POETS Day! Hartley Coleridge

He looks okay to me. Tiny hands, maybe.

My kids are out of school again today. This is becoming a regular thing. There have been holidays, teacher workdays, snow days, bad weather forecast days, and one power outage. It’s gotten out of hand. They’re off Monday too.

Part of this can be put down to the extended school year. Back in my day, school ended on Memorial Day and didn’t pick up again until Labor Day. Elementary school kids knew a freedom more expansive than their concept of time passage. Middle schoolers re-invented themselves, returning in the fall with a deeper voice and a few Led Zeppelin t-shirts. High school kids got jobs, went to science camp, or rehab. There was time to know an unshared existence.

The Germans may have lost the war, but they also lost the next war. After beating them twice, the rest of the Western world carried on their loser Prussian school system as if nothing had happened. Fredrick gave the Generallandschulreglement, and we still march on. Der Realschule is never satisfied. It wants year-round classes.

My kids get June and July with a week flap in August; two thirds of the summer I got. Lesson plans haven’t changed much. There’s no extra learning. You don’t get nine months of first grade plus a month of what used to be second grade. First grade just takes longer. No wonder they play loose peppering the calendar with teacher workdays. I don’t even know what teacher workdays are. You might assume that a school day was a teacher workday, but no. I suspect, whatever it is, there’s Pinot Grigio.

It’s POETS Day, so Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of the office. Seize the day. Go see a movie or catch a game at the bar. You may have to skip all that and go home to take care of your kids. Enjoy their free time.

***

Hartley Coleridge (possibly David Hartley Coleridge, Wikipedia hedges) was introduced to the world by his father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge as “My cradled infant” in his lauded poem, “Frost at Midnight.” It was quite the debut.

The great Romantic imagined his child raised far from the corrupting city as he was, blessed by nature, untrammeled, and bunny rabbit hoppy.

from Frost at Midnight
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

He spent his early years in the Lake District, notably at Greta Hall, the household of Robert Southey, the poet best known for “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” although not as it’s recently been told. The early versions starred an old woman who broke into some bears’ house, wrecked some furniture, ate some porridge, and took a nap. When the bears got back she woke up, cussed a bunch, and escaped through a window to live happily ever after.

Coleridge fils could have used the later Goldilocks tale’s validations of the middle path; not too hot, not too cold. Moderation. In 1820, his fellowship from Oriel College, Oxford was revoked due to “intemperance.” I have no details, but his father threw augustness into an appeal with no result. It must have been impressive misbehaving. Alcoholism would haunt Hartley the remainder of his life.

His younger brother, the unfortunately named Derwent, was not smitten by the corporeal incarnation of his father’s hoped for “Great universal Teacher!”

“The unlimited indulgence with which he was treated at Greta Hall, tended, without doubt, to strengthen the many and strong peculiarities of his nature, and may perhaps have contributed to that waywardness and want of control, from which in later-life he suffered so deeply.”

That a Coleridge raised in the midst of Southey and, as would be expected, Wordsworth, who enjoyed educational outings with Walter Scott, suffered “waywardness and want of control” should vex both the Nature and the Nurture people. Nature could lead to how we’re nurtured. I asked my second favorite librarian to see what they had on Hartley. The librarian typed in the name, hit search, and then pulled back from screen. “Damn, that’s an ugly man.”

Biographies and magazine essays make up the bulk of Hartley’s literary output. There are a few collections of his poetry, one called Poems I can say was published during his lifetime. I’m not sure if he put out another. The most referenced one seems to be Essays and Marginalia, and Poems published posthumously by his brother and seemingly titled intentionally to befuddle both advocates and opponents of the Oxford comma. The other books are of the aspirational purchases type: Trusted Publisher’s Series of Poets that show up with good intentions on rec room shelves in grandparents’ houses. Norton’s Anthology skips from Lord Byron (1788-1824) right past what would be his chronological place to Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). Harold Bloom leaves him out of The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost as well.

He wasn’t a poet of consequence, but Arthur Quiller-Couch included four of his poems in The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900, a book that sold 500,000 copies in its first edition and spread around the world as a “knapsack book” carried by deployed British soldiers. He may not have achieved immortality on his own, but he’s firmly attached to the coattails of those who have.

