Poems of Obscurity
While several of Coleridge’s poems in the mid-1790s participate in a pattern of figuration consistent with the rhetoric of clarity, the majority represent a poetics of positive obscurity involved primarily in the figuration of a reserve of obscurity, or an obscure refuge of security. Many critics have accepted Marilyn Butler’s assessment of this poetics of obscurity as a turn from ‘Enlightenment universalism to a concern with the private and domestic’, arguing that poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge came to believe that ‘[p]oetry in a popular style might be dangerous if it became an ideological weapon in the popular cause’.24 The decline of radical optimism is reflected in a rise of reclusive defeatist loyalism, and hence the ‘shift from a public to a private focus is in response to political events and has an acknowledged political significance - loyalism - a fact which is well demonstrated in Coleridge’s most ideologically explicit “private” poem of this sequence [‘Fears in Solitude’]’.25 Obscurity in this Romantic narrative becomes the language of psylosophical internalisation, in which the danger of poetic power and passion is contained programmatically not only within the mind, but within an explicitly depoliticised aesthetics of poetic internalisation. To internalise obscurity is to restrict the dangers of reception: thus Butler argues that ‘[t]he notion of a poetry (or prose, or grammar) for the people was profoundly in conflict with that other theme emerging in ex-radical literary London, that Literature would be guaranteed immunity from prosecution because, by definition, it did not threaten the state’.26 To focus on an internalised discourse of the sublime is to perpetuate the Romantic reflexivity of retreat, and ultimately to prefigure the Romantic ‘dogma of the mysterious, subconscious origin of art’ which Butler argues later emerged as a consequence of Romantic retreat in the 1830s.27
Such accounts of the reserve of an inspired Romantic poetics of obscurity ultimately result in a discourse of poetic passivity and exclusive reflexivity, so that ‘[t]he artist, seen now as also the first recipient or audience of these forces, comes to seem a curiously passive figure, mediating energies from seemingly hidden depths’.28 But Butler’s use of quotation marks around ‘private’ calls attention to the fact that there was nothing private about the public figuration of the obscure retreat, or the retreat into obscurity. In a discussion of ‘Frost at Midnight’, Magnuson argues convincingly that ‘[s]ince it was placed, in 1798, in the public discourse, it cannot represent rural retirement as an evasion of political issues’.29 It is precisely as a public representation of rural retirement that this element of Coleridge’s poetics of obscurity participates in political issues. Hence Coleridge’s occasional Greek signature to his poems has not in fact ‘obscured his personal authorship’ and did not in fact succeed in ‘restricting his audience’, but the metarhetorical performance of this restriction was calculated to avoid ‘the government’s fear of disseminating seditious thought’.30 Just as the warnings and restrictions invoked in the Coleridge’s early prose work and in the texts of the project of The Friend could not be relied on to guarantee an exclusive readership – anyone could still pick them up and read them – they function as a metarhetorical act, a statement of intention which reflexively constructs the anxious character of the author and announces his loyalist anxieties about the dangerous reception of his information. The poetics of obscurity, in other words, is not a retreat, but the performance of a retreat.**** Acknowledging this allows us to see that the positive obscurity developed by Coleridge also functions as a refuge for radical speculation. Obscurity is a figure of genius, but it is also a figure of doubt, and (as I mentioned in my third chapter) a device employed by the radical defendant who exploits the ambiguity of his publication before the reactionary judge. To borrow a phrase from Norman Fruman, ‘[i]n reading Coleridge’s poetry it is tempting and surely often correct to suspect that mysterious details, or passages which elude plausible interpretation, or inexplicable gaps, derive from the wish to conceal something, or from unconscious pressure to express something forbidden’.31 The following readings of various poems central to Coleridge’s development of a poetics of obscurity in the 1790s are informed by this understanding of a problematic ambiguity in the simultaneous development of the reactionary reserve and the radical positivity of obscurity.
