University of Virginia Library

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

made a number of mistakes, several substantial. The correct text reads as follows: E. H. Coleridge's transcription reads differently:[3] The manuscript pages are mounted along their vertical edge, a process which may have obscured one or two letters, or punctuation marks. In line 7, "Wreath" reaches the edge of the mounting, and a comma may have been obscured, but there is no visible basis for E.H.Coleridge's semi-colon. In line 13, "disdainful" is written above a heavily-scored word, perhaps "indignant", the reading of the first draft (see below). In line 15, "to me in manhood's years" is written below variously heavy cancellations; only "Blest if" at one end, and "belong" at the other are uncancelled, the remainder reading "in [aster] future life [to me]". (The words between square brackets are conjectural.) Of E. H. Coleridge's readings, the strangest is in line 10: "ease" for "woe", despite the fact that the latter is the rhyme word in a couplet whose second line ends in "glow". (The rhyme scheme is regular: abba / cddc / effe / gg / hh, in effect a sonnet with an extra couplet.) In line 14, the reading "Cyprian bough" for "cypress boughs" is partly accounted for by the need to find a rhyme for the previous "brow", a mistake for "brows". But "Cyprian" is pure invention.

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.

In line 13, the words in square brackets are cancelled through, and in line 15, "crown" is written above a cancelled "wreath". In the first half of the poem, line 1 has "meed" written above a cancelled "name", and line 7, "her" above heavily-scored letters, conjecturally "the".

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

the final couplet of the second draft is not represented in the first, its drift is clearly enough implied, so that first draft's broken conclusion can be read as an attempt to condense the second part of the poem within the compass of a sonnet. The attempt failed, and the second draft neither repeats it, merely tacking on the extra couplet, nor abandons the sonnet rhyming, since the last quatrain rhymes aabb, unlike its three predecessors abba. Perhaps this second failure to make a regular sonnet of the poem accounts for the fact that Coleridge rejected it from his published work. Or again, perhaps the second draft was not originally intended as final, but for later condensation into the regular 14-line form. As it stands, the poem is certainly not worse than the Morning Chronicle sonnets, so it is unlikely that Coleridge rejected it simply on grounds of merit. However, when the series was re-admitted to the light of day in the 1803 volume of poems, Coleridge had long passed the stage at which he would have been prepared to spend time and thought on a poem which hailed the Jacobin Thelwall for recovering him from an "ill-adventur'd Youth" to the republican virtues of "stern simplicity & vigorous song." Having lost its chance of publication in 1796-97, the poem then remained in manuscript for good.

Notes