2 April 2003
Holy Dread: The Results of Imagination in Three Coleridge Poems
By Jason Preu
In his October 14, 1797 letter to Thomas Poole (p. 460), Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes of his childhood predilection for imaginative tales. Coleridge argues that by being exposed to such literature his mind became “habituated to the Vast.” Coleridge continues, “I never regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions.” He then writes of fantastic literature: “I know no other way of giving the mind a love of ‘the Great’ and ‘the Whole.’”
This focus on the importance of conceptually inspired thought over empirically inspired thought threads itself through many of Coleridge’s poems. In The Eolian Harp (p. 549) the imagination of the narrator breaks from conventional boundaries to become a point of contention with the more tempered voice of the norm. Kubla Khan: or A Vision in a Dream (p. 522) ups the imaginative ante by being at once a more explicit instantiation of imaginative composition as well as providing a more drastic image of the imaginatively gifted person’s disconnect from society. Finally, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (p. 528) presents a beautifully rendered, yet ultimately frightening, example of an imagination run rampant.
Keeping in mind Coleridge’s statements from the above-quoted letter I’d like to look at each of these poems in hopes of tracing their respective presentations of possible imaginations in action. From the gentle but frustrated ruminations of The Eolian Harp’s narrator, to the poet’s dreadful ecstasy in Kubla Khan, and ending with the Ancient Mariner’s tortured conscience/consciousness, Coleridge gives his readers a full range of minds with a love of “the Great” and “the Whole” as well as the consequences those minds must bear.
Throughout most of The Eolian Harp, the tone is sensual and soft: “With white-flowered jasmine and the broad-leaved myrtle” (4). Not until the drab diction at poem’s end does the tone take on a more rigid stance. At the outset, however, Coleridge writes that the “stilly murmur of the distant sea tells of us silence,” (11) thus inviting the reader to exercise his or her imagination when thinking about the contradiction inherent in speaking of silence. Additionally, the use of the “s” sounds in this line and lines 18 and 19 act as a pneumonic relaxant, soothing a reader’s mind so that perhaps it might be more receptive to the flights of fancy that follow.
From the second stanza through the fourth, Coleridge, by way of the narrator, begins to elucidate some of the metaphysics behind his conception of “the Whole.” By loosening conventional restraints that bind his mind, the narrator, when hearing the Eolian harp’s music, slips effortlessly into metaphorical thought: “Like some coy maid half-yielding to her lover” (15). Eventually, this music and metaphor shift and seem to come from another world altogether: “Such a soft floating witchery of sound / As twilight elfins make when they at eve / Voyage on gentle gales from fairyland” (20-23).
At this point, the narrator’s imagination is fully informed by past “fairy tales and genii” in addition to various images of paradise. Here the poem begins to take a more philosophic bent and his imagination begins to push beyond those conventional restraints. Note that the mind must first be able to widen enough to entertain fantasy before any conceptually difficult, philosophic thought begins to occur. The last third of the second stanza, coming directly after these images of elves and paradise is a prime example of this “widening” effect:
Oh the one life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere –
Methinks it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so filled (26-31).
The fourth stanza shows the narrator crossing the line from speculation to blasphemy, at least in his partner’s eyes. The narrator’s pantheistic proposal immediately raises an alarm. Whether this alarm stems from the narrator’s partner on the porch (as I imagine the scene to take place) or whether this alarm is more internally derived is uncertain. The net result though is that the narrator understands that, as enlightened as his thoughts may be, they undoubtedly threaten the status quo and his ability to maintain decent relations with those who might not share his view. Ironically, the status quo’s position is no less an imaginative feat than the narrator’s conceptions. The difference is that the status quo’s imaginative paradigm (as is often the case) is here shown as rigid, bound, and unreceptive to expansion. Bringing ideas to life that go against this bound imagination, whether in words or actions, is often isolating. Kubla Khan takes this idea of being reproached for atypical thoughts from the back porch to the community at large.
The very title of the poem, Kubla Khan: or A Vision in a Dream immediately alerts the reader that they are about to encounter something of a fantastic nature. As in The Eolian Harp, the reader is presented with two types of imagination in action, bound and unbound. The first stanza is given over to an image of Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome. The dome itself is a product of imagination; imagination filtered through the will. Further, the land around the dome is sanctioned and tended: “So twice five miles of fertile ground / With walls and towers were girdled round” (6,7), which suggest the dome as a symbol of bound imagination.
The second stanza, however, altogether removes the will from the picture and offers in its place a seductive, violent display of creative energies at work:
A mighty fountain momently was forced
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail! (19-22)
This is an image of natural instinct unbound by any reasoned, willful constraints. Remarkably, the action occurs directly underneath the calm, cultivated veneer of the pleasure dome. The imagery is sexual, the movement is climactic and, at times, quite comforting: “Five miles meandering with a mazy motion (25). The “m” sounds of this line lull the senses, as would the gentle, nimble touch of lovers enjoined in a post-coital embrace. The geography of this scene is important. Again, this chaos is the pleasure dome’s foundation and is likely from whence sprung Kubla Khan’s impetus to build the dome.
The third stanza I find the most interesting in terms of what’s being suggested. As the stanza begins, the poet sees juxtaposed upon the waves of “a lifeless ocean” the reflections of both the pleasure dome and the caverns. For the poet, this is “a miracle of rare device, / A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!” (35,36) that sparks an insight along with a fragmented musical memory. The insight is that if the poet (note the conditional “if”) could fully remember that song he would build just such a miraculous “dome in air.” This imagined dome is a perfect synthesis of bound and unbound imagination. It is “the Whole” incarnate. The interesting part though is that the public is afraid (as well in awe) of such a union.
