Have been idly reading the Penguin edition of Coleridge's Complete Poems edited by Bill Keach. It's been something of a relevation. Coleridge wrote all kinds of verse on all kinds of occasions (a translation of a 'Hebrew Dirge' as 'chaunted' at London's Great Synagogue on the day of Princess Charlotte's funeral (1817), for example, or a translation from a print on the Virgin found during his walking tour of Germany) as well as many, many short unfinished lines in his notebook. The thing is that they are all compulsively readable, even if they don’t always quite rise to poetry in the most sanctified sense of the word.
I know 'tis but a Dream, yet feel more anguish
Than if 'twere Truth. It has been often so
Must I die under it? Is no one near?
Will no one hear these stifled groans, & wake me?
Part of the interest of this is its being more a diary entry than a poem, or something in between. Its very unpoeticness (compared to say Keats) is part of its effectiveness.
Or:
As some vast tropic Tree, itself a Wood
That crests its Head with clouds, beneath the flood
Feeds its deep roots, and with the bulging flank
Of its wide Base controlls the fronting bank,
(By the slant current's pressure scoop'd away
The fronting Bank becoms a foam-piled Bay)
High in its Fork the uncouth Idol knits
His channel'd Brows: low murmurs stir by fits:
And dark below the horrid Faquir sits;
An Horror from its broad Head's branching Wreath
Broods o'er the rude Idolatry beneath.
Admittedly this is creepy not just because it’s trying to be but because it represents Coleridge’s complete failure to get the point of cultural relativism, or religious toleration but it is also fascinatingly weird (why does he need that longish description of the ‘flood’ to make his point, why is the tree on a river bank in other words?) and also, in context, Coleridege’s xenophobia seems an expression of the kind of depression and anxiety expressed in the first lines cited. It’s these kinds of connections that make the book so good.