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Coleridge's Lines to Thelwall: A Corrected Text and a First Version. by C. G. Martin
E. H. Coleridge's 1912 Oxford edition of Coleridge's poems includes as the penultimate item of "Appendix I. First Drafts, Early Versions, Etc.", a 16-line poem, editorially entitled To John Thelwall, beginning "Some, Thelwall! to the Patriot's meed aspire,". A footnote reads: "Now first published from Cottle's MSS in the Library of Rugby School."[1] The source of this text is, in fact, the second of two drafts, one on either side of the sheet numbered 15 in the Rugby Ms.[2] In transcribing it, E.H.Coleridge
Who in safe rage without or rent or scar
Round pictur'd strong-holds sketching mimic war
Closet their valour. Thou mid thickest fire
Leap'st on the Wall: therefore shall Freedom choose 5
Ungaudy flowers that chastest odour breathe,
And weave for thy young locks her Mural Wreath
Nor thou my song of grateful praise refuse.
My ill-adventur'd Youth by Cam's slow stream
Pin'd for a woman's love in slothful woe 10
First by thy fair example to glow
With patriot Zeal: from Passion's feverish dream
Starting I tore disdainful from my brows
The Myrtle crown inwove with cypress boughs —
Blest if to me in manhood's years belong 15
Thy stern simplicity & vigorous song.
The other manuscript version, substantially the same for lines 1-7, but giving a different and uncompleted ending for the poem, is evidently a first draft.
From Him, whose youth thy fair example
From ill-adventur'd Passion's feverish dream — 10
And stretch'd at length by Cam's slow willowy stream
Pin'd for a woman's love in slothful woe
[Blest be the] hour, when first
Starting I tore indignant from my brows
The myrtle crown inwove with cypress boughs 15
To the considerable autobiographical interest of the finished poem, this earlier draft adds one pleasing detail, subsequently swallowed up in the more generalised self-condemnation of "My ill-adventur'd Youth": the picture in line 11 of the idling undergraduate of Jesus College "stretch'd at length by Cam's slow willowy stream". Line 14, perhaps offers an exception to the general rule that Coleridge's revisions are improvements: "I tore indignant", especially in view of the final couplet about Thelwall's maturing influence, seems a more appropriate wording than "I tore disdainful". Finally, over-all comparison of the two versions suggests that the poem was originally intended as a sonnet in the regulation fourteen lines (perhaps one of those Coleridge had once hoped to add to his Morning Chronicle series of November 1794-January 1795 on Eminent Contemporaries — he declared the intention as late as March 1796, and refers not unrespectfully to Thelwall in A Plot Discover'd in November 1795, in a context relevant to the poem and at a time when he had just dedicated himself to the "bloodless fight / Of Science, Freedom, and the Truth in Christ.")[4] Though
Notes
Most of the sheets bounds up in the Rugby Ms. show two numbers: (i) a discontinuous series in ink at the head of one or other margin, or occasionally at topcentre; and (ii) a continuous series in pencil at top-centre. Most of the inked numbers are lightly cancelled in pencil, which suggests that the pencilled series was added, and the inked series struck out, when the sheets were bound into the volume which Shadworth H. Hodgson presented to his old school. My reference is to the pencilled number.
Letters (ed. E. L. Griggs, 1956), I 155-6; Essays on His Own Time (ed. Mrs. H. N. Coleridge, 3 vols., 1850), I 69-70; Poetical Works 108: 61-2. In his discussion of the pencil abbreviations on the last leaf of the Gutch Notebook, C. R. Goodring conjectures that Thelwell may have figured in the list jotted down probably in July 1795. His comments on the poem cite some of the main ms. readings, but he seems to credit the Oxford text with independent authority. He refers to "two imperfect versions among the Cottle papers at Rugby school", adding that while the poem's "general sense supports the standard Oxford readings of 'slothful ease' and 'Cyprian bough' . . . the manuscript actually reads 'slothful woe' and 'cypress boughs'." But unless some other source turns up to support the Oxford readings, these can only be understood as mistaken transcriptions from the Rugby text. E.H. Coleridge is certainly explicit enough that here was the basis of his version. Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge (1961), 226-227, 116-117.
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