The Ecstasy of Messaging: Coleridge's Natural Telegraphy

Abstract

My topic is a hitherto unexamined aspect of the poetics and politics of a famous collaboration between Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Dorothy Wordsworth, by no means the only outcome of which was the publication in 1798 of the era-defining Lyrical Ballads.¹ One of the reasons why that collaboration has possessed an especial and enduring resonance within and beyond British literary culture is that it's so hard to tell poetics and politics apart in some of the work it made possible. Wordsworth's Muse is a ‘levelling one’, William Hazlitt declared in 1825. ‘His style is vernacular; he delivers household truths.’² A century later, T. S. Eliot was left wondering what all the fuss was about. Poets had been delivering household truths long before Wordsworth and Coleridge began to read their poems aloud to each other in the mid-1790s. Like Hazlitt, however, Eliot was prepared fully to acknowledge the levelling effect of attempts at a vernacular style. Political allegiance might not in itself have made for the poetic ‘revolution’ culminating in Lyrical Ballads. But it could not easily be ‘disentangled’ from the ‘motives’ of many of the poems we have come to regard as integral to that revolution.³ This entanglement has attracted a very substantial scholarship.⁴ My aim here is to identify, contextualise, and celebrate a motive unique, as far as I'm aware, to Coleridge. I will argue that Coleridge was radical not only in his capacity in think in terms of what we would now call ‘media’, but also in his conviction that such thinking might make it possible to articulate and sustain political dissent during a period of severe and widespread repression. Romantic poets (and not only those writing in English) are generally thought to have specialised in ecstasies of one kind or another: sensuous, perceptual, meditative, moral, political, spiritual. I'm going to add a further item to that list. Coleridge, I want to suggest, knew a little – as we now have no choice but to do – about the ecstasy of messaging.

My approach to a familiar topic will at once be narrower than is customary and more wide-ranging. I will concentrate primarily not just on a particular text, Coleridge's ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, but on the actual circumstances (the time and place) of that text's composition; while at the same time summoning up a context – the history of modern telecommunications technologies – absent from the vast majority of discussions of the poetry of the period. In combining deliberate narrowness with deliberate width, I mean to emulate the critical approach once adopted by J. H. Prynne, the éminence grise of post-war British avant-garde poetry, who a long time ago first taught me how to read Romantic lyrics, starting with another famous poem by Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’. Field Notes, Prynne's pamphlet-length critique of Wordsworth's ‘The Solitary Reaper’, incorporates, in addition to a line-by-line reading of the poem, an anthology of extracts from contemporary and more recent writings as widely divergent from its ostensible occasion as a nineteenth-century Survey of that Bloody Commerce called the Slave-Trade and Rainer Maria Rilke's essay ‘Über den Dichter’, written at Duino in February 1912.⁵ ‘The Solitary Reaper’ was conceived in response to a scene Wordsworth either observed or imagined during a tour of Scotland with his sister in the late summer of 1803. Coleridge had originally been of the party, but fell ill, quite possibly due to his addiction to laudanum, and returned home alone. He is an insistent presence in Prynne's pamphlet, as someone who understood like few others the scope and significance of what Wordsworth was attempting, but could not find in himself the poems to equal it. Wordsworth's greater fame continues to overshadow the radicalism of the poems he did in fact find in himself during the mid-1790s. A further aim of this essay is to explore the opportunities created for Coleridge by his failure to be Wordsworth.

In January 1797, Coleridge settled his young family in a cold, damp, mice-infested cottage in the Somerset village of Nether Stowey, at the foot of the Quantock.⁶ In July, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, enthused both by the beauty of the region and by the prospect of Coleridge's company, set themselves up rather more salubriously in a rented mansion in an ancient park a few miles away at Alfoxden. So began the decisive collaboration on a new poetic. ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, Coleridge's most celebrated contribution to Lyrical Ballads, is a long narrative poem on a supernatural theme. But he had already begun to experiment with the very different form of a short blank verse meditation arising out of the intense absorption in immediate circumstance of a speaker readily identifiable as the poet. These experiments have come to be known, in accordance with the subtitle of one of their number, ‘To the Nightingale’, as ‘conversation’ poems. ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ is an early and rewardingly complex example of an emergent sub-genre. In July 1797, shortly after the Wordsworths had settled at Alfoxden, Charles Lamb, once a school-mate of Coleridge's at Christ's Hospital, in London, spent a week in Stowey as his guest. One evening the Wordsworths took Lamb for a walk which included a sharp climb up from Holford Glen onto the Quantock, most likely at the Iron Age fort on Danesborough Hill; while Coleridge, immobilised by a domestic accident, was left to his own devices in the lime-tree bower (Figure 1).

