‘Cruel Wrongs and Strange Distress’: an Ethical Terror-Sublime in ‘The Destiny of Nations’

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John Axcelson has recently identified a series of Coleridge’s long politico-prophetic poems — ‘The Destiny of Nations’, ‘Religious Musings’ and ‘Ode to the Departing Year’ — as exemplary of a sublime mode in his early poetic output. Stylistically, Axcelson emphasises the ‘grand, world historical approach … [and] extravagant rhetoric’ of these texts, a set of characteristics echoed by Peter Kitson in singling out ‘The Destiny of Nations’ as articulating a so-called Unitarian sublime.1 However, in this chapter I shall identify a different kind of sublimity found not in the poem’s rhetorical and visionary flights but in the tragic, naturalistic narrative that lies at its centre. This describes the heroine, Joan of Arc, coming across a dying family of refugees caught up in the turmoil of war.2 Consider the following passage: The foremost horse Lay with stretched limbs; the others, yet alive But stiff and cold, stood motionless, their manes Hoar with the frozen night dews. Dismally The dark-red dawn now glimmered; but its gleams Disclosed no face of man.3 The writing is realistic and largely non-figural, embellished with disturbing gothic touches and a foreboding sense of hostility and danger.4 If we were to look for literary analogues, it would not be in the fantastic excess of Milton (invoked by Kitson), but rather something like Friedrich Schiller’s The Robbers. As a young Coleridge wrote in 1794, in a note appended to an admiring poem dedicated to the German playwright, ‘SCHILLER introduces no supernatural beings; yet his human beings agitate and astonish more than all the goblin rout — even of Shakespeare.’5KeywordsPhilosophical EnquiryUnitarian ApproachEthical DemandFallacious UnderstandingRadical SympathyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.