Momento Abrupto

Saddening

Saddening, worse, to read in "Frost at Midnight"

Coleridge´s ecstatic hymn to his newborn, Hartley,

for whom he imagines "...all seasons shall be sweet,"

and to find in the biographies how depressingly

their relationship deteriorated when the boy was grown:

the father struggling between his dependence on opiates

and the exertions of his recalcitrant genius, the son trying

to separate from the mostly absent but still intimidating father.

´

Their final contact has Hartley, a neophyte poem himself -

he'll never attain stature - abandoning his father in the street,

Coleridge in tears, not knowing, as though he were a character

in one of the more than minor tragedies he might have written

if his life had evolvef more fortuitously, how to begin

to reconcile his unspoken suffering with his son's,

how to conceive of healing the hurt both had to have felt

before each reeled back to his respective isolation.

´

The myth was already in effect then- Wordsworth's doing?-

that creativity like Coleridge's thrives best in seclusion.

Even Coleridge, though his poem takes place with his son

beside him and friends sleeping yards away, speaks of

"...that solitude that suits abstruser musings..."

So generations of writers go off to the woods to find...

alcohol - Schwartz, Lowry, too many others to mention -

depression, or even - Lowell, one hates to say it - wife-abuse.

´

Coleridge in fact was rarely out of some intimate situation

for five minutes in his life, sharing his friend's houses

and tables, and there's the scene, saddening, too, worse

of the poet imploring the captain of the ship ferrying him

home from Malta to administer an enema to unclog

the impacted feces of his laudanum-induced constipation.

Daily stuff for Coleridge - he hardly remarks it, poor man, poor giant -

excruciating for us, spoiled as we are, sanitised, tamed...

´

But what does the life - dope, shit, neurosis, fathers, or sons -

have to do with anything anyway? Think of innocent Clare,

twenty-eight years in insane asylums, and isn't there some fairness,

you might think, some justice, but letting yourself think that,

there's nowhere to go but bitterness, and how regret

that deluge of masterpiecdes to rejoice in? Coleridge, anyway,

at the end found fulfilment, and Clare to, if not fulfiment,

then something, perhaps acceptance; even Hartley, too, something.

´

I was ther onde, in that cottage, a pack of ill-lit rooms,

at the very spot, veside the hearth where the poem was made -

("... the thin blue flame...that film which fluttered on the grate...")

You could still sense something in that comfortless cell

resonating with youth and hope, which, almost in his deathbed,

Coleridge wrote "...embracing, seen as one, were love."

Outside, the glorious sea, the hills; easy to understand hoping

to say in such a world forever, and the qual to tear yourself away.

C. K. Williams