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But on 5 November, just as he was preparing to board a carriage for Messina, Coleridge was dramatically drawn back into his new role as public servant and all further wanderings were cut short. A diplomatic incident took place in Syracuse harbour, and Leckie deputed Coleridge, as Sir Alexander’s personal emissary, to deal with it. As unexpected as it might seem, Coleridge became part of the British naval war machine.
Four days previously a French privateer had sailed into Syracuse with two captured British merchantmen, claiming the rights of a neutral port to unload its prizes. A British navy cutter, L’Hirondelle, was immediately dispatched from Valletta to dispute the claim, and anchored alongside the privateer with broadside cannons run out, “tompions” uncovered and trained on the French ship. Both captains appealed to the Sicilian Governor, while threatening to blow each other out of the water. Officially the matter turned on the validity of the privateer’s papers, and whether it had the right to take prizes on the high seas under the normal articles of war between the two sovereign states, or whether it was simply a pirate flying the French flag for its own convenience. Unofficially, as so often in these incidents, everything depended on what political pressure could be brought to bear.
Leckie seems to have realized early on that the privateer’s papers were in fact valid, so he took Coleridge with him to make the best of a bad job. The priority was to defuse an ugly situation at the harbour front, where the British Captain Skinner soon found himself surrounded by a hostile crowd. When Leckie and Coleridge arrived at seven in the evening, bloodshed seemed imminent. “On stepping out of the carriage I found by the Torches that about 300 Soldiers were drawn up on the shore opposite the English Cutter, and that the walls etc. were manned: Mr Skinner and two of his Officers were on the rampart, and the Governor and a crowd of Syracusan nobles with him at the distance of two or three yards from Mr Skinner.”
The Governor “talked, or rather screamed, indeed incessantly”.
Coleridge was surprised to discover that he himself remained calm. “I never witnessed a more pitiable scene of confusion, & weakness, and manifest determination to let the French escape.” The French privateer captain hurled abuse from a nearby wall, but was stoically ignored. Leckie and Coleridge insisted that nothing should be done until the privateer’s papers were translated (from Italian) and properly examined the following day. At last order was restored, the French crew were put under guard at the Lazaretto, and Captain Skinner was removed to the safety of Leckie’s house.
Over the next two days Coleridge visited the Syracuse Governor, and disputed the privateer’s papers. He also drew up a long and vividly circumstantial account of the whole incident for Sir Alexander. It was soon clear that the prize and ransom money would not be released: the Governor “will acquit the Crew of Piracy, and suffer them to escape, and probably make a complaint against Mr Skinner”.
Coleridge quickly realized that it was now Captain Skinner who was in difficulties, having failed in his mission and being liable to reprimand in Malta. He therefore heavily weighted his report in Skinner’s favour, and volunteered to return to Valletta on L’Hirondelle to deliver the report in person. He wrote firmly: “It is but justice however to notice the coolness, dignity and good sense, with which Mr Skinner acted throughout the whole Business, and which formed an interesting Contrast to the noisy Imbecility of the Governor, and the brutal Insolence of the Commander of the Privateer.”
This supportive action of Coleridge for the young captain, in such an unenviable situation, was never forgotten. It not only impressed Sir Alexander, it made him lasting friends among the whole circle of British naval officers on the Malta station for the rest of his stay. He was accepted, in their tight-knit circle, as “a friend in need”, who could be counted on. It was also noted among several American naval officers, temporarily stationed at Syracuse, among whom was the gallant Captain Stephen Decatur, famed for his recent exploit in blowing up the captured Philadelphia in Tripoli harbour (and later for his saying, “my country right or wrong”).
Decatur became one of Coleridge’s warmest admirers. Thus began a connection with Americans in the Mediterranean which had a lasting impact on his stay. Coleridge was back in Valletta on 8 November, and while in quarantine (for plague had been declared) completed his report, with nine documents annexed, for Sir Alexander. He concluded: “of course nothing further was to be done…and instead of going to Messina have returned to Malta, thinking, that I might be of some service perhaps to Captain Skinner in the explanation of the Business.”
He returned to Sir Alexander’s congratulations, and glorious autumn weather, the trees “loaded with Oranges” and his health “very greatly improved in this heavenly climate”.
