Dreaming Vol. 7, No.

1, March 1997

Coleridge, Creative (Day)Dreaming, and "The Picture"

Susan Luther, Ph.D.1

Abstract:
Meant less as traditional argument than as a scholarly
meditation, the essay adopts quasi-fictional strategies of
composition to read Coleridge's "The Picture, or the Lover's
Resolution" through Freud's "Creative Writers and Daydreaming" and other, relevant scholarship. It adopts the
localized point of view of the practicing poet to reflect upon
"The Picture" and interpretation (or reading) itself
considered as forms of (day)dreaming, giving particular
attention to what "The Picture" suggests about the dynamics
and consequences of creative wish-fulfillment when the
dream of art is dreamt under the sign of Eros. Must the poet's
muse become a figment, a shadow? Is the (day)dream of
creative romance false, or true? Disclosing to reader and
interpreter in turn selected prospects revealed within "The
Picture's" interior landscape, the essay seeks to preserve the
element of (self-)discovery characteristic of dreaming. It
concludes by reiterating a challenge implicit all along:
(when) are our dreams of interpretation themselves truths
or idle fancies?
KEY WORDS: Coleridge; Freud; interpretation; dream poetry; self-projection; wish-fulfillment; creativity.

Is it that poetry is explained through itself and by itself and from

itself, its own and inalienable psychoanalytical behaviors?
Moiss Lemlij
(1995, 174)

In " 'Creative Writers and Day-dreaming': A Parochial View" (quoted above),

Moiss Lemlij reads Freud through the glass of a specific Peruvian culture (the

Quechua) as well as the insights of friends who are writers. This approach honors
Lemlij's sense that "the artist in the task of perfecting the subject, and the
psychoanalyst in the task of intensifying it, both appeal to creative means of
interpretation" (169).
The present essay pays similar tribute to the intersubjective, literary character of
analysis. "Parochial" in Lemlij's sense, it too adopts a restricted point of view that
thrives in the provinces: in this case, the point of view of the creative artist
specifically, of the practicing poet. Like Lemlij's meditation, it implicitly mirrors
and contrasts its models with themselves, itself with itself, and employs
quasi-"fictional" strategies of composition. 2 The result is meant less as traditional
argumentation than as a speculation, an attempt at a form of scholarly poesis: that
is, an exploration of some aspects of the interpretative landscape revealed when a
literary text is read through theoretical and practical scholarship of similar theme
by one who has a particular, "local" or "localized" interest in the process.
Its immediate point of departure is Coleridge's poem about erotic and poetic
daydreaming titled "The Picture, or the Lover's Resolution," in which a lovelorn
narrator who has forsworn all romantic fancies wanders through a forbidding
wilderness, only to re-encounter his muse in the precincts of fantasy and in a
birchbark drawing she has left behind her in the wood. An allegory about love,
spirit, self-seeking, poetic making and also reading, the first-person, playful-andserious dramatic monologue startlingly prefigures (or models) the essay of
Freud's that is 'intensified' (to borrow his term) by Lemlij, "Der Dichter und das
Phantasieren" (translated into English as "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming";
see Freud 1908 [1907]). Freud makes explicit the aesthetic speculation implicit in
"The Picture," namely that literary composition (especially of works usually
judged to be "lesser" art) may resemble day-dreaming. Both accounts emphasize
the theme, or themes, of wish-fulfillment and escape.
Part one of this essay, "The Critical Fantasy," prepares the ground for an
exploration of these themes in relation to Coleridgean and scholarly
(day)dreaming. It locates within Coleridge's writings the themes of "true" and
"false" dreaming, of literary production, "The Picture," and reading itself as types
of (day)dreaming, with notice given to Coleridge's distrust of (in modern terms)
"escapist" reading and the literature that promotes it. This section acknowledges
the literary, provisional character of interpretation and takes up the point of view
of the scholarly poet-reader who will (so to speak) "dream a dream": who will
read Coleridge's poem through Freud's essay (and the views of other critics) by
way of what "The Picture" suggests about the workings of and risks involved in
the poetic (and recreative) task. Part two, "The Poem as (Day)Dream," briefly
sketches the literary-historical and life background of "The Picture." It further
links the poem's themes with those of Freud's essay, and consolidates the point of

view of the practicing poet. The section also includes a phenomenological plotsummary of the poem. This plot-summary (in its locomotive metaphor, or
storyline) mimics the structure of "The Picture" and of the present essay: it
describes a walk through the muse's demesne wherein certain features of the
territory act as "landing-places" (to borrow a term Coleridge used for some of the
prose excursions in his periodical The Friend), and various prospects of
interpretation discover themselves by turns to reader and narrator alike.
An embedded section, "The Dream within the Dream," pursues the theme of true
and false dreaming with particular reference to the central scene of "The Picture,"
wherein the love-wounded narrator imagines his surrogate gazing at the
reflection of the beloved woman in a woodland pool. Part three, "The Dreamer
and the Dreamed," the final section of the essay, frames subsequent scenes of the
poem within the memory-traces of other Coleridgean (and critical) texts, to query
whether the poem's resolution celebrates a cure of false fancy (and dreaming) by
true love, or ends in self-delusion. The essay concludes by reiterating the
challenge implicit within it all along: to what extent does the interpreter, too,
construct a picturesque, wish-fulfilling fantasy, seeing not "truth" but her or his
own idolized reflection in the linguistic mirror?
1. THE CRITICAL FANTASY

The critic must recognize that criticism is no longer a question of

metaphor but of metamorphosis.3
As David Miall (1982) points out, Coleridge's writings on dream communicate a
fundamental uncertainty and "ambivalence" about the moral status of dreaming,
especially as it relates to the self. This ambivalence extends to his representation
and experience of certain phases of composition as types of day-dreaming or
"reverie."4 Unfavorably comparing Klopstock's Messiah to Paradise Lost, for
example, Coleridge admonishes: "A poem may in one sense be a dream, but it
must be a waking dream" (my emphasis).5 An often-quoted notebook entry of
1804 takes the analogy between poetry and dream further, outlining the problem
in strikingly modern terms:
Poetry a rationalized dream dealing to [?about] manifold Forms our own Feelings, that
never perhaps were attached by us consciously to our own personal SelvesWhat is the
Lear, the Othello, but a divine Dream/all Shakespere, & nothing Shakespere.O there are
Truths below the Surface in the subject of Sympathy, & how we become that which we
understandly behold & hear, having, how much God perhaps only knows, created part even
of the Form.6

In the preface to "Kubla Khan," a poem it describes as a "fragment" composed

during "a profound sleep, at least of the external senses," Coleridge outlines an
ambiguous dream-process whose mystery has long tantalized interpretation (51,

52). In his dreamlike state, the poet (or preface-writer) claims, he was given 200
to 300 lines or more which "On awaking" he remembered and began to record,
until "a person on business from Porlock" arrived and kept him from his work for
over an hour (52-53). Fragmented by this interruption, all but a few of the
dream's impressions, we are told,
had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into
which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the
latter:
Then all the charm
Is brokenall that phantom-world so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape the other. Stay awhile,
Poor youth! who scarcely dar'st lift up thine eyes
The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon
The visions will return! And lo, he stays,
And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms
Come trembling back, unite, and now once more
The pool becomes a mirror. (53)

Is this narrative of the poem's origins meant to explainor to enchant? Is "Kubla

Khan: or A Vision in a Dream" to be read as a type of the traditional, divinelyinspired dream vision? Or is itas the artifact of a "profound sleep," as a perhaps
self-created reflectionto be regarded as an "idle flitting phantasy" of "His
Majesty the Ego?"7
In "The Picture, or the Lover's Resolution," from which the lines quoted above
are taken, the narcissistic inference barely submerged in the preface comes to the
surface. Kathleen Coburn, editor of many of his notebook ramblings, is surely
right that Coleridge described "The Picture" when, in March 1802, he made note
of "A Poem on the endeavor to emancipate the soul from day-dreams & note the
different attempts & the vain ones" (CN 1153 6.144 & n). That this
'emancipation' might have had personal significance he intimated to his friend
and publisher Joseph Cottle in 1814, when he confessed that "in my early
manhood in lines, descriptive of a gloomy solitude, I disguised my own
sensations in the following words" and then quoted "The Picture." 8 The poem
explores a problem of aesthetics similar to that implicit in the preface to "Kubla
Khan" and explicitly addressed by Freud when he posited the creative writer as a
version of the "'dreamer in broad day-light' " ("Der Trumer am hellichten Tag";
1908 [1907], 149). That is, the poet as day-dreamer may replicate the strategies
of the night-dreamer and build his composition upon the scaffold of wish and
(frustrated) desire.9 As a romance whose hero is a barely-masked figure for the
artist, "The Picture," even more pointedly than "Kubla Khan," calls into question
the dream of art, dreamt under the sign of human erotic passion. "The Lover's

Resolution" poses a central dilemma of what it calls "passion's dreams" (l.

