Coleridge’s problems did not only come from his laudanum addiction. Look at one of the poems we most obviously identify with the ill-understood effects of withdrawal, and see if you cannot see here in the beginning the reason Coleridge woke from sleep with terrors–or, rather, as those pangs were probably drug-related, why his reaction was a poem which ended with the plaintive “But wherefore, wherefore fall on me? / To be beloved is all I need, / And whom I love, I love indeed.”
His problem was hard enough; his efforts to compose himself, however, were seriously defective:
Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees ;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,
In humble trust mine eye-lids close,
With reverential resignation,
No wish conceived, no thought exprest,
Only a sense of supplication ;
A sense o’er all my soul imprest
That I am weak, yet not unblest,
Since in me, round me, every where
Eternal Strength and Wisdom are.
(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Pains of Sleep“)
“My spirit I to Love compose.” The “I” that is mine, the “spirit I” and not the gross one, the one that may be “compose[d]” by the efforts of the Imagination, “composed” by such efforts “to Love” as the concord of Will (which directs the Imagination) and Reason (which Coleridge cannot but identify with the Spirit speaking within “My spirit”) called Faith (conducing always to Love wholly thus defined), a concord identical with the indifference among “in me” and “round me” and “every where” that the “Eternal Strength and Wisdom” perdure in being. . . .
Yet do we not decompose when we see such action to “compose”? Read the rest of this entry »