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Rachel J. Galvin, Princeton University Poetry and Revolution Conference Birkbeck, University of London, May 27, 2012 rgalvin@princeton.edu Incantation and Recantation in Coleridge’s Odes on the French Revolution

This paper was sparked by my surprise in discovering a fact of literary history: in

English and French poetry written during and after the French Revolution, one encounters a

remarkable preponderance of odes. During the first and second stages of Romanticism this

classical form, which had come to be considered an ideal poem of praise, and whose themes

tended to be politically conservative, saw a rebirth in France and England (not to mention in

Germany and Italy). Whether in the public, elegiac mode of Pindar or the private,

contemplative mode of Horace, and whether supporting or questioning the Terror, it’s clear

that the French Revolution spurred an abundance of Romantic odes. This raises a question

concerning the imbrication of poetics and politics: namely, how literary revolution has been

conceived as corresponding to social revolution. Poets as diverse as Wordsworth, Byron,

Hugo, Lamartine, Musset, and Chénier wrote poems on the French Revolution. (This paper

is drawn from a larger project that’s new for me, as I’m beginning to look for the roots of

twentieth-century poetry written about wars and revolutions.) To investigate this question

today, I will concentrate on just two odes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “France: An Ode”

and “Fears in Solitude,” both written in 1798 when the events of the Revolution were still

fresh. Coleridge’s politics shifted dramatically between the earlier and later parts of his life—

from active sympathy with the Revolution as a way to establish a new order (Byatt 131) to

disillusionment and fear instilled by the Terror, and ultimately, to the view that the

Revolution had betrayed its own ideals (Kitson 163)—and I am interested in how he used

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the ode to stage a debate with himself about this change in perspective.1 I want to explore

here how the ode embodies the turns in his thought, as he weighed constructive and

destructive human passions. How does it translate ideational turning into the strophic

evolution of the ode?

Now, the fact that contemporaneous poets in England and France were writing odes

about the French Revolution indicates that a revolutionary break with past forms of

government was being harnessed to the resuscitation of a traditional aesthetic form. English

Romanticism brought a revival of Renaissance and medieval poetry, vernacular poetry, old

ballads and Scottish songs, and a return to poetic forms such as the ode and the satire.

“Revivals do well by revolution,” John Hamilton has argued, pointing out that innovative

movements seek legitimacy and persuasion through connection with the past. He notes that

the quasi-official poet of the Terror, Ponce-Denis Écouchard-Lebrun, was known as

“Lebrun-Pindare.”2 Stuart Curran writes that “[Form] is a link with the past as a conceptual

repository” (209).3 (This is certainly a phenomenon of the 20th century, too, as Eliot and

Pound looked to Dante and further back to the Greeks to carve out modernist verse.)

The mystery of the upsurge in odes written on the French Revolution is in part

explained by this phenomenon of establishing credibility in innovation by basing it upon

ancient authority, but I also want to build on Hamilton’s argument to suggest an additional

explanation: in brief, the ode was a particularly excellent candidate for rejuvenation at this

time, since it is suited to self-reflexivity and the debate of political questions. The ode is a

1 Coleridge had a long personal history of writing politically minded odes: in 1792 he won an award (“the Browne medal”) for an ode he wrote on the slave trade (Everest 18). 2 “Lebrun characterized his poetry as a return to mythic origins, radical enough to constitute a poetic revolution that would correspond to the current milieu of political upheaval” (1-2) 3 “…its contents not construed as involving (though it was, of course, the case) even more constricting belief systems, but rather liberating imaginative structures that reaffirm the commitments all of us have to what transcends the necessary limitations of any cultural epoch”

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form conducive to thinking about politics insofar as it enacts, repeats, and is contingent

upon and constructed through turning: turning toward and against an idea or oneself.

Traditionally composed of a strophe, an anti-strophe, and an epode, the form imitates the

to-and-fro pattern of Greek choric performances of odes (Koehler). The dynamic, revolving

movement was developed as a dance of praise, but it is also conducive to the progression of

an inquiry or the weighing of a deliberation.4

I argue that the ode naturally invites a dance of dialectical thinking—examination

through movement, as the poem turns back upon itself.5 In the case of Coleridge’s poems,

the ode form allows the poet to consider a betrayal of a once beloved idea or cause, or, as

Coleridge wrote in a letter, a tension between “my self that is and has been and my self that

can not cease to be” (qtd in Byatt 134).

