Coleridge in the Mirror

I’ll tell the story as best as I remember it.
As I drove the car towards Grasmere,
my girlfriend looked out of the window and said,
‘What will the sky be like when we’re dead?
Will it still burn as blue, or will it fade,
even just a little, out of respect?
Doesn’t it make you bitter
to think it could stay the same warm but indifferent blue
when we’re lowered into the shadows of our graves?’

As I parked the car
a poem’s distance from Wordsworth’s house, I thought,
Did people in 1800 look at the sky and see its dazzling blueness
and hope it would fade a little,
when they were gone?
As I locked the car
I saw the sky above me was as blue as it could be,
so they were vain in their hope, if they hoped that.
How awful it is to think the world
will still turn after you’re dead –
part of me wishes it would stop spinning, if only for a minute,
out of respect. Or acknowledgement.

I was brought up to believe the end of the world
would happen in my lifetime -
not surprising, given the poise of nuclear weapons -
a Biblical Armageddon
that would coincide with my death –
it made some kind of sense.
A justice. A marriage. An arrangement.

But the bargain will no longer be kept,
and this cruel divorce is killing me indeed.
The merry-go-round of the planet
will still keep turning without me,
almost eager in its rush to keep spinning,
as if it wants to throw us off
and that’s what brings the chill.

When we were inside Dove Cottage,
she said, ‘Look, if I hold my hand out now, in this spot,
do you think I can touch Coleridge’s hand two hundred years ago
when he sat here, or stood here,
or looked out of the window here at some frost at midnight
or the moon sliding behind clouds or whatever it was?
The time is different, but the place is the same –
can we get a union out of this?’

With a Christmas excitement in her eyes
and her top teeth biting her lower lip
as she held out her fingers, she said,
‘Will he know I am here, two hundred years in the future –
maybe he can sense
some invisible hand brushing against his,
and maybe even wrote about it:
maybe some poem of his has lain forgotten,
slipped down the back of some antique furniture somewhere,
and it will be discovered one day,
when perhaps some farmer in some nameless village
chops up for firewood
that anonymous worm-drilled chest of drawers
that’s been in the back bedroom since his grandmother was a child -
some mysterious poem,
falling vulnerably out of the splinters
and blinking in the sunlight,
written between the albatross
and the lime-tree bower,
when Coleridge was alone in a room
and felt an invisible reader reaching back into the past
to touch him -
and he was mystified and wrote it down.
Maybe one day the poem shall appear,
and we shall read this marriage on faded paper
and it shall feel so strange.’

Well. That was that.
There was no reply from the room’s silence.
The four walls kept looking back at us,
and the ceiling and floor invited us to shrug
and forget the moment.
We wandered round the rest of the house,
walked around Grasmere, and drove home.
And as you know,
the next day you couldn’t escape the news -

All over the country,
people were getting up in the morning to wash or shave
and through their sleepy eyes as they looked in the mirror
they were shocked to see their reflection had been stolen -
only this poet from 1800 staring back at them instead.
What did it mean?
And it’s an old story now but as you know,
all over the world people went to doctors and psychiatrists
and priests and policemen to try to find the answer,
but since that day this poet is still locked in everyone’s mirror,
staring back in despair, never blinking,
and no-one can make him go away.

What do the biographies say about Coleridge?
A drug addict and failure
who didn’t live up to his promise.
But we are all Coleridge, I suspect:
fearing we’ve wasted our talents,
wondering where we went wrong.

Maybe you sit in the chair on Sunday nights,
haunted with the memory of a time
when you were much younger,
when the blue in the sky was your bold future
and the white in the clouds was your purity,
and the vibrance of the world around you
was an exclamation mark of proof of what was inside you,
and you were going to show everyone what you were made of
whilst the colours of the world
were a reflection of the intensity
of what you were going to achieve.

That talent, vision, hope…
How could it not unfold?
How could a promise so vivid not blossom?
On Sunday nights in December
with the room around your sullen chair a cocooned shroud,
you may feel the blue sky in your childhood
and the clouds and the dance of birds
and the weave of eager grass
and the hot sunlight on the windowsill
were just con-men humouring you
and laughing amongst themselves behind your back.
How can life itself, and the innocence in white clouds,
betray you?

Some of us failed because we didn’t try enough.
Understandable. But get this:
Many of us failed because, so scared of failure,
and so scared of being irresponsible
in handling this one life and one life only that was handed to us,
that we tried so hard,
and tried harder and harder out of fear
that we tried too hard to get things right,
and ironically we ended up being failures.

That was Coleridge, I reckon:
not the lazy man of the biographies,
but so responsible and dedicated
to nail the mysteries inside him
and the strange fabric of existence
that all his fears ran out of control
and the stress turned him to opium
and his life fell apart in his hands.

Last night, I brushed my teeth
as Coleridge stared back at me,
and then before I got into bed -
where my girlfriend lay sobbing,
crying so hard I thought her tongue would split in two -
I looked out at the black sky crammed full of stars.
Up there, behind this nightmare sky
that’s now our constant daytime companion,
permanently and forever drained of all blue
since Coleridge came back,
I told myself I could almost sense
an alien spaceship in orbit above the planet
as it has done undiscovered for eighty thousand years,
a silver wheel lying empty, long since deserted,
its mission to explore the Earth abandoned at the last minute
because the years of perfectionist preparation
meant some tiny thing got overlooked,
as though some trifle, like a fuse to control an airlock door,
only got checked five times instead of six
but it nevertheless failed and ruined everything.
And the aliens returned home in nuclear lifeboats
to the other side of the galaxy in their shame and despair
and long since forgot us.

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~ by Paul Badger on 17 January, 2010.