The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772 in Ottery
St Mary in Devon, and he died in Highgate, Middlesex. However, it was during the short time he
spent in Somerset, in 1797-1798, when he lived at what is now known as
Coleridge Cottage in Nether Stowey, that he produced some of his most famous
work.
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Coleridge Cottage - Nether Stowey - Somerset, England - DSC01217. Photo by Daderot, via Wikimedia Commons
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Probably the most well known of his works is The Rime Of The
Ancient Mariner. The story goes that
Coleridge was walking in the Quantock Hills with William Wordsworth and his
sister Dorothy, who were staying at nearby Alfoxton Park, when the conversation
turned to a book Wordsworth was reading about a round-the-world sea voyage, and
that this provided the inspiration for The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, which
features an albatross which helps the ship and its crew out of an Antarctic ice
jam. There is a statue in nearby Watchet
commemorating the poem, depicting the mariner with the albatross looped around
his neck as described in one of the verses.
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| The Ancient Mariner, Watchet - geograph.org.uk - 1707049. Photo by Nigel Chadwick, via Wikimedia Commons |
Another work conceived during this time was the poem Kubla
Khan. Coleridge started the poem in 1797
following a vision in a dream – possibly opium-induced, as Coleridge was in the
habit of using opium to ease his health issues.
However, the poem was never completed because while he was composing it
he had an unwelcome visitor from Porlock who interrupted his train of
thought. Since then the phrase “person
from Porlock”, or just Porlock, has been used as a reference to an unwanted
visitor who interrupts the writer’s creative flow.
It was also during his time in Somerset that Coleridge
composed a trio of poems known as the “conversation poems”: This Lime-Tree
Bower My Prison, Frost at Midnight and The Nightingale. In 1798 he teamed up with his new chum
Wordsworth to produce a joint volume of poetry called Lyrical Ballads. This is widely recognised as marking the
birth of the English ‘romantic age’. The
Lime-Tree Bower My Prison includes an entrancing description of the charms of
the Quantocks, referring to: “the many steepled tract magnificent”; the view
towards the Bristol channel with “the slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two
isles”; the elms whose “branches gleam a darker hue through the late twilight”;
and the birds – “the bat wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters”. In fact, Coleridge wrote this passage from
the point of view of one of his friends, who had gone off to enjoy the hills
while Coleridge was forced to stay behind at Nether Stowey after an accident
involving boiling milk.
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Newton, Bicknoller, and Quantock Hills - geograph.org.uk - 93580. Photo by Martin Southwood, via Wikimedia Commons
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The village of Nether Stowey lies midway between Watchet and
Bridgwater, just below the eastern flank of the Quantocks. Coleridge Cottage, in Lime St, is now run by
the National Trust and open to visitors.
There is a pub opposite called The Ancient Mariner in a nod to the
famous poem. Another point of interest
in the village is the ancient Nether Stowey Castle, of which only the
foundations of the keep remain. It is
believed that the castle was destroyed during the 12th Century Civil
War.
