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This series presents original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of literary works and public figures in Great Britain, North America, and continental Europe during the nineteenth century. The volumes in Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters evoke the energies, achievements, contributions, cultural traditions, and individuals who reflected and generated them during the Romantic and Victorian periods. The topics: critical, textual, and historical scholarship, literary and book history, biography, cultural and comparative studies, critical theory, art, architecture, science, politics, religion, music, language, philosophy, aesthetics, law, publication, translation, domestic and public life, popular culture, and anything that influenced, impinges upon, expresses, or contributes to an understanding of the authors, works, and events of the nineteenth century. The authors consist of political figures, artists, scientists, and cultural icons including William Blake, Thomas Hardy, Charles Darwin, William Wordsworth, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and their contemporaries.
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J.C.C. Mays
Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner
J.C.C. Mays
Department of English
University College Dublin Dublin, Ireland
Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters
ISBN 978-1-137-60257-2 ISBN 978-1-349-94907-6 (eBook)
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Cover image: “An Exact Prospect of the Town and Harbour of Ilfracombe” by John Walters. Courtesy of the Ilfracombe Museum.
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. New York
Ad Manes
R. C. Carthew
Inez Conibear
J. F.W. Conibear
That ships, when they are a little shattered, must…refit themselfs the best they can.
Samuel Pepys*
I became involved with studying Coleridge by accident. He seemed at the time to offer wider scope to read and think than most of the authors on an old-fashioned English Literature course. My dissertation was concerned with what you could call his prose interests; I had very little interest in his poetry; indeed, most of my literary interests were in writers who did not appear on any English syllabuses at that time, because they were either recent or American. I found more in Samuel Beckett than Samuel Coleridge.
I returned to Coleridge at a later stage to edit his poems, and anyone who has found themselves involved in such an enterprise will confirm that the process of editing a text is very different from thinking about it in a literary way. Of course, matters of value are involved but one is largely comparing and sorting, and making choices in a medial position between the writer and his readers. The version of poems they expect to find has to be put on the scales against the one an editor might prefer. Every poem has to be treated alike although you might hardly think this fitting. And there are house rules affecting the edition in hand with which you must reach a decent compromise. In short, it is a job that is best done without
* Diary 4 July 1666; ed. Latham and Matthews 7:194.
departing too far from certain conventions and expectations, which have their good reasons, and as far as I thought seriously about poetry at all, meanwhile, it involved off-road writers whom I read for my own pleasure and instruction. It was only when I had done with editing projects that I began to think seriously—for myself—about Coleridge. This is the third book to come out of that process, following one about Coleridge’s poetry in general and one about his father.
Coleridge’s Experimental Poetics was an attempt to challenge the notion—surprisingly prevalent and persistent—that Coleridge is to be understood as a failure who wrote three great mystery poems (the other two being “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan”) and then retreated into impenetrable prose. My argument was that his career as a poet hangs together and that the poems he wrote later in life are continuous with, if not in some ways more impressive than, the poems he wrote earlier on. I have given occasional lectures, some of them published, on particular poems that I hope elaborate the same point, but I embarked on the present extended commentary on his best-known poem for other reasons.
First, it is a special case, being the first of a famous trio: the poem in which he discovered the need to extend and perfect the manner that subsequently served him so well. Second, it is a poem so wrapped about in commentary that it deserves more space than I was able to give it when it was part of a larger argument. I cite previous commentary here not to give the poem another lick of paint but to burn it off and start afresh from the bare wood. Third, following Wordsworth—the poem’s first critical reader—the “Ancient Mariner” is at the core of Coleridge’s twohundred-year reputation as it developed phase by phase. By setting the insights—and the blindness—of successive generations of readers against a reading of this central text, one becomes particularly conscious of prejudices one might have inherited, as well as more humble in the views one wants to hold.
Many questions arise. For example:
• How central is the killing of the albatross to the story, and how serious is the moral at the end? How can a poem written in such simple language contain a complicated meaning?
• Why did Wordsworth, who began the poem with Coleridge, turn on it savagely when it was republished? Did Coleridge take notice of what Wordsworth thought when he revised his poem?
• Does the “Mariner” stand separately from Coleridge’s criticism and other poems? For example, he wrote another ballad towards the end of his life, “Alice du Clós,” where a near-innocent victim is slain by a hastily thrown lance (not arrow). Or how to read the retrospective comments in Biographia Literaria?
• Why was a poem that was so very popular for the first sixty years of its life not included in Palgrave’s famous anthology, The Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics, only to become one of the bestknown poems in English during the next forty years, translated into many languages?
