The Wanderings of Cain (1797)

I've never been entirely sure what to make of Coleridge's 'The Wanderings of Cain'. It's a 2000-word piece of prose written November 1797 (a few other fragmentary bits and pieces were written at later dates) that styles itself 'Canto 2' of an unfinished three canto work on the subject of Cain's exile after he murdered his brother Abel. At some point in the 1800s Coleridge tinkered with the notion of adapting his prose into verse, but this came to nothing. He finally published it in 1828 as 'a fragment'. The best place to read the original chunk and all the other related bits is this useful 'Romantic Circles' set of pages on The Wanderings of Cain.

To the 1828 version Coleridge added a preface in which he explained that the work was originally to have been a collaboration with Wordsworth.

The title and subject were suggested by myself, who likewise drew out the scheme and the contents for each of the three books or cantos, of which the work was to consist, and which, the reader is to be informed, was to have been finished in one night! My partner [Wordsworth] undertook the first canto; I the second: and which ever had done first, was to set about the third. Almost thirty years have passed by; yet at this moment I cannot without something more than a smile moot the question which of the two things was the more impracticable, for a mind so eminently original to compose another man's thoughts and fancies, or for a taste so austerely pure and simple to imitate the Death of Abel?

Coleridge wrote his piece, but Wordsworth drew a blank, and at that point the two were overcome by a 'sense of the exceeding ridiculousness of the whole scheme—which broke up in a laugh: and the Ancient Mariner was written instead.' The reference to 'imitating the Death of Abel' makes the germ of the idea clear: Coleridge had read the English translation of Salomon Gessner's extremely, indeed bafflingly popular Der Tod Abels (1758), a lengthy sort-of prose-poem that, despite its grim title (and as well as expatiating fruitily on questions of morality, piety, family and religion) spends most of its time lushly describing the delightful scenery of the post-Edenic world in an access of pastoral delight.

1797 is before Coleridge learned German, so he must have read the English translation by Mary Collyer (1761).

Not just any engravings, mark you: superb engravings. The Death of Abel, flowery in several senses, was one of the bestsellers of its age, as Gabrielle Bersier notes:

[Collyer's version] became an immediate and enduring bestseller on a par with Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe. The sheer numbers are stunning: 40 editions and reprints between 1762 and 1800 reaching a total of 70 editions and reprints through to 1830 in Britain and North America, a success much to the dismay of the critics. The recipients of Gessner's biblical elegy belonged to a poorer and less educated public. While sophisticated readers on the Continent found delight in the Arcadian pantheism of the idyll, the poorer masses of England and North America were attracted to the epic's mixture of sentimental and pious feelings, hymnal pathos and cultural criticism, all of which was intensified in Mary Collyer's translation. [Bersier, 'Arcadia Revitalized: The International Appeal of Gessner's Idylls in the 18th Century', in Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (ed), From the Greeks to the Greens: Images of the Simple Life (Wisconsin Univ. Press 1989), 37-8]

Presumably Coleridge hoped to enjoy something like that commercial success. I also like this idiosyncratic use of the past tense in Collyer's translator's preface:



'Is wrote', indeed. At any rate, reading Collyer's Gessner is a good way to prime us for reading Coleridge's rather over-ripe prose.



108 pages of that kind of thing. Coleridge's version overlaps with the end of Gessner's, plot-wise, and is a little more elevated and stiff in tone than Collyer's. This is how it starts:

"A little further, O my father, yet a little further, and we shall come into the open moonlight:" Their road was through a forest of fir-trees; at its entrance the trees stood at distances from each other, and the path was broad, and the moonlight, and the moonlight shadows reposed upon it, and appeared quietly to inhabit that solitude. But soon the path winded and became narrow; the sun at high noon sometimes speckled, but never illumined it, and now it was dark as a cavern.

"It is dark, O my father!" said Enos, "but the path under our feet is smooth and soft, and we shall soon come out into the open moonlight."

...

