Birthday is our Word of the Week, and you’d expect many a poet to have written about the birth of a child, though I don’t know how you could write one without feeling that somehow you’ve not done the event justice. When I first held our daughter Jessica in my arms, the little baby looked up at me as if she had come from another world. Nobody can persuade me that a human child is only as intelligent as a puppy or a monkey, because what you see in the eyes is the searching, the seeing, the learning, all the first promptings of personality. We get too used to each other’s eyes! But there was in those first days no getting used to her eyes; only wonder.
Well then, the year was 1796, in the fall, and one of our favorite personages at Word and Song, that titan of poetry, philosophy, theology, and criticism, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a few weeks after his 24th birthday, received a letter informing him that his wife Sara had given birth to a son. Sara and the child, Hartley, were in the town of Clevedon, on the coast of an arm of the Irish Sea, in the southwest of England, while Samuel was in Birmingham on business affairs. That was about 120 miles away. Nowadays, of course, you needn’t get a letter; you’d know about the birth instantly, you and a few other thousand people, if your wife wanted the news to get out, and you could get in your car and drive a couple of hours and you’d be at her side, maybe picking up some snacks for her along the way. But it seems to have taken Samuel a while to get the news and then another while to make his way to mother and child. In the meantime, he had the leisure to think about what it meant that he had a child, and being of a brooding temperament, he felt rather more fear at the prospect than we might feel now. Sure, part of it must have been the slender threads that in those days bound a frail little infant to life. But part of it came also from Coleridge’s sensitive nature and his then unsettled relation to religious faith (later in life, as I’ve suggested, he became quite a powerful theologian). So his heart must have knocked at his breast on that long ride from Birmingham to Clevedon.
On that topic of mortality, by the way, here are a couple of historical tidbits that may please you. Coleridge named his son Hartley after the philosopher and medical scientist David Hartley, one of the most passionate proponents of the first smallpox vaccine, some decades before Edward Jenner discovered that a far less dangerous vaccine taken from cowpox would do the job just as well, without risk of death. Almost two centuries after David Hartley, the British army set up a site at Clevedon for the mass production of a wonder drug for fighting against bacterial infections. It was the first such site, and the first of all antibiotic drugs — penicillin.
So, while he was on the way to Clevedon, Coleridge wrote two poems about the birth of his son, and then another one, in November, on what it was like when he first saw the child. The poem doesn’t have a proper title; it’s just Sonnet, with the subtitle “To a Friend Who Asked, How I Felt When the Nurse First Presented My Infant to Me.” The friend, Charles, is his fellow poet and publisher, Charles Lloyd. You’ll note that Coleridge’s first feelings are not joy and pride. Instead he thinks about “all I had been,” which brings sorrow to his heart, “and all my child might be,” which brings foreboding. It’s only when he sees the child with his mother that those feelings melt away. He loves both mother and child together, and each one the more for being with the other. Good for a father to feel that way: he stands as the prime witness of a miracle that occurs outside of himself. Let every father read those last two lines, and feel that good clutch of the throat, when words fail before the wonder.
Charles! my slow heart was only sad, when first I scanned that face of feeble infancy: For dimly on my thoughtful spirit burst All I had been, and all my child might be! But when I saw it on its mother's arm, And hanging at her bosom (she the while Bent o'er its features with a tearful smile) Then I was thrilled and melted, and most warm Impressed a father's kiss: and all beguiled Of dark remembrance and presageful fear, I seemed to see an angel-form appear -- 'Twas even thine, beloved woman mild! So for the mother's sake the child was dear, And dearer was the mother for the child.
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