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between them are mixed ashes
The Poet is dead in me – my imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been my imagination) lies, like a Cold Snuff on the Rim of a Brass Candle-stick, without even a stick of Tallow to remind you that it was once cloathed & mitred with Flame. That is past by! – I was once a Volume of Gold Leaf, rising & riding on every breath of Fancy – but I have beaten myself back into weight & density, & now I sink in quicksilver, yea, remain squat and square on the earth amid the hurricane, that makes Oaks and Straws join in one Dance, fifty yards high in the Element.
Coleridge in a letter to William Godwin, March 1801
It seems to those who cry that all is lost, almost all almost lost; worse still it seems on the one hand that all has been lost by me, on the other hand that all has lost me; a double mourning then spreads itself over the earth like two sheets, one black, one white, one feminine, one masculine, one easterned, one westerned, and between them are mixed ashes, showing now carmine now grey,
Hélène Cixous, Neuter, 1972, tr. Lorene M. Birden
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The Coleridge is amusing. O Earth, ye have lost your poet etc. He writes it down in his most elevated prose to see how it feels, to test out the idea, to be reassured that he is wrong.
ReplyDeleteCixous is more direct but somehow seems less egotistical. I'm not sure why that is though I really admire it.
He's practically daring his correspondent not to come back with, "But Samuel, you write like magic angel trumpets. No imagination? How can you say such a thing ..."
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