Obscurity and the Mystery Poems

The poems in Coleridge’s corpus which are most heavily circumscribed by the concept of positive Romantic of obscurity are undoubtedly those which have been positively dubbed by various critics his ‘mystery’ poems: ‘Kubla Khan, or A Vision in a Dream’ (1797-99), ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ (1797-8), and ‘Christabel’ (1798, 1800). In these poems, Coleridge deploys various forms of the positively valued poetic, Romantic obscurity which I have discussed throughout my previous chapters. Indeed, the critical history of these poems is itself Romantically obscure in its uncomprehendable unboundedness: so much has been written about these poems that the anxiety of overdetermination by critical accumulation threatens to overwhelm anything approaching a comprehensive study or even an acknowledgment of their various interpretations. But the framework of Romantic obscurity which I have developed throughout this thesis, I hope, will at least offer a relatively unique account of their participation in a Romantic discourse that has yet to be discussed at any length in the history of Romanticist criticism. In these poems we can see Coleridge’s fullest development of a poetics of obscurity which radically figures the emanation of opaque rays as a productive source of knowledge, at the same time as it reinscribes the subordination of the reader to a notion of truth which is not fully clarifiable.

As many critics have suggested, the representation of ‘Kubla Khan’ as a fragment, as it is figured metarhetorically in the note which prefaced it when it was finally published in 1816, thematically delays the possibility of its comprehensive interpretation. In the sufficient insufficiency which is generated by this thematised containment it is therefore a primary example of what Marjorie Levinson has termed the ‘Romantic Fragment Poem’:

[t]he indeterminacy of the fragment poem, conceived within this context [‘enlarged freedom of literary expression and response’], figures a display of authorial autonomy and an invitation to participatory reading. Quite decidedly, it seems, ‘the law of sufficient information is broken and darkness which has become expressive gains a poetic function’.¹⁰⁵

Like most modern considerations of obscurity, however, in a fascinating historical inversion of traditional rhetorical expectations, such statements eschew the suspicious questionability of obscurity. In the modern appropriation of the thematised poetics of Romantic obscurity, that is, obscurity is unquestionably associated with virtue. Even accounts of Coleridge’s glosses to ‘Kubla Khan’ and the ‘Rime’ that argue they provide ‘a “negative interpretative model,” which the alert reader recognizes as inadequate to the vision contained within the poem’, nonetheless reinscribe the sufficiency of the gloss in its deliberate evocation of insufficiency.¹⁰⁶ In the gloss Coleridge poetically figures this delayed transformation from the indeterminate to the determinate by quoting his 1802 poem ‘The Picture’, in which a broken vision involves the spread of ripples that ‘each mis-shape the other’ (94). If the reader will ‘Stay awhile’, however, ‘the fragments dim of lovely forms’ will ‘Come trembling back’ and ‘unite’ (94, 98, 99). The poetic defence of the obscurity of ‘Kubla Khan’ thus involves the promise of delayed completion, but it is an endless delay, and thus leads Romantically to endless theories and endless readings: one does not know what shape the fragments will take when they unite, and the promise of a lovely unification is merely a promise, not a principle, or proof.

The poet, indeed, calls attention to the questionably indeterminate origins of his own inspiration, in the form of a warning that invokes the double twilight of healthy and unhealthy spirits.¹⁰⁷ Like the crowd in the ‘Fable of the Madning Rain’, all who encounter this poetic circle of creation and self-creation

should cry, ‘Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread:
For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise (49-54).

Like the Hebrew God, the poet is not bound by determinate form, but that which is divinely dark with excessive light is still indistinguishable from a satanic darkness that goes all the way down.¹⁰⁸ As Mays remarks in his commentary on the poem, ‘[i]t carries emotion, but you cannot say what sort. The completeness of C’s statement is even less certain than in unfinished narratives like The Ballad of the Dark Ladiè or Love, because of this suspension of moral determinacy’.¹⁰⁹ The poet who has drunk the milk is a figurative inversion of the Monitor who refuses to drink the water: but it is still uncertain which has been divinely and which demonically inspired. Citing the reception of the Pindaric image of a flow that exceeds its bounds, John Hamilton (in a discussion of Goethe) notes the eighteenth-century radical associations with this dark potential: ‘this image served as an important justification of lyric obscurity… for the latter part of the eighteenth century, the dark waters that overflow all conventional limits came to represent the highest mode of creativity, with its impetuous and transgressive force’.¹¹⁰