He was paid four months’ back-salary of £100, and given a new set of rooms in the garrets of the Treasury building (now the Casino Maltese) with a decorated ceiling and huge windows “commanding a most magnificent view” of Valletta harbour. The ceiling depicted the Four Winds as baroque, curly-headed angels “spewing white smoke”, and whirling around a mariner’s compass in the middle.
Coleridge would spend many hours in the coming months contemplating their navigational symbolism, and then gazing out over the sea with all its possible voyages.
11
The first of these was no less than a trip to Russia and the Black Sea. One of Sir Alexander’s primary duties in the defence of Malta was to obtain corn supplies, and each spring he sent a special mission to purchase corn in Greece, Turkey and the Crimea. He now requested Coleridge to consider undertaking the 1805 mission, in company with a Captain Leake, departing in January for a round trip of three or four months. “The confidence placed in me by Sir A. Ball is unlimited…but it will be a most anxious business – as shall have the trust and management of 70, or 80 thousand pounds, while I shall not have for my toils & perils more than 3 or 4 hundred pounds, exclusive of all my expenses in travelling etc.” For the moment he was undecided.
The Russian proposal finally forced Coleridge to turn to the question he had been avoiding for many months, not least at the bedside of Cecilia Bertozzi. What was he really doing in the Mediterranean? Did he intend to make a new life out there, to abandon once and for all the difficulties of his marriage, the affections of his children, the ambiguous dreams of happiness with Asra and the Wordsworths? Could he remake his career as a civil servant and diplomat, writing poetry and political reports, following Sir Alexander’s wartime star, drawing an ever-increasing salary, and settling in some exotic country villa shrouded in orange and lemon groves, waited upon by servants and some dusky, voluptuous Italian muse? Could this be a rebirth, a second life; or an ultimate self-abandonment, with the alluring demon of opium ever at his side?
It is clear that the answer hung in the balance for many weeks in the winter of 1804–5, and was not fully resolved until the following summer. But now for the first time he faced it. In a long letter of 12 December to his wife Sara, he set out the position. His health was radically improved, his work for the government was valuable and well paid, he could guarantee her an allowance of £100 a year and a continuance of his life assurance policy in her favour, as well as the £150 Wedgwood annuity. “I remain faithful to you and to my own Honour in all things.” He was “tranquil”, though never happy – “no visitations of mind or of fancy” – and he agonized always over his children – “My children! – my children!” – sometimes in “a flood of tears”. He had only agreed to consider the Russian mission “in a fit of Despair, when Life was a burthen to me”, and he would refuse it “on the whole, if I could get off with honour”. Yet all the same, he might stay in the Mediterranean, in Malta or Sicily or Sardinia. He admitted this in a sudden burst of explanation and self-contradiction, which well expressed his divided feelings.
If I could make up my mind to stay here, or to follow Sir A.B. in case that circumstances & changes in the political world should lead him to Sardinia, no doubt, I might have about £500 a year, & live mainly at the Palace. But O God! O God! if that, Sara! which we both know too well, were not unalterably my Lot, how gladly would I prefer the mere necessaries of Life in England, & these obtained by daily Effort. But since my Health has been restored to me, I have felt more than ever how unalterable it is!
One wonders how Sara Coleridge would have understood this. Her wayward husband’s “unalterable lot” could be taken as simply a reference to his opium addiction, which had been known to her ever since 1801. Or it could be a darker admission, of Coleridge’s depression and unhappiness, his emotional incompatibility with her, and still obsessive love for Asra which made any true return and reunion impossible. Perhaps indeed the two elements were inextricably involved for him, and he was trying to get her to accept this. He concluded his letter with a formal assurance that “whatever & wherever I am” he would make it his “first anxiety and prominent Duty” to contribute to her happiness; and signed “most anxiously and affectionately, your Friend and more than Friend, S. T. Coleridge”. But it could not have been a reassuring letter to receive.
Sitting up in his garret in the Treasury, gazing out at the “beautifully white sails of the Mediterranean (so carefully when in port put up into clean bags)”, Coleridge considered the same problem in the privacy of his Notebooks. He felt the “Quietness, Security within & without in Malta”.
He valued the regularity, the naval comradeship among the officers, the smooth sequence of time and command, “the rings of Russet smoke from the evening Gun, at Valletta”.
