Coleridge: Darker Reflections. Richard Holmes

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      The opium doses had completely blocked his bowels. The shame, guilt and horrid symbolism of this seized upon him. His body had closed upon itself, just as his mind had become fruitless and unproductive. He was a vessel full of mephitic horror. His journal becomes extraordinarily explicit, and details his sufferings with weird, unsparing exactitude. “Tuesday Night, a dreadful Labour, & fruitless throes, of costiveness – individual faeces, and constricted orifices. Went to bed & dozed & started in great distress.”⁵⁰

      Wednesday, 9 May was “a day of Horror”. He spent the morning sitting over a bucket of hot water, “face convulsed, & the sweat streaming from me like Rain”. Captain Findlay brought the Speedwell alongside the Maidstone, and sent for Mr Hardy. “The Surgeon instantly came, went back for Pipe & Syringe & returned & with extreme difficulty & the exertion of his utmost strength injected the latter. Good God! – What a sensation when the obstruction suddenly shot up!” Coleridge lay with a hot water bottle on his belly, “with pains & sore uneasiness, & indescribable desires”, instructed to retain himself as long as possible. “At length went: O what a time! – equal in pain to any before. Anguish took away all disgust, & I picked out the hardened matter & after awhile was completely relieved. The poor mate who stood by me all this while had the tears running down his face.”⁵¹

      The humiliation of this experience never left Coleridge. He knew it was caused by opium, and he reverted to it frequently in his Notebooks, and even in his later letters. From now on he dreaded the enema, as the secret sign and punishment for his addiction. The pain of “frightful constipation when the dead filth impales the lower Gut”, was unlike any other illness, because it was shameful and could not be talked about “openly to all” like rheumatism, or other chronic complaints. It crept into his dreams, and haunted him with its grotesque symbolism of false birth and unproductivity. “To weep & sweat & moan & scream for parturience of an excrement with such pangs & such convulsions as a woman with an Infant heir of Immortality: for Sleep a pandemonium of all the shames and miseries of the past Life from earliest childhood all huddled together, and bronzed with one stormy Light of Terror & Self-torture. O this is hard, hard, hard.”⁵²

      It was “a Warning”. Profoundly shaken, he resolved – as he was to do time and again in later years – to do without opium altogether. This resolution was fierce and genuine on each occasion. But what Coleridge could not know was that by now complete withdrawal from the drug was physiologically a virtual impossibility without skilled medical aid. He could no longer do it alone, by a simple effort of will. So each time his will was broken, he suffered and lost confidence in his own powers. This terrible repetition of resolution and failure – like one of the endless, circular punishments of Dante’s Inferno – shaped much of what happened in the second part of his life. Yet he never stopped resolving, and this dogged determination to battle on also became characteristic and took him through experiences that few of his contemporaries shared or even remotely understood.

      Aboard the Speedwell, at midnight on 13 May, he turned towards his Creator for help: “O dear God! give me strength of Soul to make one thorough trial – if I land at Malta – spite all horrors to go through one month of unstimulated Nature – yielding to nothing but manifest danger of Life – O great God! Grant me grace truly to look into myself, & to begin the serious work of Self-amendment…Have Mercy on me Father & God!…who with undeviating Laws Eternal yet carest for the falling of the feather from the Sparrow’s wing.”⁵³

      Crawling back on deck, he found they were in sight of Sardinia. A hawk with battered plumage flew overhead, and settled on the bowsprit, until the sailors shot at it. It flew off heavily among the other ships, and Coleridge listened to the firing from further and further away, as each crew refused it hospitality in turn. “Poor Hawk! O strange Lust of Murder in Man! – It is not cruelty: it is mere non-feeling from non-thinking.”⁵⁴ He ate rhubarb for his bowels, and was cosseted by “the good Mrs Ireland”, never again referred to as “Mrs Carnosity”.

      Gradually his thoughts grew calmer. “Scarcely a day passes but something new in fact or illustration rises up in me, like Herbs and Flowers in a Garden in early Spring; but the combining Power, the power to do, the manly effective Will, that is dead or slumbers most diseasedly – Well I will pray for the Hour when I ‘may quit the tiresome sea & dwell on Shore’…” He sat at the rudder-case and wrote notes on the moon, the notion of Sublimity, and the nature of poetry. “Poetry – a rationalized Dream – dealing out to manifold Forms our own Feelings – that never perhaps were attached by us consciously to our own Personal Selves”.⁵⁵

      7

      By 17 May Coleridge was quite restored, “uncommonly well”, and observing the noble blue peak of Mount Etna rising out of the eastern waters. By dawn on the 18th the Speedwell was in clear sight of Malta, and Mrs Ireland was confiding in him that she expected to be met by her lover.⁵⁶ Captain Findlay put on all sail, and by 4 p.m. they were sliding under the huge sandstone fortifications of Valletta harbour ahead of the Maidstone. Observing the great battlements and citadel, originally built by the Knights of Malta to withstand the Great Siege of 1565, Coleridge felt like Aeneas arriving at Carthage.

      Leaving his boxes to be unloaded, he disembarked in the first cutter and clambered breathlessly up the long stairs of Old Bakery Street, feeling like his own Mariner, “light as a blessed Ghost”. He was glad to be alive. He made straight for the Casa de St Foix, the house of John Stoddart, the Chief Advocate of Malta. It stood at the top of the street, a large building in orange freestone, with brightly painted wooden casements and enclosed balconies, commanding a dramatic view over the Marsamxett harbour. Round it spread a labyrinth of tilting streets, enclosed by huge bastions, which echoed with the bustle and shout of Maltese street-vendors, the barking of dogs, the clanging of church bells and rumble of donkeycarts. Music poured from the taverns, as the innkeepers and prostitutes prepared to welcome the new influx of British sailors.

      Coleridge was stunned by the noise and activity. “They are the noisiest race under Heaven…sudden shot-up explosive Bellows – no cries in London would give you the faintest idea of it. When you pass by a fruit stall, the fellow will put his Hand like a speaking trumpet to his mouth & shoot such a Thunder bolt of Sound full at you.”⁵⁷

      After two hours of confusion and delay among the servants, Stoddart finally appeared and greeted him with a further “explosion of surprise and welcome”. He was given rooms and promised introductions. So began Coleridge’s sixteen-month sojourn on the tiny, rocky, Mediterranean outpost.

      Initially, Coleridge’s plans were uncertain. He would restore his health, travel to Sicily perhaps, keep a journal, maybe find a temporary post in the colonial administration. He would write essays on art or politics, and send articles to Stuart. He would let the Mediterranean sun bleach out his heartache and his opium sickness. What actually fixed these plans was his meeting with the civilian governor of Malta, Sir Alexander Ball. It was, Coleridge later wrote, “that daily and familiar intercourse with him, which made the fifteen months from May 1804 to October 1805, in many respects, the most memorable and instructive period of my life”.⁵⁸ It was also, perhaps, the most unlikely of all his friendships, for Ball was, par excellence, the man of action, a wartime admiral, confidant of Nelson, hero of the battle of Aboukir Bay, and forceful administrator and strategist.

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