Richard Holmes – Coleridge: Darker Reflections (страница 15)

The true chaos of his existence over the past eighteen months came to a head at Pisa. He was holed up in a cheap inn with an art student, virtually penniless, having a few books and presents in an old box, a supply of opium and an enema, and two precious Notebooks. He was in imminent danger of arrest, disguised as an American, and deeply uncertain if he wanted to return to England to take up his old life and identity. Once again he felt the best solution would have been if he had died in John Wordsworth’s place. “O dear John Wordsworth! Ah that I could but have died for you: & you have gone home, married S. Hutchinson, & protected my Poor little ones. O how very, very gladly would I have accepted the conditions.’¹⁸⁷

On the night before their final departure for Livorno, he wrote a hymn to death, sitting in the window of the inn and watching the bolts of lightning crash down over the river Arno. “Sunday, June 22nd 1806. Globe, Pisa…Repeatedly during this night’s storm have I desired that I might be taken off, not knowing when or where. But a few moments past a vivid flash passed across me, my nerves thrilled, and I earnestly wished, so help me God! like a Love-longing, that it would pass through me!”¹⁸⁸

Yet this Coleridgean death was no ordinary extinction. It was more like a transfiguration, a complete transformation of the terms of his existence. It would “take him off” to some other dimension. It was: “Death without deformity, or assassin-like self-disorganization; Death, in which the mind by its own wish might seem to have caused its own purpose to be performed, as instantaneously and by an instrument almost as spiritual, as the Wish itself!” It was Death which seemed almost like re-birth, Death which seemed like an act of love, preparing for something new, blowing away the old self:

Come, come, thou bleak December wind,

And blow the dry Leaves from the Tree!

Flash, like a love-thought, thro’ me, Death!

And take a life, that wearies me.¹⁸⁹

The imagery of winter, with its dead leaves, still promised the possibility of some other springtime, with the buds and blossoms of another life.

It would be easy to misjudge Coleridge’s mood of temporary despair on departing from Italy. Years later he would remember the “heavenly” valley of the Arno with affection, and put it into his poetry. He would write and lecture on Italian art, and recall the work of Michelangelo and Giotto as “deeply interesting to me…having a life of its own in the spirit of that revolution of which Christianity was effect, means and symbol”. He would fix on Italy as an ideal place of retreat, and an image of spiritual resurrection from the dead. “Were I forced into exile…I should wish to pass my summers at Zurich, and the remaining eight months alternately at Rome and in Florence, so to join as much as I could German depth, Swiss ingenuity, and the ideal genius of Italy; that, at least, which we cannot help thinking, almost feeling, to be still there, be it but as the spirit of one departed hovering over his own tomb, the haunting breeze of his own august, desolate mausoleum.”¹⁹⁰

As he and Russell rattled along in the coach to Livorno, he looked tenderly on a group of “beggar children” running alongside and calling to them with a strange “shudder-whistle” of farewell. The Gosport set sail for England on 23 June 1806.

18

The passage took fifty-five days – almost twice the outward voyage – and lived up to Coleridge’s worst expectations. He spent much of his time in his cabin, sick and constipated, and for once kept no journal at all of his impressions. They were boarded by a Spanish privateer, but Captain Derkheim talked them free, after throwing official papers (including some of Coleridge’s Malta notes) into the sea. Coleridge submitted to twelve enemas, “my dread of and antipathy increased every time”, each administered by Derkheim in conditions of pain and humiliation. The sense of violation and punishment horrified him, as he later admitted to Southey. “Tho’ the Captain was the strongest man on board – it used to take all the force of his arm, & bring the blood up in his face before he could finish. Once I brought off more than a pint of blood – & three times he clearly saved my Life.”¹⁹¹

Both Derkheim and Russell continued to behave with “every possible Tenderness”, though their own feelings can only be imagined. For the rest it was a battering, claustrophobic voyage: “working up against head winds, rotting and sweating in calms, or running under hard gales, with the dead lights secured”. Russell later wrote home of their grim experience, saying that Coleridge had nearly died. Coleridge himself wrote that “no motive on earth” would make him venture on another sea-voyage of more than three days: “I would rather starve in a hovel”.

Confined in his quarters, he grew fat and pallid, and his Mediterranean tan faded away. Gazing out through the closed porthole, he thought distractedly of Asra at Grasmere. It was perhaps now that the first images of his fine, bleak meditative poem on their love, “Constancy to an Ideal Object” began to coalesce.

…Home and Thou are one.

The peacefull’st cot, the moon shall shine upon,

Lulled by the thrush, and wakened by the lark,

Without thee were but a becalméd bark,

Whose Helmsman on an ocean waste and wide

Sits mute and pale his mouldering helm beside.¹⁹²

But it would be many years before the verse were completed.

The Gosport finally sighted Portsmouth in early August, where it was quarantined, and then allowed to continue eastwards into the Thames estuary. Here Coleridge took the earliest chance of disembarking at the little quayside and customs post of Stangate Creek, on the edge of the Medway. He “leaped on land” on the afternoon of 17 August 1806. Leaving his box of books and papers in Captain Derkheim’s care, to be taken on up to Wapping, he hurried to “a curious little Chapel” by the quayside at Lower Halstow, which still exists, overlooking the mournful expanse of the Kentish marshes towards Sheerness. He found it open and empty, and dropping to his knees “offered, I trust, as deep a prayer as ever without words or thoughts was sent up by a human Being”.

Going outside again, he surveyed the lapping waters and the tide running up through the baked mud and yellowing bulrushes of his native land. “Almost immediately after landing Health seemed to flow in upon me, like the mountain waters upon the dry stones of a vale-stream after Rains.”¹⁹³ The following morning he was in London, at the Bell Inn in the Strand, wondering if he had enough money for a “decent Hat” and a pair of shoes.

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