suddenly—& before the nurse or the Surgeon
arrived, delivered herself.” Sara gave birth in their
Bristol cottage with no midwife in attendance—
and no husband either. Coleridge was away in
Birmingham. hartley arrived a month prematurely, so you can’t entirely blame his father for
not being there; on the other hand, you could
hardly call the absence auspicious. You might
also take issue with Coleridge’s breezy claim that
his wife had had “a wonderfully favorable time.”
If my husband were a hundred miles away while
I delivered my first child entirely alone in drafty
lodgings, the words “wonderfully favorable”
might not spring to mind. And I might sigh if
his signal contribution to the occasion were three
sonnets, the last of which, written after seeing his
son for the first time, reflected, as he put it, on
“All I had been, and all my child might be!”
I cannot bear a parent’s tears.
—Virgil, c. 25 BC
hartley Coleridge began life with limitless
promise—“all my child might be”—and ended
it universally viewed as a failure. he is remem-
bered not for his poems or his essays, though
he wrote some fine ones, but for two things and
two things only: he was the son of Samuel Tay-
lor Coleridge, and he was a disappointment.
he has been called a misfit, a dreamer, a sinner,
a castaway, a wayward child, a hobgoblin, a flib-
bertigibbet, a waif, a weird, a pariah, a prodigal,
a picturesque ruin, a sensitive plant, an exquisite
machine with insufficient steam, the oddest of
god’s creatures, and, most frequently—by his
father, his mother, his brother, and his sister; by
William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth,
and Thomas Carlyle; and by countless others
over the years—“Poor hartley.”
I will not call him Poor hartley. relieved
of the adjective that has followed him around
like a cringing cur for nearly two centuries, he
will be, simply, hartley. (Although the “Da-
vid” referred to in his father’s letter—an hom-
age to David hartley, the eighteenth-century
metaphysical philosopher—faded away before
baptism, hartley was still stuck with one great
man for his first name and another for his last.)
And that raises the question of what I should
call his father, he of the abscessed buttocks and
the great poems. “Coleridge” not only grants
him sole proprietorship of a last name that be-
longs just as rightfully to his son but also makes
the father sound like an adult and the son—
forever—like a child. For the sake of parity, I
should call him “Samuel.” however, he detested
that name, considering it “the worst combina-
tion of which vowels and consonants are sus-
ceptible.” he signed his poems with a variety
of pseudonyms, from Aphilos to Zagri. his
most celebrated alias was Silas Tomkyn Comb-
erbache, the name under which he enlisted in
the dragoons and with whom he shared a set of
initials: STC. Since that is how he referred to
himself in his notebooks, sometimes in greek, I
will call our ill-starred pair hartley and STC—
with the rueful realization that, as always, hart-
ley gets the short end of the stick.
