Coleridge

Midlife by Julie Cadwallader-Staub This is as far as the light of my understanding has carried me: an October morning a canoe built by hand a quiet current above me the trees arc green and golden against a cloudy sky below me the river responds with perfect reflection a hundred feet deep a hundred feet high. To take a cup of this river to drink its purple and gray its golden and green to see a bend in the river up ahead and still say yes. "Midlife" by Julie Cadwallader-Staub. Reprinted with permission of the author. It's the birthday of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge(books by this author), born in Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire, England (1772). He was a very ambitious young man, who lectured on religion, wrote journalism, and single-handedly tried to launch his own magazine. But he was exhausting himself and falling into a depression when he was introduced to the poet William Wordsworth. They met only briefly in 1795, but they struck up a correspondence and began exchanging poems. Wordsworth encouraged Coleridge to stop writing journalism and focus on poetry, and Coleridge took the advice. That first year of their friendship was the most productive period of Coleridge's life. They both liked to compose their poetry while walking, so they took long walks together throughout that summer, though Wordsworth preferred to stay on the path while Coleridge liked rough terrain. That winter, they spent several days hiking along the coast, and to pass the time, they made up a gothic ballad about a tragic sea voyage. Coleridge became obsessed with the poem when he got home, filling it with images from nightmares he'd had since he was a kid. It became his masterpiece, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798), the story of a sailor who brings a curse on his ship when he kills a bird. And for the rest of his voyage, he is tormented by sea monsters and the ghosts of his dead shipmates. Within a few years of writing "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Coleridge's life began to fall apart. He became addicted to opium, which ruined his friendship with Wordsworth. He had a habit of starting enormous projects that he could not then finish, including a 1,400-page work of geography, a two-volume history of English prose, a translation of Faust, a musical about Adam and Eve, a history of logic, a history of German metaphysics, a study of witchcraft, and an encyclopedia. His friends hated the fact that he had wasted so much of his talent. They'd all considered him the most brilliant writer and thinker they'd ever known, but he accomplished so little. Near the end of his life, his friend Charles Lamb wrote of Coleridge: "His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Archangel a little damaged."