Coleridge underwent a period of revolutionary zeal that lasted until the early 1790s,

actively supporting the French Revolution in his writings. But by 1793 the political scene had

radically altered: Coleridge felt that the Revolution had betrayed its own ideals (Kitson 163);

Louis XVI was executed; and France declared war on Britain, so that support for France

became treasonous. Coleridge recanted, abandoning his radical lecturing and

pamphleteering. “I have snapped my squeaking baby-trumpet of sedition,” he wrote in 1796,

“and the fragments lie scattered in the lumber-room of penitence.”6 He noted he was

4 Esther Schorr also identifies the Romantic ode as particularly associated with political satire: “What shapes our sense of certain odes as ‘satires’ is not their political stance, which can be left or right, but their strategy of indirection. Instead of embodying a transcendental deity, such odes elevate an sublunary object through which they expose a multitude of sins: abrogations of rights and liberties, abuses of power, public deception, even self-deception.” 5 In a fashion characteristic of the Romantic search to unite theory with practice, the ode yokes “conceptual and sensual life in the production of form,” as Susan Stewart argues (“Romantic Meter and Form,” 72). 6 Cited in Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century: A Study of the Political and Social Thinking of Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1929.

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“wearied with politics, even to soreness.” He began to adopt a posture of retirement,

idealizing culture as severed from society and history7—although he continued to find

himself obliged to refute accusations of Jacobinism for the rest of his life. By 1798,

Coleridge had revised his earlier convictions to such an extent that he declared in a letter that

his opinions had never been “tainted by the French system.”8

After the atrocities of the Terror, Coleridge suffered another deep disillusionment

when France’s war against absolutist oppression was transformed into a war of aggressive

expansionism and it invaded Switzerland in 1798. The first poem I’d like to discuss, “France:

An Ode,” is constructed as a monologue in which the poetic speaker examines his own

beliefs. The ode recounts the poetic speaker’s change of political perspective with regard to

the French Revolution and his current cynicism regarding mass movements. The speaker

revises, reviews, recants, and rehearses his earlier political convictions, atoning through a

linguistic rehearsal of the arc of his beliefs, and making an appeal to the allegory of Liberty.

The odic form is complicated by the characterization of the addressee, or multiple

addressees (which are France and Freedom), the extended incipit—which provides an

introductory invocation before the first strophe—and the narrative gesture of the poem,

which takes on the form of a revision of political fervor. In this sense, the poem is actually a

palinode—or an ode in which the author retracts a view or sentiment expressed in an earlier

poem.

It pivots on the word “recantation,” which appears in Coleridge’s original title for

the poem. He called it “The Recantation: An Ode” and published it in 1798 in the

opposition newspaper, The Morning Post. At the heart of the verb “to recant,” meaning to

retract, renounce, or disavow, is “cant,” referring to a musical sound, a type of chanting or 7 Following Kant 8 Letter, April 1798. Cited in Cobban, 157.

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singing, or a deceitful use of language. Additionally, the word “cant” is akin to “canton,” that

is, one of the sovereign states of the Swiss confederation, and the term for the Helvetian

state under French subjugation after 1798.

The term also leads the eye toward “incantation,” or the work of the poet in

chanting or speaking a magical formula or ceremony, or casting a charm over the listener.9

Coleridge in fact anonymously published a satirical poem titled “Incantation” on October 29,

1791 (in The Diary/Woodfall’s Register), which attacked Edmund Burke (a critic of the French

revolution) with lines that follow the meter and rhyme of the weird sisters’ scene in Macbeth:

“Despot's root, from heart of B—ke; / Balm of Tartar and of Turk: / Freedom's venom

hissing hot: /Fry thou first i' th' brazen pot.” The poem concludes “Double, double toil and

trouble, /Fire burn and Cauldron bubble. […] Cool it with a Nation's blood, / Now the

charm is firm and good.” “Fire, Famine, and Slaughter,” another poem of 1798 that similarly

follows the witches in Macbeth to satirize William Pitt for his handling of the war with France,

his repressive domestic policies, and his stance on Ireland.10 In Sybilline Leaves Coleridge

recounts having shamefacedly admitted to Sir Walter Scott in 1803 that the anonymous

poem was his, saying, “I do not attempt to justify my past self, young as I then was; but as

little as I would now write a similar poem, so far was I then from imagining that the lines

would be taken as more or less than a sport of fancy.” Thus the “recantation” poem of April

1798 revises not only Coleridge’s youthful incantations, but it also comes hard on the heels

of more recent gibes against Pitt.

9 “Considered as an entertainment, the ode is not a sleight of hand but a performance on the high wire, not an illusion but an enchantment—or incantation,” as Paul Fry suggests in The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (9). 10 “A simple way of measuring the oscillating temperature of Coleridge’s politics at this time, from violently red-hot to temperate, is to read the two poems he contributed to the Morning Post within three months of each other: ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ (January 1798 ) and ‘Recantation: An Ode’ (April 1798 )” (Coleman 125-126).