The poem's first brief movement is to locate the poet by means of a delightfully casual ruefulness: ‘Well, they are gone, and here must I remain, /This lime-tree bower my prison.’⁷ Household truths, indeed, as Hazlitt might have said. Its second, more elaborate movement ascends in mood and tone in company with the walkers as the faintly Gothic detail of the ‘poor yellow leaves’ and ‘long lank weeds’ (ll. 13–20) they feel duty bound to inspect in sunless Holford Glen gives way to the rapture induced by a panoramic view of the coastal plain from the crest of the Quantock. The poem's third movement returns us to the lime-tree bower at twilight, and Coleridge's singular predicament. The excursion undertaken in imagination has transformed the woebegone invalid into an observer capable of a gently exultant description of what is immediately to hand: the ‘deep radiance’ (l. 52) on the ancient ivy, the ‘solitary humble bee’ singing in the bean flower (ll. 58–9).

That should be that. In the conversation poem – or ‘greater Romantic lyric’, as they're sometimes known – the speaker begins with an exact description of immediate circumstance, but is then for whatever reason moved to evoke in passionate remembrance or anticipation another time or place. Thus elevated into ecstasy, the poem ‘rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation’.⁸ The two greatest conversation poems, Coleridge's ‘Frost at Midnight’ and Wordsworth's ‘Tintern Abbey’, one a response to the other, both round upon themselves to end where they began; but not ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’, which exceeds the prescribed dialectic of description and remembrance or anticipation by adding a fourth and final movement extraneous to its tripartite meditative structure. It's that exceeding of itself – of sub-generic requirement – which will constitute the focus of my analysis. I aim to show that the poem's final movement invites us to think again, and more radically, about what conversation might involve, about how alterations in circumstance might affect the speed and security of its conduct, and about the ways in which poems of all kinds communicate with their readers.

In Hazlitt's terms, the conversation poem could be said to level down, while still in principle adhering to, the lofty aims of a form such as the ode which remains integral to our conception of what Romanticism was. Put another way, it vividly complicates John Stuart Mill's enduringly influential claim that the poet's voice is not so much heard as ‘overheard’, its ruminations distinguished above all by ‘utter unconsciousness of a listener’.⁹ It is remarkable, Ingo Berensmeyer observes, that poetry should so persuasively have been redefined as ‘soliloquy and unmediated expression’ at a time when ‘literature, and the novel in particular, had long adapted itself to a literary market, a media culture, and a public sphere saturated by print’.¹⁰ To be sure, poetry's ‘printed voice’ was understood soon enough to constitute a versatile and commanding resource.¹¹ The levelling conversation poem has long been recognised as a precursor of the dramatic monologue.¹² But there are reasons enough, as William Waters has insisted, to want to examine the many and various ways in which poets have sought to address a listener they are eager, if not always to name, then at least to specify. Poetry's resemblance to ‘ordinary communication’ may well matter as much as any departure from it. ‘Saying you, and the irreplaceable particularity of that addressee, can be the centre of a poem's gravity.’¹³ For Waters, direct poetic address is at its most thrilling when framed as intimate contact, as touch. The intimacies which will concern me here, by contrast, are those which take place at a distance. But we agree in thinking that investigations of poetic address require some acknowledgement of the protocols of communication in general.¹⁴ In enacting a to and fro among participants, conversation precludes soliloquy or unmediated expression. It invites, as I hope to show, an emphasis on media: on what comes (or comes and goes) between.

Culler has been taken to task for failing to distinguish adequately between the figure of apostrophe and other forms of address or invocation. In a highly informative article first published in 1991, Douglas Kneale points out that apostrophe – or aversio, as it was sometimes known – requires a very specific manoeuvre: a turn away from the designated addressee (for example, the judge in a court of law) to invoke or enter into dialogue with another person or thing (the defendant, a witness). ‘The positing of what later rhetoricians would call the “proper” or intended hearer, and the oratorical diversion from that person to another person,’ Kneale concludes, ‘constitute the two chief characteristics of the figure.’¹⁷ Like other figures of exclamation (prosopopoeia, ecphonesis), apostrophe is motivated by passion. Unlike them – unlike most of the examples cited by Culler – it requires an abrupt switch of attention from one person to another. Of course, it's important not to over-estimate apostrophe's aversive force. The exordium addressed to a defendant or a witness is not intended to exclude the judge whose assessment of its argumentative worth will be the one that counts. By implicitly invoking the ‘social character’ of communication, Alan Richardson argues, the frequent apostrophes in Romantic conversation poems ‘underscore the strong gravitational pull of self-regard even in seeking to break its hold’.¹⁸ But that hold could be broken. To understand how, we need to build on Kneale's instructive attempts to capture apostrophe's unique ‘redirecting of voice’.¹⁹

