The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels

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Many years later, on a return visit to the Quantocks, but filled with regret for the passing of time, Coleridge lay in reverie in just one such nook on the margins of wood and heath, easing himself back on to the perfect elastic mattress of the heather, but dreaming of love lost and love never to be had.

How warm this woodland wild Recess!

Love surely hath been breathing here;

And this sweet bed of heath, my dear!

Swells up, then sinks with faint caress,

As if to have you yet more near.

Eight springs have flown, since last I lay

On sea-ward Quantock’s heathy hills,

Where quiet sounds from hidden rills

Float here and there, like things astray

And high o’er head the sky-lark shrills.

This is where the wavering wind-songs of the Aeolian harp could soothe and seduce the mind. When the wind was right, a long, continuous and minimal music eased out of it. The sound belonged on empty heights like these – not the buffeting white noise of wind in the ear or in a chimney but something more hidden, tapered, as if the harp were releasing an element that was buried in it, or in the air. Deeper tones come from the heavier strings, along with witchery notes from the others, as if this were dream music or, as Coleridge says, the sound of the world singing.

Again and again, the year was filled with walks that followed this movement, the two poets up ahead, always a few dozen yards ahead, Dorothy following at their heels, always slightly behind. It is the deep psychic structure of the year, repeatedly drawing from these landforms, up from the settlements of the valley, through the combes and the oakwoods, on to the sunlit widths of the wide-ranging tops and then down again, back into the rowan and oakwood, as if into a bath of shade.

Nothing in the walk together would ever have been silent. Talk was the medium in which Coleridge swam. ‘He runs up and down the scale of language,’ Virginia Woolf wrote of him in her notebook,

stretching and suppling prose until it becomes pliable enough and plastic enough to take the most subtle creases of the human mind and heart. But while he disports himself like a great sea monster in his element of words, spouting, snorting, he uses them most often to express the crepitations of his apprehensive susceptibility.

You only have to read Coleridge’s own notebooks to feel that these hill-paths are still crackling with the crepitations of his apprehensive susceptibility. There is one place on the way down, in the little sub-hamlet of Over Stowey, or Upper Stowey as Coleridge called it, where an old well near the church had entranced him. Years later, from a time when he was abroad in Malta and in distress, he remembered gazing into its waters:

The images of the weeds which hung down from its sides, appeared as plants growing up, straight and upright, among the water weeds that really grew from the bottom/& so vivid was the Image, that for some moments & not until after I had disturbed the waters, did I perceive that their roots were not neighbours, & they side-by-side companions. So – even then I said – so are the happy man’s Thoughts and Things –

There, preserved in his memory, is a tiny fragment of Coleridge’s ebullient, ever-referential talk, perhaps to Wordsworth as they were coming down one day off the high tops.

It is his governing vision of the intimate co-existence of everything the mind shapes – the Thoughts – with everything that comes to him through his senses, the Things that seem so solidly present around us. The two are side-by-side companions. Thoughts and things are friends, and this for Coleridge is not a description of any sort of delusion but of happiness.

Intriguingly, Wordsworth had a parallel but different experience, which appears in The Prelude. He too is looking down into weedy water, not at a well but hanging over the side of a slow-moving boat, floating on stillness. The Wordsworth figure,

solacing himself

With such discoveries as his eye can make

Beneath him in the bottom of the deeps,

Sees many beauteous sights – weeds, fishes, flowers,

Grots, pebbles, roots of trees – and fancies more,

Yet often is perplexed and cannot part

The shadow from the substance, rocks and sky,

Mountains and clouds, reflected in the depth

Of the clear flood, from things which there abide

In their true dwelling;

Upper and lower surfaces are interlaced here too, but there is a difference between them. For Coleridge, this twinned condition of the seen and the imagined was an aspect of how things were, the intertwining of sense impressions and the constructions of the mind. For Wordsworth, it was part of how he was, a description of himself, an entangled muddle of what he had been and what he was now. The figure in the boat is Wordsworth’s own self hanging

Incumbent o’er the surface of past time,

his own invigilator, the priest of his own being, wrapped up in the ever-entrancing story of his own evolving self.