This week's poem, "Time's Acquittal" by Sara Coleridge, is the second in a group of three rather unusual poems, gathered under the heading, Dreams. All seem to have their source in actual night-dreams, each with a similar theme of loss. This interest in the subconscious is one poetic strand of several that connect Sara to her father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
In the first dream-poem, "The Lilies", the poet looks down from a mountain road and sees some waterlily-like plants growing by a stream far below. She hurries down the slope, fearless of its dangerous steepness, but finds only "mountain weeds of common form and line". This poem ends on a desolate note.
The third dream-poem, "To a Friend", is dedicated to Aubrey de Vere, the young Irish poet with whom Sara, in widowhood, enjoyed a literary friendship that stimulated some of her best writing. This is the most complex of her three dreams of loss. As she walks beside her beloved companion (Aubrey himself) she finds "... all was changed, thy voice and look / Were such as I could scarcely brook. / 'Twas thou and yet it was not thou ..." The final stanza achieves consolation, and looks forward to "A last immortal changeless change".
The epigraph of this poem, said to be by Sir Thomas Browne, is worth quoting, as it's relevant to the whole sequence: "However dreams may be fallacious concerning outward events, yet may they be truly significant at home: and consolations of discouragement may be drawn from dreams which intimately tell us ourselves."
Although it recounts a dream, "Time's Acquittal" is a spirited piece of writing. The little parable, about a woman's loss of her youth and beauty (Sara Coleridge had been a famously beautiful young woman) is fluently narrated, with wry humour and not much self-pity. It has an often informal syntax, with clauses linked by the casual punctuation of a dash, and moments of down-to-earth, even colloquial language: "full of spleen", "thousands more beneath the sun", "But I'm assured by all / Old friends that it was there." The verse is supple in its movement, especially when recording the speaker's direct address to Time.
At first glance, the poem might seem sentimental, its moral too sweet an image of self-effacing Victorian motherhood for modern taste. But I'm intrigued by the distortions which quirk the buoyant surface. The comparison of the two children's faces to rosy-cheeked dawn, complete with "sunny eyes," renders them vast and garish and faintly frightening. The little girl's face, "like peony dispread", seems almost rapacious. That may be too strong a word, but such broad, colourful faces (especially the girl's) are not those of little angels. The poem ends triumphantly, the woman understanding that her lost radiance is actually "doubly blooming". But while the outward argument redresses the sacrifice, the imagery of stanzas four and five has imprinted the idea that children in their vivid energy and growth are inevitably destructive as well as redemptive to the mother they outlive.
The three "dream" poems are not the only works by Sara in which her father's influence gently registers. Some refer to poems of his by title; others engage with themes he addressed. In one called "Poppies" the connection is more sombre: here, Sara contrasts her son's delight in the brilliantly-petalled flowers with his mother's use of laudanum during troubled nights. If the magisterial Coleridge inheritance was a gift, it was also a burden, both psychologically and in practical terms: Sara and her husband, Henry, put enormous effort into sorting and editing STC's chaotic papers after his death in 1834.
Sara seems to have been modest to excess regarding what she called "my little weak poetic faculty". Yet the poems show an unaffected writer who trusts the plain strength of her own voice. Besides lyric poems, she wrote translations, a prose tale with verse, Phantasmion, and lightly instructive poems for children. The latter often describe and name her own children, Herbert and Edith, whom she clearly cherished. She enters their world of bright colours and moral contrasts with confident ease, and pitches her ideas and diction at the appropriate level – "writing the height", as a children's author once described it.
Interesting in its own right, Sara Coleridge's work also extends our knowledge of an extraordinary family's inter-textual, and inter-generational, relationships. For the gifted women in that family, the legacy must have been an ambiguous one. Sara, though always frail in health, managed to sustain a quiet but productive literary career of her own, doing so with considerable resilience and élan.
Sara Coleridge's Collected Poems is edited by Peter Swaab and published by Carcanet.
Time's Acquittal
1
I dreamed that, walking forth one summer's day
I chanced to meet old Time upon my way,
And, full of spleen,
Taxed him with mischief he had done
To me, and thousands more beneath the sun
Plain to be seen.
2
"Blush, blush for shame", said I, "to view this face
Despoiled by thee! – Canst thou one line retrace
That erst was there?
I vow, ev'n I myself can scarce recall
Its heav'nly charm! – But I'm assured by all
Old friends that it was fair.
3
"Come, thou canst bring it forth again, I know,
In pristine bloom – once more, 'ere yet I go
Beneath the sod,
Present me to myself in finest feather
Of youth and health, – as when the mountain heather
I lightly trod."
4
Time seemed not all unwilling to comply:
Bade me look forth, and I should soon enjoy
An apparition.
I looked: like morn slow-kindling in the skies
A dawn of rosy cheeks and sunny eyes
Enriched my vision.
5
Cried I, "This is the strangest thing on earth.
Two faces here I see – both full of mirth,
And one much bolder
And broader too, like peony dispread,
Than mine, when wreathed in curls and garlanded,
I looked no older."
6
My children's faces! Time, I did thee wrong.
Thou'st made me doubly blooming glad and strong! –
Let my light wane –
Since stars new ris'n my downward path are cheering
And for one radiance, now fast disappearing,
Thou giv'st me twain.