Poems of Clarity

In a number of his early political poems Coleridge participates in a pattern of transvaluative figuration typical of the radical rhetoric of clarity, using obscurity as a figure for tyranny and oppression. As Paul Magnuson has argued, ‘[t]he complex situation of literature in the 1790s is that the discourse of esthetics is often figurative of the discourse of politics, and that the tropes of the literary are often the public rhetoric of law courts and public addresses’.¹³ It is from this tradition that Coleridge first appropriated the figures of clarity and obscurity and used them as a poetic means for challenging the hegemony of oppressive hierarchies. Light, for contemporary radicals, represented a commitment to the emancipatory promise of reason and science, and insofar as it was appropriated from a traditional religious rhetoric for which light represented not the truth of material nature but rather the truth of God, it functioned as an ironic subversion of various mainstream Christian values. Thus Coleridge’s early use of figures of clarity participates in a radical discourse in which these figures had already ceased to function merely as aesthetic or poetic figures and devices, and had become synonymous with particular political commitments, collapsing a poetic into a political language.

In the ‘Sonnet on Pantisocracy’ (written along with his Pantisocratic colleague Samuel Favell in 1794) light and darkness are figured in accordance with this radical language to represent positive political possibility and negative stagnation. A future time is conflated with another place, where the poet will experience a dawning like those pursued by ‘Fiends’ and ‘see the rising Sun and feel it dart / New rays of Pleasance trembling to the Heart’ (12, 13-14).¹⁴ The creation of a new political landscape is associated with poetic productivity in the 1794 version of the ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’, where the young ‘MINSTREL’ ‘Pours forth the bright blaze of Freedom’s noon-tide ray: / And now, indignant, “grasps the patriot steel,” / And her own iron rod he makes Oppression feel’ (34, 46-8). Such figurations of Chatterton invoke a classical and problematic assertion of the identity of good poetry with a good man: ‘[a]ccording to one argument popular with Chatterton’s supporters, Chatterton could not have produced so expert an oeuvre as the Rowley poems and at the same time have been so debased as to deceive his readers. We observe here a familiar assumption: good poetry can only be written by good men’.¹⁵ Good poetic creation resembles the utopian creation of bright new men with a clear new politics in a ‘new’ world, a revolutionary fiat lux which resembles a mortifying and purifying creation by the labour of the furor poeticus, and indeed recalls the imagery of spreading and consuming fire so dear to revolutionary rhetoric. Contra Campbell and Lowth and the tradition of prophetical obscurity, there is a triumphant clarity in these early prophetic, hopeful pronouncements.¹⁶

This use of clarity as a figure for promise and hope and obscurity as a figure for tyranny and oppression is developed further and in the more definite national political and intellectual arena of reciprocal figuration in Coleridge’s sonnets on ‘eminent Contemporaries’, which were published from December 1794 to January 1795 in the Morning Chronicle.¹⁷ The first sonnet, to Thomas Erskine, the Whig lawyer and defender of pro-revolutionary radicals in 1790s treason trials, is perhaps the most complex in its subversive use of religious imagery. ‘British Freedom’, here represented as a bird in punning flight, is stopped by Erskine’s voice and inspired with a ‘Sublime’ hope (1, 4) for justice. Erskine is heretically represented with a ‘censer glowing with the hallow’d flame’, and as ‘An hireless Priest before th’ insulted shrine’ (5, 6). As a result of his ‘unmatch’d eloquence’ - here an implicit criticism of the apostate Burke - Erskine’s ‘light shall shine’ (12) even after his death. The sonnet to Burke represents his treacherous repudiation of the figure of freedom as the result of ‘error’s mist’ (13) which had corrupted his eye - a typical representation of the disruption of vision as the disruption of the communication of reason which appears throughout Coleridge’s poetry. Burke’s support for the power in the rhetoric of sublimity and obscurity is parodied in the representation of the poet waking from ‘slumber’s shadowy vale’ to hear the truth about Burke, who had blasted ‘with wizard spell [Freedom’s] laurell’d fame’ (1, 8). This pattern of light as a sign of the good and rational, and darkness or obscurity as a sign of the bad and corrupted/corrupting, continues throughout the sonnets, with Priestley dwelling in ‘halls of Brightness’ (5) and witnessing the lifting of Nature’s veil as she ‘smile[s] with fondness on her gazing son’ (14), and with the almost godlike Godwin ‘form’d t’illume a sunless world forlorn’, and disrupting ‘terror-pale’ Oppression with the power of his gaze (1, 5).