I add that I deliberately introduced poets of the present day (or at least my day) who helped me understand what Coleridge was trying to do. It is important that he quickly gave up the idea of becoming a professional poet after he met Wordsworth and realised that this was not an admission of failure. Seen objectively, it was the platform of his future success: the realisation enabled him to do things in poetry that he could not have done otherwise, and I compare him to J.H. Prynne, who appears to have made a similar decision after his first volume. He, too, was viewed with suspicion for withdrawing from the race but slowly found “fit audience, though few,” and now, fifty years on, is finding a larger public on his own terms. Separately, one casualty of the divide between Coleridge’s criticism and his poetry that emerged with twentieth-century criticism, to the detriment of the same, was the hitching of his poetry to the standard biographical fiction of failure.
When the poetry is read alongside his thinking in prose—about ideas of the numinous, in particular—it can be very helpful to compare it with the work of contemporary poets like Susan Howe. I wrote about Coleridge in relation to poets and theorists of poetry like Charles Olson and Robert Duncan in my earlier book, which is not to say that he is not of his own time: he is, of course, and I say a lot about Wordsworth, along with Hazlitt and Hunt, in particular. Byron has been canvassed as the Romantic poet closest to the spirit of the early twenty-first century, and if that is true in a particular sense, Coleridge is equally so in a more generous way as an experimental poet.
The cover illustration reproduces an “an exact prospect” of Ilfracombe harbour which I suggest in Chap. 1 is the only possible actual place that can have been in Coleridge’s mind when he wrote the poem. Note the lighthouse atop Lantern Hill at the centre, Holy Trinity Church on Parish
Hill to the left, and a pilot’s boat attached to the ocean-going vessel to the right. The original watercolour by local artist John Walters in 1805 is in the care of Ilfracombe Museum and reproduced by kind permission. I am especially grateful to Sara Hodson, the Manager, who went out of her way to provide a copy at very short notice.
It only remains to thank others who helped me along the way. I become ever more aware of those dolmens round my childhood, and this book is dedicated to their memory. Otherwise and as always, I thank my wife, Marianne, my uncompromising first reader. I am also most grateful to three Coleridgean friends who advanced my education: Peter Cheyne, Graham Davidson, and Gerald Janzen. Finally, like so many authors who have tried to bring the understanding of Romantic period writing up to date, I sincerely acknowledge the help of Marilyn Gaull, the series editor, along with the team at Palgrave Macmillan in New York, from the moment this book went into production.
J.C.C. Mays Dublin, Ireland December 2015
A BBREVIATIONS AND R EFERENCES
The following abbreviations are employed in references to and quotations from Coleridge’s writings. They are identical with those employed in the Bollingen Collected Coleridge.
Lyrical Ballads is included in the list and referred to in the notes as LB. References are to the first editions unless otherwise specified, for example, LB 1800 and LB 1802.
Bolded numbers following a poem title or alone in parentheses within the text refer to poem numbers in the chronological arrangement of Poetical Works below.
AR S. T. Coleridge. Aids to Reflection. Ed. John Beer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993—Collected Coleridge IX.
BL S. T. Coleridge. Biographia Literaria. Ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate. 2 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1983—Collected Coleridge VII.
C&S S. T. Coleridge. On the Constitution of the Church and State. Ed. John Colmer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1976—Collected Coleridge X.
CL Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71. References are to page numbers, not letter numbers.
CM S. T. Coleridge. Marginalia. Ed. George Whalley and H. J. Jackson. 6 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980–2001—Collected Coleridge XII.
CN The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Kathleen Coburn, Merton Christensen, and Anthony John Harding. 5 double-vols. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul; New York and Princeton, NJ: Bollingen Foundation and Princeton UP, 1957–2002. References are to item numbers, not page numbers.
EOT S. T. Coleridge. Essays on His Times in The Morning Post and The Courier. Ed. David V. Erdman. 3 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1978—Collected Coleridge III.
Friend S. T. Coleridge. The Friend. Ed. Barbara Rooke. 2 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1969—Collected Coleridge IV.
LB [S. T. Coleridge and William Wordsworth]. Lyrical Ballads with a Few Other Poems. 2nd issue. London: printed for J and A. Arch, 1798.
LB [followed by date] William Wordsworth. Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems in Two Volumes. 2nd ed. London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1800; Lyrical Ballads with Pastoral and Other Poems in Two Volumes. 3rd ed. London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1802; Lyrical Ballads with Pastoral and Other Poems in Two Volumes. 4th ed. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1805.
