The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume I Part 113

When she asks, 'What! Is he sick?' 5 Say, dead!--and when for sorrow She begins to sob and cry, Say, I come to-morrow.

? 1799.

FOOTNOTES:

[326:1] First published in the _Morning Post_, Sept. 27, 1802: reprinted in _Essays on His Own Times_, 1850, iii. 992. First collected in _P.

W._, 1877-80, ii. 170.

HEXAMETERS[326:2]

PARAPHRASE OF PSALM XLVI

G.o.d is our Strength and our Refuge: therefore will we not tremble, Tho' the Earth be removed and tho' the perpetual Mountains Sink in the Swell of the Ocean! G.o.d is our Strength and our Refuge.

There is a River the Flowing whereof shall gladden the City, Hallelujah! the City of G.o.d! Jehova shall help her. 5 The Idolaters raged, the kingdoms were moving in fury; But he uttered his Voice: Earth melted away from beneath them.

Halleluja! th' Eternal is with us, Almighty Jehova!

Fearful the works of the Lord, yea fearful his Desolations; But He maketh the Battle to cease, he burneth the Spear and the Chariot. 10 Halleluja! th' Eternal is with us, the G.o.d of our Fathers!

1799.

FOOTNOTES:

[326:2] Now published for the first time. The lines were sent in a letter to George Coleridge dated September 29, 1799. They were prefaced as follows:--'We were talking of Hexameters with you. I will, for want of something better, fill up the paper with a translation of one of my favourite Psalms into that metre which allowing trochees for spondees, as the nature of our Language demands, you will find pretty accurate a scansion.' _Mahomet_ and, no doubt, the _Hymn to the Earth_ may be a.s.signed to the end of September or the beginning of October, 1799.

HYMN TO THE EARTH[327:1]

[IMITATED FROM s...o...b..RG'S _HYMNE AN DIE ERDE_]

HEXAMETERS

Earth! thou mother of numberless children, the nurse and the mother, Hail! O G.o.ddess, thrice hail! Blest be thou! and, blessing, I hymn thee!

Forth, ye sweet sounds! from my harp, and my voice shall float on your surges-- Soar thou aloft, O my soul! and bear up my song on thy pinions.

Travelling the vale with mine eyes--green meadows and lake with green island, 5 Dark in its basin of rock, and the bare stream flowing in brightness, Thrilled with thy beauty and love in the wooded slope of the mountain, Here, great mother, I lie, thy child, with his head on thy bosom!

Playful the spirits of noon, that rus.h.i.+ng soft through thy tresses, Green-haired G.o.ddess! refresh me; and hark! as they hurry or linger, 10 Fill the pause of my harp, or sustain it with musical murmurs.

Into my being thou murmurest joy, and tenderest sadness Shedd'st thou, like dew, on my heart, till the joy and the heavenly sadness Pour themselves forth from my heart in tears, and the hymn of thanksgiving.

Earth! thou mother of numberless children, the nurse and the mother, 15 Sister thou of the stars, and beloved by the Sun, the rejoicer!

Guardian and friend of the moon, O Earth, whom the comets forget not, Yea, in the measureless distance wheel round and again they behold thee!

Fadeless and young (and what if the latest birth of creation?) Bride and consort of Heaven, that looks down upon thee enamoured! 20 Say, mysterious Earth! O say, great mother and G.o.ddess, Was it not well with thee then, when first thy lap was ungirdled, Thy lap to the genial Heaven, the day that he wooed thee and won thee!

Fair was thy blush, the fairest and first of the blushes of morning!

Deep was the shudder, O Earth! the throe of thy self-retention: 25 Inly thou strovest to flee, and didst seek thyself at thy centre!

Mightier far was the joy of thy sudden resilience; and forthwith Myriad myriads of lives teemed forth from the mighty embracement.

Thousand-fold tribes of dwellers, impelled by thousand-fold instincts, Filled, as a dream, the wide waters; the rivers sang on their channels; 30 Laughed on their sh.o.r.es the hoa.r.s.e seas; the yearning ocean swelled upward; Young life lowed through the meadows, the woods, and the echoing mountains, Wandered bleating in valleys, and warbled on blossoming branches.

1799.

FOOTNOTES:

[327:1] First published in _Friends.h.i.+p's Offering_, 1834, pp. 165-7, with other pieces, under the general heading:--_Fragments from the Wreck of Memory: or Portions of Poems composed in Early Manhood: by S. T.

Coleridge._ A Note was prefixed:--'It may not be without use or interest to youthful, and especially to intelligent female readers of poetry, to observe that in the attempt to adapt the Greek metres to the English language, we must begin by subst.i.tuting _quality_ of sound for _quant.i.ty_--that is, accentuated or comparatively emphasized syllables, for what in the Greek and Latin Verse, are named long, and of which the prosodial mark is ; and _vice versa_, unaccented syllables for short marked ?. Now the Hexameter verse consists of two sorts of _feet_, the spondee composed of two long syllables, and the dactyl, composed of one long syllable followed by two short. The following verse from the Psalms is a rare instance of a _perfect_ hexameter (i. e. line of six feet) in the English language:--

G.o.d came | up with a | shout: our | Lord with the | sound of a | trumpet.

But so few are the truly _spondaic_ words in our language, such as Eg?pt, uproar, turmoil, &c., that we are compelled to subst.i.tute, in most instances, the trochee; or ?, i. e. in such words as merry?, lightly?, &c., for the proper spondee. It need only be added, that in the hexameter the fifth foot must be a dactyl, and the sixth a spondee, or trochee. I will end this note with two hexameter lines, likewise from the Psalms:--

There is a | river the | flowing where|of shall | gladden the | city?, Halle|lujah the | city? | G.o.d Je|hovah hath | blest her.

S. T. C.'

On some proof-sheets, or loose pages of a copy of _The Hymn_ as published in _Friends.h.i.+p's Offering_ for 1834, which Coleridge annotated, no doubt with a view to his corrections being adopted in the forthcoming edition of his poems (1834), he adds in MS. the following supplementary note:--'To make any considerable number of Hexameters feasible in our monosyllabic trocheeo-iambic language, there must, I fear, be other licenses granted--in the _first_ foot, at least--_ex.

gr._ a superfluous ? prefixed in cases of particles such as 'of, 'and', and the like: likewise ? where the stronger accent is on the first syllable.--S. T. C.'

The _Hymn to the Earth_ is a free translation of F. L. s...o...b..rg's _Hymne an die Erde_. (See F. Freiligrath's _Biographical Memoirs_ prefixed to the Tauchnitz edition of the _Poems_ published in 1852.) The translation exceeds the German original by two lines. The Hexameters 'from the Psalms' are taken from a metrical experiment which Coleridge sent to his brother George, in a letter dated September 29, 1799 (vide _ante_).

First collected in 1834. The acknowledgement that the _Hymn to the Earth_ is imitated from s...o...b..rg's _Hymne an die Erde_ was first prefixed by J. D. Campbell in 1893.

LINENOTES:

[8] his] its F. O. 1834.

[9] that creep or rush through thy tresses F. O. 1834.

[33] on] in F. O. 1834.

[After 33]

F. O. 1834.

MAHOMET[329:1]

Utter the song, O my soul! the flight and return of Mohammed, Prophet and priest, who scatter'd abroad both evil and blessing, Huge wasteful empires founded and hallow'd slow persecution, Soul-withering, but crush'd the blasphemous rites of the Pagan And idolatrous Christians.--For veiling the Gospel of Jesus, 5 They, the best corrupting, had made it worse than the vilest.