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The term “cant” also draws the poem along a diagonal line, implying a departure

from previous certainty or “uprightness.” The odic speaker inclines himself in a posture of

atonement, and the ode he utters is a lament, a self-castigation; as well as an expression of

hope and a vision of nature as consolation—a vehicle for unity with the absolute. Paul Fry

writes, “Only the hymn speaks from knowledge, while the ode always hopes for knowledge”

(8), and Coleridge’s ode clearly articulates the poet’s ambivalence and self-examination.

The incantatory rhyme and meter are fairly regular in “France: an Ode,” alternating

between pentameter and hexameter, and an abbacdcd rhyme scheme. Each of the five

sections contains a melodic interlude in tetrameter, heralded by a reference to musicality in a

line directly preceding: in the first section, lines 7-8, “your own imperious branches swinging,

/ Have made a solemn music of the wind,” which announces the shift; in section two,

“Unawed I sang amid a slavish band” in line 27; and so on through the poem. I mention

these refrains because they foreground the poet’s incantatory endeavor, reinforcing the

liturgical aspects of the utterance, while providing musical interludes in the ritual of expiation.

From the guarded optimism recounted in stanza two—“When France in wrath her

giant-limbs upreared, / And with that oath, which smote air, earth, and sea, / Stamped her

foot and said she would be free, / Bear witness for me, how I hoped and feared!” (l. 22-

25)—to stanza three, with the speaker’s quailing at the onset of the Terror and its “fatal

stamp” (he giant’s aggressive foot; but also the mark of finality, or a seal of death), a stamp

which crushes out “Domestic treason,” the speaker maintains that France may still become a

paragon of liberty and “compel the nations to be free” (l. 62). By the antistrophe in stanza

four, however, the poem turns: the speaker repents his misguided hopes, asking the

allegorized Freedom to “forgive those dreams,” citing France’s devastation of Switzerland

and the annihilation of 10,000 Russian soldiers who perished in the mountain passes: “O

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France, that mockest Heaven, adulterous, blind, / And patriot only in pernicious toils!” (l.

78). A second turn occurs after the tumultuous first three quarters of the epode, in which

the poet denounces the Satanic, “mad game” of false Liberty. A moment of comparative

tranquility emerges and the poet dons his vatic robes, encountering Liberty in the liminal

space between earth and sea. Here, nature is an antidote to society’s ills, and offers

transcendence and an experience of Liberty’s lately absent spirit: “And there I felt thee!—on

that sea-cliff’s verge / ….Yes, while I stood and gazed, my temples bare, / ….O Liberty! my

spirit felt thee there” (l. 99-105). The Liberty found in nature is thereby contrasted with the

false “Freedom” that the Revolution had promised. “Fears in Solitude,” too, the other ode

Coleridge composed in 1798, will close with a critique of the “impious and false” French

who “laugh away all virtue, mingling mirth / With deeds of murder; and still promising /

Freedom, themselves too sensual to be free.”11

“Fears in Solitude” enacts a self-accusation that is consonant with that of section IV

of “France: An Ode,” yet is even more explicit. The poetic speaker recasts his earlier views

in lines 12-16: “he, / the humble man, who, in his youthful years, Knew just so much of

folly, as had made / His early manhood more securely wise!” A series of exclamations

convey self-castigation (“We have offended”) reminiscent of the liturgical cry of the

responsorial psalm taken from Daniel 9: “We have sinned.”

Carnage and groans beneath this blessed sun! We have offended, Oh! My countrymen! We have offended grievously, And been most tyrannous. From east to west A groan of accusation pierces Heaven!

11 See Kitson for a discussion of this similarity between the two poems.

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In this poem, Coleridge takes on culpability for his nation’s bellicosity in the first person

plural, speaking for those who had supported the revolution from afar.

Secure from actual warfare, we have loved To swell the war-whoop, passionate for war! The poetic speaker summons the allegory of a vengeful Providence, a counterpart to the

allegories of Freedom and Liberty, to confront the easy and baseless warmongering he

witnessed among his people:

And what if all-avenging Providence, Strong and retributive, should make us know The meaning of our words, force us to feel The desolation and the agony Of our fierce doings? The speaker excoriates himself for his previous, youthful exuberance for revolution—

Coleridge had been just sixteen when the Bastille fell, and he wrote this poem nine years

later. He invokes the tension between word and deed that is common to writing about war

from afar, and particularly characteristic of language used to describe the French Revolution

in both France and England at the time (Favret 278). Edmund Burke had written, "What

Spectators! and what actors! England gazing with astonishment at a French struggle and not

knowing whether to blame or applaud!" (cited in Favret 278-279). Mary Favret notes that the

new Republic marked its first anniversary with a pageant that became a revolutionary event:

“while the English stood back and watched, the French themselves produced their

revolution as theater….Indeed, the introduction of modern public ceremonial, together with

the use of dramatic imagery for widespread propaganda, arises with the political culture of

the French Revolution” (279). In his ode, Coleridge compares warfare to “animating sports,

/ The which we pay for as a thing to talk of” and to further emphasize the spectacular

element, he contrasts such sports with war’s actual, “ghastlier workings,” which he encloses

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within an understated parenthetical: “(famine or blue plague, / Battle, or siege, or flight

though wintry snows).”