Lects 1795 S. T. Coleridge. Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion. Ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971—Collected Coleridge I.
Lects 1808–1819 S. T. Coleridge. Lectures 1808–1819: On Literature. Ed. Reginald A. Foakes. 2 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987—Collected Coleridge V.
Lects 1818–1819 S. T. Coleridge. Lectures 1818–1819: On the History of Philosophy Ed. J. R. de J. Jackson. double-vol. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000—Collected Coleridge VIII.
Logic S. T. Coleridge. Logic. Ed. J.R.de J. Jackson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1981—Collected Coleridge XIII.
LS S. T. Coleridge. Lay Sermons [being The Statesman’s Manual and A Lay Sermon]. Ed. R. J. White. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1972—Collected Coleridge VI.
OM S. T. Coleridge. Opus Maximum. Ed. Thomas McFarland with Nicholas Halmi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2002—Collected Coleridge XV.
PW S. T. Coleridge. Poetical Works. Ed. J. C. C. Mays. 3 double-vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001—Collected Coleridge XVI. While poems alone are referenced by a poem-number, note that quotations are referenced by volume plus page.
SW&F S. T. Coleridge. Shorter Works and Fragments. Ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson. double-vol. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995)—Collected Coleridge XI.
TT S. T. Coleridge. Table Talk. Ed. Carl Woodring. 2 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton: Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1990—Collected Coleridge XIV.
W S. T. Coleridge. The Watchman. Ed. Lewis Patton. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton: Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970—Collected Coleridge II.
CHAPTER 1
Taking Bearings, Setting a Course
The providence that’s in a watchful state Knows almost every grain of Pluto’s gold, Finds bottom in th’ uncomprehensive deep, Keeps place with thought, and (almost like the gods) Do thoughts unveil in their dumb cradles.
William Shakespeare1
1.1 WHAT, WHEN, AND WHY
Owen Barfield wrote a particularly trenchant, characteristically insightful review-essay on The Friend, edited by Barbara Rooke, when only one volume of the Bollingen edition had appeared. One of the several points he made concerns the way Coleridge hoped his writing would be read and why it is often misread:
Much of what has been written about the mind of Coleridge in the last forty years is of a very high quality. One recalls, for example, Humphry House’s Clark Lectures (1953). But there is one feature that is common to nearly all of it; and that is its excessive absorption in the two related “problems” of chronology and plagiarism. Did Coleridge change his opinions much in the course of his life—or not? Did he only borrow from everything he read, or did he sometimes think for himself? It began with De Quincey and it was still going on last year in Thomas McFarland’s packed and learned
J.C.C. Mays, Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, Nineteenth Century Major Lives and Letters, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-94907-6_1
Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition. The “when” and the “why” seem to take precedence of the “what” so powerfully that one sometimes feels rather uneasy—like a man listening in to a sophisticated argument about different wines and rival vintage years and suddenly afflicted by a qualm of doubt as to whether the disputants had ever actually tasted any of them. (76)
Of course, the proportion of “when” and “why” did not grow less as the Bollingen edition advanced. It was applied to throw light on the substance of what Coleridge had to say, with startling results; Barfield would surely have approved the volumes prepared by George Whalley and Carl Woodring, no less than many others. Still, the point he makes is important and it distinguishes the value of his own commentaries. He restates it again in terms borrowed from Coleridge himself:
We must have discovered the truth ourselves by other means, before, out of the mass of traditions, assertions, and fables, we can discriminate what really was Coleridgean and that it was Coleridgean. (cf. Lects 1818–1819 1:170)
Such is the ideal. Unusual difficulties nevertheless remain when the task is faced. First, Coleridge often wrote to discover or improve his grasp on what he sought to say—not just to communicate what he had already determined in his mind—and, second, times have changed. Not only must the fog between then and now be dispersed: there are also differences between the same thing seen at different times. The words in the “Ancient Mariner” are simple, the overall story can be appreciated by a child, and all this can come adrift, leaving one lost among the changes of position, shifts of mood, and the way apparently random things happen in the poem. The ingredients are recognisable, but what is being done with them? The logic of a more recent “difficult” poem like T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” can seem easier to follow: at least, if specific details are annotated. By contrast, a serious reader of the “Ancient Mariner” can be brought up short by the recollection that Coleridge began the poem light-heartedly as a mock Gothick parody. The words are the same, but what is the entity we are reading? Are we looking at a picture of a duck or a rabbit?2
I recall one group of students who found a way to situate themselves when they imagined marking up the poem for a film-shoot (this was a class in Los Angeles, with Hollywood nearby). They fastened on the rapidly changing shifts of scene in the opening stanzas, how the tempo settled and mounting expectations replaced it; how the action was interpreted all the time by changing focal lengths and points of view; and how situations
built up only to crest or crumble and go into reverse. The narrative progresses in this way throughout. The hold on cause-and-effect loosens further as episodes follow each other; events happen with neither reason nor justice. Beauty, horror, hope, and incomprehension are sustained by the momentum of a voyage out and back, although that too contains unexplained gaps. The narrative returns to its starting place; but home safe and sound are not the right words because the mixture of emotions at the close is particularly, and most subtly, the most uncomfortable of all. The Mariner is haunted by ineradicable memories and remains in a forever unsettled, somehow compromised position. In what way has he come through, and how can one really say his story is finished?