He was working; he was content; he saw a possible future for himself.
But was he happy? In a long, calm, reflective entry he considered it. “Days & weeks & months pass on; and now a year; and the sun, the Sea, the Breeze has its influences on me, and good and sensible men. – And I feel a pleasure upon me, & I am to the outward view of all cheerful, & have myself no distinct consciousness of the contrary; for I use my faculties, not indeed as once, yet freely. – But oh [Asra]! I am never happy, – never deeply gladdened – I know not, I have forgotten what the Joy is of which the Heart is full as of a deep & quiet fountain overflowing insensibly; or the gladness of Joy, when the fountain overflows ebullient – STC.”
That absence, surely, was his unalterable lot; and for the moment he rested within it, waiting upon events. Through the long nights he read deeply, Thomas More on Utopia, Sir Thomas Browne on religion, Harrington on government. No letters reached him from England.
On 18 January 1805, the eighty-year-old Public Secretary of Malta, Mr Macauley, died in his sleep in a thunderstorm. Coleridge was immediately offered and accepted the post of Acting Public Secretary, the second in diplomatic rank to the Governor, with a salary of £600 a year. The Russian mission was put aside, and Coleridge agreed to remain with Sir Alexander in Malta for the next three months or until the arrival of the new Public Secretary, Mr Chapman, on the springtime convoys in March or April. The post was distinguished but laborious, requiring regular work in Sir Alexander’s cabinet, the drafting of a steady stream of bandi or civil decrees, and attendance in the law courts.
Coleridge was pleased, for though it curtailed the opportunities for further travel and writing, it would sort out his finances, and give him valuable experience of public affairs. It also put off the problematic question of his return from the Mediterranean. He wrote cheerfully to Southey, who had become in effect the guardian of his children at Greta Hall: “I am and some 50 times a day subscribe myself, Segretario Publico dell’Isole di Malta, Gozo, e delle loro dipendenze. I live in a perfect Palace, & have all my meals with the Governor; but my profits will be much less, than if I had employed my time & efforts in my own literary pursuits. However, I gain new Insights; & if (as I doubt not, I shall) I return, having expended nothing, having paid all my prior debts…with Health, & some additional knowledge in Things & Languages, I shall surely not have lost a year.”
But as he settled into his work, letters did begin to reach him from England, and the news that they brought was bad and began to throw his plans into disarray. First was the rumour that Mr Jackson, the landlord of Greta Hall, was considering selling the house in his absence, leaving his family and Southey’s without a home. Second was the bitter intelligence that his friend Major Adye had died of plague in Gibraltar and all his effects were burnt by quarantine officers. Thus one by one, most of Coleridge’s literary papers of the previous year had been destroyed. He had lost the entire travel journal for Beaumont, the letter to Wordsworth on “The Recluse”, an extended political essay for Stuart, and several long family letters. All back-up copies of these had also been lost from the frigates Arrow and Acheron, thrown overboard according to navy regulations during pursuit by French privateers.
Thus almost all his literary work in the first year at Malta (except for the four strategic papers) had been useless. Among them, incidentally, must have been the missing account of climbing Mount Etna. Later he felt that he was being “punished” for all his previous neglect, by “writing industriously to no purpose” for months on end. “No one not absent on a dreary Island so many leagues of sea from England can conceive the effect of these Accidents on the Spirits & inmost Soul. So help me Heaven! they have nearly broken my Heart.”
So more and more Coleridge turned now to his Notebooks. They are extraordinarily rich for the winter and spring of 1804–5, despite the daily pressures of his duties as Public Secretary. While there are only six letters home between January and August 1805, there are over 300 Notebook entries for a similar period, amounting to several hundred manuscript pages, mainly in four leather or metalclasp pocket-books, much worn from carrying.
Coleridge recorded his external life, visits to hospitals, workhouses, the theatre, and his regular talks with Sir Alexander about government, diplomacy and warfare. Even more vividly he recorded his inner life: dreams, psychological analysis, theories of perception, religious beliefs, superb visions of the Mediterranean landscape and skyscape, and long disquisitions on opium-taking and sexual fantasies.