Many of Coleridge’s early poetic figurations of hope involve a dubious obscurity which expresses an ambiguous optimism for political reform qualified by a fear that the light of revolution can be inverted into a destructive darkness. This ambiguity is a consequence of the fact that Coleridge’s first foray into public activity came in a period of war and Terror rather than in the period of relatively unrestrained radical optimism in which Wordsworth’s early political experiences were formed. The optimism associated with unqualified clarity could not withstand the developments of history, and Coleridge’s sympathetic poetic appropriation of the rhetoric of clarity is simultaneously inverted by the function of obscurity in his poetry. Indeed his first significant poetic publication (written in collaboration with Robert Southey in 1794), ‘The Fall of Robespierre’, includes in its dedication a typically Coleridgean metarhetorical warning about the relation between the excesses of (foreign) rhetoric and revolution:
[i]n the execution of the work, as intricacy of plot could not have been attempted without a gross violation of recent facts, it has been my sole aim to imitate the empassioned and highly figurative language of the French Orators, and to develope the characters of the chief actors on a vast stage of horrors.32
A Burkean rhetoric of obscurity would certainly perpetuate the forces which radicals blamed in part for this eruption of violence, as indeed would a poetics of obscurity which invoked and evoked unrestrained passion in a riot of figures. But in Coleridge’s early poetry the obscure is figured as something softer than an overwhelming darkness, a figuration of doubt, caution, and uncertainty, in which the dusk’s interchangeability with the dawn makes dimness a potential sign of either the divine or the demonic.
In ‘Domestic Peace’, a poem which was originally printed as part of ‘The Fall of Robespierre’, Coleridge already represents the location of safety in the terra cognita of a rural refuge which is already known; the figuration of retreat is a return, a temporal inversion of the prophetic hopes for the unknown lands to be found and created in the future on the basis of progressivist optimism or a radical historical and political determinism. Thus ‘DOMESTIC PEACE’, the poet announces in 1794, is to be found far from both ‘the pomp of scepter’d State’ and ‘the Rebel’s noisy hate’, dwelling in ‘a cottag’d vale’, where Love and Sorrow, ‘conscious of the past employ / MEMORY, bosom-spring of joy’ (2, 5, 6, 7, 13-14). Secure from the interchangeable dangers of the rebel and the state, as Coleridge figures it in the ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’, the cottage provides a refuge for indulgence in an otherwise dangerous obscurity:
Sublime of Hope I seek the cottag’d dell
Where VIRTUE calm with careless step may stray;
And, dancing to the moon-light roundelay,
The wizard PASSIONS weave an holy spell! (122-125).
The ‘wizard PASSIONS’, dangerous in association with public rhetoric like Burke’s, thus find a place for peacefully playing out their otherwise dangerous obscurity in an obscure haunt outside of time and, therefore, of consequences.
But in a further development of the confused temporality of the figure of retreat, this return to the past, or to the timeless, is overpowered in other figurations of a refuge as something lost in the past. In his 1794 sonnet ‘On Hope’, written with Charles Lamb, the poet’s prophecy takes place amongst the ‘lunar beam’ of ‘parting day’, when he thinks ‘in sickly mood’
Of Joys, that glimmer’d in Hope’s twilight ray,
Then left me darkling in a vale of tears.
O pleasant days of Hope – for ever flown!
Could I recall you! – But that thought is vain (4, 5, 7-10).
The ‘twilight’ of a potential dawn turned out to be the dusk of disappointment, the end of joy – and the poet’s inability to recall them signals not only his despair to achieve a distinct memory of joy, but also to bring back early visionary hopes of radical reform. This inability is linked, significantly, to a failure to achieve focused and constrained influence over the reception of his work by the people. The ‘thought is vain’ precisely because
Availeth not Persuasion’s sweetest tone
To lure the fleet-wing’d Travellers back again:
Yet fair, tho’ faint, their images shall gleam
Like the bright Rainbow on an evening stream (11-14).
In the troubled figurations of retreat in these early poems, past hopes for a bright future ultimately signify the failure of persuasion, and remain merely figured as harmless and ineffective, obscure reflections in a dim and timeless refuge.
