Poet’s Corner: Coleridge–Christabel 20

22 June 2026

(29 May 2015) Greetings to all our readers, and a good day! Last week, the ladies joined the Baron for their morning meal, and we saw the Baron’s reaction to both daughter and guest. This week, we learn more of the Baron’s reaction to Geraldine, as she relates her story (with embellishments!) to Sir Leoline:

But when he heard the lady’s tale,
And when she told her father’s name,
Why waxed Sir Leoline so pale,
Murmuring o’er the name again,
Lord Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine?
Alas! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.
And thus it chanced, as I divine,
With Roland and Sir Leoline.
Each spake words of high disdain
And insult to his heart’s best brother:
They parted—ne’er to meet again!
But never either found another
To free the hollow heart from paining—
They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
A dreary sea now flows between;—
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been.

We discover that Christabel’s father–the Baron, Sir Leoline–and Geraldine’s father–Sir Roland–were the best of friends in their youth until wagging tongues and rumors drove a wedge between them; both said things that they would come to regret, and since that time so long ago, neither has spoken to or met with the others. The poet tells us that neither of these two men have found anyone to replace the other as what we would call a ‘best friend’, discounting their wives. The description of the chasm between them shows Coleridge’s power as a poet: ‘rent cliffs’ between which ‘a dreary sea now flows’, a sea that no power of nature can remove, only through a reckoning between these two long sundered friends. Come back next week for more of this unfinished poem by Coleridge. Good reading!