Tuesday 19 April 2016

The Pains of Sleep (1803)



Written in 1803, when what were probably withdrawal symptoms from his opium addiction caused Coleridge such suffering that (he wrote to his friend Poole) 'my repeated Night-yells had made me a Nuisance in my own home.'
Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,
In humble trust mine eye-lids close,
With reverential resignation
No wish conceived, no thought exprest,
Only a sense of supplication;
A sense o'er all my soul imprest
That I am weak, yet not unblest,
Since in me, round me, every where
Eternal strength and Wisdom are.

But yester-night I prayed aloud
In anguish and in agony,
Up-starting from the fiendish crowd
Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:
A lurid light, a trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,
And whom I scorned, those only strong!
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
Still baffled, and yet burning still!
Desire with loathing strangely mixed
On wild or hateful objects fixed.
Fantastic passions! maddening brawl!
And shame and terror over all!
Deeds to be hid which were not hid,
Which all confused I could not know
Whether I suffered, or I did:
For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe,
My own or others still the same
Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame.

So two nights passed: the night's dismay
Saddened and stunned the coming day.
Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me
Distemper's worst calamity.
The third night, when my own loud scream
Had waked me from the fiendish dream,
O'ercome with sufferings strange and wild,
I wept as I had been a child;
And having thus by tears subdued
My anguish to a milder mood,
Such punishments, I said, were due
To natures deepliest stained with sin,—
For aye entempesting anew
The unfathomable hell within,
The horror of their deeds to view,
To know and loathe, yet wish and do!
Such griefs with such men well agree,
But wherefore, wherefore fall on me?
To be loved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed.
There's a lot to say about this, but for now I'm only going to note one small thing: the title. This ('doloribus somnum') is a piece of medical terminology, and speaks to a particular medical diagnosis. Here is Eduard Sandifort (1742-1814), the Dutchman who became one of the most famous physicians of the 18th-century, reporting in 1769 on a man aged 30 (coincidentally the same age that Coleridge was when he wrote his poem):



The key phrase is in the middle: 'Doloribus somnum excutientibus misere transegit noctem': he passed the night sadly, suffering paralysing pains of sleep. (You can see from that passage that, on day 5, the doctor managed to clear his costive bowels with an enema, but that on day 6 'extremum effudit spiritum', he poured out his final breath. Poor chap.)

The point here is that Coleridge is stressing the physicality of his situation: it's not a way of referring to 'bad dreams': it is very much a medical referent to somatic suffering enduring whilst sleeping.

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