He was transfixed by the huge fresco in the Camposanto at Pisa, said to be by Giotto and his pupils, “The Triumph of Death”. The faded condition of the tempera, the flat glimmering of human forms without colour or perspective, all processing towards inevitable death, impressed him even more than Dante. He was haunted by it, and over a decade later recalled his impressions at length in a set of Philosophical Lectures. The frescoes presented that sense of inexhaustible and hypnotic power, “which we are reminded of when in the South of Europe we look at the deep blue sky…The same unwearied form presents itself, yet still we look on, sinking deeper and deeper, and therein offering homage to the infinity of our souls which no mere form can satisfy.”180
At Pisa he had less Platonic detachment, and felt that he was now drifting into Death’s cortège. By the time he reached Livorno on 7 June, he was in a mood of “black” despair equal to any experienced in Malta. While Russell looked for a ship to take them back, Coleridge plunged into a suicidal state of gloom, dreading the dangers of the voyage, and dreading even more its safe completion. Nothing could more clearly reveal his reluctance to leave the South, which he had so long half-hidden from himself, disguising it as his duty to Ball, or the difficulties of travel, or his new friendship with Allston. Now all his thoughts turned to his children, the one thing he felt he could not abandon. “O my Children, my Children! I gave you life once, unconscious of the Life I was giving; and you as unconsciously have given Life to me…Many months past I should have essayed whether Death is what I groan for, absorption and transfiguration of Consciousness…Even this moment I could commit Suicide but for you, my Darlings.”181
Even the thought of returning to the Wordsworths and Asra was no comfort. “Of Wordsworths – of Sara Hutchinson: that is passed – or of remembered thoughts to make a Hell of.” He felt racked with pain and self-disgust: “no other Refuge than Poisons that degrade the Being, while they suspend the torment”.182 Grimly, he went out and purchased a brass enema and pipe.
It was not easy to find a ship, as the navy had suspended its operations off Italy, and neutral merchantmen were nervous of taking British nationals. They shuttled between inns at Livorno, Pisa and Florence, making enquiries and spending the last of their money. Allston’s recommendation to Pietro Benevuti, the Professor of Painting at the Florentine Academy, came to nothing as Coleridge was for once beyond the point of projecting his charm in bad Italian. But at last they found an American sailor, Captain Derkheim of “the Gosport”, and Coleridge summoned sufficient energy to convince the Captain that they were cargo worthy of passage on credit. Captain Derkheim later said he had heard nothing like Coleridge since leaving the Niagara Falls.183
The effort of it all was so great that Coleridge awoke the next day screaming and trying to vomit, his right arm paralysed. It gradually wore off, but he believed he had suffered a “manifest stroke of Palsy”. Trying to calm himself, he finally sat and wrote a long letter to Allston at the Cafe Greco in Rome. He did not mention opium, but wrote frankly about his depression, his dangerous illness, and his thoughts of his children.
“But for them I would try my chance. But they pluck out the wingfeathers from the mind.” He praised young Russell for his “Kindness & tender-heartedness to me”; and worried about the Wallis family still in Rome. His farewell to Allston expressed passionate friendship, and a sense of star-crossed destiny as he prepared to leave. “My dear Allston! somewhat from increasing age, but much more from calamity & intense pre-affections my heart is not open to more than kind good wishes in general; to you & to you alone since I have left England, I have felt more; and had I not known the Wordsworths, should have loved & esteemed you first and most: and as it is, next to them I love & honour you. Heaven knows, a part of such a Wreck as my Head & Heart is scarcely worth your acceptance.”184
By 22 June, Coleridge and Russell were back at Pisa, waiting at the Globe Inn for a storm to disperse before boarding. It seems that it was too dangerous to linger in Livorno itself, because of possible arrest by French troops, and Captain Derkheim had already had to pass them off as American nationals. Coleridge would later embroider a much more dramatic story that Napoleon had issued a personal warrant for his arrest, and his “escape” from Rome to Livorno had been arranged through “the kindness of a noble Benedictine, and the gracious connivance of that good old man, the present Pope”.185
A warrant had certainly been issued for the British consul in Rome, Mr Jackson, and a general order to expel British nationals from Italy in May, which was why Coleridge was worried about the Wallis family. But the tale of a hectic personal pursuit was really a fiction, designed to cover up the otherwise inexplicable time he had remained in Italy with Allston, undecided about returning to England at all.186
Coleridge would soon present this whole latter part of his sojourn in the Mediterranean as a sequence of events almost entirely beyond his control: “retained” against his will by Sir Alexander Ball, “duped” by the consul at Naples Mr Elliot, and forced to live in hiding among the bohemians of Rome while pursued by Napoleon’s vengeful officers. In truth, he had acted much more wilfully, delaying and taking casual risks which would have appalled his family and friends.
The true chaos of his existence over the past eighteen months came to a head at Pisa. He was holed up in a cheap inn with an art student, virtually penniless, having a few books and presents in an old box, a supply of opium and an enema, and two precious Notebooks. He was in imminent danger of arrest, disguised as an American, and deeply uncertain if he wanted to return to England to take up his old life and identity. Once again he felt the best solution would have been if he had died in John Wordsworth’s place. “O dear John Wordsworth! Ah that I could but have died for you: & you have gone home, married S. Hutchinson, & protected my Poor little ones. O how very, very gladly would I have accepted the conditions.’187
On the night before their final departure for Livorno, he wrote a hymn to death, sitting in the window of the inn and watching the bolts of lightning crash down over the river Arno. “Sunday, June 22nd 1806. Globe, Pisa…Repeatedly during this night’s storm have I desired that I might be taken off, not knowing when or where. But a few moments past a vivid flash passed across me, my nerves thrilled, and I earnestly wished, so help me God! like a Love-longing, that it would pass through me!”188
Yet this Coleridgean death was no ordinary extinction. It was more like a transfiguration, a complete transformation of the terms of his existence. It would “take him off” to some other dimension. It was: “Death without deformity, or assassin-like self-disorganization; Death, in which the mind by its own wish might seem to have caused its own purpose to be performed, as instantaneously and by an instrument almost as spiritual, as the Wish itself!” It was Death which seemed almost like re-birth, Death which seemed like an act of love, preparing for something new, blowing away the old self:
Come, come, thou bleak December wind,
And blow the dry Leaves from the Tree!
Flash, like a love-thought, thro’ me, Death!
And take a life, that wearies me.189
The imagery of winter, with its dead leaves, still promised the possibility of some other springtime, with the buds and blossoms of another life.
It would be easy to misjudge Coleridge’s