Today’s Poem: Dejection: An Ode
The art of despair
Dejection: An Ode
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon,
With the old Moon in her arms;
And I fear, I fear, my Master dear!
We shall have a deadly storm.
(Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence)
I
Well! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made
The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,
This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence
Unroused by winds, that ply a busier trade
Than those which mould yon cloud in lazy flakes,
Or the dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes
Upon the strings of this Æolian lute,
Which better far were mute.
For lo! the New-moon winter-bright!
And overspread with phantom light,
(With swimming phantom light o’erspread
But rimmed and circled by a silver thread)
I see the old Moon in her lap, foretelling
The coming-on of rain and squally blast.
And oh! that even now the gust were swelling,
And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast!
Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed,
And sent my soul abroad,
Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give,
Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live!
II
A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear —
O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood,
To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo’d,
All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
Have I been gazing on the western sky,
And its peculiar tint of yellow green:
And still I gaze — and with how blank an eye!
And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
That give away their motion to the stars;
Those stars, that glide behind them or between,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:
Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
I see them all so excellently fair,
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!
III
My genial spirits fail;
And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
IV
O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live:
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the Earth —
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!
V
O pure of heart! thou need’st not ask of me
What this strong music in the soul may be!
What, and wherein it doth exist,
This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,
This beautiful and beauty-making power.
Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne’er was given,
Save to the pure, and in their purest hour,
Life, and Life’s effluence, cloud at once and shower,
Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power,
Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower
A new Earth and new Heaven,
Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud —
Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud —
We in ourselves rejoice!
And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,
All melodies the echoes of that voice,
All colours a suffusion from that light.
VI
There was a time when, though my path was rough,
This 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 twining vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
But now afflictions 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.
For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all I can;
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man —
This was my sole resource, my only plan:
Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.
VII
Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind,
Reality’s dark dream!
I turn from you, and listen to the wind,
Which long has raved unnoticed. What a scream
Of agony by torture lengthened out
That lute sent forth! Thou Wind, that rav’st without,
Bare crag, or mountain-tairn, or blasted tree,
Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb,
Or lonely house, long held the witches’ home,
Methinks were fitter instruments for thee,
Mad Lutanist! who in this month of showers,
Of dark-brown gardens, and of peeping flowers,
Mak’st Devils’ yule, with worse than wintry song,
The blossoms, buds, and timorous leaves among.
Thou Actor, perfect in all tragic sounds!
Thou mighty Poet, e’en to frenzy bold!
What tell’st thou now about?
’Tis of the rushing of an host in rout,
With groans, of trampled men, with smarting wounds —
At once they groan with pain, and shudder with the cold!
But hush! there is a pause of deepest silence!
And all that noise, as of a rushing crowd,
With groans, and tremulous shudderings — all is over —
It tells another tale, with sounds less deep and loud!
A tale of less affright,
And tempered with delight,
As Otway’s self had framed the tender lay,—
’Tis of a little child
Upon a lonesome wild,
Nor far from home, but she hath lost her way:
And now moans low in bitter grief and fear,
And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother hear.
VIII
’Tis midnight, but small thoughts have I of sleep:
Full seldom may my friend such vigils keep!
Visit her, gentle Sleep! with wings of healing,
And may this storm be but a mountain-birth,
May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling,
Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth!
With light heart may she rise,
Gay fancy, cheerful eyes,
Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice;
To her may all things live, from pole to pole,
Their life the eddying of her living soul!
O simple spirit, guided from above,
Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice,
Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice.
═══════════════════════In previous discussions of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), we’ve dwelt on poems at least drafted, if not published, between 1797 and 1798, during what the British writer Adam Nicolson has called a “Year of Marvels.” That year, spent in the Somerset hills near William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, culminated for Coleridge in the publication, with Wordsworth, of the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads; the life-changing grant of financial support from the Wedgewood family of pottery fame and fortune; and his own departure for an immersion in German philosophical, theological, and literary life at the University of Göttingen, with walking tour to follow.
The “Year of Marvels” was defined by a new, intoxicating awareness, on the part of both young poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, of their own imaginative powers. Less marvelously, it was also defined by cracks beneath the veneer of that exhilaration, that would gradually work their way to the surface. For Coleridge, the literary partnership he shared with Wordsworth was as potentially volatile as it was fertile. Literary disagreements — over the nature of the relationship between the poet and the speaker in a poem, for example — troubled their collaboration on the Lyrical Ballads and their attempts to co-author a long poem, “The Three Graves.”
For Coleridge, too, this disquietude in one central relationship in his life mirrored an even deeper disquietude in the other. In the autumn of 1795, newly married, he had written “The Eolian Harp,” addressed to his wife Sara and beginning, “My pensive Sara! thy soft cheek reclined / Upon my arm, how soothing sweet it is / To sit beside our Cot . . . .” By 1797, he and Sara had traded the magical bower of that poem, in Clevedon, near Bristol, for a dilapidated cottage in Lime Street, in the village of Nether Stowey, in Somerset’s Quantock Hills. This cottage, by contrast, became a scene not of the aeolian harp’s “soft witchery of sound,” but of jangling discord.
Not long after the Coleridges’ move to Nether Stowey, the Wordsworths — William and his sister Dorothy — took a house at nearby Alfoxden. This was (mostly) good news for Coleridge, though he had declared that “Literature will always be a secondary Object with me.” His primary objective, so he persuaded himself, was the nurture of his family: Sara, their son Hartley, and a new baby, Berkeley, born in May 1798.
