Ruler (September)

September presents the latest performance to which we play Greek Chorus. The flooding of America’s fourth largest city is photo opportunity for its ruler. He exclaims at large crowds come to see him, those not drowned, or busy saving their homes. In Australia, a ruler who says he’s Yes capitulates to the Noes. Coleridge (1798): “History has taught me that rulers are much the same in all ages, and under all forms of government; they are as bad as they dare to be. The vanity of ruin and the curse of blindness have clung to them like an hereditary leprosy.”

Aspheterized (August)

Coleridge dreams, in a letter to Southey (1794), of a time when “the pure system of pantisocracy shall have aspheterized.” He explains this coinage as the joining of two Greek words that mean no private property and that “we really wanted such a word.” We did? Googling ‘aspheterized’ this August all meaningful hits refer back to Coleridge. Scrabble Word Solver states: ‘No definition available’. During the French Revolution our would-be communists pant for their pantisocracy, a system of government of their own invention, where all rule equally. But they couldn’t agree on a location. Susquehanna? Wales? Their utopian plans collapsed.

Sublime (August)

“The earth, a ghost/ orbiting forever lost/ in our monotonous sublime.” Lowell in 1967, a year before the first earthrise photograph, describes our planet in ways we could say are self-descriptive of Lowell, aged 50. For him, it seems, the universe is the sublime in which we find ourselves and at which we gaze. Coleridge in a letter of 1794, aged 22, writes good-humouredly, “My last ode was so sublime that nobody could understand it.” There are many poems that fit that category, though not usually Coleridge’s. He wishes to push past the august in Augustan, the monotony of hours.

Sincere (August)

‘Now suppose I conclude something in the manner with which Mary concludes all her letters to me, “Believe me your sincere friend,” and dutiful humble servant to command! Now I do hate that way of concluding a letter. ‘Tis as dry as a stick, as stiff as a poker, and as cold as a cucumber. It is not half so good as my old God bless you, and, Your affectionately grateful S.T.Coleridge’. This August would he sign-off to Mrs. Evans, ‘Kind regards’? Or reduce it to the semiotic cipher ‘Regards’? ‘Best regards’ or its hasty reduction, ‘Best’? The insincere ‘Sincerely’?