Leigh Hunt on Coleridge

age 65

THE EXAMINER. 

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No. 720. SUNDAY, Oct. 21, 1821. 

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SKETCHES OF THE LIVING POETS. 

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No. 4.—Mr. Coleridge

Kubla Khan is a voice and a vision, an everlasting tune in our mouths, a dream fit for Cambuscan and all his poets, a dance of pictures such as Giotto and Cimabue, revived and re-inspirited, would have made for a Storie of Old Tartarie, a piece of the invisible world made visible by a sun at midnight and sliding before our eyes. 

Beware, beware,  His flashing eyes, his floating hair!  Weave a circle round him thrice,  And close your lips with holy dread,  For he on honey dew hath fed,  And drank of the milk of Paradise.

Justly is it thought that to be able to present such images as these to the mind, is to realise the world they speak of. We could repeat such verses as the following down a green glade, a whole summer’s morning:— 

A damsel with a dulcimer  In a vision once I saw,  A lovely Abyssinian maid;  And on her dulcimer she played,  Singing of Mount Aborah.

As to the “Ancient Mariner,” we have just this minute read it again, and all that we have been saying about the origin of the author’s poetry, appears to be nonsense. Perhaps it is, and we are not sorry that it should be. All that we are certain of is, that the “Ancient Mariner” is very fine poetry, and that we are not the “one of three” to whom the sea-faring old greybeard is fated to tell his story, for we are aware of the existence of other worlds beside the one about us, and we would not have shot the solitary bird of good omen, nor one out of a dozen of them. 

It is an Ancient Mariner,  And he stoppeth one of three:  “By thy long grey beard and thy glittering eye,  Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?

The Bridegroom’s doors are open’d wide,  And I am next of kin;  The guests are met, the feast is set;  Mayst hear the merry din.”

He holds him with his skinny hand,  “There was a ship,” quoth he,  “Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!”  Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

He holds him with his glittering eye—  The wedding guest stood still,  And listens like a three year’s child: