A Romantic Icon on Opium—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

                        Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his early success.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21, 1772 at Ottery St Mary, Devon, England.  He was the youngest of the fourteen children of an impoverished vicar who died in the boy’s ninth year.  His early brilliance was recognized and he was accepted as a charity student at the School of Christ’s Hospital.  He was able to attend Jesus College, Cambridge with the support of an elder brother.  Despite his success as student including winning a medal for a long poem in Greek, he surrendered to the temptations of campus life—then as now alcohol, drugs (opium,) and sex.  Opium addiction would be his lifelong bane. 

Coleridge left school and enlisted in the Dragoons under an assumed name after a messy affair with the sister of a friend.  An indifferent soldier, he frequently fell off his horse.  The Army was not disappointed when a brother showed up and paid for his release.  

William Wadsworth, Coleridge's friend, mentor, and co-author of Lyrical Ballads                                   

After another abortive attempt at school, he schemed to form a utopian plantation in Pennsylvania.  The articles of covenant of Pantisocracy required members to be married, so Coleridge rushed into an unhappy marriage.  Plans for the plantation, of course, collapsed and Coleridge turned more heavily to opium. 

He was, however, serious about religion and literature.  He managed to become ordained as a Unitarian minister and made his living serving small chapels while he began to write seriously.  He became a close friend of William Wordsworth.  The two poets together published Lyrical Ballads, which included Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  His reputation as a poet was immediately made.  The fame from the poem led to a £150 yearly annuity from the wealthy Unitarian Wedgewood family, the famous manufacturers of fine china and porcelain.  He was able to give up the ministry and concentrate on his poetry.  

Coleridge's vision of Xanadu in his Kubla Khan is often thought to have been inspired by opium revels.  Illustration of the poem by Dugald Walker.

Despite success, he slid into greater opium dependency and fought dark depressions.  Kubla Kahn was written in 1797 and published in Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Pains of Sleep in 1816 and is regarded by most scholars as the product of an opium vision. 

Coleridge accompanied Wordsworth on a European tour in 1799.  The two separated in Germany where Coleridge immersed in German philosophy, especially Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism.  On his return to England he published translations of Friedrich Schiller. He moved to the Lake District to be close to Wordsworth but his marriage was tension filled, his opium use increased, and he began quarreling with his friend. 

In 1802 Coleridge fell helplessly in love with Wordsworth’s sister in law Sara Hutchinson and composed his ballad Love for her.

Somehow Coleridge obtained a minor diplomatic position on Malta during an 1804 trip to that island and Sicily.  Despite perfuming his duties satisfactorily his health began to fail and he increased his daily consumption of laudanum.  When he returned to England in 1806 his deterioration shocked his friends.  After a short stay, he returned to Italy until 1808.

Unitarian industrialist and philanthropist Josiah Wedgewood II and his brothers sustained Coleridge with a comfortable annuity of 150 Pounds but reduced it in alarm as the poet sank deeper into addiction.

Now using up to two quarts of laudanum a week, Coleridge separated from his wife, alienated his friends, and finally breached his relationship with Wordsworth. The Wedgewood’s reduced his annuity in alarm at his deteriorating condition.

In 1809 he established his own periodical The Friend in which he indulged his wide interests.  It lasted through twenty-five seldom read issues before failing.  Years later essays from the magazine published in book form finally found an audience and influenced philosophers John Stuart Mill and Ralph Waldo Emerson among others.

In a crisis of faith, Coleridge foreswore the Unitarian Church and returned to the Anglicanism of his father, sometimes rising to the defense of orthodoxy from attacks by his former comrades. 

                            Coloridge at 42 by Washington Allston.

Finally, in 1817 his long slide to oblivion was ended when he moved in with the family of his London physician, Dr. James Gillman, who kept his demons largely in check for his remaining 18 years.  While in residence at the Gillman home, he managed to write his major prose work, the Biographia Literaria, biographical essays and philosophical musings.  He also published new poetry including Sibylline Leaves in 1820, Aids to Reflection in 1825, and Church and State in 1826. During his final years he was regarded as a great talker in the tradition of Samuel Johnson and his weekly Thursday Salons became famous.  He died in London on July 25, 1834.

