From the dank and airless cell within the sheriff’s quarters, I penned a letter to the Prince of Wales. “If you could see my state, you would but pity me,” I wrote, entreating him to pay me a visit and release me from my degradation.
His Royal Highness’s reply: “There is no money at Carlton House.” And of course he never called on me.
The sheriff granted me but one month’s time to garner the amount of my obligation, during which I would remain in his custody. If I failed, I would be sent down to a spunging house in London within the King’s Bench.
I poured out my despair in letters to Coleridge and to Godwin, and just before my period of leniency had lapsed, I learned that my friends had taken up a collection and paid the sixty-three pounds, thereby discharging my debt. Tears of gratitude and joy bedewed my cheeks. I knew that even if the prince should tender his long-awaited annuity payment, I should never be able to repay their kindness.
We had a little celebration upon my release, and my friends thought it meet to gratify my self-esteem by informing me that according to the press, “Banastre Tarleton has not made one good speech in Parliament since his desertion of the Muses.” Everyone knew whose name they invoked.
In early autumn, Coleridge wrote to announce the birth of his son Derwent, and in the infant’s honor, I penned an ode, complimenting his father as well in its allusions to Coleridge’s own poetic vocabulary.
Coleridge responded, thanking me for the unique and most appreciated baby gift, and enclosed a copy of his latest manuscript for my perusal. His letter said:
From your “Haunted Beach” I have rowed out into the pounding surf. I have been visited by dreams such as man has never seen nor known. My imagination has been oared into the ether by a prophet of sorts—a radical poet most assuredly—taken on a journey filled with color and wonder, bolstered by billows of cloud and sea. Perhaps more credit is due to the euphoric effects of my romance with opium, without which I cannot survive from the rosy hours of dawn to dusky twilight and beyond, but if you are indulgent enough to critique it, I should be ever in your debt.
I snipped the string and began to read:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery…
From the poem’s first lines, I knew that I was looking at a work of genius. Everything about it was new and indeed radical. The language, the rhyme scheme, scansion, and rhythm took the reader on an undulating journey through a world of fantasy and phantasm. Critique it? I adored it! And the only way I could think of to thank Coleridge for the sublime pleasure of this poem was to pen a response of sorts, a counter-poem in this new, revolutionary style.
But I knew, even as Maria posted it, that my poetical effort was to Coleridge’s technique as pap is to Cognac.
As I write now, the year 1800 is nigh upon closing. The November winds whistle through the trees outside my window; Maria has laid the fire to keep us warm. Englefield Cottage is a cozy oasis, though I am bedridden—and despite my inability to perambulate, I cannot stop writing.
Publication of my poems brings in but a few guineas, so an English translation (from the German) of Dr. Hager’s Picture of Palermo will not wait for my condition to improve. I remain hard at work on my series of essays titled Society and Manners in the Metropolis of England for the popular Monthly Magazine. There is the arrangement of my Poetical Works to complete and Longman & Rees will publish my collection of Lyrical Tales by Christmas.
I hope I live to see it. My extremities are swollen with water and the doctor fears to lance them again. In September, my coachman, mistaking my person for a bale of hay, heaved me so high when he carried me indoors one day that I was clocked in the head when my pate met the ceiling! Thank goodness it was only timber and lathe or I should have been dead from the injury; but ever since, I have suffered the most frightful headaches. My scalp is blistered, which does nothing for my vanity—and I have so little beauty to protect nowadays that I jealously guard what I can.
The worst of it is that some days the pain is so great that I cannot concentrate, and my editors have accused me of indolence. If only they realized how prolific and quick I have been with my quill this last decade—perhaps even too quick—and this is in the face of a progressively crippling illness, they would know that something must be terribly amiss with Mrs. Robinson to have forgone a deadline. To the last, they lack all respect for the artist, except as an alchemist who turns words into gold for their coffers.
I have been fighting melancholia, spectrally haunted by the characters that starred in the grand production of my life.
Forgive me while I lay aside my pen and allow my fingers to reach into the desk drawer. Their memory of a distinct pattern of raised tracery locates the framed miniature of a familiar face and brings the portrait into view. Nicholas Darby, my father—of black Irish stock, though American born, embodying the best and worst of his ancestors’ character. The painting almost springs to life in my palm. His half smile makes me blink back tears. But are they of sorrow or of joy?
I have begun to pen an elegy in verse for my late father,
