A further daily excerpt from Cold World…

The path taken by Coleridge in “Dejection: An Ode” is…one of intellectual self-dissection, with the explicit goal of diverting or overcoming the pressure of painful emotion:

For not to speak of what I needs must feel,

But to be still and patient, all I can;
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural Man -
This was my sole resource, my only plan:
Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my Soul.

“[W]hat I needs must” and “all I can” are here counterposed as separate and contending powers: one the one hand, a force of “feeling”, emanating from “the natural Man”, which impels one to speak, and on the other a capacity for stillness fortified by “abstruse research”. Considered in the light of Wordsworth’s famous dicta concerning poetry - “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling”, “emotion recollected in tranquility”, and so forth - this deliberate stifling of emotive speech, this patient exercise of self-thwarting intellectual cunning, appears as a “plan” of singular perversity.

The final couplet of the lines quoted above plays on the double sense of “habit” as both covering garment and mental custom. Just as “that which suits” (e.g. clothes and covers) “a part” can by extension become a “habit” covering the entire body, so the entirety of one’s inner life can come to be taken over by the mental customs one has cultivated in order to deal with one intolerable portion of it. In the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, the immediate consequence of Adam and Eve’s eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is that they know that they are naked, and try to cover their sexual organs. After the fall, the body infected by sexual shame becomes the sinful flesh, corrupt in its entirety: the sexual “part” disorganises the body’s integrity. The separation in this passage between the pressure of “what I needs must feel” and the intellectual imperatives of patient self-knowledge and self-control is the result of a struggle to regain this compromised integrity, to rid “my own nature” of “the natural Man”: the “old Adam”, the sexed being whose nature is never wholly his own.