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COLERIDGE
COMPANION
©   John Spencer Hill


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The Wordsworth-Coleridge "Dialogue"
[191]   It is now universally accepted that Coleridge's verse-letter of April 1802 was prompted by and is, in some sense, an answer to the first four stanzas of Wordsworth's Ode:   Intimations of Immortality; and it is widely believed that these two poems form part of a larger dialogue carried on between the poets in a number of poems [192] written between 1802 and 1807.   The subject of this poetic dialogue is the nature of poetic creation and the relationship between the perceiving mind and the external world of nature.
      The starting-point of this dialogue is provided by the second stanza of Coleridge's poem The Mad Monk,1 which was first published in the Morning Post in October 1800:
There was a time when earth, and sea, and skies,
    The bright green vale, and forest's dark recess,
With all things, lay before mine eyes
    In steady loveliness:
But now I feel, on earth's uneasy scene,
    Such sorrows as will never cease;--
    I only ask for peace;
If I must live to know that such a time has been!
                                                              (9-16; CPW, i 348)
These lines, as Stephen Prickett points out, were "taken up by Wordsworth for the opening of the Immortality Ode, and . . . used by him as the initial schema from which he can move towards a more precise analysis of his own sense of loss, and of its relation to his development":2
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
            To me did seem
        Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
        Turn wheresoe'er I may,
            By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.         (1-9)
In the three stanzas which follow Wordsworth develops further his conviction that "there hath passed away a glory" from his perception of the natural world; he can still respond to Nature's universal springtime joy--
My heart is at your festival,
        My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel -- I feel it all           (39-41)
[193] but he is aware of an undefined "something that is gone"; and he closes the introductory section with the queries,
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?           (56-7)
      As I said at the beginning of this chapter ( pp. 170-2), it was probably at this point -- the end of stanza 4 -- that Wordsworth broke off the composition of his ode on Saturday, 27 March 1802, and it was probably, therefore, this opening section only that Coleridge heard recited during the following week when the Wordsworths were visiting Keswick.   Coleridge, too, had experienced a loss, but it was more profound, more crippling, and more enduring than that described by Wordsworth.   And on Sunday, 4 April, while the Wordsworths were still at Keswick, Coleridge undertook to explore the nature and extent of his loss in the long verse-letter to Sara Hutchinson.   Wordsworth's ode was much in his thoughts and he echoed his friend's poem on a number of occasions;3 indeed, there is one section in the middle of the letter where, contrasting what he was with what he now is, he seems to be gauging the distance between Wordsworth's qualified loss and his own more severe imaginative failure:
        For, oh! beloved Friend!
I am not the buoyant Thing, I was of yore--
When like an own Child, I to joy belong'd;
For others mourning oft, myself oft sorely wrong'd,
Yet bearing all things then, as if I nothing bore!

        Yes, dearest Sara! yes!
There was a time when tho' my path was rough,
The joy within me dallied with Distress;
And all Misfortunes were but as the Stuff
Whence Fancy made me Dreams of Happiness:
For Hope grew round me, like the climbing Vine,
And Leaves & Fruitage, not my own, seem'd mine!
But now ill Tidings bow me down to earth /
Nor care I, that they rob me of my Mirth /
        But oh! each Visitation
Suspends what Nature gave me at my Birth,
       My shaping Spirit of Imagination!   (226-42; CL, ii 796)
[194] The loss described in Wordsworth's ode is that of a je ne sais quoi "visionary gleam" -- a loss of a degree of perceptual insight rather than that of the ability to perceive at all.   For Coleridge, on the other hand, it is precisely this inability to feel, to respond sympathetically to natural joy, that lies at the heart of his dejection:   "He felt", in Stephen Prickett's words, "his whole imaginative intercourse with the created world -- his whole capacity for open response -- to be threatened".4
      On Wednesday, 21 April 1802, Coleridge "repeated the verses he wrote to Sara" to the Wordsworths in the garden behind Dove Cottage.   The recitation left Dorothy (and, we may assume, William as well) "in miserable spirits" (JDW, p. 113).   Wordsworth himself, although doubtless aware of echoes of his own unfinished ode in his friend's lines, was prompted to respond to Coleridge's despairing view of what was happening to him, not by completing his Ode:   Intimations of Immortality (he did not return to finish it until March 1804), but rather by composing an altogether new poem.   On Monday evening, 3 May 1802, less than a fortnight after hearing Coleridge recite his verse-letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth began to write Resolution and Independence -- or, as it was then called,"The Leech Gatherer" -- and the next morning before breakfast "he wrote several stanzas in bed" (JDW, p. 120).   Later that day, while they were out walking, the Wordsworths ran into Coleridge near the shore of Thirlmere; the trio found "a moss covered Rock" rising out of the bed of Wyth Burn, where they ate dinner while "Wm and C. repeated and read verses" (ibid.).   By Friday, 7 May, Wordsworth had finished the first draft of the poem, but (as usual) he spent more time in revision than in original composition.   Thus, on Sunday, 9 May, we hear that "William worked at the Leech gatherer almost incessantly from morning till tea-time", while Dorothy copied it and some other poems for Coleridge; and it is not until two months later (4 July) that we are told that "Wm finished the Leech gatherer today", with Dorothy transcribing the revised version for Coleridge on the following day (JDW, pp. 122-3, 145).
