Samuel Coleridge was born on October 21, 1772 in Devonshire , England Jesus College
younger sister of
his friend, the future poet laureate Robert Southey. He earned a living as a
Unitarian preacher for a short time while remaining in an incompatible
marriage, and began to focus seriously on his love of writing. In the late
1790s, Coleridge began his famous friendship with William Wordsworth and his
sister, Dorothy. Their intellectual and artistic exchanges culminated in Lyrical
Ballads
After travels abroad in Sicily and Malta , Coleridge returned to England
Samuel Taylor Coleridge died on July 25, 1834 at the age of 61. Upon his
death, his good friend Charles Lamb claimed he could not grieve for Coleridge,
saying: "It seemed to me that he long had been on the confines of the next
world - that he had a hunger for eternity." According to Lamb, Coleridge
spent his life striving for the eternal and sublime, so that death was for him
the fulfillment of his deepest desire, rather than a dreaded end.
"The Picture,"
Coleridge
wrote "The Picture," or at least completed and published it, in 1802.
It first appeared in The Morning Post of September 6, 1802, and was reprinted
in The Poetical Register, and Repository of Fugitive Poetry for 1802 (1803).
The Dream Within
the Dream
The
narrator's explicitly-stated, or 'manifest,' dream for himself is emancipation,
freedom from love's (day)dreams. His method of pursuing it is that of Gessner's
lover, recreated as philosopheme: self-loss in the wilds of nature (or, for the
poet, self-loss in the wilderness of verse). But one may wonder just what the
"new joy" really is that "Beckons" him "on, . . . /
Playmate, or guide!" (ll. 7-11, SL, 128). Nor is it long before the figure
of "Love"—the pastoral, erotic motive—returns, "ensnared"
in the very fancy of expulsion: in the form of a sulky Cupid who is chased by
Nymphs, Oreads, Earth-winds, wingless Airs, Fays, and elfin Gnomes through
eighteen lines of mocking reproof that imagine—in present tense—how the spirits
of the place would punish "His little godship" if he had the temerity
to cross their borders (ll. 28-45, SL, 129-30).22 Next in the cast of imaginary
characters excluded from the scene appears a lovely maiden, around whose
"tendril ringlets," "blue, delicate veins" and "half
disclosed / . . . snowy bosom" the breeze, in this landscape, thinks the
narrator, "Ne'er play'd the wanton" (ll. 58-67, SL, 129-31). Almost
immediately thereafter, however, a worshipful youth (the "he"
referred to below) arrives in his thoughts as the narrator's surrogate, to
dream of the "stately virgin." "Like a dissolving thing"
(l. 67), the narrative line disappears so quickly it is not at first clear that
the narrator is still day-dreaming, that he does not actually see a woman
reflected in the pooled stream beside which he sits.
The images
rise up before the narrator (and reader) "as things" (I borrow from
the preface to "Kubla Khan," 52), when the narrator apostrophizes the
"desert Stream": "no pool of thine," he protests,
Though clear as lake in latest summer-eve,
Did e'er reflect the stately virgin's robe,
Her face, her form divine, her downcast look
Contemplative! Ah see! her open palm
Presses her cheek and brow! her elbow rests
On the bare branch of half-uprooted tree,
That leans towards its mirror! He, meanwhile,
Who from her countenance turn'd, or look'd by stealth,
(For fear is true love's cruel nurse,) he now,
With stedfast gaze and unoffending eye,
Worships the watery idol, dreaming hopes
Delicious to the soul, but fleeting, vain,
E'en as that phantom-world on which he gazed.
She, sportive tyrant! with her left hand plucks
The heads of tall flowers that behind her grow,
Lychnis, and willow-herb, and fox-glove bells;
And suddenly, as one that toys with time,
Scatters them on the pool! Then all the charm
Is broken—all that phantom-world so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape the other.
Did e'er reflect the stately virgin's robe,
Her face, her form divine, her downcast look
Contemplative! Ah see! her open palm
Presses her cheek and brow! her elbow rests
On the bare branch of half-uprooted tree,
That leans towards its mirror! He, meanwhile,
Who from her countenance turn'd, or look'd by stealth,
(For fear is true love's cruel nurse,) he now,
With stedfast gaze and unoffending eye,
Worships the watery idol, dreaming hopes
Delicious to the soul, but fleeting, vain,
E'en as that phantom-world on which he gazed.
She, sportive tyrant! with her left hand plucks
The heads of tall flowers that behind her grow,
Lychnis, and willow-herb, and fox-glove bells;
And suddenly, as one that toys with time,
Scatters them on the pool! Then all the charm
Is broken—all that phantom-world so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape the other.