The optimistic affirmation of poetic progression in human history typical of the rhetoric of clarity is challenged by Coleridge’s problematic figuration of refuge in his 1794 poem ‘To a Young Lady, with a Poem on the French Revolution’. In his youth, the poet dwells in ‘cloisters pale’ (3) and in ‘pensive twilight gloom’ (9), safely viewing guilt from an almost unfallen perspective, in which experience has yet to qualify the opposition of light and dark. The ensuing imaginative representation of the French Revolution, here construed as the poet’s fall, is figured by the appearance a dangerous light: ‘Fierce on her front the blasting Dog-star glow’d; / Her Banners, like a midnight Meteor, flow’d’ (19-20). In the imagery of 1790s radicalism, this representation of an ‘EXULTATION’ that ‘wak’d the patriot fire’ (23) would usually lead to the poet’s embrace of the new possibilities, and a reversal of the value traditionally placed on the fall: the poet’s flight from the dark cloisters of religion would represent instead a form of redemption. In Coleridge’s poem, however, the disillusioned poet retreats to his bower. Invoking the myrtle that he was later to figuratively tear from his brows in the sonnet to Thelwall, he writes: ‘With wearied thought once more I seek the shade, / Where peaceful Virtue weaves the MYRTLE braid’ (29-30). The safety of poetic activity lies not in the hopeless activity of the patriot, but in the reflection of a poetic retreat secure from the dangers traditionally associated in rhetoric with poetry. This return to the garden/cloisters involves the poet’s return from the imaginative sublimity of the ‘midnight Meteor’ to the more pleasant poetic activity of describing ‘The blameless features of a lovely mind’ (38). The Edenic imagery is most strongly invoked in the closing lines of the poem, when the poet offers flowers (here read as a symbol of his poetic activity) to Sara: ‘Nor, SARA! thou these early flowers refuse - / Ne’er lurk’d the snake beneath their simple hues’ (41-42). The dangerous light of the revolutionary spirit is here figured as a sexual threat which has no place in the safety of the post-Edenic ‘shade’ to which the poet has returned.
Though they arose out of an ambiguous commitment to a patriotic poetics of clarity, it was in the expression of his practical doubts concerning political persuasion that Coleridge began to develop his poetics of positive obscurity. Given the diversity and interrelation of his political with his philosophical and religious speculations, Coleridge sought a form of poetry in which he could simultaneously express and develop doubts and dangerous speculations. Between the light of Reason and God, and the darkness of Unreason and Evil, he found in the spaces of half-light and mist a refuge for his potentially subversive insights. In developing this obscure terra incognita, Coleridge participated in what Mehtonen has identified as ‘a heritage of poetic obscurity of a different stamp. This is the tradition in which poets were permitted liberties for which any speaker in prose would be condemned’.33
A complex example of the positive potential of obscurity for potentially subversive speculation is evident throughout the figurations of ‘Religious Musings’. In this poem, Coleridge’s philosophical break from materialist Enlightenment ideals is represented by a complex inversion and transvaluation of the figures of the rhetoric of clarity. Obscurity, already associated by the rhetoric of clarity with the abdication of authorial responsibility and the disruption of critical expectation, with oppressive tyranny and manipulation, with the nature of mystical religious speculation, with the complexity of communication, and with evasive readerly resistance, here becomes associated with a positive space for heretical speculation and ideological positioning. Indeed, this resistance to materialism invokes an association between false religion, misleading science, and the politicised French rhetorical excess represented in ‘The Fall of Robespierre’. As Ronald Paulson points out, himself invoking a rather Romantic concept of the poetic, ‘of their very nature poetic language and images are complex, indefinite, and alogical, in contrast to the scientific language of the modern historian, which tries to be simple, definite, and logical and thereby becomes as “poetic” as the language of the contemporary historians of the Revolution’.34 Paulson’s is not merely an unproblematic perpetuation of a Romantic ideology, for as Mehtonen indicates, the concept of a poetics of obscurity as a subversive or inversive counterforce to legitimate rational speculation did indeed have a long history, as one can see in Thomas Nash’s pronouncement that ‘Poetrie [is] of a more hidden & divine kinde of Philosophy, enwrapped in blinde Fables and darke stories, wherein the principles of more excellent Arts and morall precepts of manners […] are contained’.35 In the tradition of a positive poetics of obscurity, ‘obscurity is the point of departure, not an obstacle to interpretation’.36
When Coleridge begins ‘Religious Musings’ in the 1796 Poems on Various Subjects with the line ‘This is the time, when, most divine to hear’ (1), he is referring not only to the religious significance of Christmas eve, but also to the poem’s figured composition in the evening and an early certainty in the divine origin of his twilight reflections. This twilight space invokes a discourse of doubt and speculation which reflexively signals guarded reflection upon subjects incomprehensible and potentially pantheistic. This makes sense of his initial inclusion of an adapted passage from lines 1.49-59 of Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination:
Yet serious Truth her empire o’er my song
Hath now asserted: Falsehood’s evil brood
Vice and deceitful Pleasure, she at once
Excluded, and my Fancy’s careless toil
Drew to the better cause!