Working over the poem with greater care, at this stage of the reading process, risks dulling initial impressions that are all important. One might notice, for example, that traces of Part VII appear to be anticipated in Part V (lines 341–61). What to make of this? Is it a deliberate foreshadowing or the trace of a change of plan? The purpose of a poem is—as Coleridge repeatedly emphasised—to give pleasure and in this case it is better to begin with the thought already suggested, that Coleridge’s first casual intentions were overtaken in the course of writing. If the basic story of voyage out and back became less of a parody as it progressed, the pattern of what he discovered may provide the next step in describing the puzzling rationale of the poem. The neutral word describing is important here: an over-anxious wish to understand can destroy the half-grasped mystery of what is there. Coleridge came across deeper themes in the course of composition that troubled him. His attempt to comprehend them better led him to revise and expand the very first (lost or, as likely, never written down) version in 300 or 320 lines (PW 1:365 gives refs), and to continue to make further changes, large and small, following the first published version. Only when this incomplete dimension of the poem is acknowledged— the mystery in the poem confronted—should analysis cross from facing the “what” to begin to discuss the relation of the same to the “why and when.” The transition derives from the same necessity Coleridge faced in Chap. 14 of Biographia Literaria when he argued that it is not enough to understand how a poem works by reading carefully and slowly. To understand how the same may or may not be poetry involves one differently in an argument about intention, which—I emphasise—does not involve the personality of the author. The poem itself is, in Shakespeare’s words at the head of this chapter, a “dumb cradle.” The “gold” contained in its “depths” waits on the assistance of “watchful providence” that has “kept
place with thought.” The life of the material poem is infused by an activity almost like that of the gods. So much can be said simply now, and before I elaborate, it will be helpful to set out what each chapter contains.
Several kinds of reader are likely to look into this book. One might look for thoughts on, or help with, a specific aspect of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; another might possess an interest in Coleridge’s writing as a whole and how the poem fits into it; yet another might have no more interest in Coleridge and his poem than in many other poets and poems. The ambition must be to cater to an interest in all three categories equally.
1.2 PECULIAR DISTRACTIONS
Anyone writing seriously about Coleridge’s best-known poem faces peculiar distractions. Coleridge’s personality has been part of the story since his years at school, where he was a star pupil. A formulaic understanding of his career was reached by 1816 by a curious coincidence of judgements between friends and enemies (Wordsworth and Hazlitt), and this has remained essentially unchanged down to the present time. It turns on the argument that the trio of poems of which the “Mariner” is one (the others being “Christabel” 176 and “Kubla Khan” 178) marks the climax of his early years of promise and the beginning of his years of decline. It matters less whether the biographers are hostile or sympathetic—for example, E.K. Chambers or Richard Holmes—than whether they possess a firm grasp of what was going on in Coleridge’s mind. Without that, whatever they write of the earlier years, and however enthusiastically, is likely to be distorted. Coleridge’s later writing is now available in printed editions, and there is nothing to prevent the two phases from being brought into relation with each other.
The importance of the task is perhaps not generally understood. Equally important is the uncommon relation between Coleridge as the subject of biography and Coleridge as the poet. I wrote about this in Experimental Poetics, and the topic will recur in the chapters that follow. It applies to the “Ancient Mariner” very obviously, in that the story is pure invention: outside Coleridge’s time and place on earth. The storyteller enters it by accident, his telling is driven by a particular theme, and in the course of its development, Coleridge clearly discovered that the processes of his own invention drew on feelings he did not know he had. In this way, undercurrents that threatened to usurp it complicated
the advancement of the story. In the following chapters, I do my best to describe this process. It is made easier by knowing how the conflicts in his mind—emotional and intellectual together—subsequently advanced towards reconciliation and dynamic coherence; although there is always a danger that the backward explanatory projection will clarify too much the confused seedbed of a life-long project. For the moment, enough to say that although Coleridge is an experimental, not overtly experiential poet, the experiment was rooted in and nourished by experience. It is unimportant to worry about whether he began to take opium or wrote “Kubla Khan” before, during, or after the “Mariner” was substantially complete; or when he decided that what he was writing was too long or too good to publish in the Monthly Review, as was initially intended; or whether his preoccupation with the poem interfered with his obligations as a husband and father.
