Coleridge: Darker Reflections

The Speedwell got under way from Gibraltar on 25 April 1804, now escorted by HMS Maidstone, and hoping to make the second leg of their journey in a week. In the event it took twenty-eight days, alternately beaten by storms and transfixed by calms, which took a terrible toll on Coleridge’s health and spirits. Initially his journal records the continuing beauty of the seascape, the excitement of a turtle hunt, hornpipe dancing on the deck, and long grog sessions in Captain Findlay’s cabin.

To beguile the time he began an essay on Superstition, “taken in its philosophical and most comprehensive Sense”, as it affects men of action – soldiers, sailors, fishermen, farmers, even lovers and gamblers – who are placed “in an absolute Dependence on Powers & Events, over which they have no Control”.43 He noted how the patterns of “an old Idolatry” rose in response to physical fear, and fixed themselves angrily on scapegoats or astronomical signs, like the star which dogs a crescent moon. There began to be talk of a “Jonas in the Fleet”, and he dryly remarked that this was one advantage of sailing in a convoy. “On a single Vessel the Jonas must have been sought among ourselves.”

Conditions aboard the Speedwell steadily deteriorated. The “Mephitis of the bilge burst forth, like a fury” filling the cabins with nauseous stench, turning the gold paintwork red and black and covering everything with a kind of “silvery grease” which stank of sulphur. (Coleridge made a note to ask Humphry Davy about the chemistry of this effect.)44 He became incapable of holding down food, and began to resort to opium: “desperately sick, ill, abed, one deep dose after another”.45 His unhappy dreams of Asra returned, mixed up with memories of schoolboy bullying and deprivation, “Christ Hospitalized the forms & incidents”.46*

On 1 May, in wet, foggy, oppressive weather, they had drifted back towards the Barbary coast off Carthagina. “We are very nearly on the spot, where on Friday last about this same hour we caught the Turtles – And what are 5 days’ toiling to windward just not to lose ground, to almost 5 years. Alas! alas! what have I been doing on the Great Voyage of Life since my return from Germany but fretting upon the front of the wind – well for me if I have indeed kept my ground even!”47

On 4 May, a wind got up, and Coleridge composed a grateful sea-shanty for Captain Findlay, “who foretold a fair wind/ Of a constant mind”, though “neither Poet, nor Sheep” could yet eat.48 But the wind turned into a squall, and then a storm, which carried away their foremost yard-arm on 6 May. He sank further into opium, besieged by “these Sleeps, these Horrors, these Frightful Dreams of Despair”. He could no longer get up on deck, and was now seriously ill, with violent stomach pains and humiliating flatulence. A flowered curtain was rigged round his bunk, and he began to hallucinate, seeing “yellow faces” in the cloth. The ship was again becalmed, and he thought the flapping sails were fish dying on the deck.49 Mr Hardy, the surgeon of the Maidstone, was alerted and the rumour went round the convoy that one of the Speedwell’s passengers was dying. Coleridge knew he had become the Jonas of the fleet.

The opium doses had completely blocked his bowels. The shame, guilt and horrid symbolism of this seized upon him. His body had closed upon itself, just as his mind had become fruitless and unproductive. He was a vessel full of mephitic horror. His journal becomes extraordinarily explicit, and details his sufferings with weird, unsparing exactitude. “Tuesday Night, a dreadful Labour, & fruitless throes, of costiveness – individual faeces, and constricted orifices. Went to bed & dozed & started in great distress.”50

Wednesday, 9 May was “a day of Horror”. He spent the morning sitting over a bucket of hot water, “face convulsed, & the sweat streaming from me like Rain”. Captain Findlay brought the Speedwell alongside the Maidstone, and sent for Mr Hardy. “The Surgeon instantly came, went back for Pipe & Syringe & returned & with extreme difficulty & the exertion of his utmost strength injected the latter. Good God! – What a sensation when the obstruction suddenly shot up!” Coleridge lay with a hot water bottle on his belly, “with pains & sore uneasiness, & indescribable desires”, instructed to retain himself as long as possible. “At length went: O what a time! – equal in pain to any before. Anguish took away all disgust, & I picked out the hardened matter & after awhile was completely relieved. The poor mate who stood by me all this while had the tears running down his face.”51