Later, in June 1796, Coleridge continued his pattern of radical rhetorical figuration in a sonnet to John Thelwall and a poem about Horne Tooke in celebration of Tooke’s glorious failure in the parliamentary elections of June 1796. As J. C. C. Mays notes, the sonnet to Thelwall functions as a complex reformulation of Coleridge’s attitude towards Godwin, and sides with Thelwall on the subject of his disagreement with Godwin about the safety of ‘political appeals to the masses’; the poem ‘is implicitly a recension of [Coleridge’s Morning Chronicle] sonnet to Godwin… and describes how Thelwall moves an admirer not just to zeal but to action’.¹⁸ As such, it registers Coleridge’s contradictory and problematic commitment to persuasive public speaking and to the need to reserve radical speech for those types of recipients prepared to act in a manner which was not dangerous. Invoking the highest type of recipient discussed in the Moral and Political Lecture and Conciones ad populum, Coleridge begins with an implicit criticism of Godwin’s (and indeed Burke’s) closeted, obscure reserve:

Some, Thelwall! to the Patriot meed aspire
Who in safe rage without or rent or scar
Round pictur’d strong-holds sketching mimic war
Closet their valour. Thou mid thickest fire
Leap’st on the Wall (1-5).

In an early act of self-figuration, Coleridge then compares his own youthful hopes at Cambridge to Thelwall’s fully-grown, masculine simplicity. Coleridge, Coleridge claims, desired

First by thy fair example to glow
With patriot zeal: with Passion’s feverish dream
Starting I tore disdainful from my brows
The Myrtle crown inwove with cypress boughs -
Blest if to me in Manhood’s years belong
Thy stern simplicity & vigorous song (11-16).

Here, in a curiously personal example of reciprocal figuration, Coleridge compares his own early dangerous and unreserved enthusiasm to the figure of Thelwall’s sobriety. Such pronouncements are meant to reflexively structure a discourse as clear and contained which may in fact – as it was in Thelwall’s case – nonetheless be impassioned and guilty of the crimes of those it metarhetorically claims to resist. To claim that Thelwall was plain and simple was to signify his participation in the radical rhetoric of clarity, but it was no guarantee of the sobriety of his discourse. Likewise, in his ‘Poetical Address for Horne Tooke’, Coleridge figures a political morning which has followed a dim and indeterminate dawn of faint promise, when ‘E’en Expectation gaz’d with doubtful Eye’ (4). Again invoking his highest form of recipient-communicator, and the title of Tooke’s radical grammar on ‘winged words’, Coleridge figures Tooke as a radical sun:

Patriot & Sage! whose breeze-like Spirit first
The lazy mists of Pedantry dispers’d,
(Mists, in which Superstition’s pigmy band
Seem’d Giant Forms, the Genii of the Land!) (13-16).

Through his radical grammatical attack on a conservative linguistic tradition, Tooke inverts an obfuscating inversion of the proper rank or size of pedants and their doctrines. Tooke heralds a ‘gradual Dawn’ which will ‘bid Errors phantoms flit, / Or wither with the lightning flash of Wit’ (23-4), and even his potential for rhetorical, figurative excess and dangerous misinformation will be rescued by the forces of clarity already promised in the dawn of science:

And if amid the strong impassion’d Tale
Thy Tongue should falter & thy Lips turn pale;
If transient Darkness film thy aweful Eye,
And thy tir’d Bosom struggle with a sigh;
Science & Freedom shall demand to hear
Who practis’d on a Life so doubly dear (33-8).

Through a consistent repetition of such normative figures in association with radical public figures like Erskine, Godwin, and Thelwall, Coleridge’s representations of his political contemporaries are poetically coded in the radical rhetoric of clarity, and his subversive appropriation of religious language signifies the depth of his commitment to radical ideals which perpetuated the rhetoric of clarity. But his worry about Tooke’s potential for surrendering to strong passion in his ‘Tale’ and the nature of his problematic representation of Thelwall as a sober reflector register a deeper problem with the radical poetics of clarity. Participation in metarhetorical reciprocal figuration, that is, always already invokes the rhetoric of clarity’s suspicion of poetry as the prime source of misleading and misinforming figuration. All poetry, and indeed all rhetorical figuration, involves a poetics of obscurity.