Take another example of what one could call interference deriving from the particular circumstances of the poem. Those who turn off Route A39 to visit the Coleridge Cottage at Nether Stowey, refurbished and extended by the National Trust, often continue afterwards to Watchet because it has been claimed as the port from which the Mariner departed and returned, and where there is now a prominent statue showing him with an albatross hanging from his neck. The modern visitor to Watchet will try hard to find the snug, sheltered village sketched by J.M.W. Turner in 1811 and engraved by George Cooke in 1818, and since reproduced many times down to the present (e.g. PW 1:369), but a further problem remains. Although the village has long possessed a church on a little rise, St. Decuman’s, it lacked the lighthouse twice-over mentioned in the poem: there was no lighthouse at Watchet until 1862, and they were rare constructions indeed along this stretch of coast in 1797–1798. The assiduous biographer, then, must suppose that Coleridge walked to the western end of the Exmoor tourist trail, where the only lighthouse of the time was to be found, prominently situated, at Ilfracombe. This, converted from a chapel dedicated to St. Nicholas at the time of Henry VIII, still stands high above the harbour, with the parish church on a lesser rise behind in the town: the top cover of the present book shows the prominence of these two features at the time the poem was written. It seems to me quite likely that Coleridge’s attention was drawn to the Ilfracombe lighthouse—as it had been to the chapel at Culbone and Ash Farm nearby (and also perhaps Lord King’s strange Kubla-like construction above Porlock Weir)—by Richard Warner whom he met at Bath.3 Thirty years afterwards, Coleridge associated Ilfracombe
with his favourite walk towards Lynton from Porlock (TT 1:205). There is no other reason for him to know and remember the name of Ilfracombe— which Warner makes clear was worth visiting mainly for its lighthouse— although the town came into the news when it was blockaded by four French warships in February 1797 (as Coleridge possibly remembered in the spring of 1798, when he wrote “Fears in Solitude” 175).
Thus, Ilfracombe has as good a claim as Watchet to be the little port Coleridge had in mind, if not a better one. However, the church in the poem is described as a “kirk,” which is appropriate in a poem masquerading as a Border Ballad, but the ports on the Scottish Borders could not have sent ships to the Antarctic or Pacific Oceans any more than any small port other than Ilfracombe on the coast between Bristol and Bideford: note the ocean-going vessel attached to the pilot’s boat on the cover scene. In short, while a biographer like Holmes could make a very good case for Ilfracombe while treading further in Coleridge’s footsteps, and while a tourist might like to drive onwards so far because the lighthouse is indeed picturesque and the museum contains further watercolours by John Walters, the hunt to connect the poem to real-life locations and events is a pleasure utterly separate from the pleasure the poem itself offers. This book is concerned with the latter alone: with the make-up of Coleridge’s poem, its ideas, its complicated interrelation with poems written by Wordsworth, its different versions, the ways it has been read differently during its 200-year history, and its relation to poems of a similar kind in the present day. The lighthouse and the church stand together as emblems of physical warning and spiritual rescue, creating an image of departure and return.
1.3 ALMOST LIKE A SUBPLOT
The present chapter stands as introductory to a connected sequence in which Chap. 2 addresses the primary question head-on: how to confront the “Mariner” for what it is, or appears to be; and Chap. 3 enlarges the focus by considering what was in Coleridge’s mind when he wrote it, that is, replaces the emphasis on technique with an examination of its content. Chapter 4 turns to the specific poetical context—the beginning of the poem in a joint venture with Wordsworth—and develops (in Chap. 5) into a consideration of Wordsworth’s response to the result. This was the first criticism the poem received and it remains the most searching. It proceeded by way of a different poetical treatment of the same themes and
motifs, as well as by critical redefinitions, by the end of which Coleridge came to modify the text of the “Mariner” several times. It was therefore appropriate to pause and consider the differences between the major versions and Chapter 6 forms a “landing-place” in the argument (Friend 1:148–49), a place to settle this matter of importance before moving on. Chapter 7 returns to the story of the many further reactions to Coleridge’s poem across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, before the concluding chapter addresses the situation of reading in the present. There are things to be learned from each of the several ways of reading, even if only to clear their shadows from the page.