In unison the people
. . .cry, ‘Beware, beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice
And close your eyes with holy dread – (49-52).
There seems no hope that the community will accept one who regulates creeds by conception or can reify his or her understanding of “the Whole.” The stakes are greater here than during Sara’s pointed look in The Eolian Harp. In that poem, the poet postulates an unconventional notion only to be brought back to the Now by a reasoned reproof. The poet of Kubla Khan, on the other hand, has a vision and speculates as to what might result from bringing that vision to fruition. The result of understanding “the Whole” is the visionary’s ostracism. Brutally honest, this imagined reaction by the public shows Coleridge’s remarkable social insight concerning public behavior as well as the risks involved in making real the imagination’s fancies. The possibilities for imaginative thought are nothing short of personal completion, but anyone who dares to attempt such a union must understand the risks to their day-to-day life. The Ancient Mariner embodies some of these risks on a near tragic level.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner takes a different approach to this idea of regulating creeds by one’s conceptions for the purpose of giving the mind a love of “the Great.” This poem ends the trend towards increasingly fantastic yet chaotic imagery established in The Eolian Harp and continued by Kubla Khan. In the two poems prior, imagination works conditionally and by speculation on the respective narrator’s part. The Ancient Mariner isn’t allowed this “should of, could of, would of” luxury. With this character, Coleridge portrays someone whose creeds are wholly regulated by conceptions. The Mariner seems tortured by his conceptions; so much so that his predicament may provide a strong counterpoint to Coleridge’s own argument that a fantastically inspired imagination gives the mind a love of “the Whole.”
The Mariner’s imagination is a double-edged sword. In one sense it allows him to live in a spirited, animated world:
The sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he;
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea. (25-28)
The use of the third person personal pronoun “he” in this verse shows a speaker who uses imagination to personify his world, thereby helping to make sense of it.
The double edge, however, is that this same imaginative capacity turns on its owner when he tries to come to grips with the unintelligible crap game for his life that takes place between Death and Life-in-Death. Life-in Death wins! The Mariner isn’t cursed! His luck was mere probability, the fall of the die – the ultimate representation of existing in a world of chance. The Mariner seems unable or unwilling to consider this and from here on his imagination becomes his own worst enemy. His imagination comes up with many a fanciful explanation for why he was spared and traps him in a cyclic behavioral pattern of wandering “like night, from land to land” (586), a heated build-up of desire: “That agony returns, / And till my ghastly tale is told, / This heart within me burns.” (582-585), and eventual, dramatic release: “I know the man that must hear me – / To him my tale I teach” (589-590). This process is agonizing yet cathartic (as is most penance), but perpetuates the Mariner’s loneliness. Unfortunately, it is what he must do to make some sense of his experience.
On the topic of the Mariner’s penance, there is a brief dialogue between two spirits that adds somewhat to my argument that the penance is a self-imposed product of the Mariner’s devise. The two spirits look over the Mariner and begin to discuss him. One spirit discusses his actions thus far while
The other was a softer voice,
As soft as honey-dew:
Quoth he, ‘The man hath penance done,
And penance more will do.’ (406-409)
That the spirit speaks in a voice “as soft as honey-dew” is telling. The voice isn’t emotionless or demanding of recompense. The voice doesn’t put any spin on the situation, as does the gloss writer’s bound imagination. The spirit’s ten words are journalistic and seem to recognize the pain the Mariner’s experience has wrought and also understands that, human nature being what it is, the Mariner won’t simply allow his experience of isolation to be its own penance.
Coleridge writes in his letter to Poole that exercising the imagination leads to a love of “the Whole” and in this poem one may indeed argue that the Mariner comes to this conclusion (614-617). If one accepts this line of thinking (and I don’t entirely reject it), one must ask, “At what cost comes this love?” Is the Mariner better off for being “habituated to the Vast”? This is a man who not only had some prior knowledge of spirits and the supernatural; he witnessed them firsthand.
The Mariner seems an example of a mind where imaginative has usurped the rest of awareness. The poet of Kubla Khan: an example of what might happen socially to a person who dares use their imagination to join together into a unified whole seemingly disparate elements. Finally, the narrator of The Eolian Harp either catches himself, or is reproved by his partner, as one enchanted evening his imagination gets away from him.
Coleridge never seems to argue for one type of imagination over any other. As The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’s epigraph states:
I admit that it is good sometimes to contemplate in thought, as in a picture, the image of a greater and better world; otherwise the mind, used to the minor concerns of daily life, may contract itself too much, and concentrate entirely on trivia. But meanwhile we must be vigilant for truth and moderation, that we may distinguish certainty from doubt, day from night. (p. 528)
In choosing this epigraph, Coleridge shows he recognizes the danger that being entirely unrestricted in thought poses for truth. He recognizes the danger that being too restricted in thought poses for improving our lot. Perhaps most importantly, Coleridge knows well the social effects of too much or too little conceptual thought [For an example of the ill-effects of too little conceptualization, study the gloss writer’s emotionless summaries in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.] In each of these poems, Coleridge shows what happens when one blurs the line between what one needs to believe in order to function in society and what is possible for one to believe. There is no advice for him to give only examples that mirror our behavior.
Works Cited
Wu, Duncan, ed. Romanticism An Anthology With CD-ROM. Second Edition. Malden:
Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2000. All quotations from Coleridge’s work taken from this
edition.