Herbert Read has remarked that ‘[a] poem like “The Ancient Mariner” is full of obscurities. Indeed, we might say of Coleridge’s poetry in general, that its poetic worth is in inverse ratio to its logical sense, reaching its greatest intensity in the incoherent imagery of “Kubla Khan”’.¹¹¹ This kind of observation, at various levels of theoretical abstraction, has become a commonplace in Romanticist criticism, and one could fill more than one bibliographical volume with references to readings of the ‘Rime’ in relation to obscurity. If ‘poetic worth’ is measured in terms of endless Romanticist critical attention to a poem, then one can certainly concur with Read’s reading, and acknowledge the truth of Coleridge’s jokey translation of an epigram from Lessing, addressed ‘To an Author’:

Your Poem must eternal be,
Dear Sir! – It cannot fail:
For tis incomprehensible
And without head or tail (1-4).

Reading the ‘Rime’ in relation to an unthematised obscurity thus participates in its own blessed machine of Romantic poetic self-propagation. Thus Raimonda Modiano argues in her article on the various proliferating interpretations of the poem that ‘in the poem the identity of either the world or of the bird is largely undetermined, and yields conflicting perspectives’, and to look for Coleridge’s Submerged Politics is to adopt a Coleridgean rhetoric of Romantic obscurity and repeat the medieval hermeneutical trope of unveiling mysteries.¹¹² The penetration of penetralium is a figuration of the obscurity of the terra incognita, and a voyage of exploration metaromantically presents itself in the ‘Rime’ as a figure of its own reading. The difference between the Romantic and the medieval model is that the poetics of Romantic obscurity promises irresolution as a guarantee of its value, and its eternal fame.

This figuration of the foreign text as a foreign land (and vice versa) is sublimated into a theoretical claim in comments like Marshall Suther’s, that ‘it seems often to be true that the sympathetic application of foreign criteria to a body of thought throws into understandable relief certain obscurities which the light of analysis in its own indigenous terms has failed to reach – and this even when a very minimum of affinity exists’.¹¹³ In the poetics of the foreign, this ‘reach’ is both spatial and temporal: figuratively speaking, there is no distance between time and space. To uncover a foreign land is like uncovering the past, and in its antiquated spelling the original version of the ‘Rime’ invokes a familiar unfamiliarity. In its figured penetration of the past and of neglected texts and perspectives, the discourse of New Historicism itself reproduces this function of the terra incognita, and thus it is in this sense quite fitting that Modiano should claim that ‘while the motive for the killing of the Albatross can never be fully determined, the literature of discovery in which explorers so often articulate fears about survival and uncertainty about the disposition of indigenous beings, human or animal, provides a better ground of interpretation than original sin’.¹¹⁴ The discourse of original sin is not so easy to evade, however, for it too is often figured in relation to a journey to and from a foreign land, as Perkins suggests:

central to [the ‘Rime’] is the theme of the self-imposed separation of the human individual from the rest of creation which is itself then plunged into chaos and fragmentation as a result of this act of alienation. Through spiritual redemption, the whole creation is then restored to a unified, harmonious community in which the individual (the Mariner) finds his own spiritual home.¹¹⁵

The journey of spiritual redemption here resembles the journey of internalisation and ascent figured in the staircases of Coleridge’s Friendly obscurity, and their own invocation of the discourse of mortifying spiritual ascent. Romantically speaking, in other words, the mariner’s search for the terra incognita is the search for himself. But considering the poetics of Romantic obscurity from another critical perspective, like De Quincey’s sad description of Coleridge’s sad description of Piranesi’s sad paintings, the mariner is his own prison.