Coleridge turned to these Notebooks in Malta, as consciously as he had done during the dark winters of the Lake District, as witnesses to his trials for the after times. “If I should perish without having the power of destroying these & my other pocket books, the history of my own mind for my own improvements: O friend! Truth! Truth! but yet Charity! Charity! I have never loved evil for its own sake; no! nor ever sought pleasure for its own sake, but only as the means of escaping from pains that coiled round my mental powers, as a serpent around the body & wings of an Eagle.”
12
Coleridge was in a lively mood throughout the Christmas of 1804, planning to write “300 volumes”, allowing ten years for each. “You have ample Time, my dear fellow!…you can’t think of living less than 4,000 years, & that would nearly suffice for your present schemes.”
He analysed his talkativeness as producing a “great Blaze of colours” that dazzled bystanders by containing too many ideas in two few words. “My illustrations swallow up my thesis – I feel too intensely the omnipresence of all in each, platonically speaking.” His brain-fibres glittered with “spiritual Light” like the phosphorescence “in sundry rotten mackerel!” Once started on a subject he went on and on, “from circle to circle till I break against the shore of my Hearer’s patience, or have any Concentricals dashed to nothing by a Snore”.
Yet at Malta he had tried to restrain himself and had earned, he believed, “the general character of being a quiet well-meaning man, rather dull indeed – & who would have thought, that he had been a Poet ‘O a very wretched Poetaster, Ma’am’”.
If by day Coleridge gave the impression of a busy, punctilious bureaucrat, bustling between the Treasury, the palace and the Admiralty Court (where he argued cases in a wig and gown), dining cheerfully with the Governor and gossiping with senior clerks like Mr Underwood in the corridors, his night life was another existence altogether. It was solitary, introspective, and often intoxicated. On 27 December he started using cipher in his Notebooks, and entered bleakly: “No night without its guilt of opium and spirits.”
After his autumn débâcle with Cecilia Bertozzi, he was much preoccupied with sexual matters. He dwelt on the link between mental and physical arousal, the sexual stimulation of dreams, the different sense of “Touch” in lips and fingers, and operations of “the mem(brum) virile in acts of (Es)sex”. He brilliantly intuited a whole modern theory of “erogenous zones” existing outside the genital area, which respond to sexual excitement. “Observe that in certain excited states of feeling the knees, ankle, side & soles of the feet, become organic. Query – the nipple in a woman’s breast, does that ever become the seat of a particular feeling, as one would guess by its dormancy & sudden awakings.”
Most strikingly, he linked sexual confidence and fulfilment with more general feelings of well-being and spiritual optimism in life:
“Important metaphysical Hint: the influence of bodily vigour and strong Grasp of Touch facilitating the passion of Hope: eunuchs – in all degrees even to the full ensheathment and the both at once.”
(This last entry was also in cipher, and might suggest a personal anxiety about impotence caused by opium.) Later in the spring he countered this in a beautiful entry about his own children, as proof of sexual power and as part of a living resource of social amelioration: “the immense importance of young Children to the keeping up the stock of Hope in the human species: they seem as immediately the secreting-organ of Hope in the great organized Body of the whole Human Race, in all men considered as component Atoms of Man, as young Leaves are the organs of supplying vital air to the atmosphere.”
In January 1805 these night-speculations led to a devastating piece of psychological self-analysis, examining the patterns of hope and dread which had dominated his early life. “It is a most instructive part of my Life the fact, that I have been always preyed on by some Dread, and perhaps all my faulty actions have been the consequence of some Dread or other on my mind: from fear of Pain, or Shame, not from prospect of Pleasure.”
Coleridge ran through his boyhood horrors at Christ’s Hospital, his adolescent “short-lived Fit of Fears from sex”, his wholly “imaginative and imaginary Love” for Mary Evans. Then came the “stormy time” of Pantisocracy when “America really inspired Hope”, and his increasingly unhappy marriage. “Constant dread in my mind respecting Mrs Coleridge’s Temper, etc. – and finally stimulants in the fear & prevention of violent Bowel-attacks from mental agitation.” Finally came the “almost epileptic night-horrors in my sleep: & since then every error I have committed, has been the immediate effect of these bad most shocking Dreams – anything to prevent them.”
