InfoBritain

 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biography And Visits

Somerset Coast Near Culbone

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote his greatest poems during the space of one exciting year, from the summer of 1797 to the summer of 1798. During this time he was living in a tiny cottage in Nether Stowey, Somerset, with his wife Sara and their baby son. There were visits to his friends the Wordsworths at the rather grand houses they had managed to wangle a tenancy on. Walks were taken along the beautiful north Somerset and Devon coasts. In the same way that Coleridge found the height of his powers for a brief and intense period of time, the place he wrote in was also small. There were wonderful views on those walks over the Quantock Hills, but one of his most famous poems, This Lime Tree Bower, My Prison, tells of Coleridge being left behind while his friends go out walking in those hills. Coleridge, with an injured foot, stays behind in Nether Stowey, in the garden of a friend. Sitting in the shade of a tree he imagines what his friends are seeing. In doing so he writes a poem where imagination is not limited by reality. We know nothing of what Coleridge's friends saw. Instead we have a lasting vision of what they might have seen. As John Lennon once said "there's nothing you can see that can't be seen." Somehow we always seem to be more interested in what we might see than what we can see. Coleridge was initially disappointed at being left behind, but ended up using the limits on him to reach out beyond them.

Ottery St Mary Parish Church

Coleridge was born at Ottery St Mary in Devon on the 21st of October 1772, son of Rev'd John Coleridge, vicar and master at the local grammar school. Samuel was the youngest of nine children, and described himself as rather a lonely boy: "I became fretful and timorous and a tell-tale, and the school boys drove me from play and were always tormenting me." (Quoted Coleridge and Wordsworth in the West Country by Tom Mayberry) When he wasn't wandering around the countryside on his own, he would be reading voraciously. Books such as Robin Cruesoe, and The Arabian Knights meant that a boy living in a small Devon town had a mind that was "habituated to the vast." He wrote of walking at night with his father, who pointed out Jupiter in the sky, describing its size thousands of times bigger than Earth, and telling of how "the other twinkling stars were suns that had worlds rolling around them." When the dreamy young man went on to study at Christ's Hospital in London, he would escape the limits of his surroundings by lying on the roof and looking up at the sky.

 

Cambridge

At sixteen Coleridge joined Christ's Hospital's elite, the Grecians, who were preparing for entry to Oxford and Cambridge. The teacher who had the greatest influence over Coleridge, was the fearsome Rev'd James Boyer. When Samuel decided he was an atheist, Boyer beat Christianity back into him. Despite such incidents young Coleridge greatly respected the Upper Master, and listened to his down to earth advice about writing poetry from life, rather than from other poetry: "Muse, boy, muse? Your Nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? oh aye! the cloister pump I suppose?" The misfit boy of Ottery St Mary was in his element. Things went less well when he moved on to Jesus College, Cambridge in October 1791. Here he won poetry prizes, and was known as a radical and a brilliant speaker. Privately, however, there was depression and constant worries about debt. In November 1793 Coleridge was desperate enough to try his luck on the Irish lottery in London, which unsurprisingly did not help. The next move was even more desperate. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet and speaker on radical topics decided to join the army, enlisting in the 15th Light Dragoons in December 1793 under the imaginative alias Silas Tomkyn Combermache. Anyone calling themselves Combermache is clearly not taking things seriously, and Coleridge was a hopeless solider. His comrades found a use for him writing their love letters, and he bravely spent a month in the military hospital at Henley nursing a fellow soldier suffering from smallpox. Meanwhile his father and brother Geroge were busy trying to get this poet nurse out of the army. Initially the army authorities would not budge, but eventually, under much pressure from James Coleridge, a compromise was reached. Silan Tomkyn Combermache was discharged for "being insane." Visions of Blackadder Goes Forth come to mind: "Now listen to me carefully Blackadder. Put a pair of underpants on your head, stick two pencils up your nose, and they'll ship you back to blightly."