The humiliation of this experience never left Coleridge. He knew it was caused by opium, and he reverted to it frequently in his Notebooks, and even in his later letters. From now on he dreaded the enema, as the secret sign and punishment for his addiction. The pain of “frightful constipation when the dead filth impales the lower Gut”, was unlike any other illness, because it was shameful and could not be talked about “openly to all” like rheumatism, or other chronic complaints. It crept into his dreams, and haunted him with its grotesque symbolism of false birth and unproductivity. “To weep & sweat & moan & scream for parturience of an excrement with such pangs & such convulsions as a woman with an Infant heir of Immortality: for Sleep a pandemonium of all the shames and miseries of the past Life from earliest childhood all huddled together, and bronzed with one stormy Light of Terror & Self-torture. O this is hard, hard, hard.”52

It was “a Warning”. Profoundly shaken, he resolved – as he was to do time and again in later years – to do without opium altogether. This resolution was fierce and genuine on each occasion. But what Coleridge could not know was that by now complete withdrawal from the drug was physiologically a virtual impossibility without skilled medical aid. He could no longer do it alone, by a simple effort of will. So each time his will was broken, he suffered and lost confidence in his own powers. This terrible repetition of resolution and failure – like one of the endless, circular punishments of Dante’s Inferno – shaped much of what happened in the second part of his life. Yet he never stopped resolving, and this dogged determination to battle on also became characteristic and took him through experiences that few of his contemporaries shared or even remotely understood.

Aboard the Speedwell, at midnight on 13 May, he turned towards his Creator for help: “O dear God! give me strength of Soul to make one thorough trial – if I land at Malta – spite all horrors to go through one month of unstimulated Nature – yielding to nothing but manifest danger of Life – O great God! Grant me grace truly to look into myself, & to begin the serious work of Self-amendment…Have Mercy on me Father & God!…who with undeviating Laws Eternal yet carest for the falling of the feather from the Sparrow’s wing.”53

Crawling back on deck, he found they were in sight of Sardinia. A hawk with battered plumage flew overhead, and settled on the bowsprit, until the sailors shot at it. It flew off heavily among the other ships, and Coleridge listened to the firing from further and further away, as each crew refused it hospitality in turn. “Poor Hawk! O strange Lust of Murder in Man! – It is not cruelty: it is mere non-feeling from non-thinking.”54 He ate rhubarb for his bowels, and was cosseted by “the good Mrs Ireland”, never again referred to as “Mrs Carnosity”.

Gradually his thoughts grew calmer. “Scarcely a day passes but something new in fact or illustration rises up in me, like Herbs and Flowers in a Garden in early Spring; but the combining Power, the power to do, the manly effective Will, that is dead or slumbers most diseasedly – Well I will pray for the Hour when I ‘may quit the tiresome sea & dwell on Shore’…” He sat at the rudder-case and wrote notes on the moon, the notion of Sublimity, and the nature of poetry. “Poetry – a rationalized Dream – dealing out to manifold Forms our own Feelings – that never perhaps were attached by us consciously to our own Personal Selves”.55

7

By 17 May Coleridge was quite restored, “uncommonly well”, and observing the noble blue peak of Mount Etna rising out of the eastern waters. By dawn on the 18th the Speedwell was in clear sight of Malta, and Mrs Ireland was confiding in him that she expected to be met by her lover.56 Captain Findlay put on all sail, and by 4 p.m. they were sliding under the huge sandstone fortifications of Valletta harbour ahead of the Maidstone. Observing the great battlements and citadel, originally built by the Knights of Malta to withstand the Great Siege of 1565, Coleridge felt like Aeneas arriving at Carthage.

Leaving his boxes to be unloaded, he disembarked in the first cutter and clambered breathlessly up the long stairs of Old Bakery Street, feeling like his own Mariner, “light as a blessed Ghost”. He was glad to be alive. He made straight for the Casa de St Foix, the house of John Stoddart, the Chief Advocate of Malta. It stood at the top of the street, a large building in orange freestone, with brightly painted wooden casements and enclosed balconies, commanding a dramatic view over the Marsamxett harbour. Round it spread a labyrinth of tilting streets, enclosed by huge bastions, which echoed with the bustle and shout of Maltese street-vendors, the barking of dogs, the clanging of church bells and rumble of donkeycarts. Music poured from the taverns, as the innkeepers and prostitutes prepared to welcome the new influx of British sailors.