He summed it up in an extraordinary, domestic image of food: of a child’s comfort-food, sticky and enticing, but which is also red and bleeding like a wound. “All this interwoven with its minor consequences, that fill up the interspaces – the cherry juice running in between the cherries in a cherry pie: procrastination in the dread of this – & something else in consequence of that procrastination etc.” The entry ends with a desperate thought of Asra, how he had “concentred” his soul on a woman “almost as feeble in Hope as myself”.
Self-pity and self-knowledge were finely balanced in these reflections, and the sinister percolating cherry juice gleams dark red like laudanum splashing into a wine glass and running down his throat.
But on other nights in January and February, Coleridge was also making superb, lucid entries on subjects as diverse as aesthetics, politics, theology or philosophy. Notes on Ball’s talk of Mediterranean strategy mix with discussion of the Platonic fathers, etymology, astronomy versus astrology, Roman Catholic superstitions, Captain Decatur’s naval adventures, the symbolism of wood-fires, the spring flora of Malta, or the attempt to assassinate the Bey of Tunis. Many of these topics would later appear in Coleridge’s books and lectures, so that this whole period of reading and self-immersion served a purpose not immediately evident to Coleridge and yet vital to his intellectual expansion and development.
Coleridge’s power to draw analogies and cross-references is continually astonishing. Reading Samuel Horsey’s critique of the Greek philosopher Athenagoras on the subject of childbirth (in A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of St Albans, 1783, a book he had picked up on the secondhand stalls of Queen’s Square in Valletta), Coleridge emerges with the concept of “organic form” which was to shape years of lecturing back in London. “Wherein then would Generation differ from Fabrication, or a child from a Statue or a Picture? It is surely the inducement of a Form on pre-existing material in consequence of the transmission of a Life…The difference therefore between Fabrication and Generation becomes clearly inducible: the Form of the latter is ab intra, evolved; the other ab extra, impressed.”
From this distinction, as from his earlier observations on sailing-ships, a whole theory of imaginative “generation” would come.
One of his most persistent night-themes is the huge Mediterranean moon viewed from his garret window across Valletta harbour. To Coleridge it was still the magic moon of the “Ancient Mariner”, but now he turned to it with a new intensity, as a witness to his own sufferings. One midnight it was “blue at one edge from the deep utter Blue of the Sky, a mass of pearl-white Cloud below, distant and travelling to the Horizon.” He found himself praying to it, as to a divinity. “Consciously I stretched forth my arms to embrace the Sky and in a trance I had worshipped God in the Moon: the Spirit not the Form. I felt in how innocent a feeling Sabeism might have begun: O not only the Moon, but the depth of the Sky!” He recognized in this a profoundly religious instinct that was to grow with ever-greater force in the coming years: that he was not spiritually self-sufficient, and that he had a primitive, almost pagan, need for an external power. “O yes! – Me miserable! O yes! – Have Mercy on me, O something out of me! For there is no power (and if that can be, less strength) in aught within me! Mercy! Mercy!’
On another, calmer night the same feeling emerged more philosophically. Now the moon presaged a whole theory of poetic language, which would take its authority from the same recognition of transcendent human need deep within the spirit. Now it was language itself – the divine logos – which impelled Coleridge from a pagan Pantheism to the rebirth of a fundamental Christianity. The moon at Malta provided Coleridge with a religious revelation about divine power radiating through the natural universe. It was for him, with his fundamental and never-abandoned identity as a poet, essentially an articulating power, an expressive fiat as in the opening of the Book of Genesis.
In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering thro’ the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing any thing new. Even when the latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling as if that new phenomenon were the dim Awaking of a forgotten or hidden Truth of my inner Nature. It is still interesting as a Word, a Symbol! It is LOGOS, the Creator! and the Evolver!
13
All this time Coleridge continued his daylight work as Public Secretary. In February he was inspecting the hospital, every wall covered with grotesque crucifixes, and in the ward for venereal diseases a child of twelve in the same bed as an old man of seventy.
In March he was sailing round the harbour to inspect the defences with Lieutenant Pasley. Spain had now declared war against Britain, and the French fleet had broken out of Toulon. The convoy system was in shambles, and Nelson was making a sweep to the Azores. Communications were disrupted, and there was no sign of Mr Chapman (Coleridge’s replacement) who was somewhere in the Black Sea. The plague, which had carried off Major Adye at Gibraltar, now threatened Valletta and beach landings were expected imminently in Sicily or southern Italy.