Returning to Cambridge it seemed impossible to settle. June 1794 saw the start of a walking tour which took in Oxford, Bristol, Wales and Somerset. In Oxford a friend from school introduced Coleridge to Robert Southey, a young radical poet who was studying at Balliol. The two young men immediatly struck up a friendship. Coleridge impressed Southey with his eloquence and intelligence, Southey impressed Coleridge with his decisiveness and strength. Coleridge was always attracted to strong personalities. His own crippling indecisiveness seemed to call for compensating companionship with those who had the strength he lacked. Talking together the young idealists decided that society in Britain just wasn't good enough, and they would create a perfect society beside the Susquehanna river in New England. Coleridge would dream up the ideas, and the decisive Southey would make it happen. Twelve men and women would live the perfect life, all their property held in common. Coleridge even dreamt up a new word "Pantisocracy" to describe their new society: it meant "equal rule by all." After reinventing the world, the new friends headed off in high spirits for more travelling. Coleridge preached Pantisocracy in Wales, and then met up with Southey again in his home town of Bristol. By now they had a few more Pantisocracy recruits, including Southey's mother, who thought the whole plan was madness. Perhaps she just wanted to be around to pick up the pieces when idealism came crashing down.

Cheddar Gorge

A friend called Robert Lovell was also won over. More importantly he had just married a beautiful actress called Mary Fricker, and it was through Lovell that Southey and Coleridge were introduced to the other four Fricker sisters. Southey made his rather calculating move on Edith, while Coleridge, caught up in the excitement of the moment, decided that Sarah, or Sara as he called her, was the one for him. So having sorted out the world, and having probably organised himself a fiance, Coleridge continued his trip, visiting Cheddar Gorge which made a great impression on him. Returning to Bristol, towards the end of August 1794, Coleridge proposed to Sara. She accepted, and Coleridge returned to Cambridge for what would be his final term. Back at Jesus College an agony of indecision suddenly replaced all the happy plans of the summer. Southey was informed by letter that maybe proposing to Sara wasn't a good idea after all, but that he would still do his duty and marry her. When the agreed date for Coleridge's arrival in Bristol had come and gone, Southey found his friend at his London lodgings, put him on a coach, and stood guard over him until they reached Bristol. The dream of love had faded, and so had the crazy American Pantisocracy scheme. Southey suggested a trial run on a Welsh farm, to which a dismayed Coleridge replied: "For God's sake - my dear fellow - tell me what we are to gain by taking a Welsh farm." Nevertheless Coleridge went along with the idea.

Coleridge's Cottage, Nether Stowey

By February 1795 the sadder and wiser idealists were living frugally in Bristol, in College Street, trying to save money for their Welsh experiment. At some point there was a meeting with an unknown young poet called William Wordsworth who was in town as the guest of sugar merchant John Pretor Pinney. Nothing much seemed to come of this meeting. Coleridge had other things on his mind, such as deciding that he loved Sara after all. These changeable ways had begun to grate on Southey. As Coleridge said to his friend: "you sate down and wrote - I used to saunter about and think about what I should write." Soon they weren't speaking to each other. Perhaps in an effort to get away from this strained atmosphere Coleridge and Sara moved into a cottage at Clevedon on the Somerset coast in August 1795. This was over a month before their marriage, which was quite shocking for the time. They married the following October, with the parents of both families deciding to make the best of it. A short period of happines followed in their cottage on the coast, but this seaside idyll came to an end when the weather started to get cold. Coleridge missed the public library at Bristol, and as it took him over a day's walk to get to Bristol, Sara was often left on her own in a small, and now chilly cottage. There was very little money to live on. An attempt to run a radical magazine called the Watchman failed miserably. The Bristol publisher Joseph Cottle was paying Coleridge some money for his poetry, and had published Poems On Various Subjects in April 1796, but a living couldn't be made out of this. Coleridge had to make up his mind what he was going to do. The thought of becoming a teacher brought on neuralgia, for which he started taking laudnum. In the end no decision was reached, and the couple went to live in a cottage in Nether Stowey, Somerset, near a friend named Tom Poole. While Sara battled with the tiny kitchen, and the needs of a young baby, her husband would work in his study or walk in the Quantock Hills. This cottage still survives, albeit with later additions, and is owned by the National Trust