Coleridge was stunned by the noise and activity. “They are the noisiest race under Heaven…sudden shot-up explosive Bellows – no cries in London would give you the faintest idea of it. When you pass by a fruit stall, the fellow will put his Hand like a speaking trumpet to his mouth & shoot such a Thunder bolt of Sound full at you.”57

After two hours of confusion and delay among the servants, Stoddart finally appeared and greeted him with a further “explosion of surprise and welcome”. He was given rooms and promised introductions. So began Coleridge’s sixteen-month sojourn on the tiny, rocky, Mediterranean outpost.

Initially, Coleridge’s plans were uncertain. He would restore his health, travel to Sicily perhaps, keep a journal, maybe find a temporary post in the colonial administration. He would write essays on art or politics, and send articles to Stuart. He would let the Mediterranean sun bleach out his heartache and his opium sickness. What actually fixed these plans was his meeting with the civilian governor of Malta, Sir Alexander Ball. It was, Coleridge later wrote, “that daily and familiar intercourse with him, which made the fifteen months from May 1804 to October 1805, in many respects, the most memorable and instructive period of my life”.58 It was also, perhaps, the most unlikely of all his friendships, for Ball was, par excellence, the man of action, a wartime admiral, confidant of Nelson, hero of the battle of Aboukir Bay, and forceful administrator and strategist.

Coleridge first met Ball on 20 May, when he called officially at the Governor’s palace, to deliver letters of recommendation to him and General Villettes, the military commander. The great palace with its huge shadowy inner courtyard, planted with palm trees, rather overawed him. The meeting in a vast chamber hung with crimson silk and Italian religious pictures was coldly formal. “A very polite man; but no hopes, I see clearly, of any situation.”59 Ball was a tall, avuncular figure, with a high domed forehead and small observant eyes, who said little. But the following day Coleridge was invited out to his country palace at San Antonio.

Coleridge rode out with unaccustomed punctuality at 6 a.m., and breakfasted with Ball in a garden full of orange and lemon trees. This time, a Mr Lane, the tutor of Ball’s son, was present and the conversation became more general. It was later that Ball, riding back alone with Coleridge to Valletta through the little stony lanes overlooking the harbour, began to talk of the role of luck in naval actions and life generally.

Turning to his visitor, Ball suddenly asked if he thought the old proverb was true, that “Fortune Favours Fools”. It could have been meant as a joke, but to his surprise Coleridge launched into a brilliant monologue on notions of chance, accident, contingency and superstition; and contrasted these with the underlying patterns of scientific law and human skills. In what sense, he asked, could it be said that Humphry Davy’s discoveries in chemistry were lucky? In what sense that a great commander’s victories were fortunate?60

Ball was impressed, and probably also amused. He began to tell Coleridge his own life story, and on this conversation Coleridge later felt was founded “the friendship and confidence, with which he afterwards honoured me”. It was one of the “most delightful mornings” he ever passed. Very soon he was riding with the Governor over most of the island, and the Coleridgean floodgates were opened, day after day in June. But Coleridge also listened, and Ball’s anecdotes and opinions came to fill his Malta Notebooks. Years later, in 1809, they became the basis for a biographical study – both of Ball and Nelson – in which the notion of leadership and courage, of command and self-command, is philosophically examined.61

Besides dealing with the civil administration of Malta, most pressing being the matters of law decrees and corn supplies, Ball was also engaged in a continuous debate with Nelson off Toulon, and the War Office in London, over the exact objectives of British strategy in the Mediterranean, as the war unfolded. Ball’s central idea was that Britain should permanently occupy both Malta and Sicily, with a view to controlling the sea-routes via Egypt to India. By mid-June he had enlisted Coleridge in this top-level and highly confidential discussion, commissioning him to draft a series of “position papers” setting forth arguments with the addition of whatever Coleridge could glean from books, pamphlets or newspapers.

This was work well adapted to Coleridge’s experience as a leader writer for Daniel Stuart on the Courier. Over the next weeks he produced four long papers, the first of which, “The French in the Mediterranean”, was dispatched to Nelson on 7 July 1804. Others followed on “Algeria”, “Malta”, and “Egypt”, which were forwarded to Granville Penn in Downing Street, for presentation to the secretary of state for war, during the summer. A fifth paper on “Sicily” was completed in September.62 It was evidently this work which convinced Ball of Coleridge’s real abilities; not merely a poet of genius, he would crisply inform the British Ambassador in Naples. Coleridge was given official rooms in the Governor’s palace and a salary, all within five weeks of his arrival in Malta.

