'Fancy in Nubibus' (1817)

One of Coleridge's late sonnets, this: written October 1817, first published in The Courier 30 January 1818, later reprinted in various places including Coleridge's own collections of his verse in 1828 and 1834:

O, it is pleasant, with a heart at ease,
Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies,
To make the shifting clouds be what you please,
Or let the easily persuaded eyes
Own each quaint likeness issuing from the mould    [5]
Of a friend’s fancy; or with head bent low,
And cheek aslant, see rivers flow of gold
’Twixt crimson banks; and then, a traveller, go
From mount to mount, through Cloudland, gorgeous land!
Or listening to the tide, with closèd sight,                [10]
Be that blind bard, who on the Chian strand
By those deep sounds possessed, with inward light
Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee
Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea.

The 1828 reprinting gets a touch shoutier with some select capitalisation:

It's a rather oddly-, if charmingly-, shaped poem, I think: opening with a mood of gentle reverie in order to execute a sort of knight's-move into a much grander and more stirring sestet. The opening, at any rate, has a kind of studied indolence, a confidently understated suavity of ease;—the first four rhymes barely exerting themselves to trouble the aaaa of minimum exertion into the abab actually required by the sonnet form; the second four rhymes going only a little better in terms of separating out the sounds of their cdcd. The way mid-line rhymes drape their hands in the water to make lazy ripples as the boat drifts on: head bent low/...see rivers flow of gold. Given that 'clouds' are mention in line 3, the line 'From mount to mount, through Cloudland, gorgeous land!' repeats mount, echoes cloud and doubles-up -land with land, in an effective monotony of iteration. The whole of the octave, in fact, cleverly recasts the activity of travel into a satisfying passivity: you needn't even keep your cheek upright, if you don't want it! Aslant let it lie, and project your effortless imaginary self rather than your laborious physical being into the rivers of gold and gorgeous hillocks of Cloudland. Who doesn't enjoy cloudwatching, after all?

The sestet, hinging on its 'Or...' moves from sky to sea, and from sight to blindness. There is supposed to be a 'turn' in a sonnet between octave and sestet, of course, but this one verges on the extreme. In the first eight lines a poet rhapsodises on the joys of a purely visual imaginary engagement. In the final six he shifts to the most famous of all blind poets, to hearing rather than sight, to water instead of cloudy air. There's another mode of shift, too: from originality into plagiary, for the critics have long noted that the sestet draws from Friedrich Leopold Stolberg's 'An das Meer' ('By the Sea' 1777). The whole of—to give him his rather magnificently Germanic official name—Graf zu Stolberg-Stolberg's poem is available online here, so you can see for yourself.

'An das Meer' is a poem made up of ten four-line stanzas. Most of the whole is given over to praise of swimming in the North Sea, something Stolberg loved to do, but which is much too strenuous an activity to fit STC's sonnet. Stolberg's last three stanzas, though, invoke Homer, and here we come closer to Coleridge's lines:

Der blinde Sänger stand am Meer;
Die Wogen rauschten um ihn her,
Und Riesenthaten goldner Zeit
Umrauschten ihn im Feierkleid.

Es kam zu ihm auf Schwanenschwung
Melodisch die Begeisterung,
Und Ilias und Odyssee
Entstiegen mit Gesang der See.

Hätt' er gesehn, wär' um ihn her
Verschwunden Himmel, Erd' und Meer,
Sie sangen vor des Blinden Blick
Den Himmel, Erd' und Meer zurück.

That means:

The blind singer stood by the sea;
The waves roared around him,
And the giant deeds of his golden time
Surged around him as a raiment.

It came to him like a swan's wing beating
The inspiration of his melodies,
And the Iliad and Odyssey
Rose with the singing of the Sea.

Could he have seen what surrounded him
Sky, earth and sea would have disappeared,
To sing before the blind gaze
And be returned as Heaven, earth and sea.

