact and reason”. But Coleridge regarded this as an unfinished fragment and had to find an excuse for publishing it many years after it was written. His “abstruser musings” in the realm of literary theory also led to the distinction he made between ‘Fancy’ and ‘Imagination’, the latter being the facility by which we see through those mysteries, which we are are negatively capable of inhabiting, to the process of creation : so the negative becomes a positive and the unconscious capability produces a consciously shaped artefact.

Consider Keats’ ‘Ode to Psyche’. He says in the poem that he “wander’d in a forest thoughtlessly” until he came across Eros and Psyche “In deepest grass, beneath the whisp’ring roof / Of leaves ….” and then decided to become Psyche’s priest. This could be taken as a template for the transition from an unconscious state of perception to the conscious decision to follow the impulse to engage in an act of imaginative creation. In a letter of 1819 referring to the composition of this poem, Keats says that “Psyche was not embodied as a goddess before the time of Apuleius” (the author of the story of Eros and Psyche, written in the 2nd century c.e.). She begins the story as a mortal but is immortalised at the end of it, though too late in history to become established in the Roman pantheon. Keats adds that “I am more orthodox than to let a heathen Goddess be so neglected” and so begins the Ode : “O Goddess hear …”.

‘Psyche’ can mean ‘Mind’, ‘Soul’ or in the terminology of Jungian psychology, ‘Anima’. This is a puzzling range of definitions if we are “reaching after fact and reason”, but in the context of the story, and of the poem, they are wedded in Psyche’s desire to know who is her secret lover, in her embodiment of the yearned for other, and as the object of eros, and so the beloved of Eros. If the gods are experienced in spite of “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts” and take form “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”, they are imaginatively constructed in our stories about them, as here, by finding them in a mind that already knows them and gives them form.

Coleridge defined the imaginative faculty, “the prime agent of all human perception”, as the power that shapes such stories. Although the emphasis is different, and although Keats had little time for such theorising, his finding a place for Psyche “ In some untrodden region of my mind” is not so far from a realisation of Coleridge’s definition. Keats composed long poems apparently effortlessly. But he died at the age of 26. Coleridge lived to the palindromically older age of 62, in spite of his opium habit, and struggled to compose verse in his later years. Would Keats have continued to write with effortless fluency had he lived longer? Would we think of Coleridge differently if we only had 'The Ancient Mariner', 'Kubla Khan' and the first part of 'Christabel' to go by? Perhaps. But in bringing together Psyche as ‘Mind’ and Psyche as ‘Soul’ he was surely as much her priest as Keats for whom Psyche as 'Soul' was prominently Psyche as ‘Anima’.

Even the weariest river ....

In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country, and their own natural homes which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.

(One of the marginal glosses appended by Coleridge to The Ancient Mariner.)

Literary Locations

I recently visited the cottage in Nether Stowey, Somerset, where the poet Coleridge lived between 1797 and 1800. He was not born there and three years is not very long to make a place significant. But it was from there that he developed his collaboration with Wordsworth on the groundbreaking collection Lyrical Ballads and where he wrote many of his most significant poems.

How should such places be conserved and maintained? Following his brief residence at nearby Alfoxden to be near Coleridge, Wordsworth moved back to his native Lake District to the similarly iconic Dove Cottage. In spite of its being a hive for tourists seeking literary honey, in spite of its bookshop and its contextualistion as a place of pilgrimage, there is a sense of the lives of William and Dorothy when they lived there. The cottage at Nether Stowey seems, in contrast, empty of the presence of Coleridge. It has recently been renovated by the National Trust so perhaps the newness of its atmosphere contributes to this. The cottage has also been extended since 1800 and has since had other uses while Dove Cottage has remained comparatively intact.

In the absence of very many Coleridgean artefacts in the cottage apart from an inkstand, attempts have been made to recreate the settings of some of the poems. In the living room a crade has been placed by the flickering fireplace, and a writing desk in the corner gestures to the composition of ‘Frost at Midnight’ where his child “slumbers peacefully” in the cradle while the poet is carried back to his own childhood by the flickering flame in the hearth.

In the garden a ‘lime tree bower’ has been created to represent the poem ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’ and ferns planted next to it, presumably to echo those referred to in the poem. Representation rather than recreation was perhaps all that was possible in this location. It is one way of exhibiting a  place that remains significant in memory rather than as a manifestation of what is remembered. The poems represented in the examples given above can be revisited in a room containing editions of the poet’s work and recorded examples of some of them. Other parts of the cottage, such as the kitchen, represent the way of life of the period as much as that of the poet and his family, though some emphasis is put in the interpretational material on the role of the poet’s long-suffering wife Sara in the family’s domestic arrangements. One aspect of the poet’s life is represented obliquely in the swathes of large opium-style poppies in the garden, surely creating (rather than re-creating) a flowery hinterland on the borders between irony and a tasteless joke. Never was the poet’s distinction between ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’ better represented, if not in intention, then in representational fact.

