Coleridge: Early Visions. Richard Holmes

truth seems to be that he was experimenting with every kind of poetic style and pose. His worship of Chatterton was genuine, and he had copied Bowles’ “Monody on the Death of Henry Headley” into his hymn-book to inspire him. But this did not prevent him from turning the solemn enterprise on its head with an answering “Monody on a Tea-Kettle” for George:

      While Bats shall shriek and Dogs shall howling run

      The tea-kettle is spoilt and Coleridge is undone!

      In March 1791 he also sent his brother a Pindaric ode on Euclid’s geometry of ghastly ingenuity. His accompanying comment on learning mathematics – a thing he could never do – contains an interesting prophesy of critical debates to come: “though Reason is feasted, Imagination is starved: whilst Reason is luxuriating in its proper Paradise, Imagination is wearily travelling over a dreary desert.”³⁶ Those images of fruitful Paradise and sterile desert were to haunt him long after.

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      Officially his career at Christ’s Hospital ended in triumph. As the senior Grecian in his year, he was awarded in January 1791 a School Exhibition worth £40 to take him to Cambridge, renewable for four years; and the following month obtained a place at Jesus College, with a promise of a Rustat Scholarship of £30, especially reserved for the sons of clergymen who showed outstanding merit. Bob Allen went to Oxford without an award, and Val Le Grice did not go up for another year. These awards delighted his family – especially George – and promised to relieve them of most of his expenses, which normally would have been more than £100 per annum.

      Yet throughout that last winter Coleridge was periodically ill with rheumatic fever, contracted as a result of a late autumn bathing expedition to the New River. For several months he spent long periods in the school sanatorium, dosed with opium to help him sleep, and doing little except write some striking scraps of poetry. He lay listening to the distant shouts and laughter of the boys in the cloisters, as he recorded in his sonnet “Pain”. Coleridge’s long history of illness – often recurring in damp climates, and during winter months – now began. The sonnet is his first vision of the feverish invalid, besieged by “the trembling sense of wan Disease”, cut off from the normal, healthy daylight world around him, a theme to be powerfully developed.³⁷

      He also wrote a love-poem, “Genevieve”, addressed to his young nurse, whose short lyrical lines contain the first hint of the ballads he would later write. They praise her tender solicitude and generous, maternal bosom in its starched apron like a swan:

      When sinking low the sufferer wan

      Beholds no hand outstretch’d to save,

      Fair, as the bosom of the Swan

      That rises graceful o’er the wave,

      I’ve seen your breast with pity heave,

      And therefore love I you, sweet Genevieve!³⁸

      The close association of poetry with sickness, feverish dreams, and isolation, set against the consoling, healing presence of the beloved, was now initiated. The theme was deepened by tragic sickness in his own family. Early in 1791 came news of Luke’s sudden death of a fever at Exeter; and this was quickly followed by the death of his beloved Nancy, after a long consumptive illness. Again, Coleridge turned to poetry, writing several more sonnets of deep and clumsy emotion:

      Pain after pain, and woe succeeding woe –

      Is my heart destin’d for another blow?

      O my sweet sister! and must thou too die?³⁹

      Significantly, he already linked these deaths with that of his father, and the sense of being “fated to rove thro’ Life” bereft of those who had been closest to him in childhood. Perhaps this also explains the intense emotion with which he finally left Christ’s Hospital that summer, celebrated in his “Sonnet: On Quitting School for College” (another theme taken from Bowles). He bid “Adieu, adieu!” to the “much-lov’d cloisters pale!”, and spoke in tears of his happy days there, most of which he would later say were miserable.⁴⁰

       THREE PRODIGAL SON

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      Coleridge was just nineteen when he went up to Jesus College, Cambridge in the autumn of 1791. Though academically outstanding, there was little in his letters or adolescent poetry to suggest any real creative originality by this age (compared for example with Shelley or Keats). With characteristic acuteness, he himself later remarked on this.¹ He was widely read, marvellously articulate, noisily self-confident but lacked any driving sense of literary vocation. Outwardly gregarious, as Lamb remembered, he was also an intensely lonely young man who longed for friendship. His unhappy family background, and growing sense of being an orphan in the world, made him even more emotionally volatile and self-conscious than most students. He referred jocosely to his “fat vacuity” of face, and his frequent blushes.

      In his letters to George, and especially to the Evans family, there is overwhelming evidence of his passionate desire for intimacy and acceptance. The almost hysterical intensity of this, at times, may itself have been an alienating factor for fellow students. Self-dramatising and self-mocking by turns, he was like some brilliant overgrown child, performing ceaseless exhausting parlour games for his elders, and never settling down. He danced and jumped on his own shadow – sitting scholarship exams, writing for poetry prizes, dabbling in university politics, running up disastrous debts, flirting with drink, whores, and suicide – and all the time seemed to know that the performance was somehow hollow, a dazzling demand for attention, sympathy, and recognition. Yet in the process something real and extraordinary did happen: it released the language of his imagination, at first in his letters, then gradually in his poetry.

      The opening note of this commedia of university life was struck, very early on, with almost conscious design, in his first letter from Jesus College to Mrs Evans and her daughters, written in February 1792.

      Believe me, that You and my Sisters have the very first row in the front box of my Heart’s little theatre – and – God knows! you are not crowded. There, my dear Spectators! you shall see what you shall see – Farce, Comedy, & Tragedy – my Laughter, my Chearfulness, and my Melancholy. A thousand figures pass before you, shifting in perpetual succession – these are my Joys and my Sorrows, my Hopes and my Fears, my Good tempers, and my Peevishnesses: you will however observe two, that remain unalterably fixed – and these are Love and Gratitude. In short, my dear Mrs Evans! my whole heart shall be laid open like any sheep’s heart…Come Ladies! will you not take your seats in this play house?²

      2

      Coleridge’s first act in Cambridge was to go round to Pembroke College to see his schoolboy mentor Thomas Middleton, as soon as he got off the London coach. Middleton, who was studying hard for his finals the following summer, reasserted his old scholarly influence, and did much to shape the success of Coleridge’s first year, which was otherwise lonely and unsettled. He found his own college, Jesus, bleak and unfriendly, “the very palace of winds”, set on the edge of the city surrounded by the exposed parklands of Jesus Green. “Neither Lectures, or Chapel – or anything – is begun,” he wrote plaintively to George. “The College very thin – and Middleton has not the least acquaintance with any of Jesus, except a very black-guardly fellow, whose phisiog: I did not like.”³

      With the