A Tombless Epitaph

‘Tis true, Idoloclastes Satyrane! (So call him, for so mingling blame with praise And smiles with anxious looks, his earliest friends, Masking his birth-name, wont to character His wild-wood fancy and impetuous zeal) ‘Tis true that, passionate for ancient truths, And honouring with religious love the Great Of older times, he hated to excess, With an unquiet and intolerant scorn, The hollow puppets of an hollow age, Ever idolatrous, and changing ever Its worthless idols! Learning, power, and time, (Too much of all) thus wasting in vain war Of fervid colloquy. Sickness, ‘tis true, Whole years of weary days, besieged him close, Even to the gates and inlets of his life! But it is true, no less, that strenuous, firm, And with a natural gladness, he maintained The citadel unconquered, and in joy Was strong to follow the delightful Muse. For not a hidden path, that to the shades Of the beloved Parnassian forest leads, Lurked undiscovered by him; not a rill There issues from the fount of Hippocrene, But he had traced it upward to its source, Through open glade, dark glen, and secret dell, Knew the gay wild flowers on its banks, and culled Its med’cinable herbs. Yea, oft alone, Piercing the long-neglected holy cave, The haunt obscure of old Philosophy, He bade with lifted torch its starry walls Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame Of odorous lamps tended by Saint and Sage. O framed for calmer times and nobler hearts! O studious Poet, eloquent for truth! Philosopher! contemning wealth and death, Yet docile, childlike, full of Life and Love! Here, rather than on monumental stone, This record of thy worth thy Friend inscribes, Thoughtful, with quiet tears upon his cheek.

? 1809.

EPITAPH

Stop, Christian passer-by!--Stop, child of God, And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod A poet lies, or that which once seem’d he.-- O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.; That he who many a year with toil of breath Found death in life, may here find life in death! Mercy for praise--to be forgiven for fame He ask’d, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same!

9th November 1833.

NOTES

I am indebted to Mr. Heinemann, the owner of the copyright of Dykes Campbell’s edition of Coleridge’s Poetical Works (Macmillan & Co., 1893) for permission to use that text (one of the most carefully edited texts of any English poet) in this volume of selections. My aim, in making these selections, has been to give every poem of Coleridge’s that seems to me really good, and nothing else. Not every poem, none perhaps of those in blank verse, is equal throughout; but I think readers of Coleridge will be surprised to find how few of the poems contained in this volume are not of almost flawless workmanship, as well of incomparable poetic genius. Scarcely any English poet gains so much as Coleridge by not being read in a complete edition. The gulf between his best and his worst work is as wide as the gulf between good and evil. Even Wordsworth, even Byron, is not so intolerable to read in a complete edition. But Coleridge, much more easily than Byron or Wordsworth, can be extricated from his own lumber-heaps; it is rare in his work to find a poem which is really good in parts and not really good as a whole. I have taken every poem on its own merits as poetry, its own technical merits as verse; and thus have included equally the frigid eighteenth-century conceits of “The Kiss” and the modern burlesque license of the comic fragments. But I have excluded everything which has an interest merely personal, or indeed any other interest than that of poetry; and I have thus omitted the famous “Ode on the Departing Year,” in spite of the esteem in which Coleridge held it, and in spite of its one exquisite line--

“God’s image, sister of the Seraphim”--

and I have omitted it because as a whole it is untempered rhetoric, shapeless in form; and I have also omitted confession pieces such as that early one which contains, among its otherwise too emphatic utterances, the most delicate and precise picture which Coleridge ever drew of himself:

“To me hath Heaven with bounteous hand assigned Energic Reason and a shaping mind, The daring ken of Truth, the Patriot’s part, And Pity’s sigh, that breathes the gentle heart-- Sloth-jaundiced all! and from my graspless hand Drop Friendship’s precious pearls, like hour-glass sand. I weep, yet stoop not! the faint anguish flows, A dreamy pang in Morning’s feverish doze.”

Every poem that I have given I have given in full, and, without exception, in the form in which Coleridge left it. The dates given after the poems are Dykes Campbell’s; occasionally I have corrected the date given in the text of his edition by his own correction in the notes.

p. I. The Ancient Mariner. The marginal analysis which Coleridge added in reprinting the poem (from the Lyrical Ballads) in Sibylline Leaves, has been transferred to this place, where it can be read without interrupting the narrative in verse.