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Samuel Taylor Coleridge

View full screen - View 1 of Lot 163. COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR | Christabel: Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep. London: William Bulmer for John Murray, 1816.


The Pains of Sleep

 Ere on my bed my limbs I lay, 

It hath not been my use to pray 
With moving lips or bended knees ; 
But silently, by slow degrees, 
My spirit I to Love compose, 
In humble trust mine eye-lids close, 
With reverential resignation, 
No wish conceived, no thought exprest, 
Only a sense of supplication ; 
A sense o'er all my soul imprest 
That I am weak, yet not unblest, 
Since in me, round me, every where 
Eternal Strength and Wisdom are. 

But yester-night I prayed aloud 
In anguish and in agony, 
Up-starting from the fiendish crowd 
Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me : 
A lurid light, a trampling throng, 
Sense of intolerable wrong, 
And whom I scorned, those only strong ! 
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will 
Still baffled, and yet burning still ! 
Desire with loathing strangely mixed 
On wild or hateful objects fixed. 
Fantastic passions ! maddening brawl ! 
And shame and terror over all ! 
Deeds to be hid which were not hid, 
Which all confused I could not know 
Whether I suffered, or I did : 
For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe, 
My own or others still the same 
Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame. 

So two nights passed : the night's dismay 
Saddened and stunned the coming day. 
Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me 
Distemper's worst calamity. 
The third night, when my own loud scream 
Had waked me from the fiendish dream, 
O'ercome with sufferings strange and wild, 
I wept as I had been a child ; 
And having thus by tears subdued 
My anguish to a milder mood, 
Such punishments, I said, were due 
To natures deepliest stained with sin,-- 
For aye entempesting anew 
The unfathomable hell within, 
The horror of their deeds to view, 
To know and loathe, yet wish and do ! 
Such griefs with such men well agree, 
But wherefore, wherefore fall on me ? 
To be beloved is all I need, 
And whom I love, I love indeed.

John Ashbery

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