Читать книгу Coleridge: Darker Reflections - Richard Holmes - Страница 5

“Signals, Drums, Guns, Bells, & the sound of Voices weighing up & clearing Anchors”. So Coleridge fled south aboard the Speedwell, expecting to die but half-hoping to be reborn. “Monday April 9th, 1804, really set sail…No health or Happiness without Work.”¹

Behind him he left his family under Southey’s care in the Lake District; he left the Wordsworths and his love Sara Hutchinson; he left Charles Lamb and Daniel Stuart and all his London friends; each of them anxiously speculating about his future. “Far art thou wandered now,” wrote Wordsworth in The Prelude, “in search of health,/And milder breezes…Speed thee well”.²

Ahead of him lay the glittering Mediterranean, the legendary outposts of Gibraltar, Malta and Sicily, a war-zone of fleets and harbour-fortresses, where he would fight his own battles against opium and despair. “Do we not pity our past selves?” he reflected in his new Notebook, using a special metallic pencil designed to withstand sea-salt. “Is not this always accompanied by Hope? It makes the Images of the Past vivid…Are not vivid Ideas themselves a sort of pleasure, as Music whether sad or lively, is always Music?”³

Down in his cabin on the first night, he watched the lights of England recede along the Cornish coast through the brass porthole above his narrow berth. The 130-ton ship moved uneasily, not rolling on its beam, but rocking sharply from stem to stern, “as a cruel Nurse rocks a screaming baby”.⁴ Coleridge lay with his eyes closed, thirty-one years old, but hearing childhood music. “Thought of a Lullaby song, to a Child on a Ship: great rocking Cradle…creak of main top Irons, rattle of Ropes, & squeak of the Rudder…And so play Bo-peep with the Rising Moon, and the Lizard Light. ‘There is thy native country, Boy! Whither art thou going to…’”⁵