Abstract
The concluding chapter focuses on two poems in which Sara Coleridge reflects on STC’s literary career and her own vocation. The first poem discussed is an experimental hybrid text in Latin, based on lines from Horace’s Odes, II. 9. This highly innovative adaptation is a public statement of confidence in her mediation of STC’s religious philosophy, and in her ultimate success in revising his reputation. The second poem discussed is ‘For My Father’, Sara Coleridge’s deeply personal response to STC’s late sonnet, ‘Work Without Hope’. The chapter offers a close reading of ‘For My Father’, which reveals how, for Sara Coleridge, the personal and professional, the domestic and public, past loss and future redemption, are inextricably related and coalesce in her vocation of religious authorship.
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Notes
- 1.
Edith Coleridge published only the first stanza of ‘For My Father’ in M & L, I, p. 47. The whole poem appeared in print for the first time in CF, p. 166.
- 2.
R Schofield, ‘“My Father’s Fragmentary Work”: Sara Coleridge’s Restoration of Biographia Literaria’, Coleridge Bulletin, n.s., 38 (2011), 17–36.
- 3.
See BLCC, I, pp. 50–52 n.
- 4.
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 358.
- 5.
I am grateful to Dr. Simon Hall of Radley College Classics Department for his translation of Sara’s version of Horace.
In her version of Horace’s lines, Sara italicizes the words and phrases she changes from the original text. The translation I offer follows the same practice.
Horace’s Odes II. 9, ll. 1–8 are as follows:Verse
Verse Non semper imbres nubibus hispidos manant in agros aut mare Caspium vexant inaequales procellae usque, nec Armeniis in oris, amice Valgi, stat glacies iners mensis per omnis aut Aquilonibus querquerta Gargani laborant et foliis viduantur orni.
Niall Rudd translates Horace’s lines as follows:
‘Not forever does the rain pour down from the clouds onto the bedraggled fields, nor do gusty squalls always whip up the Caspian Sea, my dear Valgius; the ice does not stand motionless on Armenia’s coast through every month of the year, nor do the oaks of Garganus always struggle against the northern blasts, nor are the ash trees widowed of their leaves’. Horace, Odes and Epodes, ed. and trans. by Niall Rudd, Loeb Classical Library (London: Harvard, 2004, 2012), pp. 112–113.
- 6.
Angela Esterhammer, ‘Coleridge in the Newspapers, Periodicals, and Annuals’, in The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Frederick Burwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 165–184 (p. 170).
- 7.
R. G. M. Nisbet and Margaret Hubbard, A Commentary on Horace: Odes Book II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 135, p. 134.
- 8.
Morton D. Paley, Coleridge’s Later Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 78.
- 9.
The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. by Roland Greene et al., 4th edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 1319.
- 10.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Derwent and Sara Coleridge (London: Moxon, 1852), pp. 329–330, ll. 1–6. The text printed in PWCC, I. 2, pp. 1032–1033 has some variations in punctuation, which moderate the celebratory tone of the opening four lines. The PWCC text replaces the dashes in the first two lines with semi-colons, and replaces the exclamation mark at the end of line four with a full stop. All of my quotations from STC’s sonnet are taken from the 1852 volume, edited by Sara and Derwent.
- 11.
J. C. C. Mays, ‘Coleridge’s “Love”: “All he could manage, more than he could”’, in Coleridge’s Visionary Languages, ed. by Tim Fulford and Morton D. Paley (Cambridge: Brewer, 1993), pp. 49–66 (p. 58).
- 12.
William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by Ernest De Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940–1949, III (1946), p. 4.
- 13.
Proverbs 16: 19, Matthew 5: 3 & 5, I Peter 5: 5, Colossians 3: 12, James 4: 6. All quotations are from the Authorized King James Version.
- 14.
Sara Coleridge, ‘Note on Mr. Coleridge’s Observation Upon the Gift of Tongues’, in Notes, Theological, Political and Miscellaneous, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Derwent Coleridge (London: Moxon, 1853), pp. 409–415.
