Sound, Silence, and Voice in Meditation: Coleridge, Berkeley, and the Conversation Poems:

... the interment of such a treasure in a dead language must needs be contrary to the intentions of the gracious Donor. Coleridge, The Statesman's Manual As James Engell reminds us, S. T. Coleridge considered himself a Berkeleian (110), yet elsewhere in Coleridge criticism we find more convincing denials: J. Robert Barth, for example, claims that we do not "have to resort to a Berkeleian philosophy" to find the source of Coleridge's belief in a God who actively sustains creation (Symbolic 20), while Seamus Perry argues that "his Berkeleianism is impure," because, "Even at his most rampantly idealist, he didn't deny that real existence of other things" (34). Thomas McFarland tells us that Berkeley "is specifically identified in the Biographia as one of the thinkers who had not provided [Coleridge] with 'an abiding place' for his 'reason'" (158). Coleridge's Berkeleianism is indeed impure, and, as Perry and McFarland would agree, nearly all Coleridge's work is held in suspension between idealist and realist tendencies; (1) furthermore, this tension is a fundamentally Christian one, inherent in a religion that worships a figure conceived as fully God and fully man. From such a viewpoint, Coleridge, so frequently accused of pantheism, appears more orthodox than a pseudo-Gnostic (and, McFarland would argue, implicitly pantheist) Berkeley. In the writings of J. Robert Barth we find a valuable theoretical perspective from which to view the purpose of Christian poetry in general and of Coleridge's poetry in particular. We take as our starting point a concept drawn from Barth's study The Symbolic Imagination: Coleridge and the Romantic Tradition: the idea that Christian poetry is essentially sacramental. That is to say, as the sacraments--particularly the Eucharist--represent God's entrance into the temporal world from transcendence (originally by the Incarnation, reenacted by the sacraments), so a Christian poetry properly conceived represents God's entrance into the world through language. Barth ties this idea of sacramental poetry to Coleridge's concept of symbol, which "articulates, however dimly, the 'interpenetration' of two disparate and often seemingly very distinct realities, such as humankind and God. It is by such language--poetic language--that the chasm between the immanent and the transcendent can be bridged" (Symbolic 26). Most important to Barth is "the notion of sacrament--and symbol--as encounter" (40), an encounter that takes place on two planes, "between the poet and the reader, for which the poem is setting and catalyst" and "between [the poet] and the sacred--the numinous 'other'--whether discovered within or outside one's self" (145). We may go farther; to conceive of poetry as an encounter between the poet and the divine can be understood as the continuation of revelation. The poet, therefore, becomes a sort of prophet (as indeed the Romantics often imagined), recording that inspired, revealed truth in such a way that others can follow and experience their own sacramental encounters. We may, therefore, take as our guiding principle one central idea: the truest poetry records an encounter with God. The symbol of conversation, representing God's incarnational and sacramental communion with humankind, is central to the poems here under study; conversation in Coleridge is a sacramental act between the human and the divine, mediated by nature-as-language and by poetic language. His use of sound--both as sound imagery within the poem, and sound as the music of the poem's expression--correlates to the symbolic colloquy of sacrament. This technique depends upon a conception of the interdependence of the spiritual and physical worlds: as God is the ground of all being, the physical world depends upon the active and sustaining power of divinity to animate it; the spiritual, in turn, uses the physical world as a language, expressing divinity through and within the world it sustains. …