Back in England the Wordsworths were deeply worried. They had planned to leave Grasmere in 1805, and settle wherever they could persuade Coleridge to join them on his return, which they expected in the spring. But they had had no news for three months, “no tidings of poor Coleridge, for Heaven’s sake”, and feared the worst from war or pestilence.
Daniel Stuart had gazetted Coleridge’s appointment as Public Secretary in the Courier, but waited in vain for further dispatches from him.
But the disaster that struck came from a wholly unexpected quarter. At one o’clock on 31 March 1805 Coleridge was summoned from the Treasury by Sir Alexander to attend a diplomatic reception. As he entered the packed drawing-room, Lady Ball turned to him and asked if he knew Captain John Wordsworth. “Is he not a Brother of Mr Wordsworth, you so often talk of?” John Wordsworth’s ship, the Abergavenny, had been wrecked in a storm off Weymouth, with the loss of all cargo, three hundred men and the captain himself. Lady Ball faltered, as she saw Coleridge go pale. “Yes, it is his brother,” he replied, and staggered from the room. He walked back to his garret, supported by the Sergeant-at-Arms and pursued by Sir Alexander. As he got to his door, he collapsed. Later he would say that the shock was so great that he “fell down on the ground in a convulsive fit” in front of fifty people in the “great Saloon of the Palace” itself.
It was an expressive exaggeration. He was ill for a fortnight, and shaken in a way that only the Wordsworths could have understood. William wrote to Sir George Beaumont: “We have had no tidings of Coleridge. I tremble for the moment when he is to hear of my brother’s death; it will distress him to the heart, – and his poor body cannot bear sorrow. He loved my brother, and he knows how we at Grasmere loved him.”
For the Wordsworths, who had also invested heavily in John’s ship, his death was to change all their plans for the future and tighten the little Grasmere circle, “the Concern”, in ways that subtly affected their commitment to Coleridge.
For Coleridge himself it was news that haunted and terrified him, with intimations of failure, loss and physical horror. “O dear John: and so ended thy dreams of Tarns & mountain Becks, & obscure vales in the breasts and necks of Mountains. So thy dream of living with or among thy Brother and his. – O heavens! Dying in all its Shapes, shrieks; and confusion; and mad Hope; and Drowning more deliberate than Suicide; – these, these were the Dorothy, the Mary, the Sara Hutchinson, to kiss the cold drops from thy Brow, & to close thy Eyes! – Never yet has any Loss gone so far into the Life of Hope, with me. I now only fear.”
The violence of his reaction can also be explained by the role he had sometimes imagined for John, as his own alter ego in Asra’s heart, capable of bringing her one day a solid, companionable love, which he could not match. If this seems a strange, almost masochistic displacement, it was genuine and indeed typical of Coleridge. “O blessed Sara, you whom in my imagination at one time I so often connected with him, by an effort of agonizing Virtue, willing it with cold sweat-drops on my Brow!”
At some level, Coleridge felt it should have been him who had died in John’s place.
The news of John Wordsworth’s death also brought to a head the question of Coleridge’s return to England. William confidently expected that it would be immediate: “he has engagements with the Governor: if these do not prevent him I am sure he will return the first minute he can after hearing the news. I am as sure of this as if I heard him say so.”
But he could not hear the silent night-voice of Coleridge’s Notebooks, which was more than ever uncertain. “Lord Nelson is pursuing the French Fleet & the Convoy is to be deferred. I felt glad – how can I endure that it should depart without me? Yet if I go, wither am I to go? Merciful Providence! what a cloud is spread before me: a cloud is my only guide by day and by night: I have no pillar of Fire…”
It was the same “procrastination” that had greeted the news of the death of his child, little Berkeley, long ago in Germany. But now it was his whole future life that seemed at issue. Part of him longed to go back to his children, to Asra and the Wordsworths; part of him would do anything to avoid a reunion with Mrs Coleridge; and part of him simply luxuriated in the easy, expansive living of the Mediterranean, the orange trees coming into blossom (“a prodigality of beauty”), the talkative dinners with Ball and the navy officers, the guilty opium sessions at night, the drowsy sexual dreams, the endless reading and philosophizing. Above all, perhaps, his suspended exile in Malta allowed him to fantasize about Asra: “O Sara! gladly if my miserable Destiny would relax, gladly would I think of thee and me, as of two Birds of passage, reciprocally resting on each other in order to support the long flight, the awful Journey.”
