44 PA RT O N E
A soft seat, and a deep and ample shade.
Thou may’st toil far and find no second tree.
Drink, Pilgrim, here; here rest! and if thy heart...Twenty-four single syllables! Their even pulse turns the fountain into a still
dance.
Meanwhile what has been moving us from Patriarch to sleeping infant, then
from traveler to toiling Pilgrim? Sacred, pure, innocent things, then peace and
seeking, draw toward the Spring. And we sense a new presence, someone al-
most biblically saying “Thou.” This speaker’s been present all along, offering
a hand, pointing out very present things: “ThisSycamore.. .Such tents.. .this
jutting stone.. .Yon tiny cone.. .HereTwilight is.. .hereis moss.” Through
these lines a benevolent kind of Ancient Mariner holds us with “Thou... thy
... thou... Thy.”
How evenly, how slowly the voice says “Drink, Pilgrim, here; here rest!”
After the warning in a natural beat, “and fíndnosécondtrée,” we ’re directed,
spiritually upgraded, and held where the rhythm compresses: “.. .hére; hére
.. .” This heath holds holy ground. Drink at the source and any sound, whether
gale or hum, makes a fresh beginning.
The voyager in an anonymous medieval quatrain, “Western Wind,” craves
rain. T. S. Eliot ’s The Waste Land conjures an oasis, “A spring / A pool among
the rock.” His poem “Little Gidding” arrives “At the source of the longest
river / The voice of the hidden waterfall.” Robert Frost ’s “Directive” sends
us back to “a spring as yet so near its source” and ends, “Drink and be whole
again beyond confusion.”
Coleridge ’s “Inscription” belongs in this company. It ends on a casual ex-
clamation: “or hum of murmuring bees!” Like human imagination, bees go
out gathering and come back, making honey and wax, sweetness and light. So
the “hum of murmuring bees” goes round to the first line “musical with bees,”
shaping this poem like a basin, offering not only an inscription for the fountain
but the fountain itself, at once origin and goal. What could be simpler?
Along with William Wordsworth, Coleridge made his first walking tour of
the Lake Country in 1799, taking notes on what impressed him. Watching river
water rush over hollowed stone, he notes
The white Eddy-rose that blossom’d up against the Stream in the scollop, by
fits and starts, obstinate in resurrection.Four years later he rewrites it from memory among several “Images”:
Thewhite rose of Eddy-foam, where the stream ran into a scooped or scolloped
hollow of the Rock in its channel—this Shape, an exact white rose, was for