The mole

One of my favorite little bits of coiled, almost crushed verse (we speak of crushed ice, why not have two options for the poetry dispenser?) from Coleridge's lesser-read later writings: "The Mole." Coleridge extracted it from his cryptic little 1811 piece, "On the First Poem in Donne's Book" (which refers to "The Flea") to use in his Friend in 1818, to describe mechanical (that is,"crass and sensual") materialists, or, as he puts it, "the advocates of the Nihil nisi ab extra":

--They shrink in, as Moles
(Nature's mute monks, live mandrakes of the ground)
Creep back from Light--then listen for its sound;--
See but to dread, and dread they know not why--
The natural alien of their negative eye.

The compactness of this little fragment and the poems immediately written before and after it are often attributed precisely to Coleridge's unfashionable fascination and admiration for Donne (this is in the age of Johnson's "Life of Cowley"): in short the seem to people like a bit of metaphysical poetry in the Romantic age (and who better to write it than the Englishman most thoroughly steeped in metaphysics?). But I don't really think this bears much relationship to Donne, actually (and for the record, Shelley is much more "metaphysical" to me than Coleridge): the sort of compactness of this verse is not like Donne's at all, really, since that comes mostly--I'll hazard--from argument. In other words, in Donne, we have intensely compressed and suprising figures like this, but their effect is secured by what they do to the (also very compressed) argumentative structure of the poem--namely, punctuate it, interrupt it, twist it. They're like time bombs for the reader in the unfolding of the case being made. Coleridge's are--almost like Dickenson's, but less opaque and disturbing in a sort of immediate sense--internally intense: they take you away from the poem completely, into the metaphor or metonymy. They are time bombs for the reader, sticking in your head, incorporated but not digested (much like Wordsworth's poetry, but more intellectual). Thus what is like Donne, is Coleridge's play with the line, and the pitting of the line--and the parts of the line--against the poem as a whole. This however is put to a different end than Donne: it gives him the space needed for a fathomless metonymy or metaphor, not an argumentative turn or suprise. It also will restore some movement or speed to the poem, as one is forced on from line to line by the pounding beats that fit the polysyllables so well (too well--that is, they do it formally, not rhythmically). While this sometimes is indeed like Donne when these rhytmic units are smaller than the line and involve more rhetorical than metric effects, or when the two sharply reinforce each other ("mute monks" sounds very Donne-like), it is overall, if anything, an amazing Miltonic sort of effect (Milton's amazing ability to fill out the line with two or three words has this effect of Coleridge's shortening), and it chiefly produces that sort of forgetting necessary for the delayed intellectual effect that is so wonderful. Now, "The Moles" is a good example of this, but the most sublime (it is one of the most amazing things Coleridge ever wrote) is the first stanza in one of those poem composed almost immediately after (in 1811, that is: besides the following, they include "Limbo," and, "A Suicide's Argument"). I'll leave you with this, which was titled by Coleridge's son (Coleridge gave it no title) "Ne Plus Ultra":

Sole Positive of Night!

Antipathist of Light!
Fate's only essence! primal scorpion rod--
The one permitted opposite of God!--
Condensed blackness and abysmal storm
Compacted to one sceptre
Arms the Grasp enorm--
The Interceptor--