Although I am focusing on the relationship of Coleridge to his previous views in

“France: An Ode,” and the conversation he maintains with himself, part of the projection of

that dialogue is in relation to France, the subject of his recantation, which he addresses as a

false patriot. France is a tempter and a betrayer, and allegorized as an ogress whose “giant-

limbs” stamp the earth. Her “front,” or forehead (with a play on battlefront), is the emblem

of her dual nature: it is “deep-scarr’d and gory” yet “concealed with clustering wreaths of

glory.” In yoking “gory” with “glory,” Coleridge draws on the logic of rhyme to make his

claim that it is not sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.

By the late 1790s, Coleridge would argue that government ought to protect property

rights, not personal rights (Kitson 165), writing:

For Jacobinism is monstrum hybridum, made up in part of despotism and in part of abstract reason misapplied to objects that belong entirely to experience and the understanding. Its instincts and mode of action are in strict correspondence with its origin.12

Within ten years of the Terror, Coleridge wrote that systems of government based on reason

were “the mad and barbarizing scheme of a delegation of individuals,” and added, “There is

no unity for a people but in a representation of national interests; a delegation from the

passions or wishes of the individuals themselves is a rope of sand.”13

Just as he conceived of form as an organic, innate mode of shaping, Coleridge also

held a notion of political institutions as natural organisms that developed in accordance with

the needs of the people. Nationalism, in this sense, is an organic relation between the senses,

feelings, and beliefs. Because humans are gregarious animals, the individual is only

12 Statesman’s Manual (1816) 340. 13 Table Talk 120, and 247, cited in Cobban 169.

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conceivable within the framework of society; and society is “a moral unit, an organic

whole.”14 In Coleridge’s “Essay on Faith,” he writes,

Unlike a million of tigers, a million of men is very different from a million times one man. Each man in a numerous society is not only co-existent with, but virtually organized into, the multitude of which he is an integral part.

His idem is modified by the alter. And there arise impulses and objects from this synthesis of the alter et idem, myself and my neighbour.15

In “France: An Ode,” the speaker’s relationship to the masses is one of objectification: the

crowd as a whole becomes an allegorized object upon which he composes his ode, but the

dialogue is not, ultimately, with the crowd, but about the crowd: the dialogue is with himself, it

is internal and self-contained, and in the last, he stands alone on the wind-swept sea-cliff to

encounter the true spirit of Liberty, at a distance from the life of the masses. “France: An

Ode” is thus the record of a loss of political hopes and the dissolution of the canto of

conviction for Coleridge.

It is precisely this sort of depiction in Coleridge’s poems of his previously held

convictions as a “youthful aberration” (Kitson 157) that has fueled critical debate

surrounding the trajectory of his political philosophy and his shift from “idiosyncratic

dissenter to idiosyncratic conservative,” as Peter Kitson has called it (164). While some

scholars identify a continuum in his thought, others emphasize a definitive break and retreat

into the natural sublime, as Coleridge joined William Wordsworth and Robert Southey in

what would be known as the Lake School.16

14 Church and State, 90. 15 “Essay on Faith,” Aids to Reflection, 347. 16 Everest points out that Coleridge himself participated in the obfuscation and mythologizing of his own trajectory: “Lacking the confidence and self-belief simply to articulate changed opinions, he came to rely on his eloquence to present his own development as internally consistent, but at a level of complexity which left most observers perplexed, if not sceptical. This tortured compulsion to

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But regardless of which narrative of this political trajectory that one finds persuasive, as I

have shown, for Coleridge, lately disillusioned by the bloody atrocities of the Terror, the

dialectical form of the ode offered a particularly well-suited staging grounds for self-

examination, as he reviewed his youthful zeal from a posture of retirement.

To conclude: I intend to expand this project to consider how Romantic poets in

France as well as England grappled with their political and ideological convictions in odes

written about the French Revolution; and the seeds they planted for subsequent poetic

treatment of political issues. This will necessitate analysis of the dynamic between the self-

portrait of the poet and his depiction of his audience. The poetic speaker assumes a number

of roles and postures in these poems: he is the vates who offers himself as a sacrifice on

behalf of his people; he is a Nero figure, a psychopath composing lyrics while his homeland

sinks into ruin around him17; and or he critiques his own lack of military experience (Hugo

writes in “The Poet in the Revolutions” in 1821, “What right do you have to enter the arena

/ and judge, without having fought?”—a sentiment which W.H. Auden will echo more than

a century later in expressing his desire to travel to Spain during the Civil War: “I shall

probably be a bloody bad soldier but how can I speak to/for them without becoming

one?”18).