Others had been thinking along similar lines. In a lecture given at the British Academy in 1988, Prynne developed a comparable distinction between two main kinds of interjection in poetry: outward-facing ‘apostrophe’ – a figure addressed directly ‘either towards surrogate recipients inside the poem or towards an acknowledged reader outside it’ – and inward-facing ‘exclamation’, which conjures a ‘possible world internal to the feeling self, where the real and the unreal combine to generate a vehement personal passion by the devices of emphatic culmination’. The device Prynne had primarily in mind was interjection in its purest form: an ‘O’ or ‘Oh!’ which, devoid of semantic content, and lacking any discernible syntactic function, seems less a word than a sort of natural noise. This noise-like word is by his account a hybrid capable of serving either as apostrophe or as exclamation. Its frequent occurrence in the Romantic lyric marks the boundary between private and public modes: between the ‘pathos of individual sensibility’ and the ‘ethos of concerted human action’; between persuasion to think or feel, and persuasion to act.²⁰

It seems to me fair to say that both Kneale and Prynne are interested primarily in those redirections of voice from one person or thing to another which serve to enact an enquiry into the co-constitution of self and world. Such redirections proceed by exclamation rather than by apostrophe. It's no coincidence that both draw heavily for examples on the work of William Wordsworth. ‘The turning aside of address,’ Kneale explains, ‘even to the point of its turning around, carries us far into the interplay of voice in Wordsworth.’²¹ An address that turns aside or away only in order then to turn around is headed in the direction either of self-discovery or of self-display – neither of which need amount to Richardson's ‘self-regard’. In the Romantic lyric, Prynne observes, the ‘conventions’ of ‘an enclosed station for the uttering voice’ mean that ‘even the modes of apparently outright apostrophe often develop forms of invoking or calling-on which function as kinds of meditative exclamation’. Such poems explore ‘the continuing ambiguity which hovers about the relations between apostrophe as a form of address and exclamation as a form of expression’.²² But we can already see in this formulation the hardening of a distinction between ‘address’ and ‘expression’; or, as Coleridge himself was to put it rather more bluntly, between oratory and poetry. Coleridge, I will argue, could not entirely reconcile himself to the sort of ‘enclosed station’ his injury had obliged him to take up in the lime-tree bower. More generally, his stubborn adherence to the advocacy of radical dissent meant that meditative exclamation, which anchors ethos in pathos, was never going to be enough. No sooner had the mould of the conversation poem been formed than he broke it. To con-verse is to turn together with, to keep company, to go to and fro among, facing inwards. A-version provokes a turning away or against, a separation, perhaps even a fresh start, its trajectory that of no-return. If we are to grasp how and why ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’ concludes in a demonstration of apostrophe's obdurately aversive force, we need to start from the circumstances of the poem's composition.

I begin my reading of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ with what seems to me a puzzle. For more than two centuries, Coleridge's captivating hymn to the restorative powers of the natural world has been read and studied without reference to the fact that the garden he wrote it in contained, in addition to the lime-tree bower, part of a fully functioning tannery. If we are to discern its motive, and thus its intrinsic interest, we need to attend to the actual circumstances of its composition. Coleridge's cottage was located at the top of Lime Street, a narrow lane running up a steep hill out of the centre of Stowey. The original lime-tree bower stood at the far end of an adjacent garden which once stretched at right-angles all the way down to an unassumingly elegant house on Castle Street, Stowey's main residential thoroughfare. House and garden belonged to Coleridge's close friend and patron Tom Poole. The studious, strong-willed Poole was a reluctant heir to the family tanning business which occupied an extensive site behind the houses on Castle Street.²³ Once he had got the hang of its technological processes, however, he developed a genuine and widely influential enthusiasm for their maintenance and improvement. The design of the mills which ground the oak-bark used to tan hides became a particular preoccupation. Poole contributed to the entry on ‘Tanning’ in volume 18 of the third (1797) edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Success as a businessman did not by any means preclude a fierce and enduring commitment to the sorts of pursuit more likely to endear him to Coleridge. His nineteenth-century biographer (and distant relative) Margaret Sandford speaks of a dominant ‘passion for usefulness’.²⁴ That quality, too, may well have appealed to someone as uncertain as Coleridge habitually was of his true vocation. Poole had a hot temper, and could appear overbearing. Coleridge knew how to sulk. But the friendship endured.