The ‘Rime’ is packed with figures of obscurity, and here I will merely pick up on a few of the more striking incidents. I have chosen to discuss the original version because its antiquated spelling invokes not only an appeal to a venerable tradition, but also because it invokes a new rhetorical primitivism: as Olivia Smith notes, ‘[b]y choosing to write in a “primitive” language, Coleridge implies that it is fully capable of expressing poetic feeling and that no essential difference exists between the sensibility of the poet and that of the savage’.¹¹⁶ The antiquated spelling is in this sense an invocation of the obfuscating dangers of poetic passion. The figure of the albatross, of course, as I have already mentioned, is not only a figureof obscurity for critics like Modiano but also, as Holmes would have it, a figurefor Coleridge’s Romantic obscurity. Not surprisingly, the albatross appears through a ‘Fog’ (64), and the purpose of its killing is made clear by the mariner: ‘I had kill’d the Bird / That brought the fog and mist’ (99-100).¹¹⁷ In this reading, the mariner’s punishment is figured as a reaction to his attempt to dispel obscurity, to achieve a pure and unsullied, permanent, radical enlightenment. What he achieves is merely the inversion of the proper light that exists in a fine balance with a palpable darkness, and the mariner is stranded under a fixed, ‘bloody sun’ (112) that, like the stagnant air and the stagnant water, figures the stagnation of fully achieved, final interpretation. The life of the albatross, and the life of the world of the poem, is contingent upon motion, just as the life and eternity of the poem is contingent on the corresponding breeze of original interpretation. But progression too comes with its price, and the mariner’s motion is motivated as much by an obscurity associated with ‘fear and dread’ (447) as it is by hope. The compulsion of the storyteller and the compulsion of the (hermeneutical) explorer are both grounded in a vision of obscurity, and their journey to and from the terra incognita is a curse which burdens them with the darkness they have discovered. As the mariner puts it in a moment of reflexive figuration:

I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
The moment that his face I see
I know the man that must hear me;
To him my tale I teach (586-90).

In his work on Coleridge’s divisions and dramatic irresolutions, Seamus Perry has discussed the darker implications of this dark ‘end’ of Romantic obscurity. Countering a tradition which represents the Rime’s poetics of obscurity as a success in itself or as the presentation of a positive potential for productive readerly response, Perry writes in Coleridge and the Uses of Division that ‘[u]nity and diversity would then feature in the poem not in the form of a unifying vision that redeems an experience of disorder, but as a futile, superstitious dream of salvation perpetually thwarted by an unyielding meaninglessness’.¹¹⁸ The insufficiency of the autonomous Romantic poem, like the sense of geographical and historical insufficiency which impels one to explore unknown lands, causes it to ‘spill into footnotes, headnotes, marginal commentaries, admissions of incompleteness, prose paraphrases’.¹¹⁹ Self-consciously personifying the ‘Rime’ as the mariner himself, and the struggling poet, Perry concludes ominously that ‘the poem (as it were) looks to the would-be paraphrase of the gloss to draw from its private agonies the coherence of a publicly available moral; but the marginal commentary is often obtusely at odds with the poem it is meant to be expounding, as though a dark parody of successful connection, and only compounds the darkness’.¹²⁰

The figure of a ‘dangerously uncontrolled sexuality’ in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period often manifest itself as a feminised obscurity that lurks throughout Coleridge’s writings and finds its ultimate figuration in the menacing obscurity of Geraldine in Christabel.¹²¹ Inspired by Milton’s figure of menacing indeterminacy, the fearsomely feminised Death who sits at the gates of Hell, Coleridge’s dark ladies appear in various pregnant forms: the ‘She’ (329) of ‘Religious Musings’ ‘On whose black front was written MYSTERY’ (330), and who recalls the dark sensuality of the negative feminine figures of the superstition allegory; Tongarsuck, ‘the other great malignant spirit [that] is a nameless female’ in ‘Joan of Arc’ (2.112.1-2 n); the ‘unutterable shape’ of ‘Jabme Akko, or the mother of death’ in ‘The Destiny of Nations’ (95 and 95n); the figure of France who conceals her scarred breast in ‘France: An Ode’ (51); the ‘Harlot’ with her ‘distended breast’ in ‘Lines Composed in a Concert-room’ (3); the devil’s ‘Grannam’ in ‘The Two Round Spaces’ (35); the feminised ship and the shape ‘far liker Death’ of the 1798 ‘Rime’ that is transformed into the dicey ‘spectre-woman’ of Death in the 1834 version (1798 185-194.1, 1834 185-194); and of course the Dark Ladiè, in addition to various ‘biform’ hell-hags and fiend-hags (‘Destiny’ 312, 293; ‘Departing Year’, 156). An extended study of such figures, and their relation to the watchful ‘beauties’ (like the recurring figure of the pure Sara in Coleridge’s early poems) who appear elsewhere in Coleridge’s corpus, is not possible within the already overflowing bounds of this thesis, but in my concluding passage I will offer a brief discussion of ‘Christabel’ as a synecdoche for this critical figuration of dangerous feminine obscurity** in Coleridge’s poetics of obscurity.

