Poem of the Day

Psyche

The butterfly the ancient Grecians made
The soul's fair emblem, and its only name -
But of the soul, escaped the slavish trade
Of mortal life! - For in this earthly frame
Ours is the reptile's lot, much toil, much blame,
Manifold motions making little speed,
And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed.

S.T. Coleridge

Coleridge is my favourite poet not because of his supposedly opium-fuelled Kubla Khans and Ancient Mariners (though I do love those too) but because he writes about life, and if I'm feeling grim and lonely I find a friend in him.  Nature, struggle, despondency, the Elements, transcendence, the Stars, cottages, fireside, the comfort of a dying flame and the vulnerable, doomed warmth of loved ones. I identify with his struggle, physical, psychological, spiritual, through howling winds and wintry blasts.  I can easily imagine going back to the early 1800s and spending a pleasant afternoon by a fireside chatting with Coleridge about ever-present Death and the difficulties and possibilities of transcending the trials of a doomed mortal life.

Poetry, and Psychogenic Osmosis

It was National Poetry Day yesterday.  I love poetry. But there's nothing worse than looking at your Twitter timeline and seeing folk banging on about it.  I dislike the feeling of being churlish and sour of spirit (where's the harm in tweeting poetry?), while at the same time I think it's quite a sane reaction; Twitter is no place to be, if you want to 'create' anything other than kitten pictures, puns and one-liners. The inner disquiet produced by all this, is enough to put me off writing, completely.  Well, for about five minutes.  Almost!
It's not really that though.  For me, the whole literary thing feels a bit distasteful and uncomfortable.  There are a couple of exceptions though.  There's a John Betjeman account I like, and a Richard Jefferies.
My favourite poet is probably Coleridge.  I'm fondest of him anyway.  It's probably the opium.  I've most likely absorbed quantities of it via his poems, through some form of psychogenic osmosis.
Frost at Midnight is probably my favourite Coleridge poem.  'The Frost performs its secret ministry,  Unhelped by any wind*.' 
I'm unlikely to have discovered it had I not bought a small second hand edition of a selection of his poems after browsing in a second hand bookshop about twenty years ago.  The bookshop closed ten years ago, at least, and now there is nowhere to browse, unless I go to a city.
Don't start me off complaining again, but you can't browse books on the internet.  You just can't.


There once was a girl with a plan
To cook with an old frying pan
She fried up some bread
And stood on her head
In a market in Uzbekhistan.

S.T. Coleridge (after)

*titters at the word wind

Quote of the day - from Coleridge's Frost at Midnight

...again...it is a lovely poem though.


"Or of the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in quiet icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet moon."

Coleridge Binge, and the smell of second hand books

I tend to go through obsessive phases with writers and at the moment it's Coleridge.

I'm not new to Coleridge. I went through a Romantic Poet phase about twenty years ago, and read everything I could lay my hands on by Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth and outriders such as Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt. It all felt very fresh and real, and easy to relate to. Sometimes linear time doesn't seem to matter at all.

At university I studied Mary Wollstonecraft. It was an extremely interesting time for women, but they were limited by their biology in a way that men obviously weren't. Crude methods of contraception at best. Dropping like flies due to ghastly puerperal complications. Wollstonecraft died soon after giving birth to her daughter, also called Mary, who of course grew up to write Frankenstein and have, I would say, a pretty grim time as Shelley's wife. Who knows what she might have achieved had she lived? She'd already visited Paris during the revolution, and written several books.

Frost at Midnight appeals to me especially, because I love the imagery of ice and frost and also because Coleridge set it at the fireside in his "cottage", which sounds not dissimilar to my own pretty draughty ramshackle and tiny mid-19thC. home.

Here is a link to Coleridge's cottage.

I really like my copy of Coleridge's poems. It's very small, circa 1900, published by Harrap, with a lovely illustration from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. You can stick it in your pocket quite easily. I bought it in a second hand bookshop years ago for three pounds. Where have all the second hand bookshops gone? Ruined by Ebay, that's where. It's not the same, shopping for old books online - you have to hold a book in your hands and SMELL IT to know if you want it or not.

Quote of the Day (2) Coleridge - a fragment from the life of dreams

'Call it a moment's work (and such it seems),
This tale's a fragment from the life of dreams;
But say, that years matured the silent strife,
And 'tis a record from the dream of life.'

S.T. Coleridge, Phantom or Fact (1830)