There’s not a lot available without buying. My library offered to do a deep search but there were no promises and it would take weeks or more. Project Guttenberg has Hartley Coleridge in its author index, but it’s the poet’s nephew by Derwent (that really is a terrible name), Earnest Hartley Coleridge, a poet in his own right. In addition to the four poems in The Oxford Book, I’ve found only three others, first in a collection of Romantic Poets and then the same three repeated across various websites. What I’ve seen is a small sample and considering it’s all that’s readily proffered, probably his best regarded. It may not be representative, but there’s good stuff there.

from The Solitary-Hearted

She was a queen of noble Nature’s crowning,
A smile of hers was like an act of grace;
She had no winsome looks, no pretty frowning,
Like daily beauties of the vulgar race:
But if she smiled, a light was on her face,
A clear, cool kindliness, a lunar beam
Of peaceful radiance, silvering o’er the stream
Of human thought with unabiding glory;
Not quite a waking truth, not quite a dream,
A visitation, bright and transitory.

The “human thought” line jars in a way that it probably didn’t before the popularity of science fiction, but the whole is otherwise pleasant if spoken calmly and not in the ham actor’s annunciation/projection voice everyone seems to want to use when reciting Romantics aloud. In the first four lines expectation pools until spilling over in little drips of phrase after “But if she smiled.” It’s charming.

Long time a child, and still a child, when years

Long time a child, and still a child, when years
Had painted manhood on my cheek, was I,—
For yet I lived like one not born to die;
A thriftless prodigal of smiles and tears,
No hope I needed, and I knew no fears.
But sleep, though sweet, is only sleep, and waking,
I waked to sleep no more, at once o’ertaking
The vanguard of my age, with all arrears
Of duty on my back. Nor child, nor man,
Nor youth, nor sage, I find my head is grey,
For I have lost the race I never ran:
A rathe December blights my lagging May;
And still I am a child, tho’ I be old,
Time is my debtor for my years untold.

He’s affirming Derwent’s assessment of him, but to his credit, he does so very well. Wikipedia tells me that sonnets are “a form which suited his particular skills” without elaboration. He’s playful with his rhyme scheme and direct as a befits a shorter poem. I suppose in his longer poems he rambles?

Friendship

When we were idlers with the loitering rills,
The need of human love we little noted:
Our love was nature; and the peace that floated
On the white mist, and dwelt upon the hills,
To sweet accord subdued our wayward wills:
One soul was ours, one mind, one heart devoted,
That, wisely doting, ask’d not why it doted,
And ours the unknown joy, which knowing kills.
But now I find how dear thou wert to me;
That man is more than half of nature’s treasure,
Of that fair beauty which no eye can see,
Of that sweet music which no ear can measure;
And now the streams may sing for others’ pleasure,
The hills sleep on in their eternity.

Both sonnets are about loss, either opportunity or contentment. He’s morose, but talented. From these I’d think he’d be better remembered. Is the rest – the stuff I can’t immediately get my hands on – so bad?

I read a eulogy type article about Martin Amis after he died. I can’t remember by whom, but early in his career, the article notes, Amis was bothered by people who dismissed his success as an inheritance, that he wouldn’t have been published were he not Kingsley Amis’s son. I forget the exact words Amis used, but basically, he said that a literary career is not an accounting firm or a drug store (I suppose he would have said chemists) where dad retires and hands the keys over to a son.

There aren’t a lot of successful writers whose parents were also successful writers. Brian Herbert continued his father’s Dune series. That is an inherited franchise. Other than that, I came up with Christopher Buckley. My wife mentioned Joe Hill, but he hid that he was Stephen King’s kid. I’m sure there are others. None come immediately to mind.

Expectations can be ruinous. With a different name and less “peculiarities of his nature” he may have had a wider audience.

Lines —

I have been cherish’d and forgiven
By many tender-hearted,
’Twas for the sake of one in Heaven
Of him that is departed.

Because I bear my Father’s name
I am not quite despised,
My little legacy of fame
I’ve not yet realized.

And yet if you should praise myself
I’ll tell you, I had rather
You’d give your love to me, poor elf,
Your praise to my great father.