Thursday 28 April 2016

John Wilson, 'The Magic Mirror' (1812)


For a time, John Wilson (also known as 'Christopher North', 1785-1854) lived at Ellera, his estate on Windermerein 1807. He soon befriended his neighbours Coleridge and Wordsworth. A few years later he published 'The Magic Mirror' in the Edinburgh Annual Register [3 (1812), 107-117: it's dated 'for 1810' but was actually published 1812]. That's the first page of the poem up there, and here, with its interesting footnote, is the second page:

Inevitably we wonder: which unpublished poem? J C C Mays [Poetical Works (2 vols Princeton 2001), 1:526] thinks the reference is to a fragment Coleridge wrote in his notebook, perhaps in 1798:
The silence of the City—How awful at midnight—
Mute as the battlements & crags & towers
That fancy makes in the clouds—yea, as mute
As the moonlight that sleeps on the steady Vanes,—
The cell of a departed Anchoret,
His skeleton & flitting ghost are there,
Sole tenants—
And all the City, silent as the moon
That steeps in quiet light the steady Vanes
Of her huge temples—
I don't see this, myself: the specifics here surely don't match Wilson's poem. More, when Wilson collected 'The Magic Mirror' in his Miscellaneous Poems (1825), the wording of the footnote was changed:


To me, this suggests that whichever Coleridge poem Wilson was drawing on was an unpublished MS piece in 1812, but had been published by 1825 (the lines Mays instances were not published in Coleridge's lifetime). I wonder if Wilson didn't have in mind some lines from Coleridge's 'Destiny of Nations', written 1795 but not published under Coleridge's name until 1817. War coming like a mighty wind:
... War and all its dread vicissitudes
Pleasingly agitate their stagnant hearts;...
A vapour sailed, as when a cloud, exhaled
From Egypt's fields that steam hot pestilence,
Travels the sky for many a trackless league,
Till o'er some death-doomed land, distant in vain,
It broods incumbent. Forthwith from the plain,
Facing the Isle, a brighter cloud arose,
And steered its course which way the vapour went.’

1 comment:

  1. The line he's referring to seems to be "Even like a city storm'd upon the Sabbath day" - which is a striking simile &, if borrowed, well worth crediting to its author. I don't think either of those passages is the source, though.

    What he seems to be describing in that verse is the experience of nearly coming out of the vision, only to be recalled to unreality by the imagined 'blasts' (wind? thundering water? trumpets?): the vision fades and grows dim, then envelops him again by the end of the verse. An odd & rather unsettling image - Ode to a Nightingale in reverse.

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