Poole remained until the end of his life an Old School Whig who swore by the 1689 Bill of Rights. Writing to Coleridge on 3 May 1796, Poole's brother Richard maintained that the primary aim of their political activities was to ‘reinstate’ the constitution to its ‘former state of purity’. The person who ‘constantly rails at the establishments that exist, and proposes nothing in their stead,’ he went on, ‘can only be styled an Anarchist, a character which I know you hold in contempt’. But Tom Poole was also open to new ideas; recklessly so, at times. Sandford draws extensively on his correspondence with Samuel Purkis, a London tanner and kindred spirit. In December 1792, Poole still felt able to laugh off the reputation as a ‘violent incendiary in political matters’ he had earned by loaning a copy of Tom Paine's Rights of Man to a local cabinet-maker. But the outbreak of war with revolutionary France in February 1793 darkened the atmosphere dramatically. In August 1794, Poole told Purkis that the Home Office had been intercepting his mail and that, as a result, he was now considered the most dangerous person in the whole of Somerset. ‘At first,’ he went on, ‘it flattered the vanity of a petit tanner of Stowey to be thought of consequence by the Government of an empire which holds half the crowned heads of Europe as pensioners.’ But despair at the damage done to civil society by the intensifying assault on individual rights soon moved him to a more sombre ‘recollection of what we were, and what we now are’. Poole was as ardent an abolitionist as Coleridge. He made it his practice, Sandford notes, ‘utterly to refrain himself from the use of every article which was known to be connected to slave labour, and to employ, besides, every inducement he could think of, to persuade others to do the same’.²⁵ In 1801, he handed over the management of the tannery to his assistant Thomas Ward. His passion for usefulness subsequently found an outlet in business ventures (including a local copper mine), and in a long career as a magistrate and authority on welfare reform.²⁶ According to the memorial tablet in the local church, he was ever ‘the enlightened Friend of the Poor’.

Poole did all he could to help Coleridge and the Wordsworths settle in. But in truth he was not, to begin with, entirely thrilled by their arrival in the neighbourhood. For their reputation as trouble-makers preceded them. These were especially dangerous times for radical dissent. In February 1797, the French landed a small army on the Pembrokeshire coast near Fishguard in an abortive attempt to march on Bristol and burn it to the ground. Somerset had been the original location of the landing. The Home Department duly sent an agent to investigate the activities of the philosophising fifth column now settled at Stowey and Alfoxden.²⁷ According to local reports, the conspirators had enquired about the navigability of the river that passes through Holford on its way to the Bristol Channel at Kilve. Coleridge was in fact taking notes for a long poem to be called ‘The Brook’. He and Wordsworth were by then in retreat from revolution on the French model; both would subsequently take immense trouble to cover the traces of their youthful Jacobinism. At this stage, however, the retreat was strategic rather than headlong: a developing, if compromised, defence of liberty in an age of repression. As Kelvin Everest notes, Coleridge's conversation poems ‘celebrate values – retirement in nature, friendship, domestic happiness, the directly benevolent influence of the physical world – that were central to the specific character of his radicalism’. Given that the retreat was to a particular village, we must surely take account of the physical as well as the social and political circumstances in which those poems were written. According to Everest, Stowey is ‘one defining context’ of the best of them. In settling there, he concludes, Coleridge had attained the nirvana of ‘rural retirement’.²⁸ But Stowey was not in fact that kind of place at all. For one thing, the itineraries of the time show that the main road west from London to Bridgewater, and then on to Minehead and Porlock, threaded its way along Lime Street, past Coleridge's front door (Figure 2).

The West Country transport system constituted by no means the only intrusion into any dreams of rural retirement Coleridge might have begun to harbour. He had first met Poole in August 1794, when he passed through Stowey on a walking tour. By the time he brought his family to live in the village in January 1797, he had established a formidable reputation as an orator and metaphysician. Sandford nonetheless reports that the ‘practical aspects of his friend's life’ held a ‘wonderful fascination’ for him.²⁹ They could hardly have failed to, since this was a friendship articulated by topography. Poole had a gate installed at the point where the gardens of the two properties met, so that Coleridge (no martyr to domestic routine) could come and go more or less as he pleased. His habit, he wrote to John Prior Estlin in January 1797, was to make his way down Poole's garden ‘thro' the tan yard’ into the house.³⁰ By Sandford's account, the garden had ‘manifestly’ the air of a space devoted ‘to use rather than to enjoyment’.³¹

Tanning by traditional methods was – and still remains, at Baker & Co., the UK tannery which adheres most strictly to those methods – a complex, labour-intensive process during which a weekly intake of sixty or so hides is rotated through a sequence of substantial rectangular pits for periods of up to a year. The key facilities are the lime-yard and the tan-yard. In one set of pits, lime mixed with water strips away hair and epidermis from skin (Figure 3).

In the other, a ‘liquor’ of tannic acid extracted from oak-bark gradually suffuses hides hung vertically in loads of twenty or more, or laid in layers. An atmosphere of benign somnolence reigns in the tan-yard at Baker & Co., a warren of nineteenth-century buildings on the outskirts of Colyton, in Devon. Step a little closer, however, and you're on the edge of the abject. On all sides, peaty depths shrouded by a soup of minced bark hint at obscure marinations (Figure 4).

