Читать книгу Coleridge: Early Visions - Richard Holmes - Страница 8

In later life he talked of boyhood and schooldays with many of his closest friends, and wrote vividly about it in his poetry, his letters, his Biographia, and his private Notebooks. In all these records, a rich mixture of tragi-comedy, he developed the self-portrait of a precocious, highly imaginative child, driven into “exile” in the world, before he was emotionally prepared for its rigours, by the early death of his father. Cut off from the universe of nature and family affections, he saw himself as an exceptional creature, both intellectually brilliant and morally unstable. He was to make it one of the archetypes of Romantic childhood. This is the picture he presented to his brother George, a sober clergyman, in a poem written at the age of twenty-five:

Me from the spot where first I sprang to light

Too soon transplanted, ere my soul had fix’d

Its first domestic loves; and hence through life

Chasing chance-started friendships.¹

Thirty years later, at the age of fifty-five, talking to his physician and confidant, the surgeon James Gillman, he expressed the same feelings, though now raised into the sonorous prose of his late manner. “When I was first plucked up and transplanted from my birthplace and family, at the death of my dear father, whose revered image has ever survived in my mind…Providence (it has often occurred to me) gave the first intimation, that it was my lot, and that it was best for me, to make or find my way of life a detached individual, a Terrae Filius…”² He was to be a solitary voyager, an archetypal “son of the Earth”, an orphan of the storm, flung out to wander over the world in search of visions. Or so, most wonderfully, he said.