On 5 July he wrote triumphantly to Sotheby, “I have hitherto lived with Dr Stoddart, but tomorrow shall take up residence at the Palace, in a suite of delightfully cool & commanding Rooms which Sir Alexander was so kind as not merely to offer me but to make me feel that he wished me to accept the Offer…Sir A.B. is a very extraordinary man – indeed a great man. And he is really the abstract Idea of a wise & good Governor.”63

As Coleridge got into the new routine of his work, his health improved and his spirits soared. He breakfasted, dined and took evening coffee with the Governor, meeting foreign diplomats and navy staff, and making contact with leading Maltese figures like Vittorio Barsoni, the influential editor of the Malta Gazette. “I have altered my whole system,” he wrote to his wife in July: he was getting up to swim before sun-rise, eating regular meals, spending a few shillings on summer clothes and ice-creams, and filling his Notebooks with Italian lessons and Ball’s table-talk.

With ceaseless, extrovert activity he was able to keep opium at bay, avoid depression, and even stop longing so obsessively for Asra to be with him – a shift of feeling he hoped to put into “a poem in 2 parts”.64 He found “Salvation in never suffering myself to be idle ten minutes together; but either to be actually composing, or walking, or in Company. – For the moment I begin to think, my feelings drive me almost to agony and madness; and then comes on the dreadful Smothering on my chest etc.”65

To Stuart he wrote, that “after being near death, I hope I shall return in Spirit a regenerated Creature”; and also with his finances much improved. He started sending confidential copies of the “position papers” for the Courier to publish anonymously (a rather daring form of unofficial “leaks”): “some Sibylline Leaves, which I wrote for Sir A.B. who sent them to the Ministry – they will give you my Ideas on the importance of the Island…you will of course take them – only not in the same words.” If he survived, he would become “a perfect man of business”, and already he considered himself “a sort of diplomatic Understrapper hid in Sir Alexander’s Palace”. In the rocky, sun-beaten island (“86 in the Shade”), he was starting to flourish again.

8

In mid-July 1804 Sir Alexander moved his family and staff four miles inland, to the summer residence at San Antonio, with its high cool rooms, exotic gardens, and magnificent panoramas over Citta Vecchia (Medina) and the eastern approaches. The diplomatic understrapper went with them, now admitted to real intimacy, and was given a fine room immediately under the tower from where he could turn his telescope over much of the island.66

There was a holiday atmosphere, and in the early mornings he wandered for hours in the high stony pastures, never out of the sound of “Steeple Clock and Churchbells”, chewing the pods of locust trees “full of an austere dulcacid Juice, that reminds me of a harsh Pear”. He was continually amazed by the gorgeous variety of trees and shrubs in the San Antonio garden, a sort of oasis among the rocky landscape, where he sat making notes. He listed pomegranate, prickly pear, pepper tree, oleander, date (“with its Wheel of Plumage”), myrtle, butterfly-flower, walnut, mulberry, orange and lemon.67 He wished he had a copy of Linnaeus to look them all up in.

Coleridge was happier at San Antonio in the summer of 1804 than he had been for many months. He had “manifest strength and spirits”.68 Beside the work for Sir Alexander, he wrote the long-promised letter to Wordsworth laying out the philosophical structure for “The Recluse”, completed a travel journal of the Malta voyage for the Beaumonts (which he later intended to publish), and laid his plans for an autumn expedition to Sicily and Naples.

