Poet’s Corner: Coleridge–Christabel 23

29 June 2026

(19 June 2015) Good day to all! We return with more of Coleridge’s supernatural, and often strange, poem, “Christabel. We saw last time that Christabel, for a moment, pierced the spell clouding her mind and saw Geraldine as she is–a decrepit, old hag–but that moment passes quickly as the spell reasserts itself, and if we had any doubt about what happened, the poet clears it up here:

The touch, the sight, had passed away,
And in its stead that vision blest,
Which comforted her after-rest
While in the lady’s arms she lay,
Had put a rapture in her breast,
And on her lips and o’er her eyes
Spread smiles like light!
With new surprise,
‘What ails then my belovèd child?
The Baron said—His daughter mild
Made answer, ‘All will yet be well!’
I ween, she had no power to tell
Aught else: so mighty was the spell.

The vision–of Geraldine as young, beautiful, and vulnerable–is reestablished, and we are told more of the spell, which “put a rapture” in Christabel, with a smile on her lips and a twinkle in her eyes. The rapture is a kind of spiritually overwhelming feeling that the Romantics associated with deity, although not in any common religious sense. We have mentioned before the Romantic sublime, which is what this feeling represents in Christabel, although here it is a false feeling, something enforced from outside, not flowing from within; we might even call it the “negative sublime” since in this case it is artificial, because it is a spell. The poet hints at what the source might be, using coded language that we still use today; when referring to something that happened before the time of a person, we commonly say that this event happened “before you were a twinkle in your parent’s eyes,” a subtle reference to marital relations. A poet today would simply describe–in too much detail–exactly what happened while the two were in bed. Coleridge, however, operated under a much stricter moral/artistic code, and so had to bury such references deep inside layer after layer of metaphoric language. Next time, we will look at Geraldine’s insistence that someone be sent at once to her father. Good reading!