Coleridge's "Christabel" and the Phantom Soul

Abstract

"Christabel" is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's longest poem, his least revised, the most satisfying to himself as its preface indicates, and his most troubling to readers. It is a poem that can drive readers "mad" or make them feel "stupid." 1 From its opening—"Tu -whit!—tu-whoo!"— its lulling, almost lobotomized repetitions—"Is the night chilly and dark? / The night is chilly but not dark" 2 —its shifting narrative voices, and its metrical hesitations and forward rushes, it lures listeners into its twilight. 3 Coleridge's opening section does to listeners what Geraldine does to Christabel: leaves them anxious and ungrounded. Critic after critic has tossed interpretations into the poem's "Dark fluxion, all unfixable by thought." 4 Each interpretation seems to work as well as the next, even if the interpretations are contradictory. Some see the heroine Christabel initiated into love; some see her as a more or less innocent Eve falling into the snares of a demon from preternatural realms or from Satan; 5 some see the poem as having no meaning besides the complex contradictions of language and voice, 6 as a Blakean examination of divided states of body and soul, 7 as a dream or many dreams with condensed or displaced images, 8 even as a meditation on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 9 William Hazlitt called the poem "Obscene"; Tom Moore thought its gaps showed incompetence. 10 How do we cope with this tumult of uncertainty?