Throughout the work of this period, poets return again and again to the question of

how and which position they must take, and to what ends. For the poet living in a time of

revise his past in accordance with present imperatives was made the worse by its connection with Coleridge’s increasingly relentless self-psychologising, particularly in his notebooks, which courageously pursued his nightmares and neuroses deeper and deeper into the sub-conscious” (24). Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria does not necessarily clear up any of these points either, as Byron memorably remarked in a poem: “Explaining metaphysics to the nation / I wish he would explain his explanation.” 17 The poet appears as a Nero figure in Lamartine’s odes “À Némésis” and “Contre la peine de mort,” for example. 18 Cited in Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (New York: Viking Press, 1981) 195-196.

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war or revolution, the question of the utility of verse takes on a special urgency. This is a

dilemma for the civilian poet that can be traced forward through the twentieth century and

remains acutely relevant today, from the events of the Arab Spring and the uprisings in

Greece to the Occupy movement, as poets are writing verses that are not only published in

magazines, but are also chanted at Tahrir Square, sprayed on walls, or painted on protest

signs.

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WORKS CITED

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. J.G.A. Pocock. Indianapolis:

Hackett Pub. Co., 1987. Byatt, A. S. Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time. London: Nelson, 1970. Cobban, Alfred. Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century; A Study of the Political

and Social Thinking of Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1929.

Coleman, Deidre. “The Journalist.” Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. Newlyn, Lucy (ed). Cambridge, England; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp.126-141.

Curran, Stuart. Poetic Form and British Romanticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Everest, Kelvin. “Coleridge’s Life.” Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. Newlyn, Lucy (ed).

Cambridge, England; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 17-31. Favret, Mary. “Spectatrice as Spectacle: Helen Maria Williams at Home in the Revolution,”

Studies in Romanticism (32) 2, Romanticism and the Feminine (Summer 1993), pp. 273-295.

Fry, Paul. Poet’s Calling in the English Ode. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. Hamilton, John. “The Revival of the Ode.” A Companion to European Romanticism. Ferber,

Michael (ed). Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Blackwell Reference Online. 08 May 2012. Kitson, Peter J. “Political Thinker.” Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. Newlyn, Lucy (ed).

Cambridge, England; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 156-169. Koehler, Margaret M. “The Ode.” A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry. Gerrard, Christine

(ed). Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Blackwell Reference Online. 08 May 2012. Mendelson, Edward. Early Auden (New York: Viking Press, 1981). Schor, Esther. “’Stirring shades’: The Romantic Ode and Its Afterlives.” A Companion to

Romantic Poetry, Mahoney, Charles (ed). Blackwell Publishing, 2011, pp. Blackwell Reference Online. 08 May 2012.

Stewart, Susan, “What Praise Poems Are For.” PMLA, 120 (1), pp. 235-245. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bénichou, Paul. Le sacre de l’écrivain: 1750-1830. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1996. Bourke, Richard. Romantic Discourse and Political Modernity: Wordsworth, the Intellectual and Cultural

Critique. Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. Bygrave, Stephen. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Plymouth, United Kingdom: Northcote House in

association with the British Council, 1997. Chandler, James. England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic

Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Magnuson, Paul. Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue. Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1988. Stewart, Jean Margaret. Poetry in France and England. London: L & Virginia Woolf, 1931. Wordsworth, William. Lyrical ballads, 1798. London: Printed for J. & A. Arch, 1798.

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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834 : FRANCE: AN ODE [from The Complete Poetical Works (1912)]

I 1 Ye Clouds! that far above me float and pause, 2 Whose pathless march no mortal may controul! 3 Ye Ocean-Waves! that, wheresoe'er ye roll, 4 Yield homage only to eternal laws! 5 Ye Woods! that listen to the night-birds singing, 6 Midway the smooth and perilous slope reclined, 7 Save when your own imperious branches swinging, 8 Have made a solemn music of the wind! 9 Where, like a man beloved of God, 10 Through glooms, which never woodman trod, 11 How oft, pursuing fancies holy, 12 My moonlight way o'er flowering weeds I wound, 13 Inspired, beyond the guess of folly, 14 By each rude shape and wild unconquerable sound! 15 O ye loud Waves! and O ye Forests high! 16 And O ye Clouds that far above me soared! 17 Thou rising Sun! thou blue rejoicing Sky! 18 Yea, every thing that is and will be free! 19 Bear witness for me, wheresoe'er ye be, 20 With what deep worship I have still adored 21 The spirit of divinest Liberty.