His Notebooks contain exquisite observations on wildlife, such as his description of the brilliantly coloured green lizards with their bright gold spots and “darting and angular” movements. Some of these approach the condition of prose-poems, meditations on the relations between man and animal, which foreshadow the poems of D. H. Lawrence. The lizard’s attentive posture, “the Life of the threddy Toes…his head & innocent eye sidelong towards me, his side above the forepaw throbbing with a visible pulse”, becomes an emblem of Nature’s mysterious and fragile beauty. One “pretty fellow” lying frozen under Coleridge’s gaze in a network of sun and shade, seems to summon up a protective power to save him from all human interference: “…then turned his Head to me, depressed it, & looked up half-watching, half-imploring; at length taking advantage of a brisk breeze that made all the Network dance & toss, & darted off as if an Angel of Nature had spoken in the breeze: – Off! I’ll take care, he shall not hurt you.”69

9

On 10 August Coleridge set sail for Sicily, in the company of Major Adye who had now arrived from Gibraltar. Sir Alexander Ball generously retained him on his Private Secretary’s salary of £25 per month, and supplied him with a letter of introduction to the honorary consul at Syracuse, G. F. Leckie. But first Coleridge and Adye struck out for Catania along the coast, and made a strenuous ascent of Mount Etna, with local guides. They camped at one of the casina or shelters just above the tree-line, where the ground “scorched” their feet, and dined off meat barbecued over an open fire and drank the local wine, chatting in bad Italian to some beautiful local peasant girls: “voices shrill but melodious, especially the 21 years old wheedler & talker, who could not reconcile to herself that I did not understand her: yet in how short a time a man living so would understand a language”.70 Around them stretched the desolate lava field, purple in the shadows, with a “smoke-white Bloom upon it”.71

Coleridge seems to have made two ascents to the crater itself, though curiously there is no description in his Notebooks of the bleak, ashy lip or of his impressions from the top. Yet he seems to have reached it, for ten years later the image came surging back to him in the time of his worst opium struggles when his religious faith was threatened by a dark pit of despair.72 “I recollect when I stood on the summit of Etna, and darted my gaze down the crater; the immediate vicinity was discernible, till lower down, obscurity gradually terminated in total darkness. Such figures exemplify many truths revealed in the Bible. We pursue them until, from the imperfection of our faculties, we are lost in impenetrable night.”73

At the time he recalled only the blessed cool of the Benedictine monastery at Nicolsai as they returned, and the next day the sun on Etna rising “behind Calabria out of the midst of the Sea…deep crimson…skies coloured with yellow a sort of Dandelion”.74 On the way down he copied a Latin inscription from the monastery gardens. “Here under Black Earth, Ashes of Holy Monks lie Hid. Marvel not. Sterile sand of Sacred Bones, everywhere becomes Fruit, And loads the fruit-Tree Branches…Go on your road, All things will be well.”75

At the ancient port of Syracuse, made famous by Thucydides’s account of the Greek Expedition and its catastrophic defeat, Coleridge was given rooms by Leckie in his idyllic villa on the site of the Timoleon antiquities overlooking the bay. For two months it was his base for a series of rambles round the island, with Leckie often acting as his guide. Leckie was a formidable figure. A classical scholar and adventurer, he had farmed in India, knocked about the Mediterranean, and finally settled with a beautiful wife in Sicily, where his money and fluency in Italian and French set him on equal terms with the local aristocracy. His hospitality, his pungent views, and the flirtatiousness of his glamorous wife, made the Villa Timoleon a popular port of call among numerous English travellers and naval officers, and he remained in regular contact with Sir Alexander. Coleridge’s admiration of Mrs Leckie was expressed in a subtle appreciation of her jewellery: “Mrs Leckie’s opal surrounded with small brilliants: grey blue & the wandering fire that moves about it; and often usurps the whole.”76

The air of voluptuous enchantment which descended over this Sicilian sojourn was oddly disturbing to Coleridge. As he walked and rode between the classical ruins, he was haunted by the discovery that the fields were full of poppies cultivated for opium. Leckie described to him the process in expert detail. “The white poppy seed, sown in the months of October & November, the plants weeded to 8 inches distance, & well watered till the plants are about 1/2 a foot high, when a compost of dung, without Earth, & Ashes is spread over the beds – a little before the flowers appear, again watered profusely, till the capsules are half-grown, at which time the opium is collected.”77

Leckie showed him how each pod was incised with a knife, and Coleridge pulled out the grains with his thumb. Later he learnt that Indian hemp was also grown extensively, and that the whole island was a paradise of narcotics. Leckie, an experienced farmer, reckoned the opium crop was worth over £50 a square foot. The place where Coleridge had once dreamed of settling with Asra and the Wordsworths in an ideal Mediterranean Pantisocracy, was in reality for him one of the most dangerous places on earth.