119, CP 1, 372): who is the dreamer? Whose, and what, is the dream? And:
where is it? For words on a page are no dream.
In their introduction to a recent collection of essays on dream and literature,
Carol Schreier Rupprecht and Kelly Bulkley develop an extended metaphor of
"oneirocriticism," of dream-interpretation itself as a kind of dreaming (1993, 112). To Coleridge also, the reader may be accounted dreamer: "our state," he
says, "while we are dreaming differs from that in which we are in the perusal of a
deeply interesting Novel, in the degree rather than in the Kind" (Lectures 2, 266).
Hence the dreaming reader, no less than the day-dreaming novelist or poet, may
be a fantasist, an escapist, caught in solipsistic wish-fulfillment. "As to the
Devotees of the Circulating Libraries," Coleridge notes acidly,
I may not compliment their Pastime, or rather Kill-time, with the name of Reading. Call it
rather a sort of beggarly Day-dreaming, in which . . . the mind . . . fixes, reflects, &
transmits the moving phantasms of one man's Delirium so as to people the barrenness of a
hundred other trains [of associations] . . . under the same morbid Trance, or "suspended
Animation", of Common Sense, and all definite Purpose. (Lectures 1, 124)

Guided by morally rigorous texts like those of Plato and his successors, however,
readers, Coleridge allows, may profitably engage in "acts and energies of creative
Thought, & Recognition of conscious re-production of states of Being"
(CN 3935 18.156). Does the dream then come to us through the gate of ivory, or
the gate of horn?
In many respects "The Picture" models Freud's paradigm of writing as creative
wish-fulfillment. At the same time, like Freud's analysis, much literary criticism
(including the present essay), and the preface to "Kubla Khan," it resides in what
Meredith Skura describes as the "gap between what the text [of literature and
dream] seems to mean and the extra meaning it seems to imply" (1980, 364). Nor
does "the Picture" hold its reader harmless in the mirror of interpretation. What
follows, then, is one reader's train of thinking about some of the figurative and
vocational issues raised by "The Picture," conceived as a waking dream about
daydreaming that includes a possibly 'distempered' (see l. 64, CP 1, 371) dreamwithin-the-dream, and that calls us to consider the authority and vexed
provenance of the dream-image itself.

2. THE POEM AS (DAY)DREAM

Coleridge wrote "The Picture," or at least completed and published it, in 1802. It
first appeared in The Morning Post of September 6, 1802, and was reprinted
in The Poetical Register, and Repository of Fugitive Poetry for 1802 (1803). He
revised and expanded it for inclusion in his collection of poems titled Sibylline
Leaves (1817). In 1817 and collective editions thereafter "The Picture" appeared

in the section of Sibylline Leaves Coleridge called "Love-Poems."10 In it

Coleridge utilizes imagery from a walking tour of the Lake Country he undertook
in August 1802. He describes this tour in his notebooks and in several letters he
wrote that summer to Sara Hutchinson,11 whom he deeply loved and often saw, as
she was a member of the same social circle. (Sara's sister Mary Hutchinson
married William Wordsworth, Coleridge's best friend, in October of 1802). Sara
recorded "The Picture," with some variants from the published versions of 1802,
in her commonplace book Sara Hutchinson's Poets. Other poems of that period
inspired by her whose images and motives reappear in "The Picture" include the
"Verse Letter" to Sara which became "Dejection: An Ode"; "A Day-Dream," and
"The Day-Dream" (to which I shall briefly return). 12 "The Picture" is the least
confessional, most denaturalized and fabulist of these. However, its biographical
context suggests that it may be read as an allegory of Coleridge's relationship
with Sara,13 to whom he was profoundly attached but, as a married man whose
religious convictions permitted neither divorce nor physical consummation,
could not marry except in spiritand whom he inevitably compromised by his
attentions. Considered as an exercise in sublimation, the poem allows the
yearning poet to 'possess' his beloved in words, if not in person, as the present
absence who motivates his verse.
Paradoxically, that verse re-claims her in the act of her (attempted) exorcism. Its
"devious course" (l. 119, SL, 133)or 'manifest content,' to borrow Freud's
language of dream interpretationmight be summarized (largely in its own
words) as follows:
An erstwhile lover, protesting he is "emancipate / From passion's dreams,"
wanders through a wild landscape where "Wisdom might resort, and here
Remorse"; or the "Gentle Lunatic!," the "love-lorn Man . . . sick in soul."
But these are not Love's haunts; and, laughing at his previous "folly," he sits
beside a stream. The breeze there "Was never Love's accomplice"; and the
stream never reflected the "face" or "form divine" of the "stately virgin"
who, "see!" rests her elbow on a tree mirrored in the poolwhile her
admirer, too shy to gaze upon her directly, contemplates her image,
"dreaming hopes" all too "vain." She plucks flower-heads from behind her,
tosses them into the stream, and breaks the charm. But if the "Poor youth"
will stay, "The visions will return!" He does; they do; but without including
the figure of the virgin, who, traveling "homeward" now, is nowhere to be
seen. "Ill-fated youth!"thinks the cured lover: go ahead and "waste" your
life in "mad Love-yearning." "This tale" does not belong to the stream,
whose course he presently resumes following through his gloomy, "chosen
haunt." Emerging from a thicket of firs to find himself "Beneath a weeping
birch" by a waterfall, he is struck by the landscape revealed, hills enfolding a
circular valley populated by "Half hid" cottages. He observes the close and
distant scenethen discovers a picture drawn with berry-juice on birchbark, in which he recognizes the hand of "Isabel! / Daughter of genius!

stateliest of our maids! / More beautiful than whom Alcaeus woo'd / The
Lesbian woman of immortal song!". With beating heart, he resolves, and
hastes, to return the "sketch"which, if kept, would only "feed" his passion
to her. (seeSL, 128-35)
14