And Cain lifted up his voice and cried bitterly, and said, "The Mighty One that persecuteth me is on this side and on that; he pursueth my soul like the wind, like the sand-blast he passeth through me; he is around me even as the air! O that I might be utterly no more! I desire to die—yea, the things that never had life, neither move they upon the earth—behold! they seem precious to mine eyes. O that a man might live without the breath of his nostrils. So I might abide in darkness, and blackness, and an empty space! Yea, I would lie down, I would not rise, neither would I stir my limbs till I became as the rock in the den of the lion, on which the young lion resteth his head whilst he sleepeth. For the torrent that roareth far off hath a voice; and the clouds in heaven look terribly on me; the mighty one who is against me speaketh in the wind of the cedar grove; and in silence am I dried up." Then Enos spake to his father, "Arise my father, arise, we are but a little way from the place where I found the cake and the pitcher." And Cain said, "How knowest thou?" and the child answered—"Behold the bare rocks are a few of thy strides distant from the forest; and while even now thou wert lifting up thy voice, I heard the echo." Then the child took hold of his father, as if he would raise him: and Cain being faint and feeble rose slowly on his knees and pressed himself against the trunk of a fir, and stood upright and followed the child.

Cain's son, Enos, is sad that the squirrels won't play with him: 'How happy the squirrels are that feed on these fir trees! ... I clomb a tree yesterday at noon, O my father, that I might play with them, but they leapt away from the branches, even to the slender twigs did they leap, and in a moment I beheld them on another tree. Why, O my father, would they not play with me?' Since neither squirrels nor fir trees are native to the Holy Land, we have to assume that Cain's wanderings have taken him far from his home; indeed much of the scenery in the piece comes (according to Hazlitt) from Coleridge's own wanderings in the 'valley of the rocks' near Lynton in Dorset. Cain himself is so physically broken-down as to scare his son ('the child was affrighted'):

The mighty limbs of Cain were wasted as by fire; his hair was as the matted curls on the Bison's forehead, and so glared his fierce and sullen eye beneath: and the black abundant locks on either side, a rank and tangled mass, were stained and scorched, as though the grasp of a burning iron hand had striven to rend them; and his countenance told in a strange and terrible language of agonies that had been, and were, and were still to continue to be.

Bison, eh? Maybe Cain has wandered all the way to the States, which would indeed be some wander. The poem describes them travelling across a desolate land: 'hot rocks and scorching sands. Never morning lark had poised himself over this desert; but the huge serpent often hissed there beneath the talons of the vulture, and the vulture screamed, his wings imprisoned within the coils of the serpent.' They walk to a giant rock, and there Cain encounters the ghost, or 'Shape', of his murdered brother.

Thus as he stood in silence and darkness of Soul, the SHAPE fell at his feet, and embraced his knees, and cried out with a bitter outcry, "Thou eldest born of Adam, whom Eve, my mother, brought forth, cease to torment me! I was feeding my flocks in green pastures by the side of quiet rivers, and thou killedst me; and now I am in misery." Then Cain closed his eyes, and hid them with his hands; and again he opened his eyes, and looked around him, and said to Enos, "What beholdest thou? Didst thou hear a voice my son?" "Yes, my father, I beheld a man in unclean garments, and he uttered a sweet voice, full of lamentation." Then Cain raised up the Shape that was like Abel, and said. "The Creator of our father, who had respect unto thee, and unto thy offering, wherefore hath he forsaken thee?" Then the Shape shrieked a second time, and rent his garment, and his naked skin was like the white sands beneath their feet; and he shrieked yet a third time, and threw himself on his face upon the sand that was black with the shadow of the rock, and Cain and Enos sate beside him; the child by his right hand, and Cain by his left. They were all three under the rock, and within the shadow.

The canto ends with Cain miserably asking to be taken to the 'god of death':

"Abel, my brother, I would lament for thee, but that the spirit within me is withered, and burnt up with extreme agony. Now, I pray thee, by thy flocks, and by thy pastures, and by the quiet rivers which thou lovedst, that thou tell me all that thou knowest. Who is the God of the dead? where doth he make his dwelling? what sacrifices are acceptable unto him? for I have offered, but have not been received; I have prayed, and have not been heard; and how can I be afflicted more than I already am?"

Abel's ghost promises to show him, and the canto ends: 'And they three passed over the white sands between the rocks, silent as the shadows.' Boom.

There are scattered bits and pieces, some more convincingly related to this project than others, that can be quarried out of the Notebooks; but I think the key is right there, in plain sight. This reference to 'the god of death' ought to make us think, as it surely would have been in Coleridge's mind, of Romans 14:9, 'For to this end Christ both died, and rose, and revived, that he might be Lord both of the dead and living'. Canto 2 is the pre-redeemed Cain; but the third canto would surely bring him to a true understanding of the nature of this 'god of the dead'.