Poet’s Corner: Coleridge–Christabel 30

17 July 2026

(14 August 2015) Welcome back to all our readers! We continue with the final stanza of the second part of Coleridge’s unfinished “Christabel,” and we remind our readers that last time, we saw Christabel plead with her father to send Geraldine immediately away, breaching the laws of hospitality, with the poet then breaking in and adding his plea to forebear from punishing Christabel for this breach. This time we see the Baron’s response to these pleas, and we remind our readers that Bracy the Bard argued–because of his dream of a snake–to delay his journey to Geraldine’s father; however, the Baron is unmoved by any of these pleas:

Within the Baron’s heart and brain
If thoughts, like these, had any share,
They only swelled his rage and pain,
And did but work confusion there.
His heart was cleft with pain and rage,
His cheeks they quivered, his eyes were wild,
Dishonoured thus in his old age;
Dishonoured by his only child,
And all his hospitality
To the wronged daughter of his friend
By more than woman’s jealousy
Brought thus to a disgraceful end—
He rolled his eye with stern regard
Upon the gentle minstrel bard,
And said in tones abrupt, austere—
‘Why, Bracy! dost thou loiter here?
I bade thee hence!’ The bard obeyed;
And turning from his own sweet maid,
The agèd knight, Sir Leoline,
Led forth the lady Geraldine!

The Baron, apparently under Geraldine’s ‘spell,’ does not respond to either plea; instead, he becomes angry with his daughter, seeing her request as a “dishonour” (note the British spelling of ‘honor’) to him and his house. He turns a blind eye upon his daughter and berates the bard for failing to act on the command he has given. The bard, as an inferior to his master, can only obey, with that last reminder that the Baron leads forth, not his daughter, for she has dishonored him, but the snake in a maid’s clothing, and one can easily see the look of triumph she, the villain, casts back upon the forsaken Christabel! Next Monday, we will examine the conclusion to this second, and final, part of Coleridge’s long, supernatural poem. Until then, good reading!