The self-contradictions and semantic dissolutionsor, rather, the dreamlike

'condensations' and 'displacements'of the narrative should, from the way I
chose to retell it, be clear. They create distance from the action and narrator of the
poem, casting him as a type of the self-deceived lover. The narrative eddy
emphasizes stasis and gaze, tableau, objt, image as objects of contemplation and
motivating forces; all, like the lover, to be looked at rather than (as well as)
identified with. The poem's doubled title ("The Picture, or the Lover's
Resolution"), also signals story, irony, even (self-)parody.
In Freud's account of creative (day)dreaming,
A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a
memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his
childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its
fulfilment in the creative work. The work itself exhibits elements of
the recent provoking occasion as well as of the old memory. (1908
[1907], 151)
Freud refers to memories and wishes that are personal, that have to do with the
writer's relationships in waking life. And, on these terms, "The Picture" dreams a
dream. Coleridge's walking tour might be taken as the inciting experience which
awakens (instead of redressing) memories of one or more similar occasions
shared by Sara Hutchinson (see, e. g., "Inscription for a Fountain on a
Heath," CP 1, 381-2;SL 186; and CN 981 21.133 and n.). The act of composition,
and the manifestation of "Isulia" (one of Coleridge's code-names for Sara
Hutchinson) as Isabel within it, express the poet's wish for (re)connection with
his beloved.15 "The wish" then, as Freud puts it, "makes use of an occasion in the
present to construct, on the pattern of the past, a picture of the future" (1908
[1907], 148).
For the creative (day)dreamer, however, wish and memory inevitably assume
vocational and textual significance beyond the immediately personal. That is (to
borrow and amend Freud's words quoted above), for the writer 'a strong
experience in the present [of reading and/or in 'waking' life] may awaken a
memory of an earlier experience [of writing and/or reading] from which there
now proceeds a wish [for self-expression, to write] which finds its fulfilment in
the creative work [itself; in its completion].' 16 What Rupprecht and Bulkley
describe as the "transitionality of the waking / reading / sleeping / dreaming
continuum and its intertextual bias" (4) constitute the writer's homeland, that
placeless place where life and art endlessly (re)combine. From the point of view

of the practicing poet, then, "The Picture" presents an allegory of creative no less
than erotic desire, whose implied or, in Freud's dream-terms, 'latent' content
addresses "the subtleties of inspiration" (Kelly [1972], 92). Within the poem
creative day-dreaming and erotic day-dreaming fulfill each other, so that "The
Picture" illuminates the human dilemma in terms of the aesthetic one, and the
aesthetic one in terms of the human: it posits a figural, psychological and
philosophical problematic of and for the artist. The dream's wish-fulfillment,
then, involves the desire of art for art, the desire of the artist for inspiration, and
the probable dependency of both, as Marshall Suther (1965, 163) suggests, upon
the Muse-imago who cathects them. 17
A primary "pattern memory" or textual process within what might be regarded as
its "textual unconscious" confirms that the 'latent,' or metaphoric content of "The
Picture" implicates literary (day)dreaming. For Coleridge's poem does not draw
only from Coleridgean materials. Directly but silently, it turns upon the narrative
premise of Salomon Gessner's idyll "Der feste Vorsatz" ('the fixed Resolution'), a
pastoral, erotic (and traditionally ironic) farewell to love. 18 Gessner's wandering
narrator, indulging in the lush delights of erotic melancholy, follows the course of
a stream through an exterior and interior landscape strikingly similar to that
which Coleridge describes. Bidding farewell to the dark and the fair, to stately
Melinde and "kleine Chloe," he comes upon a maiden's footprint in the sand;
melancholy vanishes, and he follows the maiden's trace ("Spur"), thinking how
passionately, if he finds her, he will embrace and kiss her ("O! wenn ich dich
faende, in meinen Arm wyrd ich dich dryken, und dich kyssen!", 124.) 19
Coleridge's "Picture" transumes Gessner's ('escapist'?) esprit, suppresses its erotic
motive and transforms it into a complex reflection on states of mind, especially
those of the creative artist-as-lover whose muse-lover is in turn ingested by the
Muse-imago.20 Unlike Gessner's simpler tale, Coleridge's narrative forestalls even
as it promotes the reader's "incentive bonus, or fore-pleasure" (Freud 1908
[1907], 153). It is a beautiful, painterly poem that one imagines would in many
respects greatly have flattered its Isabel, its "Isulia": yet it suggests unsettling
consequences for and to her, and refuses to enable us who are her readersuccessors henceforward "to enjoy our own day-dreams without self-reproach or
shame" (ibid.). Like its questionable use of Gessner, the poem's selffragmentations further complicate, and corroborate, an understanding of it as a
literary dream, with artitself, artistic (re)productionas its object.
Rather than attempting a comprehensive analysis, however, I will follow "the
thread of the wish" through the dream-moment I take (with Michael Kelly) to be
the imagistic and "intellectual center" of "The Picture" 21: the mirror sequence or
"primal scene" adumbrated above, partially quoted in the preface to "Kubla

Khan." Its transumption in the preface emphasizes that the scene involves not
only the dreams of love, but of creativity.
The Dream Within the Dream
The narrator's explicitly-stated, or 'manifest,' dream for himself is emancipation,
freedom from love's (day)dreams. His method of pursuing it is that of Gessner's
lover, recreated as philosopheme: self-loss in the wilds of nature (or, for the poet,
self-loss in the wilderness of verse). But one may wonder just what the "new joy"
really is that "Beckons" him "on, . . . / Playmate, or guide!" (ll. 7-11, SL, 128).
Nor is it long before the figure of "Love"the pastoral, erotic motivereturns,
"ensnared" in the very fancy of expulsion: in the form of a sulky Cupid who is
chased by Nymphs, Oreads, Earth-winds, wingless Airs, Fays, and elfin Gnomes
through eighteen lines of mocking reproof that imaginein present tensehow
the spirits of the place would punish "His little godship" if he had the temerity to
cross their borders (ll. 28-45, SL, 129-30).22 Next in the cast of imaginary
characters excluded from the scene appears a lovely maiden, around whose
"tendril ringlets," "blue, delicate veins" and "half disclosed / . . . snowy bosom"
the breeze, in this landscape, thinks the narrator, "Ne'er play'd the wanton" (ll.
58-67, SL, 129-31). Almost immediately thereafter, however, a worshipful youth
(the "he" referred to below) arrives in his thoughts as the narrator's surrogate, to
dream of the "stately virgin." "Like a dissolving thing" (l. 67), the narrative line
disappears so quickly it is not at first clear that the narrator is still day-dreaming,
that he does not actually see a woman reflected in the pooled stream beside
which he sits.
The images rise up before the narrator (and reader) "as things" (I borrow from the
preface to "Kubla Khan," 52), when the narrator apostrophizes the "desert
Stream": "no pool of thine," he protests,
Though clear as lake in latest summer-eve,
Did e'er reflect the stately virgin's robe,
Her face, her form divine, her downcast look
Contemplative! Ah see! her open palm
Presses her cheek and brow! her elbow rests
On the bare branch of half-uprooted tree,
That leans towards its mirror! He, meanwhile,
Who from her countenance turn'd, or look'd by stealth,
(For fear is true love's cruel nurse,) he now,
With stedfast gaze and unoffending eye,
Worships the watery idol, dreaming hopes
Delicious to the soul, but fleeting, vain,
E'en as that phantom-world on which he gazed.
She, sportive tyrant! with her left hand plucks
The heads of tall flowers that behind her grow,

Lychnis, and willow-herb, and fox-glove bells;

And suddenly, as one that toys with time,
Scatters them on the pool! Then all the charm
Is brokenall that phantom-world so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape the other. (ll. 72-93, SL, 131-2)