In the context of the evening’s obscurity, the limitations of the imagination are already acknowledged, and by virtue of this qualification a questionable speculation on God is rendered secure. Here, the light of God, ‘the GREAT INVISIBLE (by symbols only seen) / With a peculiar and surpassing light / Shines from the visage of th’ oppress’d good Man’ (9-12). The peculiarity and the transcendence of the questionable aura emanating from Christ are thus represented as signs of our human imperfection, and the carefully articulated stage for Coleridge’s idealist speculations is set.
The assertion about symbols requires development in the Berkeleyan climax which Coleridge introduces only after further qualifications. The light of God is represented as corrupted by ‘floating mists of dark Idolatry’ (32) which generate from their corrupted contemplation a primitive polytheism. Thus consigned to a heretical darkness, the light is only sensed in ‘Dim recollections’ (36) of a prior unity not only of a single God, but of a pantheistic ‘God all in all! / We and our Father ONE!’ (44-45). Coleridge then proposes the existence of an ‘elect’ who can ascend in contemplation to this unity, ‘Treading beneath their feet all visible things’ (51). The ‘dark Passions’ of quotidian humanity are transmuted and ‘by supernal grace / Enrob’d with Light, and naturaliz’d in Heaven’ (89, 92-93). This mystical naturalization conflates the space of heaven and the space of earth, and from the vantage of this union the elect, who feed on ‘Truth of subliming import’ (107), can ‘[Stand] in the sun, and with no partial gaze / [View] all creation’ (111-112). Marshall Suther has observed of this aspect of ‘Religious Musings’ that ‘[i]n fact, what [Coleridge] is asking for here corresponds to a state beyond that of the mystical union with God, that obscure knowledge through experienced contact which the mystics tell of and which is, after all, experienced in the bodily state, and in this life’.37 In this climactic passage of the poem, the mystical elect have managed not only to be elevated above the limitations of earthbound perception, and to view the earth from a heavenly perspective, but also, and more radically, they have managed to participate in the creation of the world, for it is light, as the activity of a Godlike gaze, which confers form upon the darkness of chaos. Paul Hamilton has discussed a Romantic echo of this ‘Godlike seeing’ in Keats’s ‘To Haydon’, where ‘Apollo subliminally figures the poet’s assumption… that were he to succeed he would communicate a kind of “godlike” seeing whose success was guaranteed because, like an observing sun, it produces the light it needs to see by’.38 As Mary Anne Perkins has shown, ‘the symbol of Light as representative of the Logos was a constant theme in Coleridge’s writings…. The Logos is the enlightenment of reason, and the light of life (power, agency, and energy); Light is the source and the instrument of the creation’.39 Participation in the divine Logos, a concept that finds its origins in ancient philosophy and its radical eighteenth-century manifestation in the Protestant ‘Inner Light’, is necessary for the light of natural world to be properly interpreted:
[W]hatever actually is, even for ourselves, is thus wholly & solely by the presence of the Deity to the mind & that sense itself as if it were an opake reason is possible only, by a communion with that life which is the light of man, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, & without which the solar light would be a contradiction in thought, a powerless power, a light that is darkness.40
Significantly, the radical element of Coleridge’s figuration of mystical poetic elevation in ‘Religious Musings’ here involves not merely a poetic participation in or penetration by the divine light, but rather a radical assumption in which the poet becomes an incarnation of the divine. At this early, optimistic point in Coleridge’s poetry, the poetic is the ultimate elevating power: ‘[w]hether pantheistic or not, [such passages] clearly [indicate] that the poetic experience and the mystical experience are in the same line’.41