Some additional considerations affect the way the poem was written and responded to, and determine the way it is seen now. They press to be taken into account because they enrich the story, even while they threaten to derail it. They are interconnected, and bear a relation to the main part of what I have to say, almost like a semi-independent subplot. A sample will explain what I mean.
To begin with, a distinctive and most surprising thing about the “Ancient Mariner” is its continuous appeal to a notably diverse spread of readers. Children and professors have fallen asleep over it; sonatas have been based upon it, and also graphic novels; it has held its place as one of the most popular poems in the English language for over 200 years while others have come and gone, or risen and fallen in fashion. The groups of readers involved are for the large part separate in a way that is matched only by Shakespeare, whose audiences laugh and cry at different things; those who once thought The Merchant of Venice was comedy being replaced by audiences who find it food for solemn thought. The text of the “Mariner” has likewise enjoyed a mixed reception on many levels simultaneously at all stages of its career. Wordsworth was evidently made anxious by it, while Macaulay forever treasured it as a simple childhood thrill. A hundred years later, one artist (Mervyn Peake) found it mirrored the horrors of war, while another (Duncan Grant) took it as an invitation to escape from the same. Such diverse responses certainly pose a vexatious question for Reception Theory, not least because the poem is not presented as a riddle.
An effort to pursue this consideration by exploring the Coleridgean context goes round in a circle likewise. The poem was written at a moment of change in its author’s circumstances. It reflects ideas and attitudes with which he was becoming dissatisfied and the beginnings of the alternatives which replaced them. That said, his unresolved state of mind continued for
almost two decades before it reached a determination. It has been natural to turn to the interim retrospective account given in the Biographia—his most extended critical statement, whose argument centres on this poem he began with Wordsworth—but this seemingly promising context turns out to be infirm ground. Coleridge’s argument in the Biographia is couched in terms Wordsworth employed in the Preface and Supplementary Essay to his Poems (1815), and forms an answer to a discussion of Imagination and Fancy of a kind that had become increasingly outpaced by Coleridge’s philosophical thinking. The mismatch prompted his argument to deflect onto an over-reliance on Schelling, the result being a confused account of where his own position had arrived. The consequence has been a similarly muddled and unresolved discussion in the middle decades of the twentieth century that attempted to match Coleridge’s compromised theory with Wordsworth’s practice as poet. It might have been more successful if an attempt had been made to match the confused Biographia theory with Coleridge’s own poems; or Wordsworth’s theory with those poems of his that directly answer the “Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan,” and “Christabel” (as I describe in Chap. 5).
As it happens, the Bollingen project has at last made all of Coleridge’s later prose writing available in a well-edited form, and the aberrant nature of the Biographia formulation of Imagination is clearer: as a faculty, it stands between Reason and the Higher Understanding, as Fancy does between the Lower Understanding and Sense. Coleridge’s 1817 distinction between Primary and Secondary Imagination is likewise clarified by his subsequent thoughts on the Trinity. The position reached in the course of the 1820s contains elements that had been there from the beginning: call them Unitarian and Neoplatonist, or whatever polar equivalent is preferred. It encompasses logical and theological difficulties, but it was the most satisfactory clarification of Coleridge’s mental, moral, and emotional processes that he managed to achieve. For this reason, if no other, we are now better placed to work back from Coleridge’s final position to estimate its status as a concept he shared with Wordsworth at the beginning of the long period of uncertainty. The period was one of extensive reading and hard thought, as well as personal anguish, and these factors need to be borne in mind to comprehend his relative silence while Wordsworth was simultaneously establishing himself as a major poet. While the latter was increasing in confidence, and at the same time using poems by Coleridge to help define his position, Coleridge had other things on his mind to which Wordsworth was largely blind.
The relative situation of the two poet-friends is the foundation of a great irony. Wordsworth’s response to the “Ancient Mariner”—from the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads, through his own poems and in critical prose, and ending in 1819 with Peter Bell—was never satisfactory, even to himself. He bypassed the fundamental questions raised by the “Mariner” (for instance, concerning the nature of innocence), misunderstood them by translating them into his own terms (for instance, the supernatural into superstition), and could only attempt to bury his failure to understand in humour and common sense. Nothing he wrote or is recorded as saying engages directly with the central issues at the heart of the poem, and it is unsurprising that Coleridge appears to have ignored his friend’s response. He might have pruned the old spellings of the 1798 “Mariner” at Wordsworth’s urging, or allowed Wordsworth (unsystematically) to prune them; and he might have made other changes of a similar kind at Wordsworth’s suggestion then and later. It has also been assumed that Coleridge added the gloss to the “Mariner” in 1817 in order to underline the moral reading Wordsworth obviously preferred, but I suggest in Chap. 6 that this is not necessarily the case. For one, the addition of the gloss makes the verse impossible to read at the same time, and this indeed may be the point Coleridge is making. For another, his new epigraph introduces a tale that the majority of readers had already come to understand as primarily to do with crime, penance, and restitution in a way that reinforces its supernatural dimension, before tying the tongue of any reader attempting to read prose and gloss together. This is not Derridean bon esprit: the literally unreadable version makes the poem even sadder and wiser than the first one. As a final response to Wordsworth, it caps the lengthy dialogue more conclusively than the Biographia.