The scene is self-reflexive: it mirrors the narrator's own activity and his
(repressed, or suppressed) wish for the "stately virgin's" presence (who is, in part,
a condensation of Gessner's muses). The lines may also be supposed to turn upon
specific, distorted textual (and personal) memories (compare with Gessner's
"noch gestern hypftest du froh im weissen Sommer-kleid um mich her, wie die
Wellen hier im Sonnen-Licht hypfen," 122).23
As figure of the poet, the narrator wishes for the muse's return; as lover, he
wishes for (as she is later named) Isabel. His "part-ego" dreams for him: 24 that,
perhaps, one day his "Lewti" will be kind ("Lewti, or the Circassian LoveChant," another poem of conventional, unrequited love, immediately precedes
"The Picture" in Sibylline Leaves.) The youth apparently cherishes a delusion.
But are his hopes of being noticed altogether so "vain"? The "virgin," presumably
amused or impatient with his image-worship, destroys her image in the pool, in a
gesture perhaps prescient (or reminiscent) of the Sara Hutchinson whom
Coleridge recalled in a notebook entry of 1808 as wishing to be accounted "no
Angel" (CN 3406 13.37). If one interprets the behavior of this "sportive tyrant" in
the same way Freud interprets that of Jensen's Gradiva, however, her action may
implicitly invite pursuit (see 1907 [1906], 75, 79). An important line added in
1828 suggests what here is only hinted: she tosses the flower-heads into the
stream because her votary's gaze was "not unheeded" (l. 86, CP 1, 371). In any
case, this dream foretells its (camouflaged) wish fulfilled: in the narrative future,
the poet-narrator will retrieve the birch-bark picture Isabel has dropped into his
dream, and follow her. His double's day-dream unmasks the narrator's inspiring
"joy" within the "master-passion" in disguise: desire for the poem, desire for the
maiden-muse.
Like its counterpart in the preface to "Kubla Khan," the "watery" idyll models the
streamlike flow of association; it also recalls Aristotle's comparison of "the
mental pictures" in dreams to "reflections in water," such that "movement
destroys the clarity of the dream."25 Some dreams, Aristotle concedes, may be
"both signs and causes" (379). In a sense, the dream of his other self functions as
the 'sign' of the narrator's "true" wishes (for reunion with the muse or his lost self;
to attract her notice and favor), and the "cause" of subsequent action in the
narrative. But Aristotle is primarily concerned to demonstrate that "prophetic"
dreams do not come from God: they are the children of coincidence. Likewise,

the second movement of the narrator's dream emphasizes that what we gaze on is
necessarily a "watery idol" (my emphasis).
Once the "charm / Is broken," what David Punter (1990, 19) terms the "processes
of primary narcissism," implicit before as a possibility of motive, become
explicit.26 The narrator has comforted his dream-double by inviting the youth to
"Stay awhile" that he may enjoy the restored "visions" which will return when
"once more / The pool becomes a mirror." But the invitation heralds a second,
more serious fall from grace that is elided in the preface to "Kubla Khan."
"Behold," the narrator commands his surrogate (and reader):
Each wildflower on the marge inverted there,
And there the half-uprooted treebut where,
O where the virgin's snowy arm, that lean'd
On its bare branch? He turns, and she is gone!
Homeward she steals through many a woodland maze
Which he shall seek in vain. Ill-fated youth!
Go, day by day, and waste thy manly prime
In mad Love-yearning by the vacant brook,
Till sickly thoughts bewitch thine eyes, and thou
Behold'st her shadow still abiding there,
The Naiad of the Mirror! (ll. 99-110, SL, 132)

The "phantom-world" of creative illusion resolves into delusion, the space of its
"shadow." No longer does a young man observe (the figure of) a real woman
reflected in a stream; held fast from pursuit of her by "fear" or the seductions of
wish-fulfilling fantasy, he loses himself to "visions" in which she can only appear
(to purloin Milton's epithet for the classical Urania) as the "empty dream" he
himself has created. Confined to the asylum of "mad Love-yearning," the now
"ill-fated youth" inhabits the realm of "imaginary Time" (SL, iii)under the
aspect of "suspended Animation" (Lectures 1, 124).
His spiritual malaise seems not unlike that of his previous textual counterpart, the
"Gentle Lunatic." Coleridge alluded to the "Lunatic's" condition as a disguised
reflection of his own, in the letter to Cottle of 1814 quoted earlier; the relevant
lines, included in Sibylline Leaves, do not appear in the 1802 versions of "The
Picture." Coleridge diagnosed his alter ego more fully in a letter to Edward
Coleridge of 1826. Both letters quote "The Picture" with reference to Coleridge's
problems of religious faith and belief. In 1826, analyzing his own recent
"indolence leavening the resignation which it counterfeited," Coleridge lamented:
There was indeed that imperfect Love which made me dread above all fears
the falling out of God into the abysm, the dreadful productivity, of my own
corrupted Soul, but not the Love, that should urge me to press forward and
lay hold of the Promises. My state of mind was too often in too close a

neighbourhood to the relaxing Malaria of the Mystic Divinity, which affects

to languish after an extinction of individual Consciousnessthe sickly state
which I had myself described in one of the Poems in the Sibylline Leaves
'the Lover's Resolutionswho sick in soul
Worships the Spirit of unconscious Life
In tree and wild-flower. . . . (CL 6, 555)

In Aids to Reflection, he had imaged a similar malady in terms that strikingly

recall the mirror-trope of "The Picture."27 One need not read backward (or
forward) in this way, however, to identify the youth's sickness as the 'sign' of the
spiritual void, of the soul devoid of its affirming image of the other.
Within the poem, the religious dilemma (the "falling out of God") takes shape as
(or is displaced within) its personal, secular and creative consequence. 28 The first
part of the dream-within-the-dream posits a greater 'reality quotient' (so to speak),
more "Will and Striving after furtherance in grace" (CL 6, 555), a more active
and balanced passage between inner and outer forms, conscious and unconscious,
that foretells the possibility of a successful narrative consummation. In the
alternate future here presented, however, the narrator abandons his double to a
contemplation that can only inspirit the "vacant brook" with a hallucination, an
infernal wraith, a "Naiad" of personificationthe "Spirit of unconscious Life." 29
The dream opens the rupture in consciousness apparent from the beginning of the
poem, the split between a 'conscious' dreaming self who 'manifestly' associates
the thorny landscape with "joy," a "joy" identified with emancipation from
passion's dreams, and a 'latent' self who dreams of passion and is, in fact,
attempting a kind of spiritual suicide. At dream's end, the "part-ego" the narrator
would exclude from the scene makes visible his own spiritual state in the present
moment of the narrative, imaged as a condition of narcissistic stasis.
The first part of the dream-within-the-dream, then, may be taken to image the
return of the "master-passion" (l. 11, SL, 128) as a healing influence, and to hint
at the subsequent course of the narrative, when the narrator will "lay hold" of the
implicit secular and aesthetic "Promises." That is, the dream-idyll's first
movement presents a kind of "true," albeit still ambiguous, poetic dreaming. Its
second movement may be taken as a warning against false dreaming, the
"relaxing Malaria of the Mystic Divinity" in which a lover, or poet, seeking "an
extinction of individual Consciousness," worships a figment of his (or her) own
'unconscious' or half-conscious making. "The Picture" suggests that poetic
dreaming held fast by its own idolatrous, "purely" aesthetic, self-reflexive desire
for desire, for the reflected image, may resemble nothing so much as the
nightmarish "distemper" or "delirious Vision," the "Somnambulism, or frightful

Reverie, or Epilepsy from accumulated feelings" as Coleridge once remarked in

Charles Lloyd (CL 1, 257). The consequence of the muse's exileor departure
may be the 'soul sickness' or visionary solipsism that translates muse into Museimago, and banishes all the world.30
The ease with which the dream turns upon itself, with which it and its figures
split and reunite and slip from one kind of wish-fulfillment into another, suggests
that the central ambiguity (re)mediated by the dream, the Platonic dilemma, may
be radically irresolveable. Only the Muse-imago, the dreamed, (the object; the
poem as words-on-a-page) cannot dream: and yet, as the cathecting double of
psychic energy, the trope in-habits, and inspires, creative (day)dreaming. The
split female figure displays the problem: the desire of the lover as a person is
directed toward the person of the beloved; but the (creative) desire of the poet is
and must always be directed toward the beloved's inspiring "shadow," toward
idealization. "Idyll," as Gessner's "Vorsatz" concludes, ends where embrace
begins (and vice-versa). The conditions of art require the artist to play
Narcissa/us.31 Moreover, just as night-dream becomes "reality" in the daylight
world only when the dreamer awakens, so is it only in the rupturewhen the
'unconscious' becomes 'conscious' of itself again and "the charm / Is broken"
that art, as artifact, can appear.