This stage of ‘Religious Musings’ involves one of Coleridge’s most committed poetic rejections of positivist, scientific Enlightenment ideals. The ‘light’ of this Berkeleyan ‘enlightenment’ constitutes a subversive inversion or transvaluation of the empirical assumptions upon which the rhetoric of clarity was based. The poet’s vision is not of the world, but of the truth that lies hidden behind it. Coleridge goes on to admonish presumptuous materialist speculators: ‘I will raise up a mourning, O ye Fiends! / And curse your spells, that film the eye of Faith, / Hiding the present God’ (142-144). To represent God or indeed the Logos as immediately perceivable is to confuse the darkness for the light, and the light for the darkness. There must be a developmental delay intervening between human and divine vision. In Coleridge’s confused conflation of the poetics of clarity and obscurity, that is, the language of nature is not ultimately distinct from the language of God, and, paradoxically, as James McKusick has put it, ‘Coleridge thus predisposes himself to accept a philosophical doctrine that relies almost exclusively on the data of sense-perception as a means to religious truth’.42 This reveals the meaning of the earlier reference to the fact that, in our pre-elect state, God is ‘only’ seen through symbols: after the transmutation of the passions and the Berkeleyan ascension to the sun, God is revealed as immanent in nature, as these symbols, and all of nature becomes a divine language, and, pantheistically, the divine itself.
Given the diversity of his commitments to notions of sublimity, light, and obscurity in this poem, its dense conclusion represents a somewhat paradoxical interpenetration of Coleridge’s diverse and unreconciled religious, philosophical, and poetic influences. In the closing lines of the poem, we are presented with an explicitly Berkelyan climax:
Believe thou, O my Soul,
Life is a vision shadowy of Truth;
And vice, and anguish, and the wormy grave,
Shapes of a dream! The veiling clouds retire,
And lo! the Throne of the redeeming God
Forth flashing unimaginable day
Wraps in one blaze earth, heaven, and deepest hell (396-401).
The note which Coleridge attached to this stanza claims that it ‘is intelligible to those, who, like the Author, believe and feel the sublime system of Berkley [sic]; and the doctrine of the final Happiness of all men’.43 In order to make sense of this gloss, ‘Life’ must be taken to represent only the fallen life of those who have yet to believe in (and understand) the system of Berkeley, which, radically and crucially, allows for a living elect. Human perfection can take place in the world, in time. The invocation of a ‘vision of shadowy Truth’ represents our contemplation of the language of nature prior to Berkeleyan revelation, and therefore on the basis of an earthbound obscurity. When the ‘clouds’ which generate this obscurity ‘retire’ (the implication being, apparently, that they are removed not by virtue of our own efforts, but by virtue of some other influence), the nature of God’s immanence and our participation in an idealist universe is revealed to us.
But, rather paradoxically in this context, there is a remnant of a Burkean sense of limitation, for the ‘day’ which flashes forth is ‘unimaginable’ - certainly to the non-elect, but there is a latent implication that this applies to the elect as well. This limitation on the act of imagining the sublime object may also refer to the poet, who in spite of his eve-inspired vision is still confined by a ‘young and noviciate thought’ (412). Bound by as yet untransmuted passions, the poet will use his only means of communication with and of the divine, a poetry grounded in the obscurity of the passions, ‘In ministries of heart-stirring song’ (413), mimicking with his fallen imagination ‘the great Sun’ (418) – or the great Son. The obscurity of the evening with which the poem began is replicated at the end with the qualified dawn projected by an imagination limited in its communion with the Deity. That is, the poet’s poetic, evening dream of a dawn figures the possibility of the corruption of its vision of an impossible perfection, and the origins of the poetic are figured as indeterminately divine or demonic. As a result, the whole poem brings itself into question, and the theologically subversive and anti-Enlightenment idealist visions in which it indulges are safely bound within the limitations of a safely obscuring poetic light which sustains, however problematically, a vestigial pattern of references in accordance with the rhetoric of clarity. In ‘Religious Musings’, the interchangeability of dusk and dawn is exploited as a figurative refuge for obscure reflections.