Adapted from the biographical notes for Four Hundred Years of Unitarian and Universalist Poets: From John Milton to Sylvia Plath, a readers theater presentation by Patrick Murfin.

Frost at Midnight

The Frost performs its secret ministry,

Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry

Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.

The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,

Have left me to that solitude, which suits

Abstruser musings: save that at my side

My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.

‘Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs

And vexes meditation with its strange

And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,

This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,

With all the numberless goings-on of life,

Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame

Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;

Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

 

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.

Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature

Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,

Making it a companionable form,

Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit

By its own moods interprets, every where

Echo or mirror seeking of itself,

And makes a toy of Thought.

 

                      But O! how oft,

How oft, at school, with most believing mind,

Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,

To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft

With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt

Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,

Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang

From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,

So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me

With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear

Most like articulate sounds of things to come!

So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,

Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!

And so I brooded all the following morn,

Awed by the stern preceptor’s face, mine eye

Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:

Save if the door half opened, and I snatched

A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,

For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face,

Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,

My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

 

         Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,

Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,

Fill up the intersperséd vacancies

And momentary pauses of the thought!

My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart

With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,

And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,

And in far other scenes! For I was reared

In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim,

And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags

Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,

Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores

And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible

Of that eternal language, which thy God

Utters, who from eternity doth teach

Himself in all, and all things in himself.

Great universal Teacher! he shall mould

Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

 

         Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch

Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

 

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

Different Drummers Put Flowers in Rifle Barrels—Marching to a at the Pentagon

 

The most enduring image of the Pentagon march--young people putting flowers in the barrels of Army M-15 rifles.

Note—It is instructive to note the Johnson administration’s massive deployment in defense of the Pentagon during the 1967 anti-war March on the Pentagon and the feeble protection of the Capitol during the January 6, 2021 siege and attempted insurrection.

There were other big marches in Washington in opposition to the Vietnam War.  Starting in 1965 they had practically become semi-annual events.  There would be more—and larger—ones later.  But the March to Confront the War Makers on October 21, 1967 was different.  It signaled a new phase in the anti-war movement that incorporated the rising youth counter   culture on a large scale for the first time and willingness for more aggressive confrontation of authority.  It also introduced onto the national stage some figures who would become household names within a year.

The march was organized, as were previous ones, by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam—universally referred to simply as the Mobe—a shaky coalition of more than 150 organizations including traditional pacifists, Ban the Bomb groups, liberals, the Old Left, the New Left, Viet Cong sympathizers, a sliver of the Civil Rights Movement, student groups like the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and anti-war veteran groups.  It was united only in opposition to the war.

 

A Mobe flyer promoting the march had a distinctly traditional, Old Left look.  With the infusion of the youth culture into the previously mostly middle class anti-war movement, such calls would soon look far different.

The organization was so shaky that after the tumultuous events of this demonstration it fell apart.  It was re-assembled, minus its less militant components as the New Mobe the following year in time to organize protests at the Democratic National Convention.

The Mobe was led by veteran radical pacifist Dave Dellinger, the fifty-something editor of Liberation magazine.  In order to reach out to more young people—earlier marches, in retrospect seem like the sedate affairs of the middle class—Dellinger recruited California activist Jerry Rubin to be project coordinator for the march.  It was Rubin’s idea to add a March on the Pentagon after the main rally on the National Mall broke up.

Three central figures of the Chicago Democratic Convention protests of 1968, Abbie Hoffman, Dave Dellinger, and Jerry Rubin, first came together for the Marches on Washington Washington and the Pentagon. 

The rally and March were just part of a series of actions in and around Washington.  A day earlier a march of hundreds on the Justice Department organized by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and other anti-draft groups presented more than 1,000 returned Draft Cards to a reluctant Assistant Attorney General.  Other small demonstrations and picketing were organized by various component groups in the Mobe around Washington.

Among those who came to Washington, many in rented school buses, was a carload organized by Chicago Seed editor Abe Peck.

A highlight of the Rally on the Mall was to be the arrival of the Peace Torch, lit in Hiroshima on August 6.  It was carried across country from San Francisco in a highly publicized relay reminiscent of the journeys of the Olympic Torch.