II

22 When France in wrath her giant-limbs upreared, 23 And with that oath, which smote air, earth, and sea, 24 Stamped her strong foot and said she would be free, 25 Bear witness for me, how I hoped and feared! 26 With what a joy my lofty gratulation 27 Unawed I sang, amid a slavish band: 28 And when to whelm the disenchanted nation, 29 Like fiends embattled by a wizard's wand, 30 The Monarchs marched in evil day, 31 And Britain joined the dire array; 32 Though dear her shores and circling ocean, 33 Though many friendships, many youthful loves 34 Had swoln the patriot emotion 35 And flung a magic light o'er all her hills and groves; 36 Yet still my voice, unaltered, sang defeat 37 To all that braved the tyrant-quelling lance, 38 And shame too long delayed and vain retreat! 39 For ne'er, O Liberty! with partial aim 40 I dimmed thy light or damped thy holy flame; 41 But blessed the paeans of delivered France, 42 And hung my head and wept at Britain's name.

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III 43 'And what,' I said, 'though Blasphemy's loud scream 44 With that sweet music of deliverance strove! 45 Though all the fierce and drunken passions wove 46 A dance more wild than e'er was maniac's dream! 47 Ye storms, that round the dawning East assembled, 48 The Sun was rising, though ye hid his light!' 49 And when, to soothe my soul, that hoped and trembled, 50 The dissonance ceased, and all seemed calm and bright; 51 When France her front deep-scarr'd and gory 52 Concealed with clustering wreaths of glory;

53 When, insupportably advancing, 54 Her arm made mockery of the warrior's ramp; 55 While timid looks of fury glancing, 56 Domestic treason, crushed beneath her fatal stamp, 57 Writhed like a wounded dragon in his gore; 58 Then I reproached my fears that would not flee; 59 'And soon,' I said, 'shall Wisdom teach her lore 60 In the low huts of them that toil and groan! 61 And, conquering by her happiness alone, 62 Shall France compel the nations to be free, 63 Till Love and Joy look round, and call the Earth their own.'

IV

64 Forgive me, Freedom! O forgive those dreams! 65 I hear thy voice, I hear thy loud lament, 66 From bleak Helvetia's icy caverns sent--- 67 I hear thy groans upon her blood-stained streams! 68 Heroes, that for your peaceful country perished, 69 And ye that, fleeing, spot your mountain-snows 70 With bleeding wounds; forgive me, that I cherished 71 One thought that ever blessed your cruel foes! 72 To scatter rage, and traitorous guilt, 73 Where Peace her jealous home had built; 74 A patriot-race to disinherit 75 Of all that made their stormy wilds so dear; 76 And with inexpiable spirit 77 To taint the bloodless freedom of the mountaineer--- 78 O France, that mockest Heaven, adulterous, blind, 79 And patriot only in pernicious toils! 80 Are these thy boasts, Champion of human kind? 81 To mix with Kings in the low lust of sway, 82 Yell in the hunt, and share the murderous prey; 83 To insult the shrine of Liberty with spoils 84 From freemen torn; to tempt and to betray?

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V 85 The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain, 86 Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game 87 They burst their manacles and wear the name 88 Of Freedom, graven on a heavier chain! 89 O Liberty! with profitless endeavour 90 Have I pursued thee, many a weary hour; 91 But thou nor swell'st the victor's strain, nor ever 92 Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power. 93 Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee, 94 (Nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee) 95 Alike from Priestcraft's harpy minions, 96 And factious Blasphemy's obscener slaves, 97 Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions, 98 The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves! 99 And there I felt thee!---on that sea-cliff's verge, 100 Whose pines, scarce travelled by the breeze above, 101 Had made one murmur with the distant surge! 102 Yes, while I stood and gazed, my temples bare, 103 And shot my being through earth, sea, and air, 104 Possessing all things with intensest love, 105 O Liberty! my spirit felt thee there.

February, 1798.

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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834 : FEARS IN SOLITUDE WRITTEN IN APRIL 1798, DURING THE ALARM OF AN INVASION [from The

Complete Poetical Works (1912)]

