Biographia Literaria - Samuel's Sarahs

Sarah Coleridge nee Fricker
Sara Hutchinson (Asra)
Sara Coleridge b. 22nd December 1802

"I speak not now of those habitual Ills
That wear out Life, when two unequal Minds
Meet in one House & two discordant Wills -
(Letter to Sara Hutchinson, April 4, 1802 - Sunday Evening.)

What sparked his sudden outburst, who can tell?
Bad sex perhaps, a botched attempt to patch
things up, a pointless row, familiar hell.
All night he writes to her. You try to snatch
some sleep, then watch alone, in misery
the strange, psychotic moon devour the old.
"He loves the other Sara more than me."
You dare not ask, for fear of being told.
Next anniversary: the final twist,
you're now with child, he's published and been damned,
"It's Asra he adored", critics insist.
His genius left forsaken, a door slammed
shut. Their daughter, Sara, survived the wreck:
her father's famous name hung round her neck.

My interest in Wordsworth and his circle and Coleridge in particular goes back a long way. I studied 'The Prelude' part of my A level English Literature course.. Sometime around that time - 1971 or 1972 - I bought the Everyman 'Complete Works of Coleridge'. I was drawn to his work more than Wordsworth's, and recall enjoying  particularly the 'Conversation Poems', Kubla Khan (maybe still my favourite poem) and Coleridge's  'Letter to Sara Hutchinson' - which later, spruced-up and de-personalised was published as 'Ode to Dejection'.

I have a clear recollection of looking out at the night sky back then from my bedroom window one blustery night in early Spring and seeing the new moon with the  'Old Moon in her Lap' exactly how Coleridge had described it in the opening lines penned 150 year previously. Over the years I read around more of the Lake Poets' works and acquired Dorothy Wordworth's 'Grasmere Journals'. The conventional view at the time was that Sarah Fricker, Coleridge's wife, was a rather dull person and it was no surprise that he became infatuated, obsessed even, with Sara Hutchinson, the lively and vivacious sister of Mary Hutchinson who became Wordsworth's wife.

Scholars over the past twenty years or so have done much to refute this myth and have revealled the more complex and at times harrowing stories of the women associated with Wordsworth's circle. In addition, material on the web has meant that so much more of this material is readily available. Why in December 2001 I was reading around this stuff I can't recall. I know Sarah (Turpie!) had been much taken with BBC serialisation of Pride and Prejudice and was reading avidly everything Austenish she could lay her hands on, so the talk in the house may well have centred around 'Regency Women'. I do recall re-reading Frankenstien around this time too.

Perhaps it was looking into the contempories of Mary Shelley that led me reading a short piece on the web about Sara Coleridge, the poet's daughter.  It gave her date of birth as 23rd December 1802; that sent me scurrying back to my complete Coleridge - his verse letter to Sara Hutchinson was dated 4th of April 1802, the arithmetic is irrefutable - the poet's love for Sara Hutchinson is clear, described by Richard Holmes as, 'overwhelmimg the reader with its intimacy, its torrent of lament and letting-go, which is both shocking and compulsive'; in the letter Coleridge describes the state of his marriage as a clash of 'two discordant wills'; yet within days of it being written Sarah Coleridge must have concieved their fourth child, who was christened, somewhat chillingly, 'Sara'.

I have no idea what these events actually signify, Coleridge hardly comes out well judged by our own moral standards, but what were the expectations of an early Nineteenth Century marriage? - I simply don'tknow. However, whatever the differences between then and now, Sarah Coleridge must surely have been unhappy to find her husband spending half the night penning effusive and florid verse-poems to 'the other Sara'. It was this situation that became the starting point for the sonnet.

The sonnet itself is interests me for two other  reasons. Firstly I remember struggling to fit the situation and characters into the constraints of fourteen lines. It does read as being a little breathless and overcrowded, but I did manage to explore a complicated situation, concisely, in a short poem. This was something I became more and more interested in over the next five years or so.

Secondly, the sonnet is neither a piece of overt self-expression or an exploration of ideas - it reads more like a critical analysis - an exploration of a situation. Although I did not know it at the time, I was not the only person beginning to develop the analytical potential of the sonnet - there were other 'situationalists' out there, I'd just not come across them yet.