Thursday 24 September 2015

Coleridge, Urinator

One of Coleridge's notebook entries reads: ‘what a beautiful Thing urine is, in a Pot, brown yellow, transpicuous, the Image, diamond shaped of the Candle in it, especially, as it now appeared, I have emptied the Snuffers into it, & the Snuff floating about, painting all-shaped Shadows on the Bottom.’ [Seamus Perry (ed) Coleridge’s Notebooks: a Selection (OUP 2002), 52]

Which is all very nice, if a trifle self-regarding (of course his high opinion depends on the fact that it's his urine; he wouldn't like a pot of my piss so much, I'd wager). And so, by a simple process of critical elaboration, I could write a whole lengthy blogpost about Coleridge's intense self-absorption. But what really strikes me here is the sense of Latin punnery, conscious or otherwise. Urine in Latin is urina; pot in Latin urna; burnt-colour (brown, yellow) uro; 'to plunge into water', like a diver (or like an old snuffer) is urino. And shadow (umbra) isn't that far away. Coleridge seems to be piddling about in the 'U's.

2 comments:

  1. Good morning,

    I wonder whether you can please help me. I an writing an account of my treatment for bladder cancer and, if I can verify it, I might include an anecdote about STC.

    At the back of my mind I have a vague memory of reading that STC had difficulty in urinating and sometimes had to stand on his head to empty his bladder. The title of your blog suggests that there might eb substance and not imagination in my supposed memory. is there please anything that you can tell me about this.

    Of course you could tell me to read all of your blogs, but I hope that I am not causing you too much trouble by asking for a lead. Besides, you might, perhaps, welcome a response to your blag, even (or many particularly) if it is not about the milk of paradise.

    Roderick Ramage, 20.xii.2020
    roderick@copehale.net

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    Replies
    1. Dear Roderick

      I'm not aware that Coleridge had particular issues with urination, I must say; and have never heard the story that he had to stand on his head to piss (how wonderful, if true!). What he talks about in his notebooks, and complained about to his friends, was constipation, which was a chronic problem of his: it's a side-effect of opium (that is, heroin) addiction, of course. He paid an old woman to visit from time to time with a "clyster pipe", a sort of enema-syringe, to clear out his bowels, a process he found humiliating and unpleasant, not surprisingly.

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