“Not sharper, no…unless you consider that through the filmy gauze one can see even more clearly. Or so I believe. And if your view of the scenery about you has remained somewhat earthbound, perhaps you have not ingested enough of it at once! Or you have diluted it sufficiently to reduce your quantity of pain without parting the curtain onto the fantastical world beyond. Dr. Sydenham’s formula is, to my view, quite a conservative dosage.”
Coleridge drew a thick packet from the pocket of his coat. “Mrs. Robinson, allow me to broaden your knowledge of opium’s exquisite wonders.” He asked if we possessed a wine decanter, and Maria was immediately charged with the task of filling it with warm, unsweetened negus.
Coleridge drew up a chair as we awaited Maria’s return with the wine. “I must confess, this journey of the senses on which I am about to guide you is but small recompense for the gifts you have given me. In fact, I may be so bold as to aver, Mrs. Robinson, that you have already had a most profound impact on my poetry.”
I blushed at such a generous compliment. “But I fear my contribution has been merely editorial—to ensure that your efforts are introduced to the public eye.”
Coleridge shook his head. “It is one of your own poems to which I refer.”
I regarded him quizzically. “One of mine?”
“‘The Haunted Beach,’” said Coleridge. “The rhyme scheme was so unusual; the meter took one on a journey with its rhythm. Wordsworth, too, I must tell you, admits its influence on his verses as well. We are of a mind when I say what an impact it had when first we read it.”
The poet closed his eyes and began to recite my words, murmuring them softly, making them tumble over each other like water burbles over stones.
Then while the smoothly slanting sand
The tall cliff wrapp’d in shade,
The Fisherman beheld a band
Of Spectres, gliding hand in hand—
Where the green billows play’d…
He could not see through shuttered lids, but my eyes were dimmed with tears.
Maria entered the room, set the decanter of negus on the table, and frowned when she saw the rivulets that had begun to bathe my cheeks.
I indicated to her that nothing was amiss. It was praise that had made me weep.
“I have experimented with as many as eight thousand drops of opium a day, but I daresay you should begin with a far lesser quantity. My druggist is a god,” said the poet, opening the packet. He lifted a teaspoon from my breakfast tray and measured out a number of spoonfuls of the dusky brown compound, pouring the earthy opiate into the decanter, now filled well past the bowl with the ruby-colored negus. “There are approximately one hundred grains of opium to a teaspoon,” he said sagely, dropping spoonful after spoonful into the watered-down wine Maria had prepared. “I think one thousand grains each is a good beginning. It’s rather a generous dose, but I am keen for you to ascend with me to the same heights I dare to experience.”
“A thousand grams of opium apiece?” I exclaimed. “My old friend, Mrs. Baddeley, tried to kill herself with three hundred drops of laudanum—an elephantine amount. My physician recommends that I take no more than nineteen drops!”
“Nineteen drops are but a mild stimulant, three hundred a generous sedative. But in the amounts I have oft-times consumed it, we are speaking of a powerful narcotic, and it is these properties that I wish you to explore with me.”
With no small degree of trepidation, I placed my trust in Coleridge’s vast familiarity with the drug. Throughout the day, we drank the opium. Within the first hour, I found that I could not stop smiling. Every sense was heightened. I could taste my hearing. The most mundane and trivial thing became a new discovery, an epiphany as curious as it was exhilarating.
“I love everyone!” I exclaimed, pressing my lips to the poet’s hand. “O, celestial drug, how I might come to worship thee!”
As Time’s winged chariot sped upon its diurnal course, and I ingested more of Coleridge’s ambrosial gift, my thoughts spiraled downward from euphoric to solemn, and yet even then I comprehended the clarity of which the poet spoke. The only exercise remaining was to write a poem whilst under the influence of so much opium, to discover whether the destination was as fantastical as was the journey.
“Promise me you will return,” I said to Coleridge, “that we might continue this experiment. Your genius keeps me keen to write, even on my worst days, and I should like to try another magic carpet ride in the comfort of your companionship.”
Coleridge assented. He became a bosom friend; and the brilliant poet and I shared a few more flights of opiate fantasy over the following months. But I found that I could not tolerate such quantities for very long, and soon grew content simply to drink enough to medicate my pain. If I did not soar to the same heights my young colleague achieved, so be it. I could live with the acknowledgment that no matter how much opium I ingested, and no matter how many poems I wrote under its mighty spell, I would never be another Coleridge. His voice was that of a new generation of writers; I was a relic of its glorious past.
Perhaps it had become time to set that past, and my place within it, in its proper perspective. We had just entered a brand-new century; what better time to look back on an eighteenth-century life than from the invisible field of the infant nineteenth?
I felt assured that my former conduct, judged harshly for so many years, had been redeemed in part through The False Friend and The Natural Daughter—which had been confessionals—and through my Letter to the Women of England. Even so, I knew I would be forever remembered