Leather is the apotheosis or sublimation of waste-matter. The by-product of one industry (animal skin) combines with the by-product of another (oak-bark) to create a substance essential to most aspects of everyday life in the rapidly industrialising societies of the late eighteenth century.³² But waste-matter does not sublimate easily. The most notorious demonstration of its resistant qualities occurred during the transfer of the hides from lime-pit to tan-pit. These had first to be scraped clean by hand of a foul viscous residue of hair, epidermis, and fat; and then sunk in a chemical bath – a brew of dog faeces and pigeon dung – to neutralise any remaining trace of lime. Unfairly or not, the stigma of by-product – of spillage, mess, and stench – clung to the industry. The narrator of Dinah Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), which is set in the mid-1790s, approaches his father's tannery with trepidation. ‘Already I perceived the familiar odour; sometimes a not unpleasant barky smell; at other times borne in horrible wafts, as if from a lately-forsaken battle-field.’ The tan-pits, he observes, are ‘deep fosses of abomination, with a slender network of pathways thrown between’.³³ He's exaggerating, no doubt. But something of this sort was happening on a daily basis within a hundred yards or so of the lime-tree bower.

Coleridge knew a tan-yard when he saw one. He understood that the topography of Poole's garden was defined by the spacing of its various functions. An inscription in the copy of Poems on Various Subjects he gave Poole in April 1796 reminisces about a visit to the house on Castle Street during which the two friends had frequently ‘passed by’ the ‘Tartarean tan-pits’ on their way through the garden to the ‘Elysium’ of the arbour, where poems could be recited without fear of interruption.³⁴ The bower, or arbour, had long been a prominent feature in royal and aristocratic gardens in Britain, and thus an object of widespread emulation.³⁵ It functioned primarily as a place of shelter and seclusion, the fragrant jasmine or honeysuckle trained over the roof guaranteeing an immersive experience. Arbours abound in eighteenth-century poems of contemplation and retirement.³⁶ If the tanneries of the time merited comparison with Tartarus – a murky lower region reconfigured in Christian mythology as hell's basement or bottomless pit – that's probably because on occasion they stank the place out. Poole's Elysium arose out of, and was defined in relation to, his Tartarus.

I've long felt uneasy about this part of the poem. The generosity of the feelings expressed towards Lamb cannot altogether conceal the fact that Coleridge has chosen to impute a very specific state of mind to someone who, although in many ways close to him, cannot be assumed to share his view of the world. The conclusion he draws from his apostrophe-fuelled spree is overbearingly metaphysical. That, at any rate, is what Lamb thought. ‘I have sat down to read over again your Satire upon me,’ he wrote to Coleridge on 14 August 1800. ‘I own I was just ready to acknowledge that there is something not unlike good poetry in that Page, if you had not run into the unintelligible abstraction-fit about the manner of the Deity's making Spirits perceive his presence. God, nor created thing alive, can receive any honor from such thin, shew-box, attributes.’⁴⁰ Coleridge, it could be, already knew that the ‘abstraction-fit’ was a problem long before Lamb so unsparingly informed him of the fact. He himself was later to comment vividly in Biographia Literaria on the damage done to ‘unaffected warmth and elevation’ in poetry by ‘the startling hysteric of weakness over-exerting itself which bursts on the unprepared reader in sundry odes and apostrophes to abstract terms’.⁴¹

Coleridge's sidelining of William and Dorothy would have been grist to the mill of the unapologetically austere theory of communication developed by the philosopher and mathematician Michel Serres in the 1960s. Serres proposed that in communication the most important relation is not that between addresser and addressee, but that between communication per se and noise. To hold a dialogue, he maintained, is at once to suppose and to seek to exclude a third party. However hostile the exchange, the two interlocutors can be said to swap roles often enough for us to view them as ‘struggling together’ against a ‘common enemy’: interference, confusion, noise.⁵⁰ Exclusion configures the ecstasy of messaging. It does so by means of a specific rhetorical gesture. Serres acknowledged an important debt to the work of Roman Jakobson.⁵¹ Jakobson's ‘Linguistics and Poetics’ (1960) exerted a very considerable influence on literary criticism through its emphasis on the poetic function of language. That emphasis also proved crucial to the development of stylistics as a discipline combining the study of language with the study of literature.⁵² Equally striking, and of greater significance for Serres, I suspect, was the essay's description of phatic utterance: a range of verbal gestures whose sole function is to initiate dialogue by establishing an appropriate channel of communication – by supposing and seeking to exclude a third party. Jakobson's example is the formula which announces the start of a conversation by phone: ‘Hello, do you hear me?’⁵³ The lyric poem should not necessarily be regarded as exempt from such requirements. The syntactic and semantic emptiness of the apostrophic ‘O’ or ‘Oh!’ readies it for use, when appropriate, as the phatic utterance which establishes a channel of communication. In ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’, the second and third reiterations of ‘My gentle-hearted Charles’ have emptied the phrase of its original substance as an indication of moral character. Its sole purpose, now, is to re-establish and maintain a secure channel of communication by excluding the other members of the hill-top party.

