Sound, Silence, and Voice in Meditation: Coleridge, Berkeley, and the Conversation Poems

Abstract

... interment of such a treasure in a dead language must needs be contrary to intentions of gracious Donor. Coleridge, The Statesman's Manual As James Engell reminds us, S. T. Coleridge considered himself a Berkeleian (110), yet elsewhere in Coleridge criticism we find more convincing denials: J. Robert Barth, for example, claims that we do not have to resort to a Berkeleian philosophy to find source of Coleridge's belief in a God who actively sustains creation (Symbolic 20), while Seamus Perry argues that Berkeleianism because, Even at his most rampantly idealist, he didn't deny that real existence of other things (34). Thomas McFarland tells us that Berkeley is specifically identified in Biographia as one of thinkers who had not provided [Coleridge] with 'an abiding place' for his 'reason' (158). Coleridge's Berkeleianism indeed impure, and, as Perry and McFarland would agree, nearly all Coleridge's work held in suspension idealist and realist tendencies; (1) furthermore, this tension a fundamentally Christian one, inherent in a religion that worships a figure conceived as fully God and fully man. From such a viewpoint, Coleridge, so frequently accused of pantheism, appears more orthodox than a pseudo-Gnostic (and, McFarland would argue, implicitly pantheist) Berkeley. In writings of J. Robert Barth we find a valuable theoretical perspective from which to view purpose of Christian poetry in general and of Coleridge's poetry in particular. We take as our starting point a concept drawn from Barth's study The Symbolic Imagination: Coleridge and Romantic Tradition: idea that Christian poetry essentially sacramental. That to say, as sacraments--particularly Eucharist--represent God's entrance into temporal world from transcendence (originally by Incarnation, reenacted by sacraments), so a Christian poetry properly conceived represents God's entrance into world through language. Barth ties this idea of sacramental poetry to Coleridge's concept of symbol, which articulates, however dimly, 'interpenetration' of two disparate and often seemingly very distinct realities, such as humankind and God. It by such language--poetic language--that chasm immanent and transcendent can be bridged (Symbolic 26). Most important to Barth the notion of sacrament--and symbol--as (40), an encounter that takes place on two planes, between poet and reader, for which poem setting and catalyst and between [the poet] and sacred--the numinous 'other'--whether discovered within or outside one's self (145). We may go farther; to conceive of poetry as an encounter poet and divine can be understood as continuation of revelation. The poet, therefore, becomes a sort of prophet (as indeed Romantics often imagined), recording that inspired, revealed truth in such a way that others can follow and experience their own sacramental encounters. We may, therefore, take as our guiding principle one central idea: truest poetry records an encounter with God. The symbol of conversation, representing God's incarnational and sacramental communion with humankind, central to poems here under study; conversation in Coleridge a sacramental act human and divine, mediated by nature-as-language and by poetic language. His use of sound--both as sound imagery within poem, and sound as music of poem's expression--correlates to symbolic colloquy of sacrament. This technique depends upon a conception of interdependence of spiritual and physical worlds: as God ground of all being, physical world depends upon active and sustaining power of divinity to animate it; spiritual, in turn, uses physical world as a language, expressing divinity through and within world it sustains. …