 Dove Cottage in 1882

Flashing Eyes and Floating Hair

Harold Bloom, writing about Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan' in 1961, observed that “Behind Coleridge’s poem [are] the dark fates of Collins, the young Chatterton, Smart, and other doomed poets of sensibility. These are the rich-haired youths of Morn, Apollo sacrifices who precede Coleridge in his appearance with flashing eyes and floating hair”. Coleridge had written his own ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’ as a young poet still wedded to the style of the late eighteenth century:

O Chatterton! that thou wert yet alive!
Sure thou would'st spread the canvas to the gale,
And love, with us, the tinkling team to drive
O'er peaceful freedom's undivided dale;
And we, at sober eve, would round thee throng,
Hanging, enraptured, on thy stately song
And greet with smiles the young-eyed poesy
All deftly mask'd, as hoar antiquity.

Chatterton had, like Coleridge, blossomed early as a poet after attending a charity school because his father had died and his mother had no other means of support.  His facility for original verse went with a talent for reconstructing the works of earlier practitioners. Like Iolo Morganwg,  who came after him, and others of his age, he used this talent for antiquarian reconstruction to create imitations of medieval texts. He composed a series of ‘Rowley poems’ to this end. Initially he was taken up by Horace Walpole , the author of The Castle of Otranto , who at first thought he recognized a kindred spirit when Chatterton sent him some of his work, but subsequently dropped him when he realized that he was a poor apprentice. Chatterton remained unrecognized, in spite of attracting the interest of some publishers in London, and eventually committed suicide in 1770, still in his teens. Al Alvarez, in his study of literary suicides, observed that “Later the Romantics transformed him into a symbol of the doomed poet. In fact, he was a victim of Grub Street and snobbery.” Coleridge himself was more fortunate and lived well on into middle age in spite of his opium addiction. It was left to others who succeeded him as Romantic poets, to fulfil the stereotype and die young.

Although he felt he had squandered his talent as a poet “in abstruse musings”, Coleridge’s status as a sage in his later years makes him, in retrospect, a rather unlikely candidate for the title “doomed bard of sensibility”. His Biographia Literaria offered the distinction between ‘Imagination’ and ‘Fancy’ as the way of distinguishing the true poetic facility from the merely clever. And it might be said that, in living the imaginative life to the full, and in the often catastrophic circumstances of his life, he did in fact carry the role of doomed bard into his later years. Whatever the consequences, and however many times he stopped – like his Ancient Mariner – an initially unwilling listener, the bright-eyed youth never lost the ability to convince his audience that "he on honey-dew had fed and drunk the milk of Paradise”.

The Genius of Coleridge

David Jones

illustration to 'The Ancient Mariner'

The entry which I’ve currently posted for the changing extracts above from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal contains a couple of phrases which are likely to have been picked up from reading the manuscript of ‘Christabel’, which Coleridge had brought for the Wordsworths to read (She records on the 23^rd March 1798: “Coleridge brought his ballad finished”.)  In a couple of years Coleridge wrote ‘The Ancient Mariner’, ‘Christabel’, ‘Kubla Khan’ (the latter two published some time later) along with several other gems of Romantic sensibility.  Wordsworth wrote ‘Lines Composed Above Tintern Abbey’ with it’s article of faith : “Nature never did betray the heart that loved her” and addressed his “dear sister” as a fellow worshipper of Nature. Meanwhile she chronicled their daily activities in her Journal. The first edition of Lyrical Ballads was published later that year with many of the poems having been written in the months leading up to publication.

But it is the vision of Coleridge that I want to discuss here.  He has been characterised as a "damaged archangel", mainly on the basis of events in his later life. But in the closing years of the eighteenth century he and Wordsworth were young poets with a mission to change the face of poetry for ever. They were successful. But they were in fact very different poets. Some of Coleridge's 'conversation poems' may be nearer to Wordsworth's desire to write in the "real language of men" ('Frost at Midnight' being an evocative example) but the visionary qualities of Coleridge's longer poems and the metrical experiments, in particular in 'Christabel', mark him out not, as with Wordsworth, as an innovator in poetic diction but as one who developed metrical practices of the sort that Hopkins, nearly a century later, still felt were necessary to reform English prosody. The following lines from 'Christabel' are often cited:

 The one last leaf, the last of its clan
That dances as often as dance it can 

  
Coleridge's preface to the poem outlines a 'new principle' of composition, "namely that of counting in each line the accents not the syllables", and the addition of extra syllables to introduce "some transition in the nature of the imagery or passion". 

 Consider the pyrotechnics of these lines:

In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell
Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel!
Thou knowest tonight, and will know tomorrow
This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow;
But vainly thou warrest
For this is alone in
Thy power to declare
That in the dim forest
Thou heard'st a low moaning
And found'st a bright lady, surpassingly fair;
And did'st bring her home with thee in love and in charity,
To shield her and shelter her from the damp air. 

Those lines are imprinted on my memory, like my name and my mother's name; I carry them around with me as part of my psychic baggage. They never cease to haunt me. By the standards of classical verse of the eighteenth century the rhythm is all over the place. The accents beat out the pulse of the verse while the 'extra syllables' weave a magic spell like no other. This is, in fact, not so much new as a recognition of the natural rhythms of English going back to alliterative verse. But it was certainly 'new' at the time, though others who were shown it - e.g. Walter Scott  and Byron -  imitated it even before Coleridge brought himself to publish it. It has my vote as one of the essential poems in the English language.