References
Bibliography of Works by Sara Coleridge
This section includes original writings by Sara Coleridge contained in editions of S. T. Coleridge. Her major extended contributions to these editions are cited individually.
Coleridge, Sara. 1847a. Introduction. In Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Second Edition Prepared for Publication in Part by the Late Henry Nelson Coleridge, Completed and Published by His Widow, 2 vols, I, v–clxxxvii. London: Pickering.
——— ed., 1847b. Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Second Edition Prepared for Publication in Part by the Late Henry Nelson Coleridge, Completed and Published by His Widow. 2 vols. London: Pickering.
———. 1848. Extracts from a New Treatise on Regeneration. In S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character, ed. H.N. Coleridge, 6 edn, 2 vols, II, 249–332. London: Pickering.
———. 1850a. Preface. In Essays on His Own Times: Forming a Second Series of the Friend, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edited by His Daughter, 3 vols, I, pp. xi–xvii. London: Pickering.
———, ed. 1850b. Essays on His Own Times: Forming a Second Series of the Friend, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edited by His Daughter, 3 vols. London: Pickering.
———. 1852. Preface to the Present Edition. In The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Derwent Coleridge and Sara Coleridge, vii–xiv. London: Moxon.
———. 1853. Note on Mr. Coleridge’s Observation Upon the Gift of Tongues. In Notes, Theological, Political and Miscellaneous, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Derwent Coleridge, 409–415. London: Moxon.
———. 1873. Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge Edited by Her Daughter, 2nd ed., 2 vols. London: King.
———. 1989. Nervousness. In Sara Coleridge: A Victorian Daughter. Her Life and Essays, ed. Bradford Keyes Mudge, 201–216. New Haven: Yale University Press.
———. 2007. Sara Coleridge: Collected Poems, ed. Peter Swaab. Manchester: Carcanet.
———. 2012. The Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Peter Swaab. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
General Bibliography
Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Barbeau, Jeffery W. 2014. Sara Coleridge: Her Life and Thought. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1852. The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Derwent and Sara Coleridge. London: Moxon.
———. 1853. Notes, Theological, Political and Miscellaneous, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Derwent Coleridge. London: Moxon.
———. 1983. Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 16 vols, VII. London/Princeton: Routledge/Princeton University Press, 1969–2002.
———. 1991. Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 16 vols, XIV. II. London/Princeton: Routledge/Princeton University Press, 1969–2002.
Esterhammer, Angela. 2009. Coleridge in the Newspapers, Periodicals, and Annuals. In The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Frederick Burwick, 165–184. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Green, Roland, et al., eds. 2012. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 4th ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Griggs, E.L. 1940. Coleridge Fille: A Biography of Sara Coleridge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Herring, George. 2002. What Was the Oxford Movement? London: Continuum.
Herringer, Carol Engelhardt. 2008. Victorians and the Virgin Mary: Religion and Gender in England, 1830–85. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Horace. 2012. Odes and Epodes, ed. and trans. by Niall Rudd, Loeb Classical Library. London: Harvard.
Mays, J.C.C. 1983. Coleridge’s “Love”: “All He Could Manage, More Than He Could”. In Coleridge’s Visionary Languages, ed. Tim Fulford and Morton D. Paley, 49–66. Cambridge: Brewer.
Milton, John. 1968. The Poems of Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler. London: Longman.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes. 1989. Sara Coleridge: A Victorian Daughter. Her Life and Essays. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Nisbet, R.G.M., and Margaret Hubbard. 1978. A Commentary on Horace: Odes Book II. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Paley, Morton D. 1999. Coleridge’s Later Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wordsworth, William. 1946. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest De Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols, III. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940–1949.
———. 1983. ‘Poems in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis, The Cornell Wordsworth. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
———. 1992. ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green, The Cornell Wordsworth. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
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Schofield, R. (2018). Conclusion: Public Renewal, Personal Redemption. In: The Vocation of Sara Coleridge. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70371-8_7
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