Chitra Ganesh, Over the City (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist and Durham Press.
It’s Just Us Talking Here: Coleridge’s Conversation Poems
Samuel Taylor Coleridge shows us one of the most remarkably versatile minds in English literature. As a critic, he made lasting contributions in such diverse fields as art history, philosophy, psychology, and Shakespeare studies. Coleridge’s poetry is also astonishingly varied. How wonderfully improbable that the same author who wrote the abstract, philosophical “Human Life” also penned bewitching, incantatory masterpieces like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Christabel,” and “Kubla Khan.” Perhaps because of the critical attention that has focused on these three visionary dreamscapes, Coleridge’s other great poetic form—the conversation poem—has remained largely undervalued.
If we are less than overwhelmed by the originality of “Frost at Midnight” or “The Eolian Harp,” it is only because contemporary poetry has so thoroughly absorbed their chief virtues. Coleridge’s conversation pieces were among the first attempts to poeticize domestic experience. In these poems, Coleridge breaks from a long tradition that places the poet in the privileged and highly artificial position of orator. Coleridge leads the poet back to his own garden, or tending to his own humble fire.
The most important result of this change is a more intimate relationship between the poet and his reader. Coleridge invites the reader to share his relaxed, unpretentious poetic space. We follow readily in no small part because of Coleridge’s immense skill in capturing the precise rhythms of thought. The cadence of the language in “Frost at Midnight,” for example, seems perfectly suited to the meditative fireside moment the poem describes.
The point might be made more generally that the conversation poems successfully enact the process of their own composition. A poem, therefore, may contradict itself to accommodate the growth of mind that occurs in the process of writing (or reading) that same poem. For instance, at the outset of “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” the poet laments having to stay behind in his garden while his friends frolic in the wider world of nature: “I have lost/ Beauties and feelings, such as would have been/ Most sweet to my remembrance …” But then, as the poem continues, the poet has a change of mind, acknowledging that “sometimes/ ‘Tis well to be bereft of promis’d good,/ That we may lift the soul, and contemplate/ With lively joy the joys we cannot share.” Importantly, this shift of perspective does not compromise the integrity or coherence of the poem, but rather heightens its realism by rehearsing the organic flow of thought. The poems often introduce abrupt shifts of mood and even setting, thereby keeping faith with spontaneous, associative thought patterns. In “Frost at Midnight,” we pass from the fireside to an extended recollection of schoolboy days, the associative link being a film of fire on the grate.
Coleridge’s conversation poems also foreground the centrality of the imagination in Romantic thought. For Coleridge, it is only through the imagination that reality is apprehended in its organic fullness. The poet must surrender to the imagination, and be, like the titular “Eolian Harp,” “by the desultory breeze caress’d.” Coleridge enlarges upon this image later in the same poem in a passage of dazzling complexity and scope:
And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely fram’d
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?
Yet, as I began by saying, Coleridge’s poetic voice possesses startling range. Notice how in these lines from “The Nightingale” (so similar in theme and imagery to the passage quoted above), we hear such a very different kind of music:
And she hath watched
Many a nightingale perch giddily
On blossomy twig still swinging from the breeze,
And to that motion tune his wanton song
Like tipsy Joy that reels with tossing head.
Two centuries later, in our strange and noisy time, I hope it is a music we are still capable of hearing.
Mike White is the author of two poetry collections, How to Make a Bird with Two Hands (The Word Works) and Addendum to a Miracle (Waywiser Press), which won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Individual poems have appeared in such magazines as Poetry, Ploughshares, The New Republic, FIELD, The Yale Review, and The Threepenny Review. He lives in Salt Lake City and teaches at the University of Utah. (updated 2017)
How to Make a Bird with Two Hands was awarded the Washington Prize by The Word Works. One of the poems in the collection, “God in the Details,” was first published here.