Today I returned from the framers with a charcoal rubbing taken from Coleridge’s gravestone of his beautiful epitaph, all clearly mounted and ready to hang in my new study in Linton, the last picture to go up. It was only as I unwrapped it that I realised that today, July 25th, is the anniversary of his death, no better day to to set this poem above my desk and give thanks for all he means to me, to pray for him as his epitaph asks, and to invoke his blessing on my own efforts to receive his insights and interpret them for a new generation.!
I have signed a contract with Hodder and Stoughton to write a new book, which will be called Mariner! A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and will be published in the spring of 2017, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Coleridge’s seminal book Biographia Literaria, and also the first full collection of his poems Sybilline Leaves. My book will tell Coleridge’s story through the lens of his own great poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a poem which was uncannily prophetic not only of Coleridge’s own life, but of our own history and culture. My book will try both to show the vital thread of Christian thought and witness that runs through Coleridge’s life and writing and also the startling relevance of that life and writing to the challenges of the 21st century.
I could not begin to reckon the personal debt I owe to Coleridge; for his poetry, for his personal and Christian wisdom, above all for his brilliant exploration and defence of the poetic imagination as a truth-bearing faculty which participates in, and is redeemed by the Logos, the living Word, himself the Divine Imagination. We are only now coming to appreciate the depth and range of what he achieved. His contemporaries scarcely understood him, and his Victorian successors looked down in judgement at what they saw as the shipwreck of his life. Something of that experience of rejection, twinned with deep Christian conviction, can be seen in the epitaph he wrote for himself:
Stop, Christian passer-by!—Stop, child of God,And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sodA poet lies, or that which once seemed he.O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.;That he who many a year with toil of breathFound death in life, may here find life in death!Mercy for praise—to be forgiven for fameHe asked, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same!
From my teenage raptures when I was first enchanted by Kubla Khan and the Ancient Mariner, to my struggles and adventures in the middle of life STC has been my companion and guide. In the chapter on Coleridge in my book Faith Hope and Poetry I have set out an account of his thinking and made the case for his central importance in our own age, but what I offer here is a sonnet celebrating his legacy, drawing on that epitaph I mentioned above, one of a sequence of sonnets on my fellow christians in my most recent book The Singing Bowl, published by the Canterbury Press.
As Always you can hear the poem by clicking on the title or clicking the ‘play’ button.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
‘Stop, Christian passer-by!—Stop, child of God!’
You made your epitaph imperative,
And stopped this wedding guest! But I am glad
To stop with you and start again, to live
From that pure source, the all-renewing stream,
Whose living power is imagination,
And know myself a child of the I AM,
Open and loving to his whole creation.
Your glittering eye taught mine to pierce the veil,
To let his light transfigure all my seeing,
To serve the shaping Spirit whom I feel,
And make with him the poem of my being.
I follow where you sail towards our haven,
Your wide wake lit with glimmerings of heaven.
Great, and very appropriate photo too! Thank you again.
Lovely. Thank you Malcolm. And also on St James Day.
And Malcolm comes to bless my study. Thank you for posting this Malcolm. What an epitaph and what wonderful timing for you to receive the artwork rendering today. Wonderful timing for me as well. I just bundled up my Regent library books on the Christian year to take back to the library and then my plan for the day was to walk through Vancouver cemeteries hoping to become inspired. Deciding on the lasting marker for my husband’s life as well as my own is daunting. Receiving your post when I did has given me a new excitement and anticipation about the whole adventure. Thank you.
Elaine Erb
Thanks Elaine every blessing
Sam, you found at last
A long-sought peaceful port.
The restless sea,
In truth your restless heart.
Now Malcolm stirs the ship
You left behind.
We now know
That he shares your questing mind.
Our prayers are with you both
As you find rest,
And he sets sail,
Retracing your own quest.
O Lord, as he sets forth
On turbulent sea,
Command the winds
And make all dangers flee.
Let him too in time
Find tranquil port,
And listening hearts
Who long for his report.
Thanks Charles just the prayer I needed
Welcome, Malcolm. “Stirs”—->”stears.” Perhaps some other goofs!
Oh, I’m looking forward to this new book! And then, perhaps, one on TSE’s Four Quartets?
Ruan’s right!
Yes, indeed; we’ll keep you working, Malcolm 😀
I love this poem, Malcolm, thank you.