Daniel Robinson Widener University. Volume 1. Context Dates. United Kingdom, England Country of Origin. Other Resources. We're all left hanging. An unfinished poem doesn't sound like a big deal until you get wrapped up in the story and then get cut off just when things are heating up. Parents Home Homeschool College Resources. Study Guide. By Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Previous Next. Christabel Summary Christabel is a lovely, innocent young woman who goes out into the woods one spooky night at midnight to pray.
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They're more the "kick back, check out the natural scenery, and wonder what it all means" kind of crowd. Somehow, though, Samuel Taylor Coleridge pulls spooky off in his poem " Christabel. Not only can we not see the truth while we read the poem, but we'll never know what the truth is because, well, the poem was never finished. The part of the story that we do have describes a rather innocent young woman, Christabel, offering shelter to another woman who claims that she has been kidnapped.
The rescued woman manipulates and seduces poor Christabel, puts her under a spell, and then proceeds to seduce Christabel's dad—eesh. This sounds like the plotline of a late-night made-for-TV movie, but only if that movie were expertly scripted and the director gave up on filming just when things started to get good.
Oddly enough, even though Coleridge never finished it, the poem has managed to maintain an impressive popularity, especially with the Goth crowd.
Even Poe was a fan, and he is pretty much the King of Goth. Though Coleridge eventually published it in pamphlet form in , "Christabel" was originally supposed to be published, along with some of Coleridge's other poetry, in a collaborative work with his very good friend William Wordsworth.
While the other poems made it in, Wordsworth decided that "Christabel" just didn't fit the tone and purpose of the publication, so he left it out. That excuse sounds perfectly reasonable to us, but poor Coleridge was devastated by the decision. He even had a bit of a Victorian meltdown over it—and by Victorian meltdown we mean he wrote a few stern letters and whined to his wife about it. His inability to finish the poem didn't really help his self-esteem either, and he questioned his abilities as a poet because of it.
It's just too bad Coleridge couldn't have seen into the future, because he would probably be quite pleased to know that we still study his work even the unfinished bits almost two centuries after his death. Yes, we said fruitcake.
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