Time and again, however, it was literature that commanded his full attention. Literature also, often in the person of Dorothy Wordsworth, positively snubbed Sara. While Coleridge walked and talked in the hills with his friends, Sara was at home with the children, excluded from the circle into which her husband had — without much resistance — let himself be drawn. When Coleridge had to miss one of those long conversational walks, an occasion remarked upon in his poem “This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison,” it was because Sara, in a fit of pique, had poured boiling milk onto his foot.
At the end of the summer of 1798, when Coleridge left for Germany, he went alone, leaving his family in Nether Stowey, and remained abroad for the better part of the next year. In February of 1799, his younger son Berkeley, nine months old, died of a long series of harrowing complications following a smallpox inoculation. Coleridge had written to Sara, upbraiding her teasingly for her failure to reply to his letters; her response to him, bearing news of the baby’s death and reminding him that she had “no husband to comfort me and share my grief,” must have scalded.
I am his Mother, and have carried him in my arms and have fed him at my bosom, and have watched over him by day and night for nine months; I have seen him twice at the brink of the grave but he has returned, and recovered and smiled upon me like an angel — and now I am lamenting that he is gone.
It may both surprise and not surprise us, then, that when Coleridge did eventually return to England, in July, 1799, he did not return to Sara and “my dear, dear Hartley” at Nether Stowey. Instead, he went to London. In the autumn, he joined the Wordsworths at Sockburn-on-Tees, near Durham, at the farm of Thomas Hutchinson. Hutchinson, a school friend of Wordsworth’s, was notable in his day as a breeder of sheep and shorthorn cattle. In hindsight the important detail is that he had two sisters: Mary, who married William Wordsworth in 1802, and Sara — another Sara — with whom Coleridge became infatuated, and who became, in notebook entries, letters, and poems, his muse and light-source, anagrammatically nicknamed “Asra.”
All this biographical narrative forms the backdrop for Today’s Poem. Written in 1802, the year of Wordsworth’s marriage to Mary Hutchinson, “Dejection: An Ode” invokes the depth of a winter night, but a winter night bereft of the secret, silent peace and hopefulness of “Frost at Midnight,” written in that “Year of Marvels” four years earlier. If, in the poem’s first section, the night is “tranquil,” the tranquility is transitory, the dark world full of the rumor of storm. There is a new moon, but it bears the old moon “in its lap,” a burden and an omen.
Worse, though, is the storm of despair, the “grief without a pang,” the “wan and heartless mood” that renders the speaker insensible. He can see, but not feel, the portentous beauty of the night. Ultimately he diagnoses this condition in terms of absence: Joy has deserted him. His one consolation is to confess this desertion to the “virtuous Lady,” whom the poem addresses, and to hope that she, at least, in her goodness, will be always attended by joy.
The poem’s epigraph, a fragment of the old Scottish maritime “Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens,” seems both a trigger — one mention of the new moon begets another — and a way of locating “Dejection: An Ode” in a place beyond the personal, in the bardic tradition itself. This, though its form and diction are far less bardic than, say, the form and diction of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Though the speaker here is an I, narrating the state of his own soul, still he gestures toward the idea less of a personal confession than of a storyteller relating a tale. This is a story not about himself, but about despair. And at intervals throughout its 139 lines, with allusions to Shakespeare and Thomas Otway, the poem continues to identify its participation the larger tradition, transcending the confines of personal experience.
Coleridge the man was freighted with private torments: the cold unraveling of his marriage, his manifest failure at the vision of fatherhood he had treasured up in “Frost at Midnight,” and now the impossibility of a full, consummated relationship with Sara Hutchinson, who in any case seems not to have returned those particular feelings. But Coleridge the artist intuited that the first rule of art is that the self and its specific circumstances are the most dispensable elements.
Where “Frost at Midnight” situates its conversation in an identifiable setting, with reference to an identifiable baby, “Dejection” withdraws itself from the specific and personal. We don’t see the room where the speaker sits meditating, but only the weather without and within. We don’t learn the lady’s name. We can infer that name from our knowledge of the extenuating circumstances, and from Coleridge’s earlier drafts of the poem, but those circumstances, like those drafts, don’t enter the finished poem in any self-disclosing way. We don’t have to know them to follow the poem’s trajectory. By the same intuition, Yeats pruned all personal and topical references from his drafts of “The Second Coming,” to produce not a work of self-expression, but a work of art, which is something else.
The form is inseparable from that art-making impulse. The poem’s eight sections, of varying lengths, give an impression of spontaneity that belies the careful pattern of quatrains and couplets (and in lines 15-20 of Section VII, an abccab sestet) — never the same pattern twice — by which each section coheres. The meter is largely iambic pentameter, though it converses, again not randomly, with trimeter and hexameter. Despite its confessional tone and its conscious break from a single overarchingly consistent rhymed or metered pattern, this long poem provides a masterclass in control and restraint. It remains an object lesson for anyone wondering how to move from a notebook full of personal jottings, and from the shadow of the private experiences those jottings represent, to the creation of a work of actual art.
Superb commentary! I missed 100% of this when I read this years ago during a Coleridge phase. Thank you!
Why, or why did this bit knock me for a bit of loop:
"Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind"
Sally, do you realize that some days your efforts just send my thoughts off somewhere? A good thing really, but I hold you responsible.