Although several Blacks spoke from the podium of the Mall Rally—mostly long time members of Old Left parties—most African Americans boycotted the main demonstration where President Lyndon B. Johnson was sure to come under attack.  Many were grateful for his steadfast support of major Civil Rights legislation.  A separate rally was held at Howard University where opposition to the war was largely separated from opposition to the President.  The most important Black leader to come out strongly against the war, Rev. Martin Luther King, was absent from both events. 

The huge rally was typical of others of its type—a parade of speakers representing the component organizations interspersed with brief entertainment.  Dellinger hinted at a shift in anti-war strategy by saying that it was time to “to go from protest to resistance.”  Norman Mailer, then the most celebrated novelist in America, famously spoke.  His role in the Rally and later events was celebrated in his book Armies of the Night, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. 

Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, poet Robert Lowell, Old Left leader Sydney Lens, Dagmar Wilson, and Dr. Benjamin Spock link arms with other luminaries and speakers as they set off from the main rally on the National Mall to head to the Pentagon. 

The main speaker was Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose baby care book was the Bible by which most of the young members of the crowd had been raised.  Spock had supported Johnson in 1964 and felt betrayed by his escalation of the war.  The kindly Spock was one of the last nods at getting the parents of Baby Boomers on board the anti-war movement.  But the days when he and organizations like Another Mother for Peace could be the face of the movement were ending.

When the main Rally broke up, a large portion of the crowd began the two and a half mile march to the Pentagon.  By some estimates as many as 50,000 began the long walk, which took them across the Memorial Bridge over the Potomac and up a long service road to the Defense Department headquarters.  Many did not finish the trip.  The line strung out so that it took well over an hour for everyone to get into the site.

When marchers got there they were confronted with a building encircled by 2,500 Federal troops and 200 U.S. Marshals.  A rope line was set up in advance of the security forces and authorities announced that anyone crossing the line would be arrested.

Marchers also encountered a smaller group already at the Pentagon.  Organized by Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, festooned in an American flag shirt and Uncle Sam hat, the newly formed Youth International Party—the Yippies, an organization that hardly existed except in flyers circulated on college campuses and in big city youth culture enclaves, were there to supposedly levitate the Pentagon.

Many of those first on the scene peacefully approached the defense line.  Images of young people putting flowers in the barrels of Army M-15s became iconic.  But soon more militant demonstrators were challenging the line.  Arrests began.  Small groups managed to get partially up the steps of the building.  Others found an unguarded access ramp and charged in.  They were met with rifle butts and particularly by the aggressive batons of Federal Marshals who busted several heads. Tear gas was used on the crowd and there was some chaos and panic.

White helmeted U.S. Marshals with heavy batons were particularly aggressive against demonstrators and inflicted several cracked skulls.

But the majority of the demonstrators continued to stand by.  Many sang America the Beautiful and other patriotic and anti-war songs as the battle raged.  By 7 pm things had settled down.  Authorizes announced that the permit for the demonstration had expired.  Most of the remaining demonstrators drifted away, but about 7,000 chose to stay.  No move was made to dislodge them, but as overnight temperatures dropped, many more left.

At dawn a few hundred left to march to the White House to “wake up LBJ.”  There were more arrests there, including those charged with picking flowers in Lafayette Park.  A few hundred others stayed behind to keep a vigil at the Pentagon.  At midnight the remaining 200 were rousted or arrested.

In all 681, including Hoffman and Mailer, were arrested over the two days.  Many demonstrators were bloodied or overcome by tear gas.  Over 100 demonstrators were documented to have been treated for injuries.  Many more were undoubtedly hurt.  In addition some soldiers, marshals, and police sustained minor injuries, mostly from objects thrown at them during the confrontation at the Pentagon or scuffles during arrests.

The events in Washington that weekend set the stage for even more tumultuous and confrontational protests around the country in the next few years.

                            Chicago Seed editor Abe Peck with Abbie Hoffman.

In Chicago the Seed offices became the unofficial headquarters for the Yippie’s next big project, the counter cultural Festival of Life during the 1968 Democratic Convention.  But Abe Peck had a warning for flower-power hippies who expected bands and dope shrouded festivities in the park—“If you come, be sure to wear some armor in your hair.”