Читать книгу Coleridge: Early Visions - Richard Holmes - Страница 9

Samuel Taylor Coleridge first “sprang to light” in the vicarage of the small market-town of Ottery St Mary in Devon, one autumn morning on 21 October 1772. He was the youngest often children, an unexpected fruit of late vintage; his father, the vicar, was already fifty-three years old and his mother forty-five. They both adored him – a large, fat, greedy baby with a shock of unruly black hair, and huge grey astonishing eyes. “My Father was very fond of me, and I was my mother’s darling – in consequence, I was very miserable.”³

He was christened after his godfather, a local worthy, Mr Samuel Taylor, and always known in the family as “Sam”, a name he grew to dislike with poignant intensity. Like many a youngest child he was petted and indulged, and almost his earliest memory was of being specially carried out by his nurse to hear a strolling musician playing ballads in the moonlight, during the harvest festivities.

To hear our old Musician, blind and grey,

(Whom stretching from my nurse’s arms I kissed,)

His Scottish tunes and warlike marches play,

By moonshine, on the balmy summer-night…⁴

Nursery tradition told of his waywardness and inquisitive mischief. When “carelessly” left by his nurse, he crawled to the fire and pulled out a live coal, badly burning his hand; a Promethean incident also fondly recalled in his poem “To an Infant” (1795). When, at the age of two, he came to be inoculated, he howled when the doctors tried to cover his eyes. It was not the pain, but the concealment of the mystery which upset him. “I manifested so much obstinate indignation, that at last they removed the bandage – and unaffrighted I looked at the lancet & suffered the scratch.”⁵ He was to do something like that for the rest of his life.