In ‘The Eolian Harp’, originally composed after ‘Religious Musings’ in August to October 1795, Coleridge’s representation of the possibility of pantheism is presented in terms of a qualified vision which is ultimately overridden, paradoxically, by the clear light in which the incomprehensibility of God is ultimately asserted. At the beginning of the poem, Sara, the recurrent wifely and motherly figure of censure and common sense in Coleridge’s early poetics, is sleeping, and her consequent intellectual absence provides the basis for the poet’s dreamy speculations. The poet is left to ‘watch the clouds, that late were rich with light, / Slow saddening round’ (6-7). It is in his reflections on this cloudy half-light that the harp is first mentioned, evoking by virtue of the evening’s air ‘a soft floating witchery of sound / As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve / Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land’ (20-22). In the freedom of this magical and not properly Christian religious space, interpenetrated as it is by figures of superstition, Coleridge invokes his famous notion of the ‘one Life’: ‘O the one life within us and abroad, / Which meets all motion and becomes its soul, / A light in sound, a sound-like power in light’ (26-28). Light, here, is properly the twilight that provides the setting for visions not of God, but of other spirits, and their ‘Melodies’ (23) are hardly those of materialist scientism. But this twilight is imaginatively juxtaposed with a half-lit space within a half-lit space, as it were, when the poet compares this evening experience to one in midday:
And thus, my Love! as on the midway slope
Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon,
Whilst through my half-closed eye-lids I behold
The sunbeams dance (34-37).
In the full light of noon, the obscurity of the poet’s vision becomes suggestively self-induced, a product of the obscuring use he makes of his faculty of vision (‘half-closed eye-lids’), not the nature of his environment.
The ‘many idle flitting phantasies’ (40) of this obscurity are, however, related not to the twilight world of fairy spirits, but of sunlit holy spirits. Before such speculations are indulged in, however, a further qualification of the poet’s vision is introduced: his sleepiness and its consequent obscurity are the product of his ‘indolent and passive brain’ (41). Here, the poet’s vision is imperfect not merely as a result of his will, but of the inescapable limitations of his visual faculty, and his receptivity to inspiration is figured as one that is dangerously unguarded. Thus even in this space of a highly qualified obscurity - a vision-within-a-vision, a consequence of both the twilit environment and his noontime weakness - the climactic suggestion of pantheism is posed as a question:
And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic harps diversely framed,
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? (44-48)
The fact that, in spite of his careful rendering of the speculative environment in which he merely seeks to ask a question, his speculation is immediately dismissed as fanciful and heretical serves only to magnify the extent of Coleridge’s self-defensive posturing. The sleeping Sara awakes and reproves him with a ‘serious eye’:
… nor such thoughts
Dim and unhallowed dost thou not reject,
And biddest me walk humbly with my God…
For never guiltless may I speak of him,
The Incomprehensible! (50-52, 58-59)
That the poet’s speaking is ‘never guiltless’ is related to the fallen nature of language, which cannot achieve an accurate communication of the nature of God, but it should be noted that the poet does not imply that never guiltless may he think of God, and the possibility remains that God’s incomprehensibility is a product of public language rather than private thought. Within the poem’s narrative, even the relative safety of the poet’s obscurity does not save him from the need to retract his question, and assert his subordination to God. But the poem itself is most certainly not a warning against serious consideration of the possibilities Coleridge is suggesting. Rather, Coleridge’s presentation of obscurity as a space constituted by the reader’s faculties allows for him a faultless freedom, for in the act of reading one is merely investigating the limits of one’s own intellectual faculties, and is always left not with the option, but with the safe necessity, of an admission of one’s own limitations. Finally, it should be noted that Sara’s ‘reproof’ itself figures as a guarantee of the poet’s guarded speculation: as a reader or recipient of poetry, she is a figure of containment, not questioning Coleridge’s poetics but, rather, judging them with the ‘serious’ and penetrating, public, institutionalised eye, like a guard in a Panopticon.