The redoubled exclusion, of people as well as surroundings, has made it possible, remarkably, for Coleridge to think in media. It is the bird he blesses; that is, the channel of communication. For eighteenth-century poets such as James Thomson and William Cowper, the cawing of rooks was a dissonance that could be expected to resolve itself, when heard sympathetically, into a more complex natural harmony.⁵⁴ Coleridge, by contrast, hears the creaking sound of a bird-machine's propulsion. He was subsequently delighted to learn that the American ornithologist William Bartram had heard something similar in the movement of a savannah crane's wings as it flew overhead: ‘their shafts and webs upon one another creek as the joints or working of a vessel in a tempestuous sea’.⁵⁵ Inn-signs are the only other things that creak in the poems Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote at this time.⁵⁶ Nature, here, is almost purely instrumental: the movement of the pair of black wings – ‘Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light’ – less a thing of beauty than a transmission in code. Coleridge imagines that Lamb has messaged him.

The machine I hear in the creaking of the crow's wings in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’ is not a ship in a stormy sea, but an apparatus recently dreamt up in revolutionary France. In April 1793, the National Convention agreed to fund the development of a new telecommunications system consisting of a series of masts erected in prominent positions in full telescopic view of each other. Attached to each mast was a wooden beam with an adjustable arm at either end. Manipulation of the apparatus generated the sequence of discrete coded signals constituting a message. The optical telegraph, intended for military or diplomatic use, and offering at least the promise of end-to-end encryption, was the paradigmatic modern narrowcast medium. ‘This invention’, one commentator declared, ‘is the most perfect method of conveying intelligence which has ever been suggested, or can be easily imagined. It unites secrecy with celerity, and communicates every circumstance necessary to be known.’⁵⁷ In Britain, the Admiralty took note. By the end of 1796, lines of a different but comparable design had been built to connect London to Deal, Sheerness, and Portsmouth.⁵⁸ There is no evidence to suggest that Coleridge ever witnessed them in action. But he understood the basic principle well enough. The Table Talk has him noting, in April 1833, that a signal transmitted by optical telegraph ‘supposes a correspondent telescope’.⁵⁹ The installation of such systems across Europe made it possible for the first time in history to ‘send word’ over great distances with reliable speed and some measure of security. Friedrich Kittler is by no means the only media theorist to have expressed delight at Napoleon's ‘wiring’ of Europe with optical telegraphs. ‘Of all things,’ Kittler observes, ‘it was church steeples – whose bells had, for centuries, provided the sole channel of communication between the authorities and the populace – that were repurposed.’⁶⁰ The platforms which had once supported a broadcast medium transmitting to a large and thus largely unidentifiable audience were now the conduit for messages passing between small groups of individuals already known to each other. Messaging had become an identifiable activity, even if there was as yet no term for it.

‘This Lime-Tree Bower’ is not a political poem; but the context for the emphasis it places on telecommunication was the widespread crackdown on radical dissent of which Poole had already been the victim, and which soon caught up with Coleridge. Although revolution on the French model had lost its lustre, the campaigns for parliamentary reform and for an end to the war with France continued. Clad in the agitator's uniform of blue coat and buff waistcoat, Coleridge made purposeful use to that end of the three main public platforms available to him: lecture-room, newspaper, and Unitarian pulpit. A tour of Midlands pulpits in the early months of 1796 drummed up a thousand new subscriptions to his reforming newspaper, The Watchman.⁶¹ But the odds were stacked against him. His public appearances, he complained, met consistently with ‘Mobs and Mayors, Blockheads and Brickbats, Placards and Press gangs’.⁶² The Watchman folded in May, after its tenth issue. Coleridge was not the only one to give up the declamatory ghost. John Thelwall, an agitator so notorious he felt obliged to armour-plate his hat against assassination attempts, resolved to put himself and his family out of harm's way by joining the sort of community of the like-minded of which Coleridge had long been the advocate.⁶³ Thelwall, however, still brought the blockheads and brickbats with him wherever he went. The gist of the letters Coleridge wrote in answer to his plea for asylum was ‘come! but not yet!’⁶⁴ Or perhaps not ever. For the sorts of community Coleridge had begun to envisage were as much virtual as actual. One way to evade persecution would be to continue to preach the gospel of liberty by means of narrow- rather than broad-cast media. Close the Twitter account, get the WhatsApp group up and running. Coleridge thought to abandon the optimised virality of broadcast media such as the lecture, sermon, or newspaper article in favour of the (in theory) end-to-end encryption of the letter or conversation poem addressed to an ally, disciple, or friend – the letter to one friend quite often containing a poem addressed to another. ‘I am not fit for public Life,’ he told Thelwall in December 1796: ‘yet the Light shall stream to a far distance from the taper in my cottage window.’⁶⁵ But would letters and poems, on their own, ever stream that light far enough fast enough to ensure its maximum effect?

