The Friendship by Adam Sisman

Author:Adam Sisman [Sisman, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007368716
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2006-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

From ‘Tintern Abbey’:

‘Knowing that Nature never did betray

The heart that loved her …’

* For some reason Coleridge did not take the opportunity to call on the Morning Post’s Daniel Stuart, who expressed the fear in a letter to Sara that he might somehow have offended his contributor.

* The poem may have been retitled to play down Coleridge’s radical past; or perhaps to conceal the fact that it had already appeared in print.

9

SEPARATION

‘Over what place does the Moon hang to your eye, my dearest Sara?’ Coleridge enquired of his wife in a letter written two nights later. ‘To me it hangs over the left bank of the Elbe; and a long trembling road of moonlight reaches from thence up the stern of our Vessel, and there it ends.’1 The packet lay at anchor off Cuxhaven, in the mouth of the estuary. They had made an unusually speedy crossing, in only forty-eight hours. Early next morning the crew hauled anchor and sailed upriver. The party disembarked at Hamburg that same afternoon, Wednesday, 19 September 1798.*

They found Hamburg filthy, smelly, noisy and populated by avaricious rogues ready to cheat foreigners at every opportunity – though the locals were ‘frantic with Joy’ at the news of Nelson’s crushing victory over the French Mediterranean fleet at the Battle of the Nile, which had left Bonaparte and his army stranded in Egypt. A celebratory dinner was held, commemorated by the firing of twenty-one guns, and when Coleridge entered the concert hall the band struck up ‘Rule Britannia’.

An audience with Klopstock, † ‘the venerable Father of German poetry’, proved a disappointment, as Coleridge reported to Poole. ‘There was no comprehension in the Forehead – no weight over the eyebrows – no expression of peculiarity, either moral or intellectual, in the eyes; – there was no massiveness in the general Countenance.’ His upper jaw was toothless, his lower jaw all black teeth, his legs swollen. Worst of all, he wore a periwig and powdered his hair, ‘& Powder ever makes an old man’s face look dirty. It is an honor to Poets & Great Men that you think of them as parts of Nature; and any thing of Trick & Fashion wounds you in them as much as when you see Yews clipped into miserable peacocks. – The Author of the Messiah should have worn his own Grey Hair. Powder and the Periwig were to the Eye what Mr Milton would be to the Ear.’ Klopstock was known as ‘the German Milton’, but Coleridge indignantly repudiated the comparison: ‘a very German Milton indeed!’ He had read a little of Klopstock’s verse, ‘& that little was sad Stuff!’ Their conversation was conducted in French, Wordsworth interpreting Klopstock’s words to Coleridge.2

Dorothy was distressed to see ‘a surly-looking German driving a poor Jew forward with foul language, and making frequent use of a stick’. She noticed the ‘cold unfeeling cruelty’ in the countenance of the bystanders, and was shocked to discover that the law provided Jews with no protection against such insolence.

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