Free Opium by Martin Booth Page A

continued artificial excitement …
    In 1812 and again in 1814, Coleridge sought medical help but to no effect. He even went so far as to employ a man whose job was to stand between him and the door of any chemist he might approach, forcibly ejecting him from it.
    Eventually his health deteriorated so far that, in April 1816, he went to a Dr Gillman in Highgate, north London. Gillman controlled and reduced Coleridge’s dependency but he was unable to eradicate it for Coleridge surreptitiously obtained supplies to give himself a temporary boost. By the time he went under Gillman’s regime, he was consuming at least 2 pints of laudanum a week, occasionally 2 pints a day, the equivalent of 20,000 drops. The pharmacist who provided his ‘illicit’ supply claimed to sell him a 12-ounce bottle every fifth day, giving a dose of 1000 drops a day in addition to Gillman’s reduced intake: 1000 drops would kill 5 first-time users.
    Whatever Coleridge thought of his addiction, which he admitted affected his moral nature, he was correct in his claim that in part he earned his living from it for, whilst it may have ruined his lecturing career, there can be no doubt it was an integral part of his literary creativity which, added to his extraordinary imagination, his considerable intellect and his catholic taste in reading, produced some of the most remarkable poetry in the English language.
    The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan are the two most famous of Coleridge’s many opium-influenced poems, although a fierce debate about the role of opium in the writing of the former has raged for decades. The Ancient Mariner was completed early in 1798, before Coleridge became addicted but certainly after his use of opium as a medicine for dysentery: the work is steeped in opium. A sensitivity to sounds, an awareness of the intricacies of colour and light, the visual images, the passage of elongated time, the sense of desolation and vast seascape and the presence of a spectral woman, all smack of opium, not to mention the central theme of an evil deed, persecution by a ghostly apparition and a catalogue of horrors. The mariner’s crew were from a ‘charnel-dungeon’, the ocean covered with ‘slimy things’ which ‘crawled with legs upon the slimy sea’, the surface ‘like a witch’s oils, Burnt green, and blue, and white’. The spectre is described:
    Her lips were red, her looks were free,
    Her locks were yellow as gold:
    Her skin was as white as leprosy,
    The Night-Mare Life-in-Death was she,
    Who thicks man’s blood with cold.
    In Kubla Khan, the opening lines of which are so frequently quoted (and misquoted), the evidence of opium is also clear:
    In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
    A stately pleasure-dome decree:
    Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
    Through caverns measureless to man
    Down to a sunless sea.
    So twice five miles of fertile ground
    With walls and towers were girdled round:
    And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
    Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
    And here were forests ancient as the hills,
    Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
    The imagery of archaic architecture, vast caverns and dark seas precedes other examples in the poem, of voices and music heard in the distance, the tactile sense of the sunny pleasure-dome containing caves of ice and the wailing woman waiting for her demon-lover under a waning moon.
    Both poems are drawn from the writing of others. The Ancient Mariner has its vague foundation in George Shelvocke’s account of rounding Cape Horn, whilst Kubla Khan has its roots in Purchas’s His Pilgrimage, with which the poet was familiar and, through it, conscious of opium and addiction. Such a talent and intellect as Coleridge possessed would almost assuredly have produced extraordinarily fine poetry without the aid of opium because, for Coleridge, opium was not the creative force behind his art, but a mere provider of