3. THE DREAMER AND THE DREAMED

When is play-acting rebuked by reality? When is fictionalizing presumptuous? What

happens after playacting?
Wole Soyinka32

Does the poem resolve its dilemma of true and false dreaming? For Raimonda
Modiano, the narrator's self-healing is evident in the youth's absence from the
poem after the dream-within-the-dream, and in the narrator's response to the
picture. As a 'real' object, it contrasts with the "false" images he has worshiped;
discovering it, he does not (apparently) relapse into fantasy. Instead, his
"journey . . . finally acquires a true destination, the reunion with another human
being" (1985, 92). Edward Kessler (1979) takes a different view of the tenor of
the narrator's delusions; but he, too, agrees that the poem's denouement
represents a positive outcome. Kessler observes that "the speaker realizes what
Narcissus failed to see: that representation is not Being, and that passion directed
toward the phenomenal self produces a destructive Phantom" (67).
A Freudian view of the poem as waking dream would have to agree that in one
sense it demonstrates how "Coleridge can use his self-reflection as a means to
redirect his passion toward 'a world of Reality' " (Kessler, 65); that "the narrator's

strategy of letting the youth fall into dangerous modes of self-deception . . .

recover[s] his own sanity and freedom" (Modiano, 91). At poem's end, all denials
seem to have ceased; the landscape of isolation has been left behind, and a
"gladsome" mood suffuses the scene. Within the arrested narrative, the dream of
arrest has re-motivated action; confronted with the 'soul-sickness' of his double,
the narrator renounces lethargyalbeit, at first, in the figure of denial. Like
Norbert Hanold in Jensen's Gradiva, he heeds the 'wake-up' call from his
'unconscious' without at first fully assimilating its implications. But the return of
(creative) day-dreaming is accomplished when the narrator arrives at the scene of
literally "disparted waters," and imagines their reunion on the other side of a
dividing rock in idyllic terms, as the renewed communion of two lovers' spirits,
"Each in the other lost and found" (ll. 123, 126; SL, 133, ix).33
Freud notes that "every psycho-analytic treatment is an attempt at liberating
repressed love"; by these terms, the poem as waking dream and the narrator's
day-dreaming have fulfilled the "model of a cure by love" (1907 [1906], 90).
"The Picture" resolves in what Coleridge referred to in the notebook entry on
Plato and Plotinian philosophy quoted earlier as an "ahndung" or "inward
omening," a "tremulous feeling of the heart,
as if it heard or began to glimpse something which had once belonged to it,
its Lord or its Belovedeven as a man recovering gradually from an
alienation of his Senses or the Judgments on beginning to recollect the
countenances of his Wife, Mother, Children, or Betrothed" (CN 3935
18.156 f70)

His false dreams of solitude and self-immolation, the shade of art as narcissistic
image-worship, disappear within a familial landscape of "brook and bridge, and
grey stone cottages" (l. 142; SL, 134); the figure of art as the unlooked-for gift
which must be returned; and the prospective (hence soulfully present)
companionship of the "maid" and artist in whom muse and Muse-imago
recombine. In the artifact of human composition, its own doubled image, "The
Picture" finds itself: creative dreaming reproduces dreaming; dream and art, in
mutual catalysis, promote renewal. The narrator has discovered exactly what the
poet, the "dreamer in broad daylight," would wish to find: a 'subjective' object to
be given back to the Reader, especially to the one reader whose reception matters
most. The romance of creative desire is consummated by publication in The
Morning Post, The Poetical Register and Sibylline Leaves, and in the private
transcription of Sara Hutchinson's own hand. The gift of inspiration has been
accepted, and returned; the poem's dream for its own future has proven true.
But the epigraph to the Love-Poems in Sibylline Leaves reserves a 'new
understanding' only to their author-presenter, not to the (implied) former self who
is their protagonist.34 Nor, within its own narrative construct, does "The Picture"
conclusively suggest it has done anything other than simply present "the

endeavor to emancipate the soul from day-dreams & note the different attempts
& the vain ones (CN1153 6.144). A person truly free of "passion's dreams,"
no longer "dreaming hopes / Delicious to the soul," would simply have left the
picture where it lay (l. 118, 83-4; SL, 133, 131). Moreover, its 'latent' content
betrays the sketch itself as a displaced emblem of (textual) day-dream and desire.
It depicts the cottage next to the waterfall where the narrator is standing, "And
close beside its porch a sleeping child, / His dear head pillowed on a sleeping
dog" (ll. 153-54, SL, 134). As Modiano suggests, the "picture by itself carries a
positive message"; its "realism . . . indicates that the artist was engaged in a
conscious reproduction of an objective reality and not in a self-indulgent play
with her own fancies" (n. 108, 229; 92). If the dream-within-the-dream may be
taken as the poem's 'mind,' then the sketch is its 'heart.' But it is no footprint in
the sand, human and soon to be erased. A picture has more masterly ambitions.
Further, as cipher painted in berry juice on the skin of that 'natural' object, the
"weeping birch,"35 the drawing is "The Picture's" 'sign' or signature for itself: just
as the dream-within-the-dream 'contains' the narrative and psychic movement of
the poem up to that point, and so is also its reflection or double. The visual object
the "curious picture"no less than the mirror-scene presents an ironic,
synonymizing resorption of the poetic text itself, here under the colophon
of muta Poesis (see CN 4397 f49v).
Moreover, its sentimental subject engages the poet's if not the artist's fancies: the
cottage is a recurrent Coleridgean motif, a figure of "domestic bliss," as Michael
Kelly (1972) points out, "with numerous predecessors and successors" (88; see
87-90). The figure of the child and dog also have Coleridgean textual analogues.
They appear in a notebook entry of March, 1810, that consolidates a memory, or
memories, of time spent with Sara and Mary Hutchinson at Sockburn and,
especially, at Gallow Hill, where Coleridge visited in the summer of 1801 and, of
most significance here, in March of 1802 (see CL2, 744-55, 788 and n., 792). In
demonstrating to "an Idolater of Hume & Hartley" that he well understood "the
vast extent and multifold activity of the Associative Force," Coleridge confided
to his notebook, he adduced many examples which brought to mind "Lewti, the
Circassian
(and as by this same force joined with the assent of the will most
often, tho' often too vainly because weakly opposed by it, I
inevitably by some link or other return to you [Sara] . . . the for ever
and ever Feeling of you/The fire/Mary, you, & I at Gallow-Hill/
or if flamy, reflected in children's round facesah whose
children?a dogthat dog whose restless eyes oft catching the
light of the fire used to watch your face, as you leaned with your
head on your hand and arm, & your feet on the fender/ . . .
(CN 3708 18.21)

