‘Beware!
Beware!’
Ted Hughes: (W. Scammell ed.) ‘The Snake in the Oak’,
Winter Pollen, Occasional Prose.
ISBN 0-571-17426-4 £8.99 Paperback
Reviewed by Paul Cheshire
(The Coleridge Bulletin New Series No 7 (Spring 1996), pp 55-58)
Poets writing on poets are usually stimulating, and this
previously unpublished 92 page essay on Coleridge, included in a collection of
Hughes’ occasional prose, lives up to expectations. This is no cautious
exposition: it is a fearless dive into Coleridge’s ‘own deepest psychological
make-up’ framed in what can only be termed a psycho-mythological exegesis of
the three visionary poems, ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Christabel’.
To Hughes, poetry of any importance is essentially vatic and he speaks to us
accordingly as an inheritor of the prophetic mantle from within that tradition
—‘as one having authority, and not as the scribes’.
[56]
In this context it feels small-minded and scribal to point
out that the essay has several inaccuracies. We are looking at deep
psychological Truth after all, and what matter if it was Bartram, not Purchas,
who had written about alligators rutting in the
Hughes sees the dominant theme of English poetry as the
relationship between poet and ‘the Greater Female of paganism resurgent’.
Protestant Christianity, is a ‘limited cognitive system’ which represses the
true creative wholeness of Nature as Great Mother, whom the poet must reach and
serve if he is to fulfil his true vatic function.
How does this apply to Coleridge? Coleridge, according to
Hughes, was of the Great Mother’s party without knowing it. He clung to his
intellectual ‘Christian self’ as an escape capsule to avoid the frightening
associations of his largely unconscious ‘unleavened Self’, that monstrous yet
fascinating Great female whose form develops sequentially throughout the three
visionary poems which Hughes puts together as a single myth in three parts.
First in ‘Kubla Khan’ the Great female is ambivalent: the
attractive yet clearly dangerous Abyssinian maid. In ‘The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner’ she appears as ‘ the Nightmare LIFE-IN-DEATH’ who cries ‘I’ve won! I’ve
won!’ Her victory is over the Mariner’s soul who in his vision of the sea
snakes is then offered a redemptive glimpse of her positive attributes.
However, he (and most importantly for Hughes, Coleridge himself) fails to
understand the significance of this vision: his Christian conscience revives on
return to shore and ‘the
[57]
Christian self in him hurriedly
takes up the pen’. The final act in this drama is the enthralment of Christabel
by the reptilian Geraldine. This represents the last battle in the unequal war
between these two Selves that has been traced throughout the three visionary
poems.
In the course of his essay, Hughes also illuminates
Coleridge’s consistent use of a symbolic language. The oak, for example, is
introduced by Hughes in the following Notebook entry on Power contrasted with Strength:
My strength is small in proportion to my Power— ...this
important distinction, between Strength and Power - the Oak, and the tropic Annual...
which grows nearly as high & spreads as large, as the Oak — but the wood,
the heart of Oak is wanting.
The power then is
his intellect whose perpetual motion Coleridge recognises to be a flight from
the solidity, the heart of deeper
feeling. Thus Coleridge’s absent strength comes to be allied with the ‘unleavened
Self’ and we finally arrive at what Hughes calls the ‘core-like image cluster
of woman/reptile/oak’ which comes to fruition when we reach Christabel.
Christabel has gone out to her oak for strength, but takes home Geraldine, the
disguised snake that will wreathe its poison around her heart.
For Hughes, the significance to Coleridge of this defeat is clear:
It is not merely the difficulty of fitting this vision of
the triumph of the Pagan Great Goddess into a Christian conscience and way of
life that sends Coleridge on his way ‘like one that hath been stunned’. It is
the fact that she has triumphed. The tongue that can tell only the truth has
told him that his Christian life, and the limited cognitive system that goes
with it, is a lie.
[58]
Hughes’ essay is not well served by an outline presentation;
there is an important distinction to be made between a bold and definite
reading and a dogmatic one. We do not have to subscribe to Hughes’ (in my
opinion) one-sided view of a life-affirming Great Mother (good because good-and-evil) versus Christianity as uptight
repression (bad because denying
wholeness) to find his insights on Coleridge valuable. We are driven back to
the poems and notebooks to read them afresh and test out this reading for
ourselves. This is an essay to put alongside Blake on