COLERIDGE IMAGINING 43To hear this poem in time, like music, we can let questions unscroll it line by
line.
First, What sort of fountain? Maybe it ’s close to the Latin fons, as in fons et
origo, source and origin. But why would a spring on a heath call for inscription,
especially in the northern Lake District, fairly open and wild? And what will form
the actual inscription: the whole poem, or its last seven, or five, or four lines?
Some saving grace must be at stake when a voice cries out three times over:
“Such tents...! O long unharmed...! Long may the Spring... !” Before
any fountain we see “This Sycamore” and its bees, Patriarchs, aged boughs,
basin and stone, falling leaves. The ancient tree turns musical organism then
biblical refuge. Thanks to a jutting stone the earth basin’s pure of fall’s dying
leaves. Then a Spring wells up, and right away an analogy. Why this suspense,
evolving moment by moment a natural, perhaps sacred scene?
Coleridge ’s first title was “Lines upon a Jutting Stone,” as if happy chance
(or human hand?) had set a stone there to keep the fountain clear. Did he refine
his title? Written at the autumn equinox, full summer verging on winter, his
“Inscription” alerts us to a source with music, bees, Patriarchs, and a sleeping in-
fant—signs of harmony, sweetness, faith, and pure promise in rough terrain.
Sometimes poems at their highest pitch act as an ars poetica, a test or testa-
ment on the art of poetry, like Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” “Inscription
for a Fountain on a Heath” has that extra excitement, pulling out all the stops.
At one point the verse suffuses with surplus music. In the fountain’s “soft and
even pulse” and “soundless dance,” we ’re overhearing a praise of poetry’s own
pulse and sound. Try sounding out those lines,
With soft and even pulse! Nor ever cease
Yon tiny cone of sand its soundless dance.Sibilants-sounds blending with soft n’s help “even” slide to “ever cease,” then
run into the next line, whose varying vowel-sounds each press on n:“Yontiny
cone of sand its soundless dance.” Subconsciously we sense this music. Coleridge
first wrote “noiseless,” which is fine, but “soundless” adds that whisper of s’s
leading “sand” toward “sound” and then into “dance.” It ’s not that “The sound
must seem an echo to the sense,” as Alexander Pope decreed, but that music
intensifies any moment for us.
At the bottom of the spring a cone of sand “dances still”—“still” meaning
constantly but also motionless (like Wordsworth’s “stationary blasts of water-
falls”). Hearing those s-sounds still dancing in “smooth surface” and again in
“coolness,” “moss,” “soft seat,” we begin to wonder if Coleridge has lost hold.
But it ’s all so simply spoken: