[Poem] FEARS IN SOLITUDE - A Brief Overview of Coleridge’s Reflection on War and Morality

My God, it is a melancholy thing
For such a man, who would full fain preserve
His soul in calmness, yet perforce must feel
For all his human brethren—O my God,
It weighs upon the heart, that he must think
What uproar and what strife may now be stirring
This way or that way o’er these silent hills—
Invasion, and the thunder and the shout,
And all the crash of onset; fear and rage,
And undetermined conflict—even now,
Even now, perchance, and in his native isle:
Carnage and groans beneath this blessed sun!
We have offended, Oh my countrymen!
We have offended very grievously,
And been most tyrannous. From East to West
A groan of accusation pierces Heaven!
The wretched plead against us; multitudes
Countless and vehement, the sons of God,
Our brethren! Like a cloud that travels on,
Steam’d up from Cairo’s swamps of pestilence,
Even so, my countrymen! have we gone forth
And borne to distant tribes slavery and pangs,
And, deadlier far, our vices, whose deep taint
With slow perdition murders the whole man,
His body and his soul! Meanwhile, at home,
We have been drinking with a riotous thirst
Pollutions from the brimming cup of wealth;
Contemptuous of all honorable rule,
Yet bartering freedom and the poor man’s life
For gold, as at a market! The sweet words
Of Christian promise, words that even yet
Might stem destruction, were they wisely preach’d,
Are mutter’d o’er by men, whose tones proclaim
How flat and wearisome they feel their trade:
Rank scoffers some, but most too indolent
To deem them falsehoods or to know their truth.
Oh, blasphemous! the book of life is made
A superstitious instrument, on which
We gabble o’er the oaths we mean to break;
For all must swear—all and in every place,
College and wharf, council and justice-court;
All must swear, the briber and the bribed,
Merchant and lawyer, senator and priest,
The rich, the poor, the old man and the young;
All, all make up one scheme of perjury,
That faith doth reel; the very name of God
Sounds like a juggler’s charm; and, bold with joy,
Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place,
(Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism,
Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon,
Drops his blue-fringéd lids, and holds them close,
And hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven,
Cries out, “Where is it?”

Thankless too for peace,
(Peace long preserved by fleets and perilous seas)
Secure from actual warfare, we have loved
To swell the war-whoop, passionate for war!
Alas! for ages ignorant of all
Its ghastlier workings, (famine or blue plague,
Battle, or siege, or flight through wintry snows),
We, this whole people, have been clamorous
For war and bloodshed; animating sports,
The which we pay for as a thing to talk of,
Spectators and not combatants! No guess
Anticipative of a wrong unfelt,
No speculation or contingency,
However dim and vague, too vague and dim
To yield a justifying cause; and forth,
(Stuff’d out with big preamble, holy names,
And adjurations of the God in Heaven),
We send our mandates for the certain death
Of thousands and ten thousands! Boys and girls,
And women, that would groan to see a child
Pull off an insect’s wing, all read of war,
The best amusement for our morning meal!
The poor wretch, who has learnt his only prayers
From curses, who knows scarcely words enough
To ask a blessing from his Heavenly Father,
Becomes a fluent phraseman, absolute
And technical in victory and defeat,
And all our dainty terms for fratricide;
Terms which we trick with childish gaieties
As the red Indian paints his horrid war-float!

Deem you a few months hence and you shall hear
This mighty empire rent, like the trunk
Of some old oak, which the midnight storm
Hath riven in the forest, hollow at heart,
And all its lofty boasted branches bare—
Thoughts that may startle well! But bring they with them
No spirit of vengeance, no desire to rend
Our country? do they not urge us to the crimes
We now behold, and fill us with the passion
Of savage nature, when the man in us
Is silent? We are teachers of revenge,
We are the pomps of vengeance, who incite
The savage youth to murder and to war;
We help them to swell the war-cry, and we sing
The loud acclaim of war! We build the gun,
And we say, Lo! thus the warlike arm
Shall be strong to scatter nations. Where is God?
O my countrymen! thus we have lived
A false life, a life of monstrous falsehoods,
Out of our hearts has gone the sense of duty,
Out of our hearts has gone the sense of truth,
And we have let in the wilderness, the plague,
And black despair. In the nation’s heart,
And (may God save us) in the nation’s mind,
Is plague, is famine, and is an insurrection
Of spirits foul and disembodied passions.

Hence, therefore, loud appeals to the brute sense,
Haunting the ear with curses and fierce threats!
Hence, false alarm! and monstrous tyranny,
And carnival of murders—hatred, fear,
And ever rankling jealousy! Yet the peace,
Which warlike fleets and armies give, is sure!
Chase not away calm Reason, that still lurks
In man’s mild heart. Let arms unlistened lie
In their dark dens for terror, not for use.
Let man call home his spirit from the wolf,
And bring it forth to track the ways of peace.
Hence also the infection of these thoughts
To all men spreads. But we have thrown aside
Our fear of God, and with it fear of man.
We have put off all reverence for ourselves;
Hence the loud talkers, those who make the page
Of daily sorrow, fierce with wild harangues,
And bless the hour they set their watchman’s face,
And cry out “Lo the patriot of the land!”
Hence idol-praise: and hence the empty noise
Of proud wrath speaking from the hollow ghost
Of our departed greatness. Hence contortions
Of dreadful shapes: once with calm aspect
They look’d upon the mild paternal sky,
But now, while we speak, how unlike themselves,
Horribly changed! Yet still, O my countrymen,
We might have peaceful days once more, and times
As bright as e’er the old country saw, and we
Might yet be free again, and wise, and be
As we have been—pure, peace-loving, and just!
Have faith, have faith! We’ll fear not for ourselves,
But fear for them, the dreadful ones, who, thus
Sent forth do cause these horrors upon earth.

We now shall see (and it is prophecy)
The hour of vengeance. O my mother Isle!
Thy valleys will be sweet in all their green,
And flowers will bloom, and harvests wave again
As in the days of yore. No stirring foot
Of foreign enemy among thy fields!
O save, O guard, O shelter them, my God!
From famine, plague, and the red sword, that rage
Like fiends among the throngs of men:—and thou,
Oh do thou now (for we who kneel before thee
Do bear a nation’s wrongs upon our hearts)
O thou, that in a sense more awful, canst
Send forth a Red-cross knight, conqueror of Kings,
Trampler of tyrannies, and warrior-lord
Of better times, O speed him, speed him, now!
Send him, a man by force of reason strong,
Not trusting outward shows, but from within
Deriving reason’s will, and knowledge sure,
Freed from illusions, wise in righteousness,
Full of high thoughts and fearless of all ill!
Such is the man we pray thee for, O God!
What though the midnight cry is, “Arm! Arm! Arm!”
And panic hurries through the sick man’s dream,
And terrifies the phrenzied, who sees shapes
Distort and monstrous stalking through the gloom!
Yet, though thou slumberest not, nor sleepest, still
We fear not: fear not thou for us, O God!
We trust in thee, and in the joyous days
When thou wilt avenge thy chosen ones, and come
In the might of gloom, a dreadful God,
And hush the storms of war, and show the world,
That thou art naught but the same eternal God,
The father of the fatherless, the friend
Of them that have no helper. We bless thee, Lord!