oleridge suffered through the years before his arrival in Nether Stowey. Among the personal battles were ambivalence toward his marriage to Sara Fricker, increased reliance on laudanum to assuage bouts of neuralgia, a failed literary enterprise which lasted for only ten issues (the Watchman), self-doubt, an inability to focus and raise money to sustain his family, and the birth of his first son. Foremost amongst these difficulties was the evaporation of his long-held friendship with Robert Southey, which had seen the two young poets through the evolution of the Pantisocratic endeavor, engagement to the Fricker sisters, a temporary stay in Bristol to revitalize the vision of their commune, and the various shared enthusiasms and criticisms of ambitious, intelligent, charged minds. This decayed to ignoring each other’s presence in passing in the street.  Coleridge wrote in the November of 1795, “You [Southey] have left a large void in my Heart…I know no man big enough to fill it” (qtd. by Mayberry 51).

It would not take long for Coleridge to find such a man, or more exactly, the two-headed angel of brother and sister, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, to fill Southey’s shoes, and the vacuum of Coleridge’s heart. In the interim, Tom Poole would be an anchor whom Coleridge could rely upon, and as essential and loving as Poole would be prior and during Coleridge’s Nether Stowey days, even he would pale in comparison.  It is documented that Coleridge and Wordsworth must have met in Bristol some time between August and September in 1796, as Wordsworth would write later that year, “Coleridge was at Bristol part of the time I was there. I saw but little of him. I wished indeed to have seen more – his talent appears to me very great” (qtd. by Mayberry 46).

As Dorothy and William’s two-year stay in Dorset was suddenly coming to a close, leaving their futures in doubt, they sat in their garden in the summer of 1797, looking up the hill toward the gateway one-hundred yards from their feet, to see a figure bound over the gate and sweep down the hill. The figure was no other than Coleridge.  His surprise entrance and stay at Racedown mansion would be memorable for the three of them. Wordsworth would later recount that he and his sister held to “the liveliest possible image” (qtd. by Mayberry 85) of Coleridge in that epic scene and Coleridge remembered the Wordsworths’ welcome and hospitality as incomparable. His stay, planned for no more than a few days, protracted into more than three weeks.

Their esteem formed immediately. Wordsworth said of Coleridge, he is “the most wonderful man” (qtd. in Coleridge xiii) and Coleridge would repay the respect in a letter to Southey, whom he had only recently decried for abandoning him, “[Wordsworth] is a very great man – the only man, to whom at all times & in all modes of excellence I feel myself inferior – the only one, I mean, whom I have yet met with – for the London Literati appear to me to be very much like little Potatoes” (qtd. in Coleridge 9). Dorothy, oft-overlooked, played a vital role in the creative outpouring of Wordsworth and Coleridge. She would say of Coleridge, “His conversation teems with soul, mind, and spirit.  Then he is so benevolent, so fond tempered and cheerful, and, like William, interests himself so much about every little trifle” (qtd. by Mayberry 85). And Coleridge would smartly reply, “She is a woman indeed! In mind, I mean, & heart – for her person is such, that if you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her ordinary – if you expected to find an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty! – But her manners are simple, ardent, impressive…Her information various – her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature – and her taste a perfect electrometer – it bends, protrudes, and draws in, at subtlest beauties & most recondite faults” (qtd. by Mayberry 88).

Their union, pregnant with similar desires and predilections, was the culmination of lives ever in transition. Just as Coleridge had been displaced from the home, orphaned by the death of his father, so were Dorothy and William with the death of their mother, Ann Wordsworth, in 1778. Dorothy would write after a brief reunion of the five Wordsworth children in 1787, “We always finish our conversations…with wishing we had a father and a home” (Mayberry 78). The home she and her brothers so yearned for, the place of refuge Coleridge sought – “To live in a beautiful country & to inure myself as much as possible to the labors of the field, have been for this year past my dream of the day, my Sigh at midnight” (qtd. by Mayberry 62) – would come in the form of a small village tucked away in Somerset, amid the Quantock Hills, Nether Stowey.

Once residence for the Wordsworths had been secured in Alfoxden (a Holford mansion three miles from Stowey) on a one-year lease for £23, Dorothy marveled, a reaction which must have been shared by brother William, at her surroundings: “Wherever we turn we have woods, smooth downs, and valleys with small brooks running down them through green meadows…The hills that cradle these valleys are either covered with fern and bilberries, or oak woods, which are cut for charcoal…Walks extend for miles over the hill-tops; the great beauty of which is their wild simplicity: they are perfectly smooth, without rocks” (qtd. in Mayberry 94).

