In our last column we explored the poetry of William Wordsworth and took a walk through his beloved Lake District of England. Today we are meeting two other Lake District friends of his, poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) and Robert Southey (1774-1843). In fact, when you add John Ruskin, Thomas de Quincey and other literary figures, it becomes obvious that this lake-filled part of the world has been an unparalleled haven and inspirational home for the most creative of English writers and artists. There must be something in the water!
Coleridge was born in Devonshire, and he read voraciously as a child. He attended Cambridge until mounting financial problems caused him to leave college and secretly join the Light Dragoons. With the imaginative kick that poets seem to relish, he assumed the name of Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. (S.T.C.) Ultimately his brothers arranged his discharge on grounds of “insanity” and returned him to what would be a life of poetry and high intellectual achievement, albeit often restless and opium oriented.
In 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth, who had forged a friendship when they met three years earlier, collaborated on a volume of poetry called “Lyrical Ballads.” Of the twenty-three poems, nineteen were by Wordsworth and just four by Coleridge; but the lead-off piece, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” by Coleridge, helped set the tone for what is now known as the Romantic Movement in English literature. (See video)
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, every where
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where
Nor any drop to drink.
Another of the oft-quoted poems to come from the Coleridge pen:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Coleridge sometimes dipped into the supernatural, and his poem “Christabel,” here excerpted, is known to have influenced Edgar Allan Poe.
‘Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
And the owls have awakened the crowing cock;
Tu—whit! Tu—whoo!
And hark, again! the crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.
Sir Leoline, the Baron rich,
Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
From her kennel beneath the rock
She maketh answer to the clock,
Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour;
Ever and aye, by shine and shower,
Sixteen short howls, not over loud;
Some say, she sees my lady’s shroud.
Is the night chilly and dark?
The night is chilly, but not dark.
The thin gray cloud is spread on high,
It covers but not hides the sky.
The moon is behind, and at the full;
And yet she looks both small and dull.
The night is chill, the cloud is gray:
‘Tis a month before the month of May,
And the Spring comes slowly up this way.
Those last two lines sound so like Robert Frost!
Side Note: Coleridge wanted to marry the sister of Wordsworth’s wife, but she showed little interest. Besides, he was already married to the sister of Southey’s wife. Ah, poets!
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Now to turn to Robert Southey, not well-remembered today, but he was popular in his time and served as Poet Laureate for thirty years. A prolific writer of prose and poetry, he was also a scholar, historian and essayist. Born in Bristol, once he had visited his friend Coleridge in the Lake District, he determined to stay there the rest of his life.
One of Southey’s most popular poems is a rhyming tour de force describing a Lake District waterfall at Lodore, still a major tourist attraction.
“How does the water
Come down at Lodore?”
My little boy asked me
Thus, once on a time;
And moreover he- tasked me
To tell him in rhyme.
Anon, at the word,
There first came one daughter,
And then came another,
To second and third
The request of their brother,
And to hear how the water
Comes down at Lodore,
With its rush and its roar,
As many a time
They had seen it before.
So I told them in rhyme,
For of rhymes I had store;
And ’twas in my vocation
For their recreation
That so I should sing;
Because I was Laureate
To them and the King.
In this abbreviated version, see how the rhymes become increasingly complex, noisier and faster in delivery.
It runs through the reeds,
And away it proceeds,
Through meadow and glade,
In sun and in shade,
Till, in this rapid race
On which it is bent,
It reaches the place
Of its steep descent.
The cataract strong
Then plunges along,
Rising and leaping,
Swelling and sweeping,
Spouting and frisking,
Turning and twisting,
And dripping and skipping,
And rattling and battling,
And shaking and quaking,
And glittering and frittering,
And whitening and brightening,
And quivering and shivering,
And hurrying and skurrying,
Dividing and gliding and sliding,
And falling and brawling and sprawling,
And sprinkling and twinkling and wrinkling,
And grumbling and rumbling and tumbling,
Advancing and prancing and glancing and dancing,
And gleaming and streaming and steaming and beaming,
And rushing and flushing and brushing and gushing,
And dashing and flashing and splashing and clashing;
And in conclusion:
All at once and all o’er, with a mighty uproar,
And this way the water comes down at Lodore.
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In one of the odder events among the Lake Poets, Coleridge and Southey in younger days concocted a scheme to establish a utopian colony (pantisocracy) on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, a site recommended to them for its beauty and security from hostile Indians. With underfunding and no skills in farming or carpentry, the project died aborning. Coleridge later said it was “a plan as harmless as it was extravagant.” Pity, we might have had a line of Penn Poets.
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Finally, I’d like to offer a personal nod to our two featured poets. To Robert Southey for coming up with the most spectacular display of rhymes since the first rhyming dictionary was invented (1570, possibly used by Spenser).
And to Samuel Taylor Coleridge for tickling this composer’s fancy by writing the epigram:
Swans sing before they die — ‘twere no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.
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VIDEO. It has always fascinated me that though Coleridge and Southey were enamored of and inspired by the Lake District, their most important poems were not about lakes but oceans. After three brief countryside poems by Coleridge, the members of the First Poetry Quartet present Southey’s “The Inchcape Rock” followed by Paul Hecht performing an excerpt from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: TAKE TO THE LAKES