A similar idyllic scene including Mary and Sara appears in 1802 in the "Verse
Letter"; in a separate poem devoted to it, "A Day-Dream"; and as a displaced
transformation in "The Day Dream," published inThe Morning Post on October
19, 1802, some six weeks after "The Picture" appeared there. 36 Both centering
dream-moments re-figure, in disguise, this process of text and memory: in the
youth's fantasy (of the virgin's open palm, pressing her cheek and brow; her
elbow, resting on the tree), and in the discovered artifact of its presence, the
picture itself. The told and re-told day-dream, then, can be taken as the primary
Coleridgean "pattern memory," in both the textual and personal senses, which is
transformed and re-duplicated within "The Picture," and upon which the poem's
wish constructs its own "picture of the future." Dreaming begets dreaming; his
discovery of the picture sets the narrator to imagining again, this time how he
will return the sketch (now the pretext for his renewed hopes) and enjoy the
companionship of Isabel. The question of psychological dependency upon desire
and its "vain" pursuit; of creative desire upon (unfulfilled) erotic or romantic
desire; of the artist's desire upon his pro- and intro-jection of a Muse-imagoas
well as the 'latent' religious problem of the artist's, and the Muse-imago's,
relationship to the Divine I AMis not resolved.37
The irresolution, or continuous dissolve, of creative (day)dreaming achieves
ironic, literal representation in the split text of the scene of "disparted waters"
reunited.38 The textual Error, the ambiguity of the beloved Image, also remains
figuratively present in Isabel. This "divinest maid" and "daughter of Genius"
more beautiful than Sappho still seems to stand before the narrator more "like a
thought" than a person, "A dream remember'd in a dream" ("Recollections of
Love"; Sibylline Leaves, 160). The act of naming itself, of conferring upon her
the "master" vocation of artist (l. 158, SL, 134) absolves her of typological
anonymity but explicitly draws her into archetypal creative myth, the old story in
which Alcaeus woos the fairestand most elusiveof them all. The problem of
"attraction to the transcendent and ideal"the motive of "nympholepsy" (see
Perkins 1990, 100)has hardly been overcome. The poem does not simply
observe the processes of romantic day-dreaming, or of the creative "dreamer in
broad daylight": it ironicizes them, and calls into question the very figure of
dreaming itself, which, like the other figures in the poem, doubles back upon the
reader. For, as the object of his amorous pursuit, Isabel represents the poet's
entire "potential audience"who, in Stuart Hood's metaphor, may have a virtual
existence in the writer's dream-economy "like Freud sitting invisibly at the head
of the couch, at once a presence and an absence" (1989, 33). In the immediate
economy of reading, however, it is the narrator himself who acts as the (future)
interpreter's most obvious double. The critic who seeks to address the poem's
mysteries inevitably replicates his actions: pursuing the muse, dreaming
reflections upon reflections, retrieving the picture, attempting to return it (to

significance, to its 'rightful owner,' to another reader). In its figural shifting of the
boundaries between dreamer, dreaming and the dreamed, "The Picture" images
the progress of its own interpretation. That is, as a type of waking dream, "The
Picture" itselfnot only its split musemay be regarded as a narrative trope of
and for dream(ing) that figures the precarious negotiation for all concerned of the
passage between 'conscious' and 'unconscious' other- and self-representation.
In the third movement of his instructive essay "Hermia's Dream" (first presented
in 1978), Norman Holland offers an example of " 'transactive criticism,' " reading
Hermia's dream (in A Midsummer Night's Dream) through his own concern with
"questions of fidelity and possession between men and women" (1993, 192).
Holland thus seeks to "make explicit" the element of "self-discovery" inherent in
literary criticism:
Through psychoanalytic identity theory, we can understand how we
are able to talk about the words of another through ourselves and, in
doing so, talk about ourselves through the words of anothereven
if they are as airy a nothing as dream of dream of dream. (197)
Who then is the literary dreamer? Whose is the dream? Does it dream the dream
of "true" reproductive Being, or the illusionary dream "a musa"? (CN 3935). One
imagines the departed subject of these queries casting a handful of "Sibylline
leaves" into the pool of reflections, just before disappearing into the wood.
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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Aids to Reflection. Ed. John Beer. Vol. 9 of The Collected Works. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Christabel, & c. 1816. Oxford and New York: Woodstock Books 1991.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Collected Letters. Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956-1971.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Complete Poetical Works. 1912. Ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Lectures 1808 - 1819: On Literature. Ed. Reginald Foakes. 2 pts. Vol. 5 of The Collected Works. Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1986.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Notebooks. Ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen. 4 vols. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957-1990.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Sibylline Leaves. 1817. Oxford and New York: Woodstock Books, 1990.

Davis, Garold N. German Thought and Culture in England, 1700-1770. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969.

Freud, Sigmund. "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming." Vol 9 of The Standard Edition. 1908 [1907]. 142-53.

Freud, Sigmund. "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva." Vol. 9 of The Standard Edition. 1907 [1906]. 3-95.

Gessner, Salomon. Smtliche Schriften in Drei Bnden. 1762. Her. v. Martin Bircher. Zrich: Orell Fssli, 1972-74.

Harding, Anthony John. Coleridge and the Idea of Love: Aspects of Relationship in Coleridge's Thought and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1974.
Hett, W. S., trans. Aristotle On the Soul; Parva Naturalia; On Breath. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1935. rev. 1957.

Hoeveler, Diane Long. Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within. University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1990.

Holland, Norman N. "Hermia's Dream." The Dream and the Text: Essays on Literature and Language. Ed. Carol Schreier Rupprecht. Albany:
State Univ. of New York Press, 1993. 178-99.

Hood, Stuart. "The Dreamer in Broad Daylight." PN Review 15.6 (1989): 30-33.

Kelly, Michael J. "Coleridge's 'Picture, or the Lover's Resolution': Its Relationship to 'Dejection' and Its Sources in the Notebooks." Costerus 5
(1972): 75-96.

Kessler, Edward. Coleridge's Metaphors of Being. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,1979.

Lemlij, Moiss. " 'Creative Writers and Day-dreaming': A Parochial View. On Freuds "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming". Ed. Ethel Specter
Person, Peter Fonagy, and Srvulo Augusto Figueira. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995. 164-83.

Miall, David. "The Meaning of Dreams: Coleridge's Ambivalence." SiR 21 (1982): 57-71.

Mileur, Jean-Pierre. Vision and Revision: Coleridge's Art of Immanence. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1982.

Modiano, Raimonda. Coleridge and the Concept of Nature. Tallahassee: Florida State Univ. Press, 1985.

Parrish, Stephen Maxwell, Ed. Coleridge's Dejection: The Earliest Manuscripts and the Earliest Printings. Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ.
Press, 1988.

Perkins, David. "The Imaginative Vision of Kubla Khan: On Coleridge's Introductory Note." Coleridge, Keats and the Imagination:
Romanticism and Adam's Dream. Ed. J. Robert Barth and John L. Mahoney. Columbia, Mo.: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1990. 97-108.

Person, Ethel Spector, Peter Fonagy, and Srvulo Augusto Figueira, eds. On Freud's "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 1995.

Punter, David. The Romantic Unconscious: A Study in Narcissism and Patriarchy. Washington Square, N. Y.: New York Univ. Press, 1990.

Rajan, Tilottama. Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism. Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1980.

Rice-Sayre, Laura., and Henry M. Sayre. 1978 (1979). "Autonomy and Affinity: Toward a Theory for Comparing the Arts." Bucknell Review 34
(2). The Arts and Their Interrelations. Ed. Harry R. Garvin. Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, and London: Associated Univ. Presses. 86-103.

Ruoff, Gene W. Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Making of the Major Lyrics 1802 - 1804. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1989.

Rupprecht, Carol Schreier., and Kelly Bulkley. "Reading Yourself to Sleep: Dreams in/and/as Texts." The Dream and the Text: Essays on
Literature and Language. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1993. 1-12.

Rzepka, Charles J. The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986.

Schneider, Elisabeth. Coleridge, Opium, and 'Kubla Khan.' Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953.

Schulz, Max F. The Poetic Voices of Coleridge: A Study of His Desire for Spontaneity and Passion for Order. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press,
1964.

Skura, Meredith Anne. "Revisions and Rereadings in Dreams and Allegories." The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will.
New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1980.

Soyinka, Wole. 1995 [1986]. Nobel Lecture, 8 December 1986. Rpt. The Georgia Review 49: 171-86.

Suther, Marshall. The Dark Night of S. T. Coleridge. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1960.

Suther, Marshall. Visions of Xanadu. New York and London: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965.

Swann, Karen. "Harassing the Muse." Romanticism and Feminism. Ed. Anne K. Mellor. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press,
1988. 81-92.

Tedlock, Barbara, Ed. Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations. Santa Fe, N. M.: School of American Research Press, 1992.