For a time, Coleridge was bogged by the local suspicion that he and fellow-newcomers were political dissenters and the ongoing drudgery of completing the drama, Osorio, but with these behind him, he undertook several walks with the Wordsworths through the Somerset countryside, and these would spark in Samuel and William increased enthusiasm and literary output.  On one walk from Porlock Weir to Culbone, the story of “The Wanderings of Cain,” derived from the unique landscape of the Valley of the Rocks, took shape for which Wordsworth was to write the first part, Coleridge the second, and who ever completed first, “was to set about the third.” The collaboration was to be a failure, as Coleridge wrote at warp speed and Wordsworth sat before a blank sheet with no expression of inspiration (Mayberry 108).

The experience would not deter, for the two planned to write a joint poem, which would pay the expenses (they believed Monthly Magazine would pay £5 for the piece) for a trip which began at dusk, November 13, 1797, to cover the Great Track through the Quantock Hills. They were in the midst of picking out the details of the plot on the descent from West Quantoxhead, when Coleridge recalled a conversation with local friend, John Cruishank. Wordsworth, in astute recollection forty years later, described the genesis of the poem:

For example, some crime was to be committed which would bring upon the Old Navigator, as Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution…and his own wanderings.  I had been reading Shelvocke’s Voyages, a day or two before, that, while doubling Cape Horn, they frequently saw albatrosses in that latitude, the largest sort of sea-fowl…‘Suppose,’ said I, ‘you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the South Sea, and the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime.’ The incident was thought fit for the purpose, and adopted accordingly (qtd. by Mayberry 110).

The two attempted to work collaboratively again, but given their disparate styles, Wordsworth decided “it would have been quite presumptuous in me to do anything but separate from an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog” (qtd. by Mayberry 111). With Coleridge’s steady progress, the initial plan for the Monthly Magazine was scrapped, in favor of a volume which would include the poem and some of Wordsworth’s pieces, in the Lyrical Ballads. This collection was to be a lasting memory of their year together.

On a March night in 1798, the Wordsworths walked back with Coleridge from their Alfoxden home at night, described by Dorothy, “A beautiful evening. Very starry, the horned moon” (qtd. by Mayberry 121), after a reading by Coleridge, of a completed draft of the epic poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”  It has been taken as an autobiography of Coleridge’s life, at parts supernatural, tragic, and haunting and the parallels are easy to see: an ancient mariner kills a beautiful albatross, without provocation, and watches as his ship’s crew falls limp to death as a spirit avenges the murder of God’s creation, and he is sent northward at inhuman speed, saved by a Pilot, the ship he drove sinks, and he is saved from death not for his penance, but to be a restless messenger of God’s goodwill, and sail from sea to sea: “He went like one that hath been stunned, / And is of sense forlorn: / A sadder and a wiser man, / He rose the morrow morn” (Reeve 44).

At around the same time, Dorothy wrote, “[Wordsworth’s] faculties seem to expand every day, he composes with much more facility than he did, as to the mechanism of poetry, and his ideas flow faster than he can express them” (qtd. in Mayberry 122). It was in this burst Wordsworth produced many of the poems included in the Ballads, among them a poem written after returning to a spot after five years absence, “Lines written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (Mayberry 129).  It was a eulogy to Nature from “A worshipper of Nature,” which would conclude the compendium, and stand in contrast to Coleridge’s dark ancient tale, which opened the collection.  When the Ballads were published for the public, the unique experimental plainness of the poetry initially elicited rebuke, but taken in its entirety, would prompt many to believe it the start of Romanticism.

On September 16, after the lease at Alfoxden rendered brother and sister homeless, the Wordsworths sailed off with Coleridge to Germany to embark on another journey which would both prove prolific and havoc-riddled, as was the theme throughout Coleridge’s life.

Thomas Mayberry recently published an accessible and insightful account of Coleridge’s time in the West Country and his relationship with the Wordsworths, in Coleridge & Wordsworth in the West Country. If the reader’s interest is piqued by the subject, I turn you to him.

Copyright © 2007 Siddharth Bansal, Kenyon College, All Rights Reserved.