J.C.C. Mays says this was first noticed by German translator of Coleridge's poems Ferdinand Freiligrath, in 1852. In fact it was noticed earlier than that: George Ripley's anthology of translated Continental poetry, Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature (London 1842) includes this slightly truncated version of Stolberg's poem:





Which leads us irresistibly to 'Note Q':





I think 'word for word' overstates this a tad. Clearly 'Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee/Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea' owes something to 'Und Ilias und Odyssee/Entstiegen mit Gesang der See', something reinforced by Coleridge's Germanic spelling of 'Odyssee'. But 'voiceful sea' is Coleridge's own contribution, and rather lovely it is too. Perhaps it gives the impression of having been translated from the German phrase Stimmegefüllt See, or something; but of course actually it's not. (If Coleridge took it from anywhere, it is more likely to be from English pastoral poet William Browne, whose Britannia's Pastorals (1613) positions the speaker ‘Near Tavy’s voiceful stream, to whom I owe/More strains than from my pipe can ever flow’).

It's not that Coleridge was shy of reworking and translating various Stolbergiana, something he sometimes did, after the manner of his characteristic delinquency, without acknowledging the fact. His splendid 'On A Cataract' (maybe written at the end of the 1790s) is actually a translation of Stolberg's 'Der Felsenstrom'; ‘Tell’s Birth-Place’ imitates Stolberg’s ‘Bei Wilhelm Telles Geburtstätte im Kanton Uri’ (although here STC at least adds 'Imitated From Stolberg' to his title); and Stolberg’s ‘Hymne an die Erde’ is largely present in Coleridge’s ‘Hymn to the Earth’. Then there are things like 'Wills of the Wisp: a Sapphic from Stolberg', probably written 1801. Indeed, as Stolberg-imitation goes, 'Fancy in Nubibus' is fairly oblique.

Or maybe a better way of putting that would be to say there's a clearer vector of imitation at work here, and its not German so much as it is Roman. I mean: just look at that title! Nubibus is the dative plural of the Latin nubes, cloud, which makes the title into two dactyls both in terms of prosodic quantity and stress: fancy in/nūbibus. Which is nice, I think; since it seems to me that the workhorse iambic prosodic skeleton of Coleridge's poem includes a kind of spectral inclination towards the dactylic: so that we hesitate between reading

oh, IT is PLEAsant, WITH a HEART at EASE,
just AFTer SUNset, OR by MOONlight SKIES,

and reading

O, it is pleasant, with a heart at ease,
Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies,

and so on. The dactyllic reading is slightly more energetic, a little more forceful; the lullaby rocking of the iambic is more restfully what we're used to. And that's also the tacit theme of Coleridge's sonnet: whether the poet's imaginative apprehension of the beauties of sky and water is perfectly passive, or a magically hidden force of active agency. I'd suggest that 'in nubibus' is there to make us think of Vergil, and of the famous two lines from Aeneid book 5, where, during the funeral games for Anchises, the Sicilian king Acestes (Ἄκέστης! It's almost like an externalised STC, ἐκ ἐστηση ...) fires an arrow into the clouds:

Namque volans liquidis in nubibus arsit harundo,
signavitque viam flammis, tenuisque recessit
consumpta in ventos, caelo ceu saepe refixa
transcurrunt crinemque volantia sidera ducunt. [Aeneid 5: 525-8]

There's your in nubibus, right there in line 525. These lines mean:

And then, soaring into the liquid clouds, his arrow caught fire, tracing a gleaming path of flame, before vanishing into the wind,—as a star will sometimes fall loose from the heavens drawing its fiery tresses behind it.

Aeneas interprets this portent regarding the divine favour bestowed on Acestes. When Walter Scott reviewed Southey's Curse of Kehama for the Quarterly Review in 1811 (a review Coleridge certainly knew) he deployed precisely this quotation:

Mr. Southey resembles Acestes, who shot merely to shew the strength of his bow, and the height to which he could send his arrow.

volans liquidis in nubibus arsit harundo,
signavitque viam flammis.

In this point of view, it is impossible to read the Curse of Kehama without conceiving the highest opinion of the author’s force of imagination and power of expression.

In Coleridge's expansion of this Vergilian tag the arrow fired is the metaphorical one of sight (the viewer with head bent low,/And cheek aslant, like an archer taking aim). It goes up into the air and is transformed into rivers of gold.