Coleridge and the landscape of vision
A psycho-geographical essay by Ratnagarbha
The Quantocks in Somerset saw one of the greatest years of creativity in the history of English poetry when the Wordsworths lived at Alfoxton Park (which is now a Buddhist retreat centre that runs retreats on mindfulness, communication and creativity) and Coleridge was living close by in the village of Nether Stowey.
Coleridge and Wordsworth, although they lived in close association in the West Country during their annus mirabilis of 1798 – 79, had very different paths to follow in art and in life. As we will discover, Coleridge’s voyage was one of surrender to unsettling forces of mind and nature, which he encountered in the wonderful landscape of the Quantocks, and expressed in his visionary poem Kubla Khan.
It is a cold and frosty night, a night of extreme cold and extreme silence, with not a breath of wind. The poet Coleridge is unable to sleep, he sits by the fire in his parlour, rocking his baby son in his cradle and tries to stave off the feelings of loneliness and isolation that afflict him at night by writing a poem about the night and the silence. The result is probably the greatest of Coleridge’s ‘conversation poems’, and one of the most tender, deeply felt poems about nature and childhood (those favourite romantic themes) ever written.
‘Frost at Midnight’, written in the very cold February of 1798 takes us right inside Coleridge’s mind, recording his thoughts and hopes and fears during that harsh winter, but also to the heart of a landscape, the Quantocks in west Somerset – a landscape which seems to haunt the poet, and subvert all sense of a normal self at home in the world of people and nature:
The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry
Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
‘Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams!
The Quantocks are indeed near the sea – a low range of smoothly rounded wooded hills that stretch North Eastwards from the vale of Taunton right up to the coast of the Severn Estuary at Quantocks Head. Although not so far from Bristol or Exeter they feel a world apart from the populated valleys and the Levels of the Eastern part of Somerset. This is an intimate, secluded landscape. Take a side lane from the village of Nether Stowey – where you can still see Coleridge’s cottage, and the parlour where he wrote Frost at Midnight – and you will quickly find yourself in a deeply rutted track leading up steeply through oak woods. This is almost an English rainforest, consisting mainly of dwarf oaks, thickly crowded together. I recall from my own rambles there in my 20s how the thin branches of the oaks are woven together above your head into a dense, writhing canopy. Down below fleshy tendrils of moss hang from branches encrusted with lichen. Strange pools of soft light are seen away in the distance beneath this green canopy, and a tempting half path will meander off, away from the main track towards that shimmering glade.
In his wonderful book, The Making of poetry, the nature writer Adam Nicholson explores this landscape and covers in detail the miraculous year of 1797 to ‘98 when Coleridge and the Wordsworths lived in the Quantocks and wrote some of their greatest poetry. Adams likens the woods to to a kind of natural mosque, in which ‘the green carpet of bilberries ‘glimmers for thousands of acres beneath the trees, lined out in avenues of sun spotted green, an arcaded temple or shrine to growth and light’:
It is a mazy, enchanting place, quite different from any other kind of English woodland. Here and there there is a damp coombe with in its depths a rushing stream, heard more than seen, that accompanies your walk with its splash and gurgle. In a few of the larger combes the path goes right by the stream and here your walk is deeper and darker.
Whichever way you climb however, before long you emerge on the bare hilltops. This is a rooftop world of swelling heather and bracken covered moors, bounding away from the eye in all directions. There are wide views towards the estuary with the grey blue hills of Wales beyond, westward towards the higher slopes of Exmoor and eastwards back towards the green levels of Somerset. Whilst walks with friends on the Quantocks were frequent, both Coleridge and Wordsworth liked to come up there alone sometimes and lie back on a bed of bracken in silent contemplation. Both poets were exploring a sense of the sacred to be found in communion with nature. This creed, if creed it can be called, came first of all from Coleridge and his readings in German and more ancient philosophy. But it was a passion not simply a set of ideas. A passionate belief in the healing virtue of dropping the normal concerns of self and identifying with the life of nature and the elements, particularly in their grand and sublime manifestations.