Throughout April his opium-taking increased, and he struggled with boils and fever. Sometimes his thoughts turned to suicide – “Die my Soul, die! – Suicide – rather than this, the worst state of Degradation!–”
; and sometimes he even beat himself, “hands, breast or forehead, in the paroxysms of Self-reproof”.
Eventually the convoy left without him, and he resumed work as Public Secretary more busily than ever. The note of pure pleasure quickly returned, as on the afternoon he walked up to join Sir Alexander for a weekend at San Antonio in the gardens. “Having had showers (23 April) I smelt the orange blossom long before I reached St Antonio. When I entered it was overpowering: the Trees were indeed oversnowed with Blossoms, and the ground snowed with the fallen leaves: the Bees on them, & the golden ripe fruit on the inner branches glowing.”
He wrote to Stuart that his work occupied him “from 8 o’clock in the morning to 5 in the afternoon, having besides the most anxious duty of writing public Letters and Memorials”. He was bitterly disappointed at having missed the spring convoy, and all sea-voyages were now perilous; but he was planning to return overland by Naples, Trieste and Germany, to outflank the French armies now pressing down on Austria and northern Italy. “I have resolved, let the struggle cost what it may, & even at the forfeiture of Sir A. Ball’s Good will, to return home at the latter end of May.” He wrote similarly to Wordsworth: “O dear Friends! Death has come amongst us!…I mean to return in the latter end of May at all events, and have wept like a child that the convoy is off without me, but my office of Public Secretary makes it impossible.”
But in fact this resolution was not to be carried out for a further year. Perhaps the only hint of his divided feelings came in his evident attachment to Ball and the satisfaction in working for him. “Sir A. B. behaves to me with really personal fondness, and with almost fatherly attention – I am one of his Family, whenever my Health permits me to leave my own House.”
14
From now on, Coleridge’s letters home become few and erratic, and none has survived until the end of July. Mr Chapman did not return, and the increasing gravity of the strategic situation in the Mediterranean put great pressures on the Malta administration, with problems of supply, unrest among the local population (including demonstrations against the Jews, which Coleridge issued proclamations to suppress),
counterfeit passports, and preparations for a huge naval expedition under General Sir James Craig. Nelson was now hastening back from the West Indies, looking for a major confrontation with the French and Spanish fleets under Villeneuve.
Coleridge was continually riding around the island, being bitten by dogs; dealing with local disputes, transport and medical problems; and working hard and late at the Treasury on bandi and official letters. On one occasion, working in the “Saloon built for Archives & Library, & now used as the Garrison Ballroom”, and probably well-dosed with laudanum, he fell into a doze and awoke to see the ghostly figure of another secretary, Mr Dennison, sitting in a chair opposite him, although the man had retired to bed ten minutes previously.
He wrote a long note on this interesting apparition, “that of a person seen thro thin smoke, distinct indeed but yet a sort of distinct Shape & Colour – with a diminished Sense of Substantiality – like a Face in a clear Stream.” He remarked that he had often had similar experiences, the product of nerves and exhaustion, “and therefore resolved to write down the Particulars whenever any new instance should occur: as a weapon against Superstition, and an explanation of Ghosts – Banquo in Macbeth – the very same Thing.” These notes eventually reappeared in 1809 in a brilliant essay on Luther’s vision of the devil. He felt no fear, and recalled: “I once told a Lady, the reason why I did not believe in the existence of Ghosts etc. was that I had seen too many of them myself.”
Despite the tense fortress atmosphere, and the pressure of work, Coleridge spent many weekends up at San Antonio, where he was given his own room high up above the gardens, and was able to walk on the palace roof with a telescope. He copied and translated Italian madrigals and sonnets by Marino; and made extensive botanical notes, and weird medical cocktails using aconite, angostura and “German Leopard’s Bane”.
