“The Dark Green Adder’s Tongue”: Osorio and the “Poetry of Nature”

Abstract

In June 1797, in the middle of writing Osorio, Coleridge wrote to Basil Cottle: “Wordsworth admires my Tragedy—which gives me great hopes. Wordsworth has written a Tragedy himself. … His Drama is absolutely wonderful” (CL I 325). The Borderers, to which Coleridge refers, addresses the irrational and emotional basis of cruel acts, which their perpetrators justify by appeals to high-minded “reason.” Coleridge would have recognized in the play one of the master-themes of the post-revolutionary period, where “an over-confident individual is led astray by too much reliance on his or her reasoning” (Butler 181). The Fall of Robespierre (1794; PW III.1 4–44), which Coleridge co-wrote with Southey, had sympathetically explored the complexities of the Jacobin figure, who, Coleridge thought, had been led into immoral cruelty by his own idealistic ardor: “I rather think, that the distant prospect, to which he was travelling, appeared to him grand and beautiful; but that he fixed his eyes on it with such intense eagerness as to neglect the foulness of the road” (LPR 35).¹