Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge appears indirectly in recollections by Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, but his brief presence has a lasting effect on the novel’s concerns with voice, authorship, and endings. For Ash, an encounter with the celebrated poet is a memory of being unable to speak; for LaMotte, an infant’s meeting with him yields a possible prophecy about her name and future. Both recollections turn Coleridge into a figure through whom the characters consider what can be known, said, or imagined about a story that has no surviving conclusion.

Identity and Literary Presence

Coleridge is invoked by his initials, S.T.C., as a celebrated poet and a personal acquaintance remembered by two nineteenth-century writers. The evidence of his character is deliberately limited to their memories rather than an independent account of his life. His significance lies less in a developed biography than in the different meanings Ash and LaMotte make from their encounters with him—and in his association with the unfinished poem “Christabel,” whose unresolved ending becomes a subject of their correspondence.

In a letter to LaMotte, Ash recalls having been taken to Highgate when he was young. He describes hearing Coleridge speak at length, his voice at once angelic and mildly self-important. The remembered talk ranged across angels, the longevity of yew trees, the suspension of life in winter, premonitions, human duties, Napoleon’s spies, and the distinction between true and lying dreams. The sequence mingled what Ash regarded as banal with what seemed profound; Coleridge said nothing about his poem “Christabel.”

Ash’s Memory: A Voice Unanswered

Ash’s recollection is shaped by the disparity between Coleridge’s fluent monologue and his own youthful silence. He had worried that he could not find a moment to interpose his voice, think in such company, or be noticed. Looking back, he guesses that he might have asked an erudite but pointless question about the Trinity or crudely begged to hear the ending of “Christabel.” The alternatives make his embarrassment vivid: the pressure to perform intelligence and the desire for the simple satisfaction of knowing how a tale concludes.

That remembered silence becomes part of Ash’s understanding of reading. He admits to pressing through even trivial works once begun, driven by a feverish appetite to reach their endings, whether sweet or sour. He asks LaMotte whether she shares this compulsion or is a more discriminating reader who can put aside an unprofitable book. His question makes their exchange about Coleridge’s poem more than literary gossip: its absent conclusion exposes the difference between the reader’s desire for closure and the limits imposed by a text’s survival and its author’s apparent indifference.

Ash calls the ending of “Christabel” impossible to predict, yet insists that it must have one. The contradiction is central to the story’s appeal: a narrative promises an outcome, but its readers will never know it. He imagines the secret sleeping with its lethargic, inconsequential author and describes the reader’s predicament as an irritable uncertainty. Coleridge thus stands at the edge of an unresolved tale, at once the poet responsible for it and the absent authority who cannot supply its ending.

LaMotte’s Memory: A Name and a Possible Omen

LaMotte’s recollection reverses Ash’s perspective. She says that she, too, saw Coleridge, but she was an infant: his pudgy hand rested on her golden curls, and his voice remarked on their flaxen paleness. She cannot be certain of the exact words. She acknowledges that, through later thought, she may have created the voice she remembers; nevertheless, she believes he said that her name was beautiful and that he trusted it would not be a name of ill omen.

For LaMotte, this uncertain remembered sentence is the only clue she has to the ending of Coleridge’s “Christabel.” She takes the heroine’s name as a sign that the character is destined for tribulation, while confessing that she finds it harder to imagine how happiness might follow. The memory therefore joins her own name to a literary heroine’s fate without resolving either one. Its force depends on the very uncertainty LaMotte acknowledges: memory may preserve an utterance, or imagination may have made it into one.

The Unfinished Poem and the Novel’s Questions

The two recollections give Coleridge’s unfinished poem a double role. Ash approaches “Christabel” as an impatient reader who longs to know the ending; LaMotte reads its heroine’s name as a possible omen, then confronts the difficulty of imagining a happy resolution. In neither case does Coleridge provide an answer. The poem’s incompletion holds open the gap between a story’s implied necessity—there must be an ending—and the reader’s inability to recover it.

Coleridge’s remembered voice also creates a contrast between speech and participation. In Ash’s account, the brilliant monologue leaves a young listener unable to make himself heard. In LaMotte’s, the voice reaches her only as a statement recalled and reconsidered many years later. Together, these scenes make the poet a figure for the unstable passage from utterance to memory and from memory to interpretation. What survives is not a definitive account of Coleridge’s meaning, but two distinct acts of reading: Ash’s hunger for closure and LaMotte’s attempt to find a fate within a name.