Rhythm and Affect in “Christabel”

This essay reads Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel” in the light of its notorious preface, arguing that Coleridge was right to link the poem’s structure to “passion,” but not in the manner that he specified. In place of “syllabic irregularity,” that is to say, I focus upon a rhythmical accent that is both open and directed: the advertised four-beat line is not an obligatory or invariant feature; even when it does arise, it produces a significantly wide variety of affects. In place of a hypostasized lyric “voice,” therefore, Coleridge’s poem forces us to consider the process of vocalization, whereby narrative speaker and distinct characters arise as the echoes of rhythmical patterns that predate them. Coleridge’s poem, I conclude, was “new” not through its putative invention of a prosodic structure, but through its peculiarly self-reflexive use of extant materials. Such a fact forces us to treat the category of rhythm itself in a more historicized manner than much current scholarship presently allows. I conclude by demonstrating how Coleridge’s metrical practice sheds light on a particular philosophical issue that he struggled to engage with in more conventional prepositional language: the eighteenth-century treatment of affect..