Coleridge’s early optimistic prophecies of hope invert traditional associations of prophecy with obscurity. Coleridge was familiar with this prophetic tradition, having borrowed Lowth’s Lectures from the Bristol Library from September 16-22, 1796, the same week that he wrote three sonnets concerning the destiny of his son Hartley, who was born on September 19.¹⁹ I would like to use this coincidence as a basis for reading Coleridge’s poetic prophecies as an informed response to Lowth’s and the wider new rhetorical discussion of obscurity and poetry which I have discussed in my first chapter. In the first sonnet, ‘Written on Receiving Letters Informing Me of the Birth of a Son, I Being at Birmingham’, Coleridge reveals his failure to receive a ‘cheering ray’ from God, because of his own confusion: ‘Ah me! before the eternal Sire I brought / Th’unquiet Silence of confused Thought / And shapeless feelings’ (5, 6-8). For Coleridge, a clear mind is necessary for communication with God, ‘overshadowing Spirit’ though He may be (13). Just as the obscurity of the object of sacred poetry, for Lowth, generally requires order and perspicuity of language in order to communicate a sense of the sublime, so does the confused father feel that his ‘shapeless’ feelings divest him of an opportunity to commune with God. Obscurity is here a barrier to prophecy, rather than its condition, and instead of being granted a prophecy of his son’s future, Coleridge can only beg through a veil of tears for a future of which he does not even have a dim vision:

And now once more, O Lord! to thee I bend,
Lover of Souls! and groan for future grace,
That, ere my Babe youth’s perilous maze have trod,
Thy overshadowing Spirit may descend
And he be born again, a Child of God! (10-14).

Representing God as ‘overshadowing’ invokes the Miltonic figure of God as dark with excessive light, which here may be read as performing an emancipatory rather than a Burkean function, creating a future revolution in his child. In his discussion of this figure, Paul Magnuson argues for the radical resonance of this obscurity-from-clarity as a register of its power: ‘[d]arkness with excessive light is the possession of Milton, Coleridge, and Lamb, and it boldly shines in opposition to aristocracy and established religion’.²⁰ But, as Lucy Newlyn has observed, obscurity is ‘ideologically appropriated by Milton, as a means of mystification’.²¹ As I have argued, figures of obscurity like that of the darkness that comes with an excess of light were constantly inverted and transvalued throughout the poetics of obscurity, and they can shine both in opposition to and in support of overwhelming, antidemocratic power. In this early invocation of an ‘overshadowing’ God, God’s darkness humiliates Coleridge and facilitates supplication rather than prophetic vision: in Coleridge’s radical poetics of obscurity, to be dark with excess of light is to be dark nonetheless.

In the second sonnet, ‘Composed on a Journey Homeward, the Author Having Received Intelligence of the Birth of a Son’, Coleridge figures his reception of transformative information. Leaping in a rather morbid manner from the occasion of the birth to the occasion of death, Coleridge contemplates the possibility of his son’s early death in language appropriate to a frenzied prophetic state:

Oft o’er my brain does that strange fancy roll
Which makes the present (while the flash doth last)
Seem a mere semblance of some unknown past,
Mix’d with such feelings, as perplex the soul
Self-question’d in her sleep (1-5).

This conflation of the past and ‘flash’ of the present neatly invokes the collapse of temporal distinctions inherent in biblical prophecy, notably the concept of the figura, according to which the significant events of the Old Testament are contained in the New Testament, and indeed in a note Coleridge mentions his invocation of Plato’s doctrine in the Phaedrus of the pre-existence of the soul.²² Tragically, Coleridge’s fear that his son should die before he can return home actually came true in the case of his second son, Berkeley, but it is important to note here that this sad fear is produced ‘thro’ excess of hope’ (9), which invokes the interchangeability of the origin of the prophetic voice, the proximity of the divine to the demonic. The sense of disconnection from an elevating ‘heavenly visitation’ (4) and the merely overshadowing presence of an inscrutable God in the first sonnet, and the sad premonition of death in the second, are transformed in the final sonnet into a positive, clear vision of the future which dispels the obscurity of the first two. In ‘To a Friend, Who Asked How I Felt, When the Nurse First Presented My Infant to Me’, Coleridge describes to Lamb the passing of obscurity when he finally sees the shape of his son before him:

Charles! my slow heart was only sad, when first
I scann’d that face of feeble infancy:
For dimly on my thoughtful spirit burst
All I had been, and all my babe might be!
But when I saw it on its Mother’s arm,
And hanging at her bosom…
Then I was thrill’d and melted…
… and all beguil’d
Of dark remembrance, and presageful fear
I seem’d to see an Angel’s form appear -
‘Twas even thine, beloved Woman mild! (1-6, 8, 9-12).

In this fascinating movement, the clear vision of the beautiful bosom of the feminine angel, his wife, clears Coleridge of his ‘dark’ fears and even emancipates him from the dreadful presence of his overshadowing God. As Mehtonen has discussed in relation to the older Christian tradition of poetic obscurity, ‘[t]he imagery of both dialectical progress and spiritual striving evinces the hope of enlightenment – reminiscent of the confidence of disambiguation in the context of rhetoric and the faith in the temporary nature of obscurity’.²³ In Coleridge’s positive prophecy, prophetic discourse is secularised as what seems to be an angel is instead a woman who provides him with a clear vision of hope and ultimate enlightenment.