      Resolution and Independence, based on an incident recorded in Dorothy's Journal in October 1800 (JDW, p. 42), tells of the poet's chance meeting with an old but resolutely persevering leech-gatherer on the moors.   It had been, we are told, a night of wind and storm, but "now the sun is rising calm and bright" and "All things that love the sun are out of doors".   The poet, however, finds that he is out of tune with Nature's joy:
[195] But, as it sometimes chanceth, from the might
Of joy in minds that can no further go,
As high as we have mounted in delight
In our dejection do we sink as low;
To me that morning did it happen so;
And fears and fancies thick upon me came;
Dim sadness -- and blind thoughts, I knew not,
       nor could name.                 (22-8)
He thinks of Chatterton and Robert Burns (both cultic figures of ignored genius), concluding that "We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness" (48-9).   In the midst of these self-pitying reflections on the poet's lot, the narrator comes upon the old man stirring wayside pools with his foot in search of leeches:
"Once I could meet with them on every side;
But they have dwindled long by slow decay;
Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may."           (124-6)
The old man's sufferings and patient resolution put the poet's situation in perspective, and the leech-gatherer assumes a didactic and symbolic function:
And the whole body of the Man did seem
Like one whom I had met with in a dream;
Or like a man from some far region sent,
To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.           (109-12)
This "moral" is often thought to have been aimed at Coleridge.   According to George Meyer, for example, Resolution and Independence was inspired "not so much by [Wordsworth's] own mood . . . as by what he was currently observing in Coleridge.   Wordsworth considered the tragedies of Chatterton and Burns, made them represent the fate of poets in general, and attributed to his ideal poet fears and self-recriminations that he regarded as appropriate to Coleridge"; and Coleridge, like the poem's persona, was expected to respond to the leech-gatherer, that "living example [196] of resolution and independence [who] rouses the poet from his melancholy trance, points up the absurdity of his own despair, and drives him to pray for resolution and independence of his own".5
      It is clear from Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, as we have seen, that Coleridge was well informed about the progress of Resolution and Independence from early May to early July 1802 and that he was sent transcriptions of the poem in an early version (9 May) and in a later, much revised form (4 July); it is also clear from Dorothy's Journal that Coleridge and the Wordsworths paid each other visits in May-June 1802 and that, when they were apart, there was a flourishing correspondence (now lost) between Greta Hall and Dove Cottage during these months.   There was ample opportunity, then, for the two men to compare their respective "losses" and to propose, if possible, solutions or ways of compensating for what had been lost.   Now, if (as seems highly probable) Coleridge's verse-letter to Sara Hutchinson was triggered by the first four stanzas of Wordsworth's Ode:   Intimations of Immortality, and if, in turn, Resolution and Independence was offered as a "solution" for Coleridge's dejection, then it seems to follow that Dejection: An Ode is Coleridge's answer to Wordsworth's two poems.   This hypothesis is supported by two significant facts.   In the first place, on 19 July 1802, two weeks after Dorothy had transcribed the revised Resolution and Independence for him, Coleridge sent about a third of his April verse-letter in a letter to William Sotheby:   these lines, which are very close to the poem printed two and a half months later in the Morning Post, are addressed to Wordsworth and they stress (since intimate details of his marriage and his love for Asra have been omitted) Coleridge's suspension of imagination and his inability to respond to nature.   They read, indeed, very much like a reply to Wordsworth -- an explanation that his creative loss is more profound than the leech-gatherer's and that, in the words of the Black Knight in Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, "I have lost more than thow wenest".   In the second place, the close relationship which the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle felt to exist between Resolution and Independence and Dejection:  An Ode is apparent in the fact that the two poems were transcribed (the first by Dorothy Wordsworth, the second by Coleridge himself) in a letter to the Beaumonts of August 1803 (CL, ii 966-73).   The conjunction of these two poems and, indeed, the appearance of two separate hands in the transcription reinforces the sense of a deliberate dialogue.