The scene
is self-reflexive: it mirrors the narrator's own activity and his (repressed,
or suppressed) wish for the "stately virgin's" presence (who is, in
part, a condensation of Gessner's muses). The lines may also be supposed to
turn upon specific, distorted textual (and personal) memories (compare with
Gessner's "noch gestern hypftest du froh im weissen Sommer-kleid um mich
As figure
of the poet, the narrator wishes for the muse's return; as lover, he wishes for
(as she is later named) Isabel. His "part-ego" dreams for him:24
that, perhaps, one day his "Lewti" will be kind ("Lewti, or the
Circassian Love-Chant," another poem of conventional, unrequited love,
immediately precedes "The Picture" in Sibylline Leaves.) The youth
apparently cherishes a delusion. But are his hopes of being noticed altogether
so "vain"? The "virgin," presumably amused or impatient
with his image-worship, destroys her image in the pool, in a gesture perhaps
prescient (or reminiscent) of the Sara Hutchinson whom Coleridge recalled in a
notebook entry of 1808 as wishing to be accounted "no Angel" (CN 3406
13.37). If one interprets the behavior of this "sportive tyrant" in
the same way Freud interprets that of Jensen's Gradiva, however, her action may
implicitly invite pursuit (see 1907 [1906], 75, 79). An important line added in
1828 suggests what here is only hinted: she tosses the flower-heads into the
stream because her votary's gaze was "not unheeded" (l. 86, CP 1,
371). In any case, this dream foretells its (camouflaged) wish fulfilled: in
the narrative future, the poet-narrator will retrieve the birch-bark picture
Isabel has dropped into his dream, and follow her. His double's day-dream
unmasks the narrator's inspiring "joy" within the
"master-passion" in disguise: desire for the poem, desire for the
maiden-muse.
Like its counterpart in the preface to "Kubla
Khan," the "watery" idyll models the streamlike flow of
association; it also recalls Aristotle's comparison of "the mental
pictures" in dreams to "reflections in water," such that
"movement destroys the clarity of the dream."25 Some dreams,
Aristotle concedes, may be "both signs and causes" (379). In a sense,
the dream of his other self functions as the 'sign' of the narrator's
"true" wishes (for reunion with the muse or his lost self; to attract
her notice and favor), and the "cause" of subsequent action in the
narrative. But Aristotle is primarily concerned to demonstrate that
"prophetic" dreams do not come from God: they are the children of
coincidence. Likewise, the second movement of the narrator's dream emphasizes
that what we gaze on is necessarily a "watery idol" (my emphasis).
Once the
"charm / Is broken," what David Punter (1990, 19) terms the
"processes of primary narcissism," implicit before as a possibility
of motive, become explicit.26 The narrator has comforted his dream-double by
inviting the youth to "Stay awhile" that he may enjoy the restored
"visions" which will return when "once more / The pool becomes a
mirror." But the invitation heralds a second, more serious fall from grace
that is elided in the preface to "Kubla Khan." "Behold,"
the narrator commands his surrogate (and reader):
Each wildflower on the
marge inverted there,
And there the half-uprooted tree—but where,
O where the virgin's snowy arm, that lean'd
On its bare branch? He turns, and she is gone!
Homeward she steals through many a woodland maze
Which he shall seek in vain. Ill-fated youth!
Go, day by day, and waste thy manly prime
In mad Love-yearning by the vacant brook,
Till sickly thoughts bewitch thine eyes, and thou
Behold'st her shadow still abiding there,
The Naiad of the Mirror!
And there the half-uprooted tree—but where,
O where the virgin's snowy arm, that lean'd
On its bare branch? He turns, and she is gone!
Homeward she steals through many a woodland maze
Which he shall seek in vain. Ill-fated youth!
Go, day by day, and waste thy manly prime
In mad Love-yearning by the vacant brook,
Till sickly thoughts bewitch thine eyes, and thou
Behold'st her shadow still abiding there,
The Naiad of the Mirror!
The "phantom-world" of creative illusion
resolves into delusion, the space of its "shadow." No longer does a
young man observe (the figure of) a real woman reflected in a stream; held fast
from pursuit of her by "fear" or the seductions of wish-fulfilling
fantasy, he loses himself to "visions" in which she can only appear
(to purloin Milton's epithet for the classical Urania) as the "empty
dream" he himself has created. Confined to the asylum of "mad Love-yearning,"
the now "ill-fated youth" inhabits the realm of "imaginary
Time" (SL, iii)—under the aspect of "suspended Animation"
(Lectures 1, 124).
His spiritual malaise seems not unlike that of his
previous textual counterpart, the "Gentle Lunatic." Coleridge alluded
to the "Lunatic's" condition as a disguised reflection of his own, in
the letter to Cottle of 1814 quoted earlier; the relevant lines, included in
Sibylline Leaves, do not appear in the 1802 versions of "The
Picture." Coleridge diagnosed his alter ego more fully in a letter to
Edward Coleridge of 1826. Both letters quote "The Picture" with
reference to Coleridge's problems of religious faith and belief. In 1826,
analyzing his own recent "indolence leavening the resignation which it
counterfeited," Coleridge lamented:
REFERENCES
1-Adair,
Patricia. The Waking Dream: A Study of Coleridge's Poetry. New York
2- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Aids to Reflection. Ed. John Beer. Vol. 9 of The Collected Works. Princeton:
3- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Christabel, & c. 1816.
4- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Collected Letters. Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. 6 vols.