ESC: English Studies in Canada

“AN EPICURE IN SOUND”: COLERIDGE ON THE SCANSION OF VERSE A. ELIZABETH McKIM St. Thomas University An 1836, William Wordsworth spoke of “the extreme care and labour” that SamuelTaylor Coleridge had devoted to “elaborating his metres.” Coleridge, according to his old friend, “was quite an epicure in sound” (Wordsworth 2: 308). Indeed, a preoccupation with the measurement of sound character­ izes not only Coleridge’s poetry but also much of his day-to-day prose. His fascination with metre extended over his entire career, and an examination of his involvement with it reveals a steady interest that occasionally height­ ened into an intense absorption. Even a casual glance through Coleridge’s Letters, Notebooks, and Marginalia reveals countless comments on metre and many passages of scanned verse. The subject, then as now, is complex and contradictory. In the last two centuries, many conflicting theories about the structure of English metre have been put forward, not one of which is completely successful in measuring and describing the sound of verse. Co­ leridge’s explorations, appropriately, were also complex and contradictory, and took one of two directions: either he attempted to fit the verse into the metrical system he knew, or he more inventively attempted to develop new ways of measuring the verse. An examination of Coleridge’s understanding of metre reveals an uneasy balance between his ingrained assumptions and his forays into uncharted metrical territory, forays that distinguish him as an important figure in the troubled history of metrical theory. Despite the emphasis placed by Coleridge on metre, scholars have not gen­ erally recognized it as an integral part of his theory and practice of poetry. Although his theoretical explication of the subject in the Biographia Literaria has received much attention, and various metrical analyses ofindividual poems have been presented, his overall metrical practice and his understand­ ing of metrical scansion have not been thoroughly explored. M.H. Abrams’s discussion of Coleridge’s metrical theory is perhaps the best known (116— 24). More recently, such scholars as Emerson R. Marks, Paul Hamilton, and James C. McKusick have demonstrated how systematic and rigorous Coleridge was in his investigation of the language of verse, but they concen­ trate on aspects of language other than its sound, and largely restrict their comments on metre to Coleridge’s abstract notions of metrical theory. A few studies of the metre of Coleridge’s most famous poems — “The Rime of E n g l ish St u d ie s in Ca n a d a , x v iii, 3, September 1992 the Ancient Mariner,” “Christabel,” “Kubla Khan,” and the Conversation poems — do exist, but they are rarely directed toward discovering his usual metrical practice.1Yet any study of Coleridge’s pronouncements on metre in the Biographia or of the structure or auditory effects of his verse are incom­ plete without an examination of his understanding of the practical aspects of metre: what he thought he was doing when he scanned — or wrote — a line of verse. The few scholars who do address Coleridge’s understanding of scansion tend to concentrate on “Christabel” and its Preface — virtually the only remarks he published on the mechanics ofmetre — and generalize what they find there into an explanation ofhis metricalhabits.2The Preface claims that the poem is “founded on a new principle: namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables” (CPW 1: 215). What Coleridge does not claim is that this new principle underlies all of his work, and arguments that it does so fail to take into account that “Christabel” was an isolated experiment, typical neither of Coleridge’s usual practice of composition, nor of his day-to-day scansion of verse. In actuality, “Christabel” stands alone among Coleridge’s works in the combination of duple and triple measures and in the wide variations in the numbers of syllables in various lines. Coleridge’s day-to-day metrical habits, in contrast to his method in “Christabel,” were profoundly influenced by his eighteenth-century educa­ tion, with its prescriptive emphasis on alternate stress, consistent syllable counts, and elision (when necessary) to preserve regularity. His use ofelision is curious as his only direct comment on the device...