  [197]     The place of stanzas 5-11 of Wordsworth's Ode:  Intimations of Immortality in this "dialogue" between the poets is difficult to ascertain, primarily because we do not know exactly when these stanzas were composed.   Dorothy tells us that on 17 June 1802 "William added a little to the Ode he is writing" (JDW, p. 137), but we do not know what or how much he added and there are no further references to the Ode before Dorothy's Journal stops in January 1803; it was not until 1804, probably in early March, that Wordsworth took up and completed his ode (WW, ii 20).   In any case, the last six stanzas of the Ode provide the philosophical answer to the question raised at the end of stanza 4:   "Whither is fled the visionary gleam?"   The answer, based on the Platonic doctrine of anamnesis or "recollection",6 is that the gradual dulling of our intuitive responses to nature in childhood is compensated for by a more mature perception that allows us to find in even the meanest flower that blows "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears".   This amounts to a flat denial of Coleridge's view in Dejection:  An Ode that (in Harold Bloom's words) "human process is irreversible:   imaginative loss is permanent, and nature intimates to us our own mortality always".7   For Wordsworth, however, imaginative love is transformed but never wholly lost; and, if we accept that Wordsworth formulated this position after Coleridge had revised his verse-letter into Dejection:  An Ode, then it is reasonable also to accept Stephen Prickett's view that "Wordsworth's final affirmation of strength from the memory of childhood moments of guilt and fear [in the completed Ode:  Intimations of Immortality] is a reply to Coleridge's lament that isolation suspended his Imagination".8
      Most scholars would, I think, accept the argument thus far (at least in broad outline) and would agree that Coleridge's ode together with Wordsworth's ode and Resolution and Independence "form a kind of dialogue".9   Some readers extend the "dialogue" to other poems.   Thus, Milton Teichman, for example, believes that "Wordsworth's reply to Coleridge overflows Resolution and Independence into a poem Wordsworth wrote immediately afterward, Stanzas Written in My Pocket-Copy of Thomson's 'Castle of Indolence'";10 and Harold Bloom argues (I think convincingly) that Coleridge continues the dialogue in To William Wordsworth (1807), where "the debate of Dejection is carried on . . . again, five years after the earlier poem".11


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Notes
[Click on asterisk (*) at the end of a note to return to the point you left in the text]
    [270]
  1. The Mad Monk was published in the Morning Post, 13 Oct 1800, over the pseudonym "Cassiani, jun." and was later reprinted under Coleridge's name in The Wild Wreath (1804), a collection edited by "Perdita" Robinson's daughter Maria.   There is some dispute as to whether The Mad Monk was composed by Coleridge or by Wordsworth -- or, perhaps, as a joint production by them both:   see S.M. Parrish and D.V. Erdman, "Who Wrote The Mad Monk?:   a Debate", Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 64 (1960) 209-37. *
  2. Stephen Prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth:  The Poetry of Growth (Cambridge, 1970) p. 152. *
  3. The verbal parallels are detailed in F.M. Smith, "The Relation of Coleridge's Ode on Dejection to Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality", PMLA, 50 (1935) 224-34. *
  4. Prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth (above, note 2), pp. 161-2. *
  5. George Meyer, "Resolution and Independence:   Wordsworth's Answer to Coleridge's Dejection:  An Ode", TSE, ii (1950) 69. *
  6. For two early views of Coleridge's "Platonic" influence on Wordsworth's Ode, see J.D. Rea, "Coleridge's Intimations of Immortality from Proclus", MP, 26 (1928) 201-13; and N.P. Stallknecht, "The Doctrine of Coleridge's Dejection and its Relation to Wordsworth's Philosophy", PMLA, 49 (1934) 196-207. *
  7. Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company:   A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (New York, 1961; rev. edn, Ithaca, NY, and London, 1971) p. 222. *
  8. Prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth (above, note 2), p. 155. *
  9. L.G. Salingar, "Coleridge:   Poet and Philosopher", in From Blake to Byron (vol. 5 of the Pelican Guide to English Literature), ed. Boris Ford (Harmondsworth, 1957; rev. edn, 1962) p. 195. *
  10. Milton Teichman, "Wordsworth's Two Replies to Coleridge's Dejection:  An Ode", PMLA, 86 (1971) 982-9. *
  11. Bloom, The Visionary Company (above, note 7), pp. 228-9. *


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Document Completed:   22/04/96