Wordsworth And Coleridge Poem by gershon hepner

Wordsworth wrote while walking over gravel,
in straight lines that prevented interruptions,
despite the fact his spirit used to travel
towards the recollection of eruptions
occurring in his level mind whenever
he took a walk with Dorothy or friends.
These recollections proved him to be clever,
but since it seems he never got the bends
when coming up for air, tranquility
became his hallmark, his poetic trade
persuading us perfectability
may be obtained with no price to be paid.

When Coleridge wrote, he chose uneven ground,
and dallied with the wind just like an eagle,
a mariner whose mind became unsound,
addicted to a substance now illegal.
Although he didn’t choose the straight and narrow
paths that William Wordsworth used to love,
he knew that birds like linnet and the sparrow
declare, “I love, I love, ” as does the dove,
but opium and his instability
forced him to leave the man he most admired;
though he had shown him great humility
he knew just when his sell-by date expired.


Richard Eder reviews “The Friendship” by Adam Sisman (“Coleridge Was Wordsworth’s Albatross, ” NYT, March 15,2007) :
By contrast with his sociable and often indolent friend, whose self-indulgence charmed others into feeling indulged, the austere and harder-working Wordsworth had no such success to compensate for his literary woes. For a number of years his main support was the love and artistic acuteness of his sister: “She gave me eyes, she gave me ears.” The price of poetic soaring, despite all that dragged him down, was a methodical discipline that edged into arrogance and intolerance of criticism. Hazlitt, who admired them both, drew a vivid contrast: “Coleridge’s manner is more full, animated, and varied; Wordsworth’s more equable, sustained, and internal. The one might be termed more dramatic, the other more lyrical. Coleridge has told me that he himself liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption.” (Uninterrupted discursiveness marks Wordsworth’s weaker stuff.) Part of their gradual falling-out stemmed from Wordsworth’s disciplined stability and the growing damage inflicted by the growing instability and wildness of the opium-addicted Coleridge. A hellish marriage — largely the result of a fecklessness that approached heartlessness, and of an obsessive love for Wordsworth’s sister-in-law — made things worse. The root of the split, though, lay in the nature of the two men’s attachment. Coleridge, who intimately doubted not his poetic genius but whether he could sustain it, invariably hailed Wordsworth as his master. Wordsworth, who required the admiration, agreed. So much so that when they collaborated in “Lyrical Ballads, ” he insisted on appearing as the sole name on the title page and retained sole copyright, even though five poems, including “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ” were Coleridge’s. Coleridge apparently agreed; but, according to Mr. Sisman, this and other matters (Wordsworth’s refusal to include “Christabel”) shattered him. Ill and humiliated, he wrote to William Godwin that “by shewing to him what true Poetry was, ” Wordsworth “made him know, that he himself was no Poet.” The account of the last years is desolate. The two met occasionally in company but barely spoke (though there was a brief, chilly European tour with Wordsworth’s daughter) . If the self-dramatizing Coleridge inevitably emerges more vividly, he also emerges as an intolerable burden. Mr. Sisman manages neutrality, and it is the neutrality of tragedy.


3/15/07,3/1/09