Poems of the Week–the other Coleridge
Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849) was the oldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He inherited much of his father's talent and brilliance but also some of his lack of discipline, which resulted in the forfeiture for intemperance of his Oriel fellowship. He wrote biography for money and is often felt to have largely squandered his considerable talents. His friends were always impressed with his originality and brilliance, though Hartley himself felt himself only a reflection of his father. Nonetheless, in limiting himself to less grandiose and "important" poems, he often surpassed his father if only in the exquisite quality of his compositions.
Here are a few sonnets:
Full well I know - my friends - ye look on me
A living specter of my Father dead -
Had I not bourne his name, had I not fed
On him, as one leaf trembling on a tree,
A woeful waste had been my minstrelsy -
Yet have I sung of maidens newly wed
And I have wished that hearts too sharply bled
Should throb with less of pain, and heave more free
By my endeavor. Still alone I sit
Counting each thought as miser counts a penny,
Wishing to spend my pennyworth of wit
On antic wheel of fortune like a zany:
You love me for my sire, to you unknown,
Revere me for his sake, and love me for my own.
No Life Vain
Let me not deem that I was made in vain,
Or that my being was an accident,
Which fate, in working its sublime intent,
Not wished to be, to hinder would not deign.
Each drop uncounted in a storm of rain
Hath its own mission, and is duly sent
To its own leaf or blade, not idly spent
'Mid myriad dimples on the shipless main.
The very shadow of an insect's wing,
For which the violet cared not while it stayed,
Yet felt the lighter for its vanishing,
Proved that the sun was shining by its shade:
Then can a drop of the eternal spring,
Shadow of living lights, in vain be made?
A Sonnet
If I have sinned in act, I may repent;
If I have erred in thought, I may disclaim
My silent error, and yet feel no shame ;
But if my sou], big with an ill intent,
Guilty in will, by fate be innocent,
Or being bad, yet murmurs at the curse
And incapacity of being worse,
That makes my hungry passion still keep Lent
In keen expectance of a Carnival;
Where, in all worlds, that round the sun revolve
And shed their influence on this passive ball,
Abides a power that can my soul absolve?
Could any sin survive and be forgiven,
One sinful wish would make a hell of heaven!
Christmas Day
Was it a fancy, bred of vagrant guess,
Or well-remember'd fact, that He was born
When half the world was wintry and forlorn,
In Nature's utmost season of distress?
And did the simple earth indeed confess
Its destitution and its craving need,
Wearing the white and penitential weed,
Meet symbol of judicial barrenness?
So be it; for in truth 'tis ever so,
That when the winter of the soul is bare,
The seed of heaven at first begins to grow,
Peeping abroad in desert of despair.
Full many a floweret, good, and sweet, and fair,
Is kindly wrapp'd in coverlet of snow.
Entries(RSS)
The seed of heaven at first begins to grow,
Peeping abroad in desert of despair."
This should remind all of us that the times in which we live are great times to be a Christian. I cannot speak for others but for Catholics, these are good times. I remember one of my old teachers telling eager students who were experimenting in tradtion to slow down and consider the fact there is little comfort in the visible Church today. " The liturgy has been set upon by thieves and is lying in the ditch, contemplatives have left the monastery to mouth political slogans in the streets, nuns have lost their habits and many of their virtues, confessors their consciences; theologians lost their faith in my generation and the one of your generation have lost their minds." He said all this during the sixties when radicals were attempting to burn down the campus, had occupied the Adminstration buildings and piano wire was being strung up across alley ways to cut the necks of National guradsmen and police who were brought in to attempt to save part of the campus from total destruction.
By telling them the truth many became contemplatives, some have become priests and bishops, others have raised familes, and taken up the old crafts of farming, carpentry and stock rearing. Few have met his dream that some students return to their decadent homes in the slums of New York, Chicago and City of Angels to start little oasis of civility where songs are sung, poems are memorized and the liturgy is restored to its full integrity. One nice thing about living in these hateful times is just a little authentic charity is received like "a gentle rain falling on parched earth." Or in the poet's words :
"The seed of heaven at first begins to grow,
Peeping abroad in desert of despair."
"Full well I know..."
A finely wrought meditation on the condition of being a famous man's son and another revelation from the bottomless font of Dr. Fleming's reading. Is it a coincidence that it should be one of his selections, whose own father was a larger than life figure?
Especially skillful are the enjambments of lines three and four,
"Had I not bourne his name, had I not fed
On him, as one leaf trembling on a tree,"
reinforced by the repetition of "Had I not...", beautifully acknowledging the son's debt to the father; and of lines seven, eight and nine,
"And I have wished that hearts too sharply bled
Should throb with less of pain, and heave more free
By my endeavor."
which humbly plead the case for the poet's own verse.
The whole poem is bound together by a delightful rhyme scheme: abbaabba, cacadd, which manages to sound trippingly light while using rhyme to call attention to the poem's argument: tree/minstrelsy; unknown/own.
Gilbert,
Somewhere in the Odyssey, Homer through one of his characters says that: "few men are as good as their fathers. Most are worse and few are better."
Here is the quote I was thinking about:
"Minerva came close up to him in the likeness and with the voice of Mentor. "Telemachus," said she, "if you are made of the same stuff as your father you will be neither fool nor coward henceforward, for Ulysses never broke his word nor left his work half done. If, then, you take after him, your voyage will not be fruitless, but unless you have the blood of Ulysses and of Penelope in your veins I see no likelihood of your succeeding. Sons are seldom as good men as their fathers; they are generally worse, not better; still, as you are not going to be either fool or coward henceforward, and are not entirely without some share of your father's wise discernment, I look with hope upon your undertaking. But mind you never make common cause with any of those foolish suitors, for they have neither sense nor virtue, and give no thought to death and to the doom that will shortly fall on one and all of them, so that they shall perish on the same day.
On a day when one reads that the Octomom has sold herself to porn in order to feed the artificially produced brood she has had by several fathers, and a story from an emergency room doc in Illinois tells of delivering a welfare mother's eighth child and hearing her call herself the family's "breadwinner" – because, as she explained it, her own mother gets over $100,000 a year plus free food, rent and medical, by having a court declare the daughter an "unfit" mother and then getting the state to hire her as her grandchildren's foster mother – reading a poem like No Life Vain is like being tucked in bed between sweet smelling sheets by a loving parent.