Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) is one of the great Romantic poets and critics of the nineteenth century. His “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan,” “The Eolian Harp,” “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “Frost at Midnight,” and "Dejection: An Ode" should be read by anyone who loves poetry and wants to understand the ideals of the Romantic poets. He gave up writing poetry after 1805 except for a handful of poems, most likely because his laudanum addiction sapped his creative energy. In one of these late poems, “Constancy to an Ideal Object” (1828), Coleridge approaches the imaginative quality of his early poems. Coleridge’s inspiration for the poem was Willaim Wordsworth’s sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson, and requires a brief explanation. Coleridge married Sara Fricker in 1794, but no longer loved her after he met Sara Hutchinson in 1799. They became friends, but their relationship never went beyond god will. In the poem almost thirty years later Coleridge asks why his unrequited love for Hutchinson has “remain[ed]/The only constant in a world of change”? His answer reveals the power of passion over logic.
Since all that beat about in Nature’s range,
Or veer or vanish; why should’st thou remain
The only constant in a world of change,
O yearning Thought! That liv’st but in the brain?
Call to the Hours, that in the distance play,
The faery people of the future day–
Fond Thought! not one of all that shining swarm
Will breathe on thee with life-enkindling breath,
Till when, like strangers shelt’ring from a storm,
Hope and Despair meet in the porch of Death!
Yet still thou haunt’st me; and though well I see,
She is not thou, and only thou art she,
Still, still as though some dear embodied Good,
Some living Love before my eyes there stood
With answering look a ready ear to lend,
I mourn to thee and say–‘Ah! Loveliest friend!
That this the meed of all my toils might be,
To have a home, an English home, and thee!’
Vain repetition! Home and Thou are one.
The peaceful cot, the moon shall shine upon,
Lulled by the thrush and wakened by the lark,
Without thee were but a becalmed bark,
Whose Helmsman on an ocean waste and wide
Sits mute and pale his mouldering helm beside.
And art thou nothing? Such thou art,as when
The woodman winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, were o’er the sheep-track’s maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist’ning haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image with a glory round its head;
The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues,
Nor knows he makes the shadow, he pursues!
The first four lines of the poem present a logical, rhetorical question: how is it possible that this single, unchanging thought continues to occupy the mind when everything else in this world changes? But when a “yearning Thought!” is in fact a yearning passion, it can grip the psyche relentlessly. In Coleridge’s formulation, the “Thought” within his mind exists autonomously, beyond the logic he asserts against it, since it independently “liv’st in the brain”[.] And immediately as he tries to subdue it, logic gives way to imagination in the six lines that follow:
Call to the Hours, that in the distance play,
The faery people of the future day–
Fond thought! Not one of all that shining swarm
Will breathe on thee with life-enkindling breath,
Till when, like strangers shelt’ring from the storm,
Hope and Despair meet in the porch of Death!
Lines 5 and 6 Coleridge directs “Thought” to envision the future, to “Call to the Hours, that in the distance play,” then retreats quickly from hopeful expectation with the logical exclamation, “Fond Thought!” He knows his “Thought” will remain unfulfilled for the rest of his life, “Till…/Hope and Despair meet in the porch of Death,” and although he can distinguish between fact and fantasy, “She is not thou, and only thou art she,” his “Thought” rules his imagination. With logic left behind, he falls into a reverie of domestic bliss (14-21), and envisions a home with Hutchinson nestled beneath the moon, serenaded by the “thrush” and the “lark.”
What Coleridge's poem exemplifies is a mind possessed by a relentless, unfulfilled passion that induces yearning despair, stimulates wishful fantasy, and compels logical acceptance. It persists through time even as all else changes. Consequently, he surrenders to it and fantasizes about the life that he wishes he had with Hutchinson. Of course, Coleridge knows that is an unattainable image and he immediately substitutes the truly haunting image of the mute “Helmsman on an ocean waste and wide,” the genuine metaphor of his actual existence. As the poem ends, there is a final remarkable image that fuses Coleridge’s psychological seesawing between logic and fantasy. He imagines a “woodman winding westward up the glen,” who as he walks “Sees full before him…/An image” that he “worships.” Coleridge states, the “enamoured rustic” does not know “he makes the shadow, he pursues.” As does the woodman, Coleridge also makes the “shadow” he has been chasing for all those years. Unlike the woodman, he recognizes the shadow is of his own making. But as the poem demonstrates, knowledge has no power against an unyielding passion and logic must ultimately submit to the greater force of love.
“Constancy to an Ideal Object” enables the reader to feel a sorrow that followed poor Coleridge for years after falling in love with Hutchinson. But even in his earlier poems, prior to meeting Hutchinson, there is an unmistakable element of sadness, a continuous quiver of despair. In his earlier conversation poem, “Frost at MIdnight,” (1798) that sadness and incipient despair slips through the beautiful lines he composed. In the poem, Coleridge enfolds layers of memories within a meditation as his imagination reviews the present, past and future. The present is depicted in the first stanza:
The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry
Came loud–and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude. Which suits
Abstruser musing: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
‘Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methings its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, everywhere
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of thought.
The first three lines envelop Coleridge’s cottage with the dark, “secret,” . Except for his sleeping infant son, he sits in “solitude” satisfied to be alone with his “Abstruser musings.” His “musings” barely begin, when the “calm” that evokes them suddenly “disturbs/And vexes his meditation “with extreme silentness.” The world outside his cottage is as “inaudible as dreams.” His attention shifts to the grate of his fire and the “thin blue flame//…which fluttered on the grate.” As he stares at the blue film of fire, he remembers when he was a young boy living at boarding school in London.
But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger! And as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birthplace, and the old church tower,
Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor’s face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My playmate when we both were clothed aliked!
In stanza 2, Coleridge remembers past days at school as he gazed at the blue film in the fire grate before falling asleep. As in stanza 1, this film stirred an even earlier and poignant memory that he had. He would dream of where he was born, hear “the old church tower bells “rang/From morn to evening,” and yearned to return to a home where he heard those “bells” that “stirred and haunted” him “With a wild pleasure” and resonated with “articulate sounds of things to come.” This second memory carries him further away from the present night and reveals his state of mind. Coleridge is searching deep into his childhood for something he has lost, which is the necessary, hopeful anticipation of future “things to come.” Apparently, that hopeful anticipation was extinguished when he moved from the countryside of his earliest years to live in London, as stanza 3 points out:
Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the interspersed vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent ’mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! Shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! He shall mold
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.
At the moment of writing the poem, he can see the world, and in particular, Nature, but having been denied the joys of Nature by being “reared/In the great city ’mid cloisters dim,” he still knows Nature abounds with “lovely shapes and sounds intelligible/Of that eternal language, which thy God/Utters,” but cannot hear that “language” of transcendence. Being denied that possibility, he envisions it for his infant son:
Therefore, all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothed the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple tree, with the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or in the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
The final stanza ends the poem poignantly. It continues with the certainty that his son’s life will be filled with experiences of transcendence. But the last three lines echo the poem’s first and make me wonder. Is Coleridge truly confident in what he envisions for his son, or does he overstate his confidence? There is no way to discern “the secret ministry of the frost” and adequately answer that question.