"Her father had looked down into her eyes and left in them the light of her own". This was Henry Taylor's view of Sara Coleridge. Her brother Hartley, a fine poet and essayist himself, waxed less rhapsodic, but he too judged that she was the most gifted of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's offspring. So why has her poetry had to wait until now, 155 years after her death, to be published for the first time?
Three reasons could be suggested. First, her papers are in Texas, in the excellent Harry Ransom Center in Austin, but out of the way for many scholars of British Romanticism. Secondly, she was known in her lifetime as a learned editor, expert in theology and philosophy, and her only published poems came out in anonymously published books for children. Thirdly, bad luck. She died young at 49, and a combination of modesty and other projects meant she hadn't arranged her poetry for publication. Near her death, she heavily hinted to her brother Derwent that he should prepare an edition, but he was no judge of poetry and failed to take the hint.
Like her father, she was a natural writer, and combined passion and intellectual force in an unusual way. She could turn her mind to any subject, and wrote widely on - for instance - English poetry, children's education, women writers, Irish politics, the Oxford Movement. She was sharper and wittier than you would think from the rather toned-down Life and Letters edited by her daughter Edith in 1873. Even as a poet, she was versatile: the collected poems include comic verses for her children, a recipe in rhyme, translations from Aeschylus and Petrarch, love poems (requited and not), religious poems, and even a long ballad story from the Arabian Nights.
The best of them are often on Romantic themes. On the gaps between innocence and experience, for instance, as in Poppies, a poem about the loneliness of good parenting, sometimes having to keep secrets from your enviably naive children (especially if you're a melancholic with a drug habit). On enchantment leaving the world, as in the haunting verses "The winds were whispering" from her wild and (yes) druggy children's romance Phantasmion (it has fairies, but "fairy story" belies its darkness and its rather adult sense of sexual compulsion). On the seasons of life, as in her well-known rhymes for children on The Months: "January brings the snow / Makes our feet and fingers glow". Or on the seasons again, in the George Herbert-like Time's Acquittal, in which Sara (a noted beauty in her youth) realizes that she can cope with her own autumn because her children are in their springtime.