In the meantime William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy had moved into the grand house of Racedown Lodge in Dorset. They were living there rent free, thanks to the benevolence of John Peter Pinney. Since that brief meeting in Bristol in 1795 Wordsworth's reputation had grown, and one day in June 1797 Coleridge decided to pay the Wordsworths a visit. William and Dorothy were gardening, when Coleridge vaulted the gate and ran down the slope towards them. What was meant to be a short visit turned into three weeks. The Wordsworths were then invited back to Lime Street, where Sara continued to struggle with conditions made even more cramped by the visitors. In the crush she spilt boiling milk on her husband's foot. This was the scald that kept Coleridge laid up in Tom Poole's garden, writing This Lime Tree Bower, My Prision when the others went off walking in the Quantock Hills. The great creative year of summer 1797 to summer 1798 had begun.

This time started with a house warming party that effectively sealed the end of it. By August 1797 rent paying tenants were wanted for Racedown, so the Wordsworths moved to another mansion, Alfoxden, which Tom Poole probably found for them. Tom negotiated a very reasonable rate, and it looked as though the penniless poet and his sister were miraculously going to continue living grandly. At the Alfoxden house warming party the usual Wordsworth Coleridge group was joined by friend and radical John Thelwell, who due to his outspoken views about the government had spent some time in the Tower of London. Thelwell did his usual turn after lunch, ranting on about the government so forcefully that he frightened Thomas Jones, the local man hired to help with catering. Thomas Jones passed a story of goings on at Alfoxden, via another servant, to Dr David Lyons of Bath, who wrote to the Home Secretary, who despatched a spy to keep an eye on the strange group. They laughed about it, Coleridge making a joke about a supposed conversation regarding Spinoza being overheard as a conversation about "Spy Nozey." But the danger had been real. Thelwell had already spent time in jail, and soon moved on. The fuss also meant that the owner of Alfoxden wanted them all out by the following summer, a departure that would mark the end of Coleridge's wonderful year. So the beginning of the year had already set the end.

Countryside near Culbone

At the end of August Coleridge, worn down by "the malignity of aristocrats" went to stay for a short time on his own in a lonely farm house, near Culbone Church on the Somerset coast. Visiting the area of Culbone today you still get a powerful sense of isolation. The roads are little more than tracks, and probably the best way to visit the village is on foot via the South West Coast Path. Coleridge's plan was to spend his time on this lonely coastline finishing a play called Orsorio, which the playwright Richard Sheridan had commissioned. Whilst at Culbone, Coleridge took a few grains of opium. This was to relieve what he variously described as "dysentry" or "a slight indisposition." For whatever reason, he took the opium and fell asleep, and dreamt of a wonderful poem that simply wrote itself in his mind. On waking he excitedly started to write the poem down. This famous story then continues with an interruption by a tradesman from nearby Porlock, who is supposed to have detained Coleridge for an hour. Sitting down to continue work on the poem, most of it had disappeared. Nevertheless Kubla Khan was an amazing poem, using images of the countryside of the Quantocks, and of Cheddar Gorge. In Kubla Khan a great king decides to hold nature within his pleasure dome, covering twice five miles of ground. The Romantic poets were writing about nature at a time when mankind's sway over the natural world was becoming all pervasive. The twice five miles of fertile ground which Kubla Khan took for his garden contained "caverns measureless to man." It contained all the uncontrollable vastness of nature.

 

A savage place as holy and enchanted

As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By a woman wailing for her demon lover

 

Man encloses nature in his pleasure dome, but nature continues, measureless caverns breaking way beyond those twice five miles. For me this poem marks the beginning of a typically modern conception of the relationship between man and nature.