1 A green and silent spot, amid the hills, 2 A small and silent dell! O'er stiller place 3 No singing sky-lark ever poised himself. 4 The hills are heathy, save that swelling slope, 5 Which hath a gay and gorgeous covering on, 6 All golden with the never-bloomless furze, 7 Which now blooms most profusely: but the dell, 8 Bathed by the mist, is fresh and delicate 9 As vernal corn-field, or the unripe flax, 10 When, through its half-transparent stalks, at eve, 11 The level sunshine glimmers with green light. 12 Oh! 'tis a quiet spirit-healing nook! 13 Which all, methinks, would love; but chiefly he, 14 The humble man, who, in his youthful years, 15 Knew just so much of folly, as had made 16 His early manhood more securely wise! 17 Here he might lie on fern or withered heath, 18 While from the singing lark (that sings unseen 19 The minstrelsy that solitude loves best), 20 And from the sun, and from the breezy air, 21 Sweet influences trembled o'er his frame; 22 And he, with many feelings, many thoughts, 23 Made up a meditative joy, and found 24 Religious meanings in the forms of Nature! 25 And so, his senses gradually wrapt 26 In a half sleep, he dreams of better worlds, 27 And dreaming hears thee still, O singing lark, 28 That singest like an angel in the clouds! 29 My God! it is a melancholy thing 30 For such a man, who would full fain preserve 31 His soul in calmness, yet perforce must feel 32 For all his human brethren---O my God! 33 It weighs upon the heart, that he must think 34 What uproar and what strife may now be stirring 35 This way or that way o'er these silent hills--- 36 Invasion, and the thunder and the shout, 37 And all the crash of onset; fear and rage, 38 And undetermined conflict---even now, 39 Even now, perchance, and in his native isle: 40 Carnage and groans beneath this blessed sun!

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41 We have offended, Oh! my countrymen! 42 We have offended very grievously, 43 And been most tyrannous. From east to west 44 A groan of accusation pierces Heaven! 45 The wretched plead against us; multitudes 46 Countless and vehement, the sons of God, 47 Our brethren! Like a cloud that travels on, 48 Steamed up from Cairo's swamps of pestilence, 49 Even so, my countrymen! have we gone forth 50 And borne to distant tribes slavery and pangs, 51 And, deadlier far, our vices, whose deep taint 52 With slow perdition murders the whole man, 53 His body and his soul! Meanwhile, at home, 54 All individual dignity and power 55 Engulfed in Courts, Committees, Institutions, 56 Associations and Societies, 57 A vain, speech-mouthing, speech-reporting Guild, 58 One Benefit-Club for mutual flattery, 59 We have drunk up, demure as at a grace, 60 Pollutions from the brimming cup of wealth; 61 Contemptuous of all honourable rule, 62 Yet bartering freedom and the poor man's life 63 For gold, as at a market! the sweet words 64 Of Christian promise, words that even yet 65 Might stem destruction, were they wisely preached, 66 Are muttered o'er by men, whose tones proclaim 67 How flat and wearisome they feel their trade: 68 Rank scoffers some, but most too indolent 69 To deem them falsehoods or to know their truth. 70 Oh! blasphemous! the Book of Life is made 71 A superstitious instrument, on which 72 We gabble o'er the oaths we mean to break; 73 For all must swear---all and in every place, 74 College and wharf, council and justice-court; 75 All, all must swear, the briber and the bribed, 76 Merchant and lawyer, senator and priest, 77 The rich, the poor, the old man and the young; 78 All, all make up one scheme of perjury, 79 That faith doth reel; the very name of God 80 Sounds like a juggler's charm; and, bold with joy, 81 Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place, 82 (Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism, 83 Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, 84 Drops his blue-fringéd lids, and holds them close, 85 And hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, 86 Cries out, 'Where is it?'

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86 Thankless too for peace, 87 (Peace long preserved by fleets and perilous seas) 88 Secure from actual warfare, we have loved 89 To swell the war-whoop, passionate for war! 90 Alas! for ages ignorant of all 91 Its ghastlier workings, (famine or blue plague, 92 Battle, or siege, or flight through wintry snows,) 93 We, this whole people, have been clamorous 94 For war and bloodshed; animating sports, 95 The which we pay for as a thing to talk of, 96 Spectators and not combatants! No guess 97 Anticipative of a wrong unfelt, 98 No speculation on contingency, 99 However dim and vague, too vague and dim 100 To yield a justifying cause; and forth, 101 (Stuffed out with big preamble, holy names, 102 And adjurations of the God in Heaven,) 103 We send our mandates for the certain death 104 Of thousands and ten thousands! Boys and girls, 105 And women, that would groan to see a child 106 Pull off an insect's leg, all read of war, 107 The best amusement for our morning meal! 108 The poor wretch, who has learnt his only prayers 109 From curses, who knows scarcely words enough 110 To ask a blessing from his Heavenly Father, 111 Becomes a fluent phraseman, absolute 112 And technical in victories and defeats, 113 And all our dainty terms for fratricide; 114 Terms which we trundle smoothly o'er our tongues 115 Like mere abstractions, empty sounds to which 116 We join no feeling and attach no form! 117 As if the soldier died without a wound; 118 As if the fibres of this godlike frame 119 Were gored without a pang; as if the wretch, 120 Who fell in battle, doing bloody deeds, 121 Passed off to Heaven, translated and not killed; 122 As though he had no wife to pine for him, 123 No God to judge him! Therefore, evil days 124 Are coming on us, O my countrymen! 125 And what if all-avenging Providence, 126 Strong and retributive, should make us know 127 The meaning of our words, force us to feel 128 The desolation and the agony 129 Of our fierce doings? 129 Spare us yet awhile, 130 Father and God! O! spare us yet awhile!