When I say that Coleridge thought in media, I mean that, like many subsequent writers, he was curious to know whether a way could be found to transmit ideas by methods not involving the application of pen to paper. On 10 February 1793, he told Anne Evans that a ‘bird of the air’ had just delivered news of an illness, easily outstripping a letter from her mother. Never, he went on, slightly misquoting Spenser's Faerie Queene, ‘did owl or night-raven (“those mournful messengers of heavy things”) pipe a more loathsome Song’.⁶⁷ War had been declared a week earlier. Getting a certain kind of message through was about to become a perilous operation. In May 1796, in one of his earliest letters to Thelwall, Coleridge described his desire to create a more rapid and more secure ‘channel’ for the transmission of radical ideas than those currently available.⁶⁸ He was much taken, for that reason, with the notion of ‘winged words’: a Homeric phrase which forms part of the title of a treatise on English grammar by his friend and fellow-radical John Horne Tooke, and which he alludes to in a poem celebrating the ‘breeze-like Spirit’ evident in the latter's performance as a candidate in the general election of June 1796.⁶⁹ The first aim of language is to communicate our thoughts, Horne Tooke argued; the second, to do so with maximum ‘dispatch’. His work was largely devoted to the clarification of the second of these aims. For example, he very much approved of abbreviations as the ‘wings of Mercury’ which enable the efficient transfer of thought from one mind to another.⁷⁰ Signalling is a form of abbreviation. In a campaign speech during the 1796 election, Horne Tooke announced that the two most momentous advances made by revolutionary France were the telegraph and the willingness of its military commanders to lead from the front.⁷¹ In the mid-1790s, the new medium was the subject of ample discussion in the press – including The Watchman – and elsewhere (thirty pages separate the entries on ‘Tannery’ and ‘Telegraph’ in volume 18 of the third edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica).⁷² As with all new technologies, there was plenty of scope for flights of fantasy – quite literally so, in the strange case of Francis Olivari's proposal for a ‘chain’ of airborne telegraph stations encircling the coast of Ireland.⁷³

Considered as a representation, the masts and sails of a ship are said to be capable of figuring a variety of incidents with an ‘absolute unarbitrary appropriateness’ of ‘passion & reality’. Coleridge had long been a student of language. He was among a number of philosophers – including Leibniz and Berkeley – who challenged John Locke's hugely influential assertion that in language the relation between signifier and signified is entirely arbitrary. ‘I would endeavour,’ he wrote in a letter to William Godwin of 22 September 1800, ‘to destroy the old antithesis of Words & Things, elevating, as it were, words into Things, & living Things too.’⁷⁷ Like Wordsworth, he sought to define and demonstrate a natural link of some kind – sustained, he thought, by the transcendental power of ‘the Logos’ – between words, images, ideas, and things. It's striking that he should speak of the appropriateness of passion and reality rather than of passion to reality: for him, as for Wordsworth, self and world are co-constitutive. Such is the faith already evident in his insistence in ‘Frost at Midnight’ that his son Hartley will grow up to see and hear in nature ‘The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible /Of that eternal language, which thy God /Utters’ (ll. 59–60). And yet, remarkably, he also saw something else altogether in the organisation of the masts and sails of a ship at sea: a capacity to communicate at a distance as well as to represent. Coleridge had witnessed ships in convoy signalling incessantly by means of sequences of flags during daytime, and lantern-flashes at night. He would have known that the distinctness of such signals depends on digital encoding: that is, on the entirely arbitrary ascription of meaning to clusters of visual or sonic marks. There is nothing natural about a signal. Any telegraph system which attempted to establish the appropriateness of passion and reality would immediately cease to function. For all his profound commitment to the intelligibility of God's eternal language, Coleridge also grasped the principle of mechanical systems involving the manipulation of ropes and levers. The miracle of the ship's outline observed en route to Malta is that it constitutes a representation at once arbitrary (a signal in code) and unarbitrary (an appropriateness of passion and reality). Similarly, in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’, the rook which passes over Coleridge's head having just passed over Lamb's is both a glorious if noisy creature whose splendour fuses passion and reality in the mind of the observer and a phatic utterance – a creaking apostrophe – which suddenly opens an otherwise inconceivable channel of communication. The ecstasy which floods both poem and journal is an ecstasy as much of messaging as of meditative immersion.