His sexual dreams continued, sometimes on an epic scale and gloriously free from guilt. One, in June, was “a long Dream of my Return, Welcome, etc. full of Joy & Love”, which was full of curious “images and imagined actions” free from desire but implying “awakened Appetite”. In this dream which clearly featured Asra in some form of tropical paradise, Coleridge found himself in a primitive state of society “like that of those great Priests of Nature who formed the Indian worship in its purity, when all things, strictly of Nature, were reverenced according to their importance, undebauched by associations of Shame and Impudence”.
It was probably now, in the summer gardens of San Antonio, that he began his unfinished poem to Asra, “The Blossoming of the Solitary Date-Tree”. It was suggested by a fact “mentioned by Linnaeus, of a date tree in a nobleman’s garden which year after year had put forth a full show of blossoms, but never produced fruit, till a branch from another date-tree had been conveyed from a distance of some hundred leagues”. It opens with the image of huge frosty mountain peaks “beneath the blaze of a tropical Sun”, an image of unreflected or unrequited love. “What no-one with us shares, scarce seems our own.” In one stanza it catches his mood of renewed hopefulness and the richness of the Mediterranean landscape offering him an “overflow” of gifts; and in the next shadows this with a sense of exile, of living in a “lonesome tent”, far away from the voice that can inspire him.
Coleridge lost the manuscript in his subsequent journeyings, but years later was able to reconstruct a rough version of the third and fourth stanzas. The first of these was a projection of his ideal poetic self, dedicated to the highest view of his life’s vocation and gratefully conscious of Nature’s gifts to him in Italy:
Imagination; honourable aims;
Free commune with the choir that cannot die;
Science and song; delight in little things,
The buoyant child surviving in the man;
Fields, forests, ancient mountains, ocean, sky,
With all their voices – O dare I accuse
My earthly lot as guilty of my spleen,
Or call my destiny niggard! O no! no!
It is her largeness, and her overflow,
Which being incomplete, disquieteth me so!
The second, by contrast, was a vision of his solitary wandering self, rootless and exiled, adrift from Asra’s love and hallucinating her voice:
For never touch of gladness stirs my heart,
But tim’rously beginning to rejoice
Like a blind Arab, that from sleep doth start
In lonesome tent, I listen for thy voice.
Belovéd! ‘tis not thine; thou art not there!
Then melts the bubble into idle air.
And wishing without hope I restlessly despair.
The poem continues with a counter-image of satisfied love, a child basking in its mother’s gaze, which has an almost Italianate, Madonna-like intensity. But it ends with Coleridge’s poignant question, to be repeated again and again in the coming years, “Why was I made for Love and Love denied to me?”
These moments of dreamy pleasure and sudden despondency seemed to alternate at San Antonio as Coleridge hovered in a kind of weightless trance in his Maltese exile, frantically busy and yet curiously passive, floating and yet marooned. There are no true rivers anywhere on the island, only wells and thin water-courses, but the image of a dried-up stream – perhaps inspired by the hesitant plashing of the Eagle Fountain (1623) in the gardens – produced one of Coleridge’s most memorable images of that summer. He is no longer a bird, but a fish. “STC – The Fish gasps on the glittering mud, the mud of this once full stream, now only moist enough to be glittering mud. The tide will flow back, time enough to lift me up with straws & withered sticks and bear me down into the ocean. O me! that being what I have been I should be what I am!”
The heat began to increase in July, and at 4 a.m. one morning there was an earthquake, which seemed to him like the premonition of some great battle. Typically, Coleridge was awake, and saw his old friend the moon above the Garrison Battery, almost at the full, but very strange with a “reddish smoke-colour” like a god of war.
With the heat came increasing noise, or at least sensitivity to it and Coleridge was regularly woken in the Treasury by trumpets of the “accursed Reveille” in the square below and the “malignant torture” of the parade drums, which attacked his head “like a party of yelling drinking North American Indians attacking a Crazy Fort with a tired Garrison”.
The Public Secretary’s temper frayed even with the ordinary Maltese, whose carts thundered down the steps of Valletta, whose children screamed (“horrid fiendliness – for fun!”), and whose boatmen howled. “But it goes through everything – their Street-Cries, their Priests, their Advocates: their very Pigs yell rather than squeak.” The dogs howled all night, and the “Cats in their amours” were like imps in hell. “He who has only heard caterwauling on English Roofs can have no idea of a cat-serenade in Malta.”
