The Romantic poets: Recollections of Love by Samuel Taylor Coleridge This week, the Guardian and the Observer are running a series of seven pamphlets on the Romantic poets. To coincide with it, Im blogging daily on one of each days selected works. Coleridges emotional frankness is one of his charms as a poet. It finds expression in his Conversation Poems – those soul-searching meditations in the implied presence of another person. Its almost tempting to think of him as the first Confessional Poet. If not immune to self-pity, he states his own case with immense persuasiveness. When he says at the end of The Pains of Sleep, To be beloved is all I need,/ And whom I love, I love indeed, how could anyone doubt that this is the man speaking, and speaking from the heart? Recollections of Love, written in 1807 and published 10 years later in Sibylline Leaves, is not one of Coleridges major poems, and may not be quite finished. But it remains a beautiful, madrigal-like lyric that displays some of his most endearing qualities, not least his musicality. With its confiding, thoughtful tone, it resembles a Conversation Poem in miniature, and it is almost certainly addressed to Sara Hutchinson, the sister of Wordsworths wife, Mary. When he fell in love with Asra (Coleridge lightly disguised her identity with this rather goddess-like, anagrammatic pseudonym), the poet was already married to Sara Fricker. He was a loving father, if a wildly inconsiderate husband. He knew that any more-than-friendly relationship with Asra must remain a painful, one-sided affair of his own imagination, to be expressed most passionately in his private writing. Coleridge gives the gentle West Country landscape of Recollections of Love a characteristically dreamy quality. Though idyllic, the scene is faintly unsettling. The details are sensuously sketched in – the woodland wild Recess, overgrown with heather, surrounded by the whisper of streams, the singing of skylarks and perhaps within earshot of the sea. Woodland wild is a little ambiguous: is a comma missing between two adjectives, or is there an unwritten hyphen, suggesting a comparison, wild as woodland? Either way, the recess is an isolated, arcadian spot, clearly ideal for lovers. But the beloved is not fully present and the bed of heath seems to sigh with longing. The reader could be forgiven for thinking the speaker is remembering an actual encounter. Well, perhaps he is. But now, in stanza II, we are told that it is eight years since he last reclined in his Quantock Hills Eden. The actual place is by now a memory, and the time the poet is remembering, he says, is a time before he associated it with love: No voice as yet had made the air/ Be music with your name … That is clearly put – and memorable. The grammar of … made the air/ Be music sounds awkward, but it is actually remarkably effective in conveying a kind of insistent, physical, almost chemical, transformation of air into music. Coleridge wrote in the Notebook he kept when in Malta in 1804 … While I am talking of War or Government or Chemistry there comes ever into my bodily eye some Tree beneath which we have rested, some rock where we have walked together, or on the perilous road edging, high above the Crummock Lake where we sate beneath the rock & those dear lips pressed on my forehead … The soul-landscape he remembers so vividly in this passage is not the landscape conjured in Recollections of Love. Here, it seems, he is recollecting either a fantasy or a dream – or even a dream provoked by a fantasy? You stood before me like a thought,/ A dream remembered in a dream. I think that in stanzas IV and V Coleridge is going back to his first meeting with Sara – in which case we must adjust our minds to a Yorkshire farmhouse setting. I like this interpretation, although it complicates things. The simile of a mother reunited with her lost child and recognising the rose mark – a beautiful, erotic way of describing a birth-mark of some kind – conveys the uncanny sense of recognition two people meeting for the first time may share. The perfect verb explore conveys the care with which the identity is confirmed, and the intensity of the recognition. Perhaps too there is a hint of the Platonic idea of lovers as two halves of a single soul. And then the speaker, rather frustratingly, breaks off. In the fourth line of Stanza V the sentence cuts out mid-flow, as if it would be simply unbearable to go on thinking of what might have been. He changes the subject, and addresses the river instead: O Greta. This dear domestic stream that flows past his family house in the Lake District is the reality, and a painful one. Its sudden introduction certainly seems a raw, unfinished edge in the poem. Coleridge could have effected a smoother transition, and found a way of linking the past to the present. Stanza V has some of the best lines in the poem, and some of the least satisfying ones. From now on, the poet addresses the river. As in the second stanza, he creates a potent soundscape. There is a counterpoint to the rivers song, and its significance is emphasised by the repetition has not…? and the use of two metaphors of speech, oves prompture deep and loves whisper. The compulsion of this illicit but all-important emotional attachment is a continued under-song (a wonderful compound-word) to the rivers gentle roar, in the same way that the sound of the river continues during the clamour of daily life, and marital discord. As in the Notebook passage quoted above, there are two layers of consciousness, and the unspoken one, the under-song is the most intense and real. Recollections of Love I How warm this woodland wild Recess! Love surely hath been breathing here; And this sweet bed of heath, my dear! Swells up, then sinks with faint caress, As if to have you yet more near. II Eight springs have flown, since last I lay On sea-ward Quantocks heathy hills, Where quiet sounds from hidden rills Float here and there, like things astray, And high oer head the sky-lark shrills. III No voice as yet had made the air Be music with your name; yet why That asking look? that yearning sigh? That sense of promise everywhere? Belovéd! flew your spirit by? IV As when a mother doth explore The rose-mark on her long-lost child, I met, I loved you, maiden mild! As whom I long had loved before-- So deeply had I been beguiled. V You stood before me like a thought, A dream remembered in a dream. But when those meek eyes first did seem To tell me, Love within you wrought-- O Greta, dear domestic stream ! VI Has not, since then, Loves prompture deep, Has not Loves whisper evermore Been ceaseless, as thy gentle roar? Sole voice, when other voices sleep, Dear under-song in clamours hour.
Posted on: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 03:27:38 +0000
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