There is some evidence to suggest that the apostrophe which had initiated this abrupt turn to oratory did indeed hit its target. The 5 January 1799 issue of The Cambridge Intelligencer juxtaposes a report of a House of Commons debate during which William Pitt had urged renewal of the suspension of Habeas Corpus with the ‘Oh! my countrymen!’ passage from ‘Fears in Solitude’, here titled ‘Address to Britain’.⁸³ The Cambridge Intelligencer was edited by the radical journalist Benjamin Flower, whom Coleridge had known as an undergraduate at Cambridge. Although in some measure devoted to local news, it had a wide enough national circulation to attract the hostile attention of the authorities. Eliza Gould found that the act of distributing the paper in South Molton, near Exeter, where she ran a school for girls, had earned her a reputation as a firebrand. In May 1795, she wrote to Flower asking him to address subsequent letters to a male friend who lived nearby. An X on the envelope would ensure that the letter was forwarded discreetly to her.⁸⁴ Flower somehow managed to keep The Cambridge Intelligencer going from 1793 to 1803, through the worst of the Treason Trials and the Gagging Acts, despite a brief spell in Newgate as a result of a spurious conviction for libel. A practice known at the time as ‘cross reading’ would have encouraged at least some readers of the issue of 5 January 1799 to understand ‘Address to Britain’ as an attempt to establish a channel of communication by supposing and seeking to exclude the kind of interference Pitt's suppression of civil rights so flagrantly exemplified.⁸⁵

‘Fears in Solitude’ was reprinted in all collections of Coleridge's verse from 1817 onwards: collections whose readership was of course by no means restricted to his fellow-citizens. One person who read the poem with especial care was the African American theologian, activist, and educator Alexander Crummell (1819–98).⁸⁶ Crummell was well-travelled. He spent several years lecturing on the anti-slavery circuit in England in order to raise funds for his New York congregation, and then enrolled at Queens' College, Cambridge, to study for a BA degree. The appeal of Cambridge lay in the significant contributions members of the university had made to the cause of abolition: including the Browne medal awarded to Coleridge in 1792 for an ode on the subject.⁸⁷ Crummell graduated in the spring of 1853, and promptly took his family off to Liberia, where he was to remain for the best part of the next two decades in a variety of prominent roles as a missionary, academic, and administrator. Returning to the United States in 1872, he continued to write and preach vigorously, earning the admiration of W. E. B. Du Bois, among others. His ideas were to exert a considerable influence on the African Nationalist and Pan-African movements. Crummell was not the only Black abolitionist to draw inspiration from Coleridge. But he did so more often than anyone else, placing particular emphasis on Coleridge's insistence that slavery had done as much damage to minds as it did to bodies.⁸⁸ ‘Bishops, presbyters and laymen all unite in a dark picturing of an entire race,’ Crummell complained, ‘almost oblivious of any wrong-doing on their part!’ The depravity so readily attributed to the ‘character’ of the race by these commentators was, insofar as it existed, the pure product of the institution of slavery itself. Better that they should take responsibility, as Coleridge had done, for the part they themselves continued to play in developing and maintaining the ideology of that institution. In one of his most powerful rebuttals of racism, Crummell quoted the whole of the ‘Oh! my countrymen!’ passage from ‘Fears in Solitude’, taking care to capitalise Coleridge's admission of the damage done by empire's malign ethos: ‘AND, DEADLIER FAR, OUR VICES’.⁸⁹ The capitalisation signals Crummell's desire to enter into the dialogue inaugurated by Coleridge's apostrophe. The light streaming from the taper in the cottage window had been seen from afar.

‘Fears in Solitude’ does not align itself fully with the public mode activated by apostrophe. Faithful to its sub-genre, it rounds upon itself to end where it began, as Coleridge, returning home at sunset, invokes by inward-facing exclamation the secluded spot – ‘O green and silent dell!’ (l. 228) – in which he had spent much of the afternoon. The ‘meditative joy’ (l. 23) originally experienced while resting there once again floods his being as he looks down on Stowey from the hill-top. He seems at this point to embrace the state of mind he was to denounce in the letter to Wordsworth as an ‘almost epicurean’ selfishness disguised as ‘domestic attachment’. But he knew what he was doing. The poem's earlier crossing of the boundary between exclamation and apostrophe, poetry and oratory, could not now be undone, however emollient its final reflections on the gratitude due to ‘nature's quietness’ for softening an agitated heart (ll. 229–31). It had faced outward resolutely enough to reconfigure itself as a narrowcast medium: telegraphy, albeit not of a natural sort. Benjamin Flower and Alexander Crummell certainly understood it as such.⁹⁰

‘Fears in Solitude’ has enjoyed a different sort of after-life to ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’. But it could be said to have arisen out of its less outspoken if no less visionary precursor. Hazlitt, for one, understood that there was something extraordinary going on in the final movement of the earlier poem. Assessing the sheer breadth of Coleridge's intelligence, he drew on the metaphor which so wonderfully animates that movement: ‘we might add (with more seeming than real extravagance), that scarce a thought can pass through the mind of man, but its sound has at some time or other passed over his head with rustling pinions’.⁹¹ The achievement of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ is to have imagined the capacity of word sent by new methods, telegraphic or otherwise, to stream to a far distance the gospel of love and beauty; and even, at some further level of encryption, the gospel of liberty. It's worth adding that the rook which arrived one summer evening at the Elysium of the lime-tree bower on its straight path from the top of the Quantock had flown directly across Tom Poole's tan-yard, neatly eliding Tartarus by the creak of its wings.