However, as Adams makes clear, when William Wordsworth arrived at the Quantocks he was in a highly demoralised state. He had travelled to France in the heat of the Revolution, in a state of joyful idealism, and fallen in love and fathered a child. The subsequent violence forced him to retreat back to England, and for reasons that are not entirely clear, perhaps simply economic ones, instead of marrying Annete Vallois he had left her behind in France. This left him in the darkest space of his life, tortured by guilt and despair. It was a darkness from which he gradually emerged from during that miraculous year of 1797-98 nurtured both by his sister’s care and inspiration and Coleridge’s sense of the vital restorative power to be found in dissolving boundaries between self and world, between mind and the powers of nature.
The power Wordsworth began to discover in himself that year was something grand and stately, an expansion of a self confident in its powers, out into nature to find kinship and faith and love there. Several writers have explored his debt to his sister Dorothy in this unfolding. As her remarkable journals make clear, Dorothy showed him how to look, how to observe the natural world in minute detail. Coleridge gave him the ideas to give this process meaning and direction. But, as this short passage from his notebooks of that year shows, the grand expansion of self, self development out into nature in faith and confidence, was Wordsworth’s own particular approach, as he wrote unashamedly about his sense of his own particular path:
But in the mountains he did feel his faith
There did he see the writing – all things
Looked immortality; revolving life
And greatness, still revolving infinite…
These are themes that return again and again in more polished form in his great autobiographical poem of the following decade, The Prelude.
For Coleridge, however, the romantic quest was much more dangerous and ambivalent. It involved an encounter with forces and images that threatened to overwhelm the frail ego, and destroy the sense of joyful participation that been the first impetus of his poetic quest. Wordsworth feels fear, certainly, out in the mountains, or famously on Ullswater in The Prelude, when the frowning cliffs above his tiny boat terrify him with “a dim and undetermined sense of unknown modes of being”. But Wordsworth knows who it is who is fearful and why. In the very next paragraph he fully digests and finds religious consolation in the experience. It is God himself, the poet declares, who gives to sublime natural forms “a breath and everlasting motion”, in order to purify “the elements of feeling and of thought” in mankind. Coleridge does not find such easy consolation, rather he loses all sense of self in a dangerous ecstasy. His is a devotional mystic’s path one might say, but without the mystic’s hermetic discipline.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the visionary poem Kubla Khan written during that annus mirabilis of 1797-98 . In the two other supernatural masterpieces of his youth, Christabel and The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge has at least a narrative thread to guide him on ‘strange seas of thought’. Kubla Khan is simply a chain of visionary associations, a mirage, a descent into a powerful current of imagery which carries the poet towards an unknown destination:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail.
As is well known this was a poem that came, unbidden and fully formed, into the poet’s mind during an opium induced slumber. Having felt unwell during a journey he was resting in an isolated farmhouse on the bare coastal hills west of the Quantocks. Coleridge claims that he had only transcribed a part of the poem when he was interrupted by the infamous person from nearby Porlock on the coast. Nevertheless what we have seems complete as far as it goes. The chain of associations has invoked an entire visionary landscape and its mage-like ruler or creator who is both Kubla himself and the poet, with his perilous power to act as if he was a god:
With flashing eyes and floating hair…
A visionary realm indeed, but not only visionary, for to trace the many and various associations underlying this vision is to wander through pathways of real English landscapes as Coleridge knew them, as well as through the mysterious lanes and byways of his imagination. Not to mention the imaginings of the many previous travellers that the arcane bookworm Coleridge had been devouring since childhood. In what follows I will explore some of these chains of association and then raise the crucial, impossible question: what does it all add up to? What really was Coleridge’s aim with this cornucopia of vision?