Weissman, Stephen M., M. D. His Brother's Keeper: A Psychobiography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Madison, Conn.: International Universities
Press, 1989.

Whalley, George. Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson and the Asra Poems. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955.
Yarlott, Geoffrey. Coleridge and the Abyssinian Maid. London: Methuen, 1967.

Endnotes

Correspondence should be directed to Susan Luther, 2115 Buckingham Drive,

S.W., Huntsville, AL 35803-2017, USA.
2

The reader will note, for example, that I have often used single quotation
marks, traditionally employed in literary scholarship to indicate quotations within
quotations or the denotation of words, to emphasize visually the ambiguous,
conventional, figurative or 'secondary' character of language and meaning.
(Explanatory, parenthetical phrases indicate when I have actually
represented or reworded another's words, rather than just emphasized the nonliteral quality of denotation or the received character of certain ideas, terms, or
concepts.) Many terms are also enclosed within double quotation marks meant to
signify the meanings 'so-called' or 'so to speak.' Both strategies are meant in part
to acknowledge that in a sense our taxonomies, however efficacious, still "have
something precarious and barren about them," as Freud puts it (1907 [1906], 45).
3

Rice-Sayre and Sayre (1978), 95 (emphasis mine).

See "Of the Fragment of Kubla Khan," in Christabel (1816; facs. rpt. 1991), 5054, the text to which I shall refer hereafter, and Schneider (1953), 24-25 .
4

Lectures 1808-1819: On Literature (1986), ed. Reginald Foakes, 2, 425. See

Adair (1968) for a full-length interpretation of Coleridge's "dreamlike method of
composition" (8) that sees his early poetry as 'waking dream'; and Rzepka (1986,
100-64, 264-72) for a discussion of Coleridge's poems as "speaking dreams" that
desire vatic self-recognition.
6

Notebooks, vol. 2 (1961), ed. Kathleen Coburn, 2086 15.52. I shall refer to the
notebooks hereafter as CN and cite references by entry number only.
7

For the last two phrases quoted see, respectively, "The Eolian Harp," l. 40, in
Coleridge's Complete Poetical Works (1912; rpt. 1975), ed. Ernest Hartley
Coleridge, 1, 100-02, hereafter cited as CP; and Freud (1908 [1907]), "Creative
Writers and Day-dreaming" ("Der Dichter und das Phantasieren"), 150. Freud's
title more literally translates to 'The Poet [or author of fiction] and Fantasizing [in
the sense of 'fantasying,' that is, 'to indulge in reveries or fancies'; 'to imagine,
dream'; 'to rave, ramble, be delirious'; 'to improvise'].' I shall here use the term
"fantasy" almost synonymously with "daydream," and "fancy" to mean a product

of the imagination characterized by an especially strong element of caprice,

(love-)liking, wish-fulfillment, or potential self-deception (as in "she fancies
herself a poet"). For contemporary interpretations and extensions of Freud's
theory and for commentary on the distinction in psychoanalysis between modes
of experiencing meant by the differently-nuanced terms "phantasy" and "fantasy"
see the essays in Person, Fonagy and Figueira (1995).
Freud's most complete analysis of the literary dream is to be found in his study of
Jensen's Gradiva (1907 [1906]), from whose method of (re)turning upon the plot
I borrow. The study also concisely explains Freud's theory of dreaminterpretation, including such concepts as manifest and latent content,
condensation and displacement (see, e. g., 59, 74, 76).
8

Collected Letters, vol. 3 (1959), ed. E. L. Griggs, 499. Hereafter I shall refer to
Coleridge's letters as CL.
9

Freud suggests that the play-acting of the child translates itself into the
daydreaming of the adult, who must (unlike the child) conceal his fantasies or
suffer expulsion from the rights and privileges accorded adult status. Under the
license of fiction, however, the creative writer may indulge his daydreams or
fancies (usually erotic or success-oriented or both) to their gratification and our
own. The writer, in a sense, dreams for us and permits us to enjoy our own daydreams within the protected zone of reading.
10

See Sibylline Leaves (1817; facs. rpt. 1990), 128-35 and xi, hereafter cited
as SL, from which I shall henceforth quote, by line and page numbers. I have
supplied line numbers that take into account the insertion required by the Errata;
following line 85, these numbers differ by one from those in CP 1, 369-74, due to
a further insertion made in the text of 1828.
11

See CL 2, letters 450 and 451; see also letters 453, 454, and 456. Michael Kelly
(1972) instructively interprets "The Picture" in the context of Coleridge's letters
and notebook entries, especially those of August 1-9, 1802 (CN 1207-1228).
12

See Whalley (1955) for a discussion of Coleridge's "Asra" poems (that is, those
written about Sara Hutchinson) and "Sara's Poets." See 12-16 for the text of "The
Picture" (#6), which Whalley suggests Sara may have transcribed in AugustSeptember 1802.
13

See Adair (1968), 192-96; Schulz (1963), 137-39; Suther (1960), 50-55; Yarlott
(1967), 39-40; and Ruoff (1989), 185-91, who interprets the text of 1802 as it
enters the dialogue of other Coleridgean and Wordsworthian texts of the period.
See also Weissman (1989), who believes Coleridge's love for Sara Hutchinson
itself was a displaced version of his love for William Wordsworth.
14

Alternatively: Rejoicing in his liberation from "passion's dreams," an

emancipated lover wanders through a harsh landscape that Cupid, he assures

himself, would never frequent. However, his fancy of how the god of love would
be punished by the local spirits if "in sullen mood" he dared invade their territory
leads the narrator to imagine, in contrast, a deluded lover not unlike his former
self who gazes at the reflection of a "stately virgin" in a woodland pool. The
narrator imagines her frustrating the devotions of the "poor youth" by tossing
flower-heads into the stream, before she vanishes into the wood. The narrator
further imagines the youth transfixed beside the pool in futile "love-longing,"
while he himself follows the woodland stream he has rested by until it takes him
"into light." Presently he finds a birchbark sketch whose style reveals it is a
picture drawn and left by his own beloved Isabel. He resolves to find her and
return it to her, and to "guide" her home through the darkening wood via a path
he knows "leads straightway / On to her father's house."
15

See CN 2055 15.28 [27 April 1804]: "My Dreams now always connected in
some way or other with Isulia." As noted above, in Freud's paradigm "a piece of
creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what
was once the play of childhood" (1908 [1907], 152). The often playful tone of
"The Picture" and its references to play acknowledge this. But although one
might therefore track the footsteps of the Mother-imago, and the child's archaic
relationship with her, throughout the poem, it is the more 'adult' dream of the
muse I wish to consider here.
16

The literary (day) dream is perhaps unlike the unwritten fantasy in that it
usually involves an extended, formally-sanctioned temporal progression (that is,
composition's long process of vision and re-vision), each phase of which may be
motivated and inspired by further textual and personal "moments" in a kind of
endless dissolve. Thus no definitive 'containment' of creative experience is
possible within the figure of creative (day)dreaming. The present discussion is
necessarily minimal in terms of the many 'intertextual' dialogues the poem
suggests.
17

To what degree might the conventional typology of the elusive muse-lover

figuratively represent not only the incommensurable otherness of language (the
ultimate Muse?), but some probable psychic necessity of creative (day)dreaming?
That is, to what extent do poets (and poems) of a certain temperament
unconsciously invent, and habitually involve others in, 'Platonic' life-dramas
designed to feed creative (day)dreaming? And when does such dreaming become
"escapist" or destructive? Such questions are implicit in "The Picture." (Ironically
for the "poor youth," Coleridge honored Platonic or "Plotino-platonic"
philosophy precisely because, he wrote, "it never suffers, much less causes or
even occasions, its Disciples to forget themselves, lost and scattered in sensible
Objects disjoined or asdisjoined from themselves"; see CN 3935.)