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131 Oh! let not English women drag their flight 132 Fainting beneath the burthen of their babes, 133 Of the sweet infants, that but yesterday 134 Laughed at the breast! Sons, brothers, husbands, all 135 Who ever gazed with fondness on the forms 136 Which grew up with you round the same fire-side, 137 And all who ever heard the sabbath-bells 138 Without the infidel's scorn, make yourselves pure! 139 Stand forth! be men! repel an impious foe, 140 Impious and false, a light yet cruel race, 141 Who laugh away all virtue, mingling mirth 142 With deeds of murder; and still promising 143 Freedom, themselves too sensual to be free, 144 Poison life's amities, and cheat the heart 145 Of faith and quiet hope, and all that soothes, 146 And all that lifts the spirit! Stand we forth; 147 Render them back upon the insulted ocean, 148 And let them toss as idly on its waves 149 As the vile sea-weed, which some mountain-blast 150 Swept from our shores! And oh! may we return 151 Not with a drunken triumph, but with fear, 152 Repenting of the wrongs with which we stung 153 So fierce a foe to frenzy! 153 I have told, 154 O Britons! O my brethren! I have told 155 Most bitter truth, but without bitterness. 156 Nor deem my zeal or factious or mistimed; 157 For never can true courage dwell with them, 158 Who, playing tricks with conscience, dare not look 159 At their own vices. We have been too long 160 Dupes of a deep delusion! Some, belike, 161 Groaning with restless enmity, expect 162 All change from change of constituted power; 163 As if a Government had been a robe, 164 On which our vice and wretchedness were tagged 165 Like fancy-points and fringes, with the robe 166 Pulled off at pleasure. Fondly these attach 167 A radical causation to a few 168 Poor drudges of chastising Providence, 169 Who borrow all their hues and qualities 170 From our own folly and rank wickedness, 171 Which gave them birth and nursed them. Others, meanwhile, 172 Dote with a mad idolatry; and all 173 Who will not fall before their images, 174 And yield them worship, they are enemies 175 Even of their country!

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175 Such have I been deemed.--- 176 But, O dear Britain! O my Mother Isle! 177 Needs must thou prove a name most dear and holy 178 To me, a son, a brother, and a friend, 179 A husband, and a father! who revere 180 All bonds of natural love, and find them all 181 Within the limits of thy rocky shores. 182 O native Britain! O my Mother Isle! 183 How shouldst thou prove aught else but dear and holy 184 To me, who from thy lakes and mountain-hills, 185 Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas, 186 Have drunk in all my intellectual life, 187 All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts, 188 All adoration of the God in nature, 189 All lovely and all honourable things, 190 Whatever makes this mortal spirit feel 191 The joy and greatness of its future being? 192 There lives nor form nor feeling in my soul 193 Unborrowed from my country! O divine 194 And beauteous island! thou hast been my sole 195 And most magnificent temple, in the which 196 I walk with awe, and sing my stately songs, 197 Loving the God that made me!--- 197 May my fears, 198 My filial fears, be vain! and may the vaunts 199 And menace of the vengeful enemy 200 Pass like the gust, that roared and died away 201 In the distant tree: which heard, and only heard 202 In this low dell, bowed not the delicate grass. 203 But now the gentle dew-fall sends abroad 204 The fruit-like perfume of the golden furze: 205 The light has left the summit of the hill, 206 Though still a sunny gleam lies beautiful, 207 Aslant the ivied beacon. Now farewell, 208 Farewell, awhile, O soft and silent spot! 209 On the green sheep-track, up the heathy hill, 210 Homeward I wind my way; and lo! recalled 211 From bodings that have well-nigh wearied me, 212 I find myself upon the brow, and pause 213 Startled! And after lonely sojourning 214 In such a quiet and surrounded nook, 215 This burst of prospect, here the shadowy main, 216 Dim-tinted, there the mighty majesty 217 Of that huge amphitheatre of rich 218 And elmy fields, seems like society--- 219 Conversing with the mind, and giving it

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220 A livelier impulse and a dance of thought! 221 And now, belovéd Stowey! I behold 222 Thy church-tower, and, methinks, the four huge elms 223 Clustering, which mark the mansion of my friend; 224 And close behind them, hidden from my view, 225 Is my own lowly cottage, where my babe 226 And my babe's mother dwell in peace! With light 227 And quickened footsteps thitherward I tend, 228 Remembering thee, O green and silent dell! 229 And grateful, that by nature's quietness 230 And solitary musings, all my heart 231 Is softened, and made worthy to indulge 232 Love, and the thoughts that yearn for human kind.

Nether Stowey , April 20, 1798.