Ever the arcane bookworm, Coleridge was reading at this time an old book of travellers tales by Samuel Puchas: Purchas his Pilgrimage; or Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all ages, first published in 1613. The title immediately highlights that this is not a mere book of travellers tales, it combines geography and religion and speculation in a kind of metaphysical psychogeography, and is thus close in spirit to Coleridge. Here’s the famous passage as quoted by Coleridge in his account of how the poem was written:
In Xaindu did Cublai Can build a stately palace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile meddowes, pleasant springs, delightful streams, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure.
But this arcane literary reference should not be allowed to obscure the more concrete influences from the landscape around him which Coleridge was absorbing. We can start by observing that the Wordsworths were living just a couple of miles away from Stowey, at a medium sized manor house called Alfoxton. Alfoxton was then, and still is, surrounded by a beautiful deer park, containing bosky meadows and many ancient trees. There is also a secluded kitchen garden surrounded by a high wall. So an enclosed paradise was right there on Coleridge’s door step. Significantly, at the edge of Alfoxton Park runs a swift flowing stream in a deep combe. It’s a secluded, shadowy, mossy defile, hardly on the epic scale of that ‘deep romantic chasm’ but suggestive nonetheless.
Moreover, no more than twenty miles away there is a chasm or rocky gorge that is indeed epic in scale – the monumental Cheddar Gorge, undoubtedly the grandest landscape feature in Southern England. We know from his letters that Coleridge visited there in 1798, some months after the Porlock incident, but it seems certain that a poet who loved natural grandeur would have known about this sublime feature long before that. He may even have used the track at the bottom of the gorge as a handy way to cross the Mendips on one of his walks from Bristol to Somerset. Here, in any case, is a rocky chasm, hundreds of feet deep, here rushing streams emerge from the dark rocks at the foot of the gorge – albeit without the bounding rocks so far as we know.
The rocks, so suggestive in romantic, even in psychoanalytic terms, must be traced in Coleridge’s omnivorous reading. As that wonderful, classic study of Coleridge’s sources, The Road to Xanadu, by John Livingston Lowes shows, the bounding rocks come from another traveller’s tale known to Coleridge. This was Bartram’s Travels, in the Southern States of the USA, published 1791. Here Bartram encounters a powerful “inchanting” spring or fountain in which rocks do indeed appear to bound up from hidden caverns below. The fountain, according to Bartram, makes an inexpressible rushing noise like a mighty hurricane or thunderstorm. The fountain “jets and flows” forming a large river “descending and following various windings of the valley…. At places where ridges oppose its course and fury, are vast heaps of fragments of rock”.
An equally important traveller’s tale for the genesis of Kubla Khan was the five volume work of James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, of 1790, also known to Coleridge. Bruce, a colourful Scotsman, had travelled in Ethiopia in search of the source, which had apparently eluded European travellers for centuries. And he certainly felt he had found it. Here is an excerpt as he nears the supposed source, a pair of fountains in a mountainous region of Ethiopia called Amhara. Incidentally this name surely influenced the ‘Mount Abora’ of the poem, as did the paradisal ‘Mount Amara’ mentioned in Milton’s Paradise Lost as “being by Nilus’ Head, enclosed with shining rock, a whole day’s journey high”:
The second fountain lies about a stone cast west of the first: the inhabitants …. say that the whole plain about the mountain is floating and unsteady, a certain mark that there is water concealed under it. For which reason the water does not overflow at the fountain but forces itself with great violence out at the foot of the mountain… The whole mountain was covered with thick woods, which often occupied the very edge of the precipices on which we stood… We were sitting in the shade of a grove of magnificent cedars….
Note the magnificent cedars… clearly reminiscent of the ‘cedarn cover’ of Coleridge’s chasm. Bruce goes on in his book to quote a more ancient authority on biblical mythic geography – a patriarch of the Syriac church in the 9th century called Moses bar Cepha. Bar Cepha wished to somehow link the four traditional rivers of the garden of Eden with the great rivers then known to geographers, the Tigris, the Euphrates, Nile and the Ganges. He suggests that the four great rivers, once they leave paradise, have sufficient momentum from the great height they have fallen to flow underground for vast distances, through “huge chasms and subterranean channels” (these are Bar Cepha’s own words), deep in the earth, so deep in fact that they go right under the oceans. The Nile, for example, after its long journey underground emerges in Ethiopia according to bar Cepha, and because its power had been confined under the earth for so long it “boils up” into outer air.
