Eastern Dreams by Paul Nurse

Author:Paul Nurse
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780670063604
Publisher: Penguin Canada

Among the literary Romantics who found solace and inspiration in The Thousand and One Nights and similar works, the writings of Coleridge, Byron and Poe are indivisible from the idea of the East as a place of alien fascination. Each writer’s work is strewn with elements taken from the Nights, the mock-oriental tale or the simple attractiveness of eastern vistas, but each uses this influence for their individual purposes. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetical heart bears the deep impact of an imaginary Orient, the outgrowth of a dreamy nature that saw him drawn like a magnet to such works as the Arabian Nights and related pastiches like James Ridley’s 1764 Tales of the Genii.

Coleridge claimed to have first read the Arabian Nights at the age of six, which, even given a tendency toward exaggeration, still indicates the extent of his precocity. Unlike most who read the work, however, Coleridge believed he detected a sinister quality to the tales, which he found disquieting. In addition to its glamour, it seemed the world depicted in the Nights had the added capacity for inspiring feelings of terror and grief; to Coleridge, this was a domain where unfettered emotions were not liberating, but all-consuming and therefore dangerous.

As a child, Coleridge wrote that the Arabian Nights “made so deep an impression on me that I was haunted by spectres, whenever I was in the dark—and I distinctly remember the anxious and fearful eagerness, with which I use to watch the window, in which the books lay….” In the daytime, the young Coleridge sat by a sun-kissed wall of his room and read the Nights obsessively until his schoolteacher father decided they were having an ill effect and burned them to cure his daydreaming son of such mania.

A destructive act that came much too late. From his earliest reading “of Faery Tales, and Genii etc.,” Coleridge came to the conclusion that his “mind had been habituated to the Vast—and I never regarded my senses … as the criteria of my belief.” For Coleridge, the oriental world of the Nights was a mélange of wonder and fright—a place of grand and lengthy journeys taking the pilgrim into unknown vistas that might devour him. Travel tales abound in the West too, but it was the East, realm of fascination and terror, that presented Samuel Taylor Coleridge with a threatening aspect tied to those issues of fate and retribution displayed so prominently in his poetry.

Drug addiction didn’t help, as at least part of Coleridge’s attitude was exacerbated by his famous addiction to opium. The increasing use of Chinese opium in Europe during this time, mixed with the idea of the East as an exotic wonderland, gave rise to an astonishing array of orientalized dreams and hallucinations on the part of users, of which those of Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey are among the most famous.

The images in Coleridge’s recorded opium jags as well as his poetry brim with reflections born of Europe’s imaginary Orient, allied with the threatening element he detected in the Arabian Nights.

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