Coleridge conversing

between soliloquy and invocation

pp. 183-191

in: Peter Larkin, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

"The stilly murmur of the distant Sea / Tells us of Silence" (CPW I.1 232: 11–12), Coleridge writes in "The Eolian Harp." Coleridge isn't telling us of silence but evoking how it might be possible to speak to silence: it is only the speaking to, or invoking, which he can tell us of, even before, it seems, he can tell himself. Voice and silence are two salients in the conversation poems, and the gesture toward invocation is the connecting link, though a tentative one, not always able to be in play, sometimes beset by the more fraught play of the conversational itself.¹ About voice, the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty writes, "Among my movements, there are some that go nowhere …: these are the facial movements, many gestures, and especially those strange movements of the throat and mouth that form the cry and the voice … my voice is bound to the awesome birth of vociferation."² The bodily intimacy of one's own voice and the recognition of the other are always intertwined: "It is the error of the semantic philosophies to close up language as if it spoke only of itself: language lives only from silence; everything we cast to the others has germinated in this great mute land which we never leave."³ Departing from a similar insight, Jean Louis Chrétien will say, "Speech takes risks because it is always the unheard-of that it wants to say.