So here we have in germinal form the mythic landscape of Kubla Khan. As well as the mighty fountains, the dancing rocks, there is the sense of a whole mountainous landscape floating on vast reserves of water hidden below. And a sense of vast caverns through which the mighty river has flowed. I would like to suggest however that the much smaller scale landscape of the green and mysterious Quantocks with their strange oak woods, and with lonely Exmoor beyond, was also an important factor in the poet’s mind. Below that isolated farmhouse where Kubla Khan was written various small ravines take streams plunging unseen, right down the steeply wooded cliffs, to the Severn Sea below. And this estuary, while not lifeless in truth, is often of a grey and muddy aspect, full of sediment from the great river as it is.
Within all of this, Coleridge’s great invention is to make the pleasure gardens of Kubla into a dome. Contemporary accounts of the magical domes of mosques in Islamic Kashmir, known dimly as a mysterious and beautiful mountain paradise, may have played their part here. But a dome with caves of ice, whose shadow floated on the waves below is the poet’s master stroke, his great symbol:
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
This is the heart of Coleridge’s vision. It is an image for the act of poetic creation itself – for the entire, self-sufficient worlds that are conjured by the creative imagination working at its highest pitch. The dome is a bodying forth of the ideas about the fundamental imaginative power of the mind that Coleridge was to spend the rest of his life elucidating. For him this was the antidote to the mechanical theories of perception put forward by John Locke and others in the European Enlightenment. Kant had subverted such theories and realised that it is the mind itself that provides the very categories by which we perceive an external world. Coleridge, influenced by later German Romantic thinkers such as Shelling, realised that this is not only a matter of mental categories such as space and time and causality, but a synthesising, building power, by which disparate items of perception are built up into a creative whole, a world.
All human beings do this via the ‘primary imagination’ which, according to Coleridge, is a reflection in humans of the original, divine creative act. But the artist does it consciously, with what Coleridge calls the ‘secondary imagination’. The artist puts forward a subcreation, a coherent universe that mirrors and subtly alters the primary, contingent world, in order to demonstrate or explore some aspect of reality. This is the shining dome, sitting above the phenomenal world we all know, ‘the sunless sea’, and pouring its influence down upon that world, with a powerful, unsettling, dangerous force, and containing within itself both darkness and light, power and tranquillity, mighty fountains and “sinuous rills”, sunny glades and caves of ice.
Like an architectural dome, Kubla’s pleasure dome is built up using difficult, opposing forces that must be balanced. And through the centre of this dome flows untamed, natural force, the primal river Alph. A richer and more complex symbol is hard to conceive. Such a dome might stand for ages, but like the great dome of the Hagia Sophia of Constantinople itself, in the earthquake of 558 CE, it may fall. As the poem says: “And mid this tumult Kubla heard from far ancestral voices prophesying War…”
In the last section of the poem the focus turns inwards to the strange being who initiates that act of creation. Who is both Kubla and the poet himself:
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
There is a kind of wish fulfilment in this. Coleridge clearly wants people to wake up and listen. It is an image of the poet as prophet. But, in this case, although so much of his later life failed to live up to the vision, he was not just dreaming. The poem has become one of the most influential in the English language. It stands as a strange, hallucinogenic reminder to the deep world-building powers of the mind, which we so rarely encounter in their full ontological strength. As the Buddha says in the Dhammapada, “all phenomena arise from the mind, they are led by mind, created by mind…”
Notes:
Alfoxton park retreats:
https://www.alfoxtonpark.org.uk/home
The Making of Poetry by Adam Nicholson, Collins, 2019
The Road to Xanadu, a Study in the ways of the Imagination, by John Livingston Lowes, Princeton, 1924, available on Kindle or at Internet Archive:
Urthona – Buddhism & art 