Two Poems on Pipe Smoking in Honor of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Today is the 250th anniversary of the birth of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Coleridge has been an immensely important poet for me personally. I had been introduced to him in high school, but it wasn’t until I was doing my PhD where I really engaged with him in a class with Dr. Alison Milbank. There I read “Kubla Khan” and began to be enchanted. A few years later, I would encounter the modern poet Malcolm Guite, who opened Coleridge even further for me. From there began something of a love affair with Mr. Coleridge. I discovered his teachings on the imagination, on the importance of reading fairy tales, and a strong belief in the interconnected nature of all reality. His thinking and his poetry have informed my own. Even his struggles with addiction reflect my own struggles with depression. I cannot express my debt to this great and troubled man.
So today, in honor of his birth, I want to share Coleridge’s poem “Apologia Pro Vita Sua” and my poem inspired by it “Smoking a Pipe on a Cool Afternoon.”
“Smoking a Pipe on a Cool Afternoon” by David Russell Mosley
Like Celtic knots the smoke unfurls and gives
The air an illuminated quality.
Breathed in, blown out, it dies and then it lives.
It gives the room a kind of sublimity.
The cherry heart comes from fire, but air
Keeps the fire alive. A balance must
Be struck. Calm, deliberate, like prayer,
The fire must be fanned. Give in to trust
And let the smoke like incense rise in rings,
In swirls and curls, like Kells now come to life.
And see how like a thurible it sings
Of a world with airish spirits, rife
With things unseen and so unheard of, whole.
All this and more pours from the poet’s bole.
“Apologia pro Vita Sua” by S.T. Coleridge
The poet in his lone yet genial hour
Gives to his eyes a magnifying power:
Or rather he emancipates his eyes
From the black shapeless accidents of size--
In unctuous cones of kindling coal,
Or smoke upwreathing from the pipe's trim bole,
His gifted ken can see
Phantoms of sublimity.
David Russell Mosley is a poet and theologian living in Washington State where he serves as the Headmaster of the Chesterton Academy of Notre Dame. His second book of poetry, Liturgical Entanglements, is out now. If you want to support his work, please consider donating through the button below.
