Andrew Keanie on Hartley Coleridge’s unpublished poem, ‘Windermere Lake’

Windermere Lake

Sweet lake, I really do not, cannot know

How much the beauty that to thee I owe,

How much I gain or how much I bestow.

For beauty is no object of the Eye

No calculable form or quality,

It is not aught that Scale or Scales can try.

It is the yearning of the immortal mind

Too glad in this sad banishment to find

A dim reflex of what it left behind.

Signed. Hartley Coleridge

Copied from the Visitors’ Book at Low Wood Inn on the East Bank of Windermere Lake 1½ miles from Ambleside, by Joseph Hume 23 Sepr 1838.

I am indebted to Peter Urbach (Hon. Archivist of the Reform Club in London) for sending me the previously unpublished poem, ‘Windermere Lake’, which he received included in a collection of documents from a direct descendant of Joseph Hume MP (1777-1855). The poem was copied by Hume from the visitors’ book of Low Wood Inn, a hostelry on the east bank of Lake Windermere that survives to this day. It seems that Hume was a guest at the inn in 1838, during the long parliamentary recess that lasted from the middle of August until the following February. At this time, Hartley’s father had been dead four years, and James Gillman’s (1782-1839) Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1838) had just been published. Hartley had been considering writing a substantial piece about his father – perhaps to counteract Gillman’s rather unimaginative biography, and, also in answer to Thomas De Quincey’s (1785-1859) scandalous (though penetrating) account of STC in Tait’s Magazine in 1834. Hartley was not keen to commit himself to producing a comprehensive account of STC’s genius. He said to Henry Nelson Coleridge (1798-1843): ‘I shall disclaim all pretensions of taking the height and measure of his [STC’s] mind, in its completeness, not on the ground of my own incapacity, for it is a bad kind of Egotism to be talking to the Public about one’s own incapacities – but on the plain common-sense argument, that such an attempt were premature till his philosophical remarks are publici juris [open to or exercisable by all persons].’ (letter, 27 March 1837)

Also, at this time, Sara Coleridge (1802-52), Hartley’s gifted sister, had just published Phantasmion (1837), in which her inheritance of her father’s imaginative power is abundantly clear. Hartley was thinking of reviewing it. In short, Hartley Coleridge was thrumming with provisional plans and inclined to improvisation. Many of the things his father had pursued, such as love, wisdom, and happiness, could not be pursued directly because the attempt to focus on them puts them more emphatically out of focus.

a great Poet must be, implicite` if not explicite`, a profound Metaphysician. He may not have it in logical coherence, in his Brain & Tongue; but he must have it by Tact / for all sounds, & forms of human nature he must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent Desart, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an Enemy upon the Leaves that strew the Forest—; the Touch of a Blind Man feeling the face of a darling Child ...(S.T. Coleridge to William Sotheby, 1802).

Hartley knew all too well that his father was implicit in him, and that to force his father – and his father’s philosophy – into the explicitness of a definitive account would be tantamount to an omission of the essential. ‘What might old Pindar be, if once again / The harp and voice were trembling with his strain.’ (Complete Poetical Works, edited by Ramsay Colles, George Routledge and Sons, London, 1908, 125) Once the Romantic child, always the Romantic child; Hartley had become such an echoic and tangential thinker that, now, just at the beginning of the Victorian era, any poem he dashed off (or indeed any that was copied by someone else, as in the case of ‘Windermere Lake’, as copied by Joseph Hume) would quickly take on something of the character of a historical document.

In ‘Windermere Lake’, the immortal mind can be glimpsed in the melancholy contemplation of its ‘banishment’. Readers of Wordsworth are familiar – and none more familiar than Hartley – with the spiritual signposts amidst the actual topography of the Lake District. The water, out of which a drowned man might be winched, or over which a little boy might row a ‘stolen boat’ in the moonlight, seems revealed again as a repository for the poet’s sense of beauty, and his sense of himself as a soul fallen into matter – a finite being whose longings are infinite.

Hartley wrote elsewhere of ‘the eternal struggling out of time’ (Complete Poetical Works, 117). The poem above momentarily establishes a downbeat contentment with the straitened circumstances of ‘the immortal mind’. Perhaps the following, from a letter he wrote to his brother in law six months earlier, can provide some philosophical context: ‘it is possible that a man may be a Platonist… in faith and hope and desire, and an Aristotelian… the natural, I may say, inevitable operation of his mind may be Aristotelian, and yet, he may be conscious that there must be certain Platonic truths essential and possible, which he cannot integrate with his self-constitutive individuality’ (letter to Henry Nelson Coleridge, 27 March, 1837).

In ‘Windermere Lake’, Hartley’s humility is much more effective than a performance of perceptual authority: ‘I really do not, cannot know’. This spontaneous little hymn is to an intellectual beauty for which the poet has had to offer the reader a circumscription in lieu of a description or explanation. In saying what beauty is not, he might adumbrate what it is. As regards the birth of this lovely poem in Hartley’s mind, he was at that time, in his early forties, a melange of literary and philosophical reverberations, and he was frequently in so susceptible a mood that almost any object coming within his range of perceptions might have begun to speak to him and generate in him some lively, penetrating, and original thought. On suddenly seeing Windermere Lake from a certain angle, its surface so peculiarly alive with its agitations of wavering shadows here and its glimmers of sunlight there, the poet, inevitably, apostrophised.

‘No man is an island, entire unto itself’, wrote John Donne (1572-1631) in his Devotions (1624), but this has been misconstrued by journalists and sociologists to mean that the functionality of society alone can give us authentic values. Hartley Coleridge may have lived more like a medieval hermit than, say, a head of state, or an ambassador, or a diplomat (or any other sort of man of the world whose values tend to be qualitative), but he was always very alert to the internal relations and needs of society. He was not so much isolated from society as he was from its delusions and bad habits.

Hartley Coleridge’s selected poems, Genius Disregarded, is published by Greenwich Exchange.