18

See Gessner (1762; rpt. 1972), "Der veste Vorsaz," 120-24, from which I shall
quote. I shall cite page rather than line numbers; it is a prose poem. See also
Davis (1969), 103-06.
19

'Oh! If only I found you, how I would hug you and kiss you!'

20

See Schulz (1963), who argues that Coleridge transforms the conventionalized
pastoral conception and plot of Gessner's piece into a dramatic representation of
the psychology of illusion ("self-deception"). "The Picture" can thus be seen as a
satiric, ironic judgment passed upon pastoral convention; yet it is even more a
"camouflage[d] . . . self-revelation" (140) of psychic "ambiguity" (145).
21

See Freud (1908 [1907]), 148, and Kelly (1972), 84.

22

The published versions of 1802 and that in Sara's Poets maintain the
subjunctive, and devote only seven lines to Cupid's ignominy. Coleridge expands
upon the smallest hint in Gessner: "Leb izt wol, Amor! dein Pfeil wird mich hier
nicht finden . . ." (122). ('Farewell, Love! Your arrow won't find me here.')
Gessner's narrator wanders with "verwundeter Fuss"; Coleridge's imagines that
"If in sullen mood / He [Love] should stray hither, the low stumps shall gore / His
dainty feet" (ll. 28-30, SL, 129). This transformation of the passage, with its sly
joke at Gessner's expense and its extension of the implicit pun on metrical 'feet,'
emphasizes the poem's element of (self)parody and Cupid's identity as a selfprojection of Coleridge's own narrator.
23

'Only yesterday you danced about me gaily in a white summer-frock, as the

waves dance here in the sunlight.' Ruoff (1989) notes the Coleridgean "pattern
memory" of images imported into "The Picture" from the "Verse Letter" to Sara
Hutchinson, including the breeze, robin, and figure of the virgin reflected in the
pool. Her appearance may be interpreted as "an elaborate displacement of one of
the central scenes of the Verse Letter" (188; see 187-88). This scene reappears,
again transformed, in the images of Isabel's birch-bark picture; see below.
24

Freud (1908 [1907], 150) notes "the inclination of the modern writer to split up
his ego, by self-observation, into many part-egos, and, in consequence, to
personify the conflicting currents of his own mental life in several heroes."
25

"On Prophecy in Sleep," trans. W. S. Hett (1935; rev. 1957, 385). See also "On
Dreams," 363. I am indebted to Barbara Tedlock (1992, 2) for calling my
attention to Aristotle's explanation.
26

See Punter's "Narcissism and contamination: 'Christabel' " (19-23). See also
Rajan (1980, 204-59), "Image and Reality in Coleridge's Lyric Poetry." Rajan
discusses in detail Coleridgean narcissism, self-projection, and the problematic of
image, with particular reference to the conversation poems and their extension in
late verses such as "Constancy to an Ideal Object." See also Kessler (1979) on
"The Picture," 61-68.

27

Ed. John Beer (1993), Aphorism XXXVI, 118-19. See also Kessler (1979), 65,
who quotes the passage and notes its narcissistic implications for "The Picture."
28

Is the religious dilemma 'actually' a metaphor for the psychological, personal

oneor the personal for the religious? In other words: is God the 'sign' or
displaced image of the earthly parent (or amniotic bliss)or vice-versa? For the
present purposes, I shall assume the immediate reference of the term God to be
God, and the muse to represent God's earthly double (the soul).
29

Compare with the "Sickness" and "miserable feeling" of the "love-stricken

visionary" in thrall to "The Visionary Hope"(SL, 155-56; CP 1, 416).
30

In "The Picture," Jean-Pierre Mileur points out, "reflection indicates the

uncertain relationship between nature and desire" (1982, 86). Mileur reserves for
reflection in "Kubla Khan," however, a resonance I would extend to "The
Picture" as well:
In 'Kubla Khan,' it [reflection] indicates the uncertain relationship
between desireespecially desire for self-image or confirmation
and poetry. The permanent loss of the reflection and the irreversible
disturbance of the calm surface of the poem represent the
transmutation of the intense, mutual gaze of the self and lyric poetry
into a series of displaced problematics of uncertain relation:
inclusion-exclusion, order-contingency, poetic-natural, figurativeliteral, conscious-unconscious, will-vision.
31

A feminist interpretation of the figure would emphasize the ways in which the
female muse (historically) has been made into a fetish, to serve the ends of
masculine erotic and creative desire. See, for example, Karen Swann (1988) and
Diane Hoeveler (1990, 208-10). But the creative problematic suggested by "The
Picture" exceeds, even as it involves, the fictions of gender. A 'complete'
psychology or phenomenology of inspiration would have to recognize that the
male figure may also be subjected to (sometimes harmful) 'muse-ification'; the
dynamic of erotic cathexis works both ways. Nor is it confined to opposite-sex
objects.
32

1995 (1986), 173. There can be no qualitative comparison between a fictive,

conventional romance poem and a play that dramatizes a real and brutal murder,
such as the performance version of the Hola Camp, Kenya massacre presented by
the Royal Court Theatre, London, 1958 that Soyinka discusses. Nevertheless,
Soyinka's questions obtain even for what may be regarded as the most "trivial"
forms of art: who or what is being served? And served up? Such questions are at
the heart of Coleridge's textual ambivalences.

33

Compare with the "unalarming turbulence / Of transient joys," imaged in "The

Happy Husband" as melody (it follows "The Visionary Hope" in Sibylline
Leaves, 157-58; see CP 1, 388).
34

SL, 118 ("Ipse mihi collatus enim non ille videbor: / Frons alia est, moresque
alii, nova mentis imago, / Voxque aliud sonat"). Coleridge quotes lines from
Petrarch's "Ad Barbatum Sulmonensem,"Epistolae Metricae I, 1. See CN 4178
24.74 and n. Kathleen Coburn translates: "For if I am compared with myself I
shall not seem the same. My face is changed, my ways are changed, I have a new
kind of understanding, my voice sounds otherwise."
35

Ruoff (1989) notes that the " 'fine skin' of the birch has an eerily
anthropomorphic quality" (190). Not long before, the narrator has described it as
"(most beautiful / Of forest-trees, the Lady of the woods)" (ll. 135-36, SL, 133).
Might Isabel be the Dryad of the Wood?
36

See, respectively, CL 2, Letter 438, 790-98: 792-93; CP 1, 385-86, 386-87. "A

Day-Dream" begins:

My eyes make pictures, when they are shut:

I see a fountain, large and fair,
A willow and a ruined hut,
And thee, and me and Mary there,
O Mary! make thy gentle lap our pillow!
Bend o'er us, like a bower, my beautiful green willow!
See also Parrish (1988) for texts of the "Verse Letter" and "The Day-Dream," and
Adair (1968, 194) who also links the Gallow Hill entry with "The Picture" and
"The Day-Dream."
37

For a thoughtful and sensitive discussion of the problem as it relates to

Coleridge's love for Sara Hutchinson and his conception of an ideal, "original
Self," see Anthony John Harding (1974), 80-93. See also 37-43. Suther (1960),
25-66, interprets Coleridge's love-poems in the context of his religious quest; and
Adair (1968), 172-216, places them, including "The Picture," in a Platonic
context.
38

Coleridge revised and expanded the poem's vision of love's reunions

after Sibylline Leaves was already in press: the Errata present eight lines to be
read in place of "lines 14, 15, and 16" on page 133. The new lines emphasize

placelessness and spiritual presence. But the rift that must be opened in the more
erotically pleasure-full first version of the lines, in order to accommodate the
greater idealization, is literally realized by a rupture in the act of reading: when
one must, if one wishes to read the poem as its author intended, turn from the
'whole text' back to the sheet of Errata (xi) that include the revision.