Another classic poem began soon after on a walk with Wordsworth along the north Devon coast. There was talk of a collaboration, and out of these discussions came the idea for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It may have been based on books Coleridge was reading at the time, or on a dream a friend from Nether Stowey had told him about. The harbour at Watchet is certainly the harbour from which the Mariner sets sail in the poem, and a commemorative monument sits on the harbour front. The first lines of the poem were supposed to have been written at the Bell Inn, Watchet. Strangely this poem set in the vast spaces of the ocean, known and unknown, mirrors the feelings of poems such as This Lime Tree Bower, My Prison. Through the poem it becomes impossible to disentangle the big world of the ocean and the small world of the Mariner sailing through it on his ship. Do ships become becalmed because the Mariner shot an albatross, or does the weather not take any notice of such things? When things are at their worst and there is no water to drink, does the world become the Mariner's own delirious dream? By the end of the poem, as the harbour at Watchett appears ahead after the terrible voyage, the Mariner himself does not know:

 

O let me be awake, my God

Or let me sleep alway

 

As in This Lime Tree Bower, My Prison the small and big world come together. To me it is as though Coleridge, at certain moments, is stepping out of his time and place, and finding his way into his reader's time and place. There is such a powerful sense of communication.

- The area which inspired much of this poetry can be explored on the Coleridge Way,and on the South West Coast Path.

Money worries continued, and there were plans to become a clergyman in Shrewsbury. But these plans were shelved, if they were ever going to happen, when Thomas and Josiah Wedgewood, wealthy sons of the famous potter offered £150 a year to Coleridge for the rest of his life. Now with wonderfully unexpected financial security the poet could now enjoy a pleasant holiday period during the last months of the Wordsworth's tenancy of Alfoxden. Coleridge wrote Frost At Midnight one cold night in February 1798, addressed to his infant son. It was another solitary conversation poem that reached beyond the limits of a small house on a cold night. On the 23rd of March 1798, so the traditional story says, Coleridge read the complete Rime Of The Ancient Mariner to Wordsworth in one of the Alfoxden parlours.

The last months at Alfoxden saw work on poems which were meant to go together in a collaberartive volume. Coleridge worked on the first part of the remarkable poem Christabel with its very modern reflection on the fluctuating categories of right and wrong. Then when the tenancy on Alfoxden finally ended so did the magic of that special year. William and Dorothy went to Bristol, and then went on to Wye; or William went off to France to see the mother of his child - depending on which biographer you read. Coleridge spent some time in Germany, seeing this as a good place to futher his self education. Sara sensibly decided that with two young children it would be better for her to stay in Nether Stowey. The separation was to ruin their marriage, Sara feeling justifiably abandoned when her second child, Berkley, died of tuberculosis. Berkley died in February 1799: Colerdige did not return from Germany until July of that year.

The Lake District

By 1800 the now unhappy couple settled in Keswick in the Lake District. The Coleridge house, Greta Hall, wasn't far from Wordsworth's Lake District home. But the closeness of the old relationship had gone. The thirteen years Coleridge spent at Greta Hall were difficult. The addiction to opium became more serious, and the ability to write poetry seemed to weaken Dejection, An Ode is one of the few successful poems to come out of these years. In 1807 Wordsworth read The Prelude to Coleridge, a poem which brought back memories of those bright days at Alfoxden. The poem also threw into focus Coleridge's own decline.

Coleridge found work, and some self-respect as a lecturer on famous English writers. He was on a lecture tour in the west country in 1813 when increasing intakes of opium and alcohol finally caused a mental and physical crisis. For many days he raved in agony, and needed to be watched constantly to prevent suicide attempts. Whilst recovering he lived with the Highgate surgeon Dr James Gillman. At first the arrangement was temporary, but from 1816 Coleridge became a permanent resident, with his own rooms at the top of the house. He lived with Gillman's family for eighteen years. Sara and his son would visit occasionally. Coleridge died on the 25th of July 1834,and is buried in Highgate churchyard.

A poetic epitaph was written the year before, and it includes the lines:

 

Beneath this sod

A poet lies, or that which once seemed he

O, lift one thought in prayer for S.T.C. -

That he for many a year with toil of breath

Found death in life, may here find life in death

 

The story of Coleridge is a sad one. His powers reached their peak for only a short time, and he was aware that the rest of his life never repeated the excitement of those months in Nether Stowey. But the brilliance of the poems he wrote during those months lies in taking limits and stepping outside them. The poems of 1797 and 1798 are not limited to that time, or to a small part of England. They still reach out. The excitment of there and then, is also the excitment of here and now.