Coleridge and Collaboration

Abstract

Coleridge and CollaborationJuly 1797. Coleridge sits alone, in conversation. He is in the arbour of Tom Poole's garden in Nether Stowey, confined there, as he tells Robert Southey, because his wife Sara 'accidently emptied a skillet of boiling milk on my foot' (CL i, 334). Unable to walk with his friends the Wordsworths, newly moved to Alfoxden, and Charles Lamb, visiting from London, he accompanies them in blank verse instead. The letter to Southey shifts from prose into poetry, retaining its conversational tone, but transmuting his burn into myth:Well -they are gone: and here must I remain, Lam'd by the scathe of fire, lonely & faint, This lime-tree bower my prison.The solitary self-dramatizing moment opens into a vicarious vision of the pleasure the friends will enjoy, out on the 'springy* heath, along the hilltop edge'. The 'springy' is marked with a scribbled asterisk, and a note is squeezed into the right-hand margin: 'elastic, I mean.' There are further marginal notes, almost running into the lines themselves, glossing details both literal and philosophical, bringing Southey, as reader, into the scene. This mirrors the movement of the whole poem, towards imaginative involvement with the experience of another: a sympathetic impulse which rebounds on the poet himself, as the impulse to share allows him a renewed appreciation of his own surroundings. Those surroundings, too, speak of reciprocity and relationship: the play of sunshine and shadow, the intertwined foliage of ivy 'which usurps / Those fronting elms', all facilitated by the friendly ministrations of Tom Poole himself, putting book-room and bower at Coleridge's disposal. Further in the background, the domestic labour of Sara, caring for baby Hartley, hosting, cooking, is registered only by accident.This single-authored poem of solitude, with its many layers of allusion, personal and literary, is a good starting point for an understanding of Coleridge's complicated collaborative process, which this chapter traces across his writing life, from Poems (1796) to Biographia Literaria (1817).