However, the loose-fitting gloss was accepted as a confirmation—not an unsettling—of a too-easily-made assumption, and the long-term consequence of Wordsworth’s fundamental incomprehension thereby makes an even greater irony. It came about as follows: The success Coleridge wished on Wordsworth created the way poetry was read in his time and this of course included Coleridge’s poetry. Consequently, by the time of the laureate’s death in 1850, the “moral” interpretation of Coleridge’s poem was firmly entrenched. The “Lost Generation” at the end of the century found ways to rescue something of what this proto-Victorian interpretation failed to take into account, but the earlier view prevailed to dominate the critical consensus throughout the following hundred years. Indeed it was cemented into place by biographers, who repeated with
little change except selective detail the old canard that Coleridge wrote only a couple of poems worth reading and his later life was a regrettable failure. In literary criticism, Coleridge’s Imagination was used to explicate Wordsworth’s verse while Wordsworth’s understanding of the “Mariner” usurped Coleridge’s own. The topic of Imagination was fought over for decades, and the symbolic importance of the Albatross likewise, until Wordsworth and with him the whole “Romantic Ideology” was dethroned by Deconstructionist and Materialist theorists in the 1970s and 1980s. Coleridge suffered differently again in the inevitable collateral damage.
Two further strands of this situation in which the fortunes of Coleridge’s poem were steered by factors beyond his control deserve mention. First, the question of the Reading Public to which I will return in Chap. 8.
Coleridge was glad to assign Wordsworth the honour of becoming the poet of his age, not least because it left him free to do otherwise: to devote his main energies to his philosophical researches and at the same time to write poems to please only himself or likeminded others. By escaping the demands of readers on whom he was reliant for a living, he joins others, in the twentieth century in particular, who did the same. I emphasise that neither he nor they sought to write for a coterie, nor were they averse to making a profit from their labours. They held to the idea that whatever they did would be less distorted by pressures to match expectations that were not integral to what they themselves chose to undertake. Thus Ezra Pound wrote in Canto XXXVI, a poem dependent on Cavalcanti’s meditation on amor as an emanation of nous, “Donna mi prega,” and therefore in close sympathy with many of Coleridge’s poems that make use of similar sources:
Wherefore I speak to the present knowers Having no hope that low-hearted Can bring sight to such reason. (177)4
Coleridge was tempted by the same notion of Gnostic “knowers,” an esoteric audience who would understand what the majority would refuse or misapply. Anne-Lise François has a nice epithet—“nonemphatic” (xvi)— for this kind of revelation without insistence and rhetorical underscoring. And if Coleridge did not withhold his meaning as adamantly as Pound (“I have no will to try proof-bringing”), he certainly exercised reserve in many matters that concerned him deeply. I mentioned in the Preface that there are comparisons to be drawn between Coleridge and a contemporary poet
with a reputation for elusive meaning, J.H. Prynne. Neither is difficult if approached on their own terms; that is, if you are prepared to attend. Their shared assumption is that truth does not come cheaply, is not to be compromised by making it more comprehensible, although a lot of readers’ firmly held assumptions must be loosened if they are going to see the point. Take, for instance, the truism voiced by W.B. Yeats with reference to (again) Pound that the successful poet must get “all the wine into the bowl” (xxvi). This is patently untrue of the “Ancient Mariner.” Indeed, the way Coleridge does not get everything into the poem is both its theme and the reason that it is so haunting. One might say that, if any poet working on the same principles as Coleridge did manage to say all he had to say, he would need to write no more. Beckett was famously explicit about the matter: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”5 The “Ancient Mariner” asks to be read like an opening of the field in Robert Duncan’s sense and, like all Coleridge’s poems, “not to reach a conclusion but to keep our exposure to what we do not know.”6
The second strand of the situation beyond Coleridge’s control is as follows. I centre my discussion throughout on the earliest version of the “Mariner,” published in Lyrical Ballads 1798, referring sparingly to other versions for reasons of comparison and postponing the topic of revision until Chap. 6. There are good reasons for doing this. The 1798 version preserves the element of parody (distancing) involved in the initial joint project that most of its first readers (including Wordsworth) appear to have lost touch with fairly quickly, while the hankering for the last-revised copy from Coleridge’s hand is in the end a sentimental fetish. I can think of only two editions of Coleridge’s poems that printed the 1798 version alone, as the poem, in the past 200-plus years of its history.7 This is surely a good reason, by itself, for a rethink. The first version has as much claim to be the default as the last; indeed it might be held to emblematise the project of the larger argument (main plot?) of the present book, the recovery of the poem Coleridge wrote from the misunderstandings under which it has laboured.
