Читать книгу Coleridge: Darker Reflections - Richard Holmes - Страница 22

The passage took fifty-five days – almost twice the outward voyage – and lived up to Coleridge’s worst expectations. He spent much of his time in his cabin, sick and constipated, and for once kept no journal at all of his impressions. They were boarded by a Spanish privateer, but Captain Derkheim talked them free, after throwing official papers (including some of Coleridge’s Malta notes) into the sea. Coleridge submitted to twelve enemas, “my dread of and antipathy increased every time”, each administered by Derkheim in conditions of pain and humiliation. The sense of violation and punishment horrified him, as he later admitted to Southey. “Tho’ the Captain was the strongest man on board – it used to take all the force of his arm, & bring the blood up in his face before he could finish. Once I brought off more than a pint of blood – & three times he clearly saved my Life.”¹⁹¹

Both Derkheim and Russell continued to behave with “every possible Tenderness”, though their own feelings can only be imagined. For the rest it was a battering, claustrophobic voyage: “working up against head winds, rotting and sweating in calms, or running under hard gales, with the dead lights secured”. Russell later wrote home of their grim experience, saying that Coleridge had nearly died. Coleridge himself wrote that “no motive on earth” would make him venture on another sea-voyage of more than three days: “I would rather starve in a hovel”.

Confined in his quarters, he grew fat and pallid, and his Mediterranean tan faded away. Gazing out through the closed porthole, he thought distractedly of Asra at Grasmere. It was perhaps now that the first images of his fine, bleak meditative poem on their love, “Constancy to an Ideal Object” began to coalesce.

…Home and Thou are one.

The peacefull’st cot, the moon shall shine upon,

Lulled by the thrush, and wakened by the lark,

Without thee were but a becalméd bark,

Whose Helmsman on an ocean waste and wide

Sits mute and pale his mouldering helm beside.¹⁹²

But it would be many years before the verse were completed.

The Gosport finally sighted Portsmouth in early August, where it was quarantined, and then allowed to continue eastwards into the Thames estuary. Here Coleridge took the earliest chance of disembarking at the little quayside and customs post of Stangate Creek, on the edge of the Medway. He “leaped on land” on the afternoon of 17 August 1806. Leaving his box of books and papers in Captain Derkheim’s care, to be taken on up to Wapping, he hurried to “a curious little Chapel” by the quayside at Lower Halstow, which still exists, overlooking the mournful expanse of the Kentish marshes towards Sheerness. He found it open and empty, and dropping to his knees “offered, I trust, as deep a prayer as ever without words or thoughts was sent up by a human Being”.

Going outside again, he surveyed the lapping waters and the tide running up through the baked mud and yellowing bulrushes of his native land. “Almost immediately after landing Health seemed to flow in upon me, like the mountain waters upon the dry stones of a vale-stream after Rains.”¹⁹³ The following morning he was in London, at the Bell Inn in the Strand, wondering if he had enough money for a “decent Hat” and a pair of shoes.