Throughout this thesis I have generally avoided ‘psylosophical’ accounts of Romantic obscurity, but the mater tenebrarum is such a striking and recurrent figure in Coleridge’s poetics that at this point it seems healthy, for a moment, to indulge in some psychoanalytic callisthenics. Harold Bloom has commented in The Anxiety of Influence that

[a] man’s unconscious fear of castration manifests itself as an apparently physical trouble in his eyes; a poet’s fear of ceasing to be a poet frequently manifests itself also as a trouble of his vision. Either he sees too clearly, with a tyranny of sharp fixation, as though his eyes asserted themselves against the rest of him as well as against the world, or else his vision becomes veiled, and he sees all things through an estranging mist. One seeing breaks and deforms the seen; the other, at most, beholds a bright cloud.¹²²

Though it is easy to apply such vague metaphors to almost any complex poetic corpus, Bloom’s division does map nicely onto the functions of Christabel and Geraldine. Like so many of Coleridge’s poems, ‘Christabel’ begins in a state of obscurity, in a chill night. Geraldine appears to Christabel in the wood ‘as a Damsel bright / Drest in silken Robe of white’ (58-9), the ultimate figure of artificial and destructive clarity, of brightness as a disguise, and a warning to those who would conflate plainness with honesty or virtue. Christabel here seems to figure for the poet’s fear of seeing too clearly. But when these veils are removed, the darkness that was covered with excessive bright is revealed – or, indeed, not revealed, in another famous Coleridgean evasion:

Her silken Robe and inner Vest
Dropt to her feet, and fell in View,
Behold! her Bosom and half her Side -
A Sight to dream of, not to tell!
Oh shield her! shield sweet Christabel! (250-4)

Like the imagination that is coyly promised but never revealed, so is the sight of Geraldine’s breast hidden from the reader’s view. It is precisely this seductive, threatening veil, this Romantic obscurity, that gives the hidden breast and the hidden Coleridgean concept of the imagination, like so many of his other figuratively unfulfilled concepts, their primarily poetic rather than philosophical power:

In the Touch of this Bosom there worketh a Spell,
Whish is Lord of thy Utterance, Christabel! (267-8)

The pattern of metarhetorical inversion discussed in my first two chapters here finds its ultimate Romantic apotheosis in the transvaluation of a vision that is too clear into one that is too obscure. This unresolved ambivalence, this interchangeability of divine and demonic origins, is nicely summed up by Harding in his discussion of the poem: ‘[i]f Christabel knew Geraldine to be wholly evil, there would be no “perplexity.” Christabel’s position is analogous to that of the poet-hermeneut, unsure whether to ascribe his own high-sounding utterance to pseudo-poetic madness or the furor divinus’.¹²³ That Coleridge never finished ‘Christabel’, that he never finished with her and that he left her meaning hidden, is merely another staging of Romantic obscurity, of the figurative refusal to penetrate to the source of meaning – and, indeed, the refusal to finish anything.¹²⁴ For in Coleridge’s Romantic poetics of obscurity, any announcement of the complete penetration of a mystery comes along with the fear of attack and the fear of insufficiency, the anxiety that in the act of reception the source of the communicator’s power will be cut off:

Infelix, ah plusquam infelicissimus Ille,
Semivir in thalamum qui dixit Sesqui-puellam;
Mutumque os sitiens, tantique voraginem hiatûs
Vis rigidi tubuli lacrymoso róre lacessit!¹²⁵