A nice irony lies here in discriminating between editions. Editors easily become excited at the prospect of multiple versions they have to work with. They can argue that, if one word or punctuation change constitutes a new version, there are forty and upwards versions of the “Ancient Mariner.” Add on digital technology and reading becomes redefined as a giddy process of fast toggling. With this in mind, it is a chastening thought that the non-authorial versions of Coleridge’s text have circulated far more
widely and have been far more instrumental in keeping the “Mariner” alive than the “transmissional” texts from which “authoritative” texts are constructed. From the 1820s onwards there has been a confused, multitudinous mass of unauthorised editions of the poem that mix up the versions or dump the gloss, and then supply a photograph of an American Coleridge-faux as frontispiece, or make the poem into a picture book for five-year-olds or for rich investors: all this to cater for the diverse group of readers that has always, uniquely, been there, hungry for the poem if not always respectful of its author’s concerns.
1.4 AND FURTHER
Appendix B comprises a previously published essay of mine on Coleridge’s late poem, “Alice du Clós” (655). It earns a place here because it completes an argument that arose out of the spectre-ship episode of the “Mariner” Part III and prompted the poems Coleridge wrote afterwards: “Christabel,” “The Ballad of the Dark Ladiè” (182), and “Love” (253), among others. The narratives of these poems develop and clarify themes that are murkily entangled in the “Mariner.” And the issue on which they turn—an innate sense of compromise and separation; a troubling speck of doubt and frailty; its causes and implications, psychological, philosophical, and theological—haunted Coleridge’s thinking and writing throughout his life. The “Alice” poem is his final statement on the matter, omitting the supernatural dimension and focussing instead on psychological and moral issues. One might say that the bequest of the nightmare figure Life-in-Death in the “Mariner” is understood in “Alice” as fatal hesitancy, incompleteness of Will: a diagnosis that underpinned the Trinitarian resolution in Coleridge’s late theological writing. The abbreviated references to many philosophical matters in Chap. 3 and elsewhere below take this larger context for granted.
The manner in which “Alice du Clós” is structured, along with other stylistic features, also makes for an illuminating comparison. The end of “Alice,” although foredoomed, is sudden and dramatic. The poem works as an intricately integrated whole—every detail connecting a situation from which there is no exit—very different from the “Mariner” where everything apart from the protagonist’s physical return is suspended in uncertainty. The same contrast is communicated in smaller stylistic features. “Alice” contains only a few regular ballad stanzas: for the most part they are extended and elaborated in ways much more various than in the
“Mariner” or even “Christabel”; they also come together in more tightly organised fashion. Allusions to parallel situations in mythology and other books manipulate the reading of words on the page in a way from which the “Mariner” is free, despite all that John Livingston Lowes wrote about its sources. The later poem is a deliberately constructed reprise and its plot snaps shut with the finality of a prison door.8 The aspects of technique that are shared with the earlier poem are employed more self-consciously and with determination. The shared human narrative appears abrupt in the clearly focused perspective, as indeed it must.
My essay was written to speak up for a poem that has been much underrated but completes a journey Coleridge began thirty years before. The end is likewise sad and wise, but finally more clearly understood—a frank acknowledgement of unsolved mystery—and the comparison points up the richer options, even the sometimes lack of control, cradled by the earlier sea-story. The condensed structure of “Alice,” its compacted style, prompts the thought that the looser, earlier, longer “Mariner” is, in what one can only call human ways, richer. Like Beckett’s Godot, say, compared to Endgame.
I should finally note that my discussion goes back and forth over a proportion of the same materials to shed light on the “Ancient Mariner” from different directions: I hope with cumulative effect. The amount of repetition involved has been minimised but a portion remains for the benefit of readers who might turn to different parts of the book with particular interests in mind. For this