In 1798 Coleridge published together three poems which figure a threatened refuge: Fears in Solitude, written in 1798, during the alarm of an invasion. To which are added, France, an Ode, and Frost at Midnight. Like so many other poems in this period, they are framed by the figures of obscurity which serve various functions related to the articulation of a poetic refugefor, not from radical political and philosophical speculation. Fears in Solitude, a directly political poem which criticises both a war-mongering England and those radical societies which would destroy its sustaining traditions, begins significantly with a critique of the obscure reflections of ‘Religious Musings’. In the face of the realities of war, such youthful indolences lead to optimistic indulgences: the young man who ‘found / Religious meanings in the forms of nature’ had, in fact, ‘his senses gradually wrapt / In a half sleep’ (23-24, 25-26), and his ‘dreams of better worlds’ (26) pale in comparison to the realities of war which the poet proceeds to present in a torrent of radical fact. And just as the poem begins with the image of a ‘dell, / Bath’d by the mist’ (7-8), it ends when ‘The light has left the summit of the hill’ and the poet glimpses ‘the shadowy Main, / Dim tinted’ (206, 216-17). Here, the positive and negative elements of both clarity and obscurity are figured in a fine Romantic balance of hope and despair.
The narrative of an ambiguous revolutionary obscurity which darkened into night is passionately invoked in ‘France, an Ode’, originally called ‘THE RECANTATION’ and published in the Morning Post on 16 April 1798. In this poem, Coleridge continues his poetic self-figuration by locating his early dreams in what appears, in hindsight, to be a suspicious obscurity, but which appeared at the time to be an auspicious one. The poem begins with an appeal to the common figures of shapelessness and indeterminacy, ‘Ye clouds! that far above me float or pause, / Veering your pathless march without controul!’ (1-2). The formlessness of ‘each rude shape’ (14) inspires the poet who pursues ‘fancies holy’ through ‘glooms’ on a ‘moonlight path’ (11, 10, 12). Despite the attempt to represent such spaces as ‘holy’, they partake more of the ambiguities and dangers of superstition and fairy bowers than a pure and divine light, and like false guides they lead the poet into false dreams of the ‘spirit of divinest Liberty’ (21). Emerging from this hopeful space the poet misfigures the sun as ‘rising’ though the storms ‘hid his light’ (48), ‘and all seemed calm and bright’ – but behind it all is the menacing figure of ‘FRANCE’ who has concealed ‘her front deep-scarr’d and gory’ (48, 50, 51, 52). In the final stanza of the poem Coleridge articulates a figurative recantation which signals the abandonment of his early radical rhetoric of clarity, as he adopts the figures of a Burkean rhetoric of obscurity. Thus ‘The sensual and the dark rebel in vain’, and Liberty flees from ‘priestcraft’s harpy minions’, residing only on the spiritual horizon of ‘earth, sea, and air’ (85, 95, 103). Earlier, the poet asks ‘Freedom’ to forgive his youthful optimistic dreams (64), and yet the poet figuratively insists on dreaming to the end, hoping that the coy and deceptive, fleeing Liberty still exists out there, somewhere, attainable in theory if not in practice
It is fitting that a series of poems which figures the emergence of the poet from a false dawn should conclude with a poem set in the freezing night. In the poem, the poet figures his own thinking in association with the ‘secret ministry’ of the cold frost, and with the ‘Abstruser musings’ of his solitude (1, 6). The only secure speculative refuge for the poet is one for which ‘all seasons shall be sweet’ (65), which can sustain itself in light and darkness, ‘Whether the summer clothe the general earth’ (55) or, as the poem ends, whether ‘the eve-drops fall’ (70)
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon (72-4).
A sufficiently developed politics, and a sufficiently developed poetics, must, on this reading of these three poems, take into account the possibility that secret ministries and the darkness of tyranny are as much a part of an oscillating history as other ‘seasons’ (65), like the summer dawn of revolutionary hope. While in one sense the poems of Fears in Solitude figure an inversive political enlightenment from Coleridge’s early dreams and a questionable hope, they involve him in a deeper association with the figures and politics of the rhetoric of obscurity. Poems that inversively figure as the twilight of the dusk what he earlier took to be the twilight of dawn, in the end, demonstrate a darker commitment to Romantic obscurity. And as the poet’s affinity with the secret ministry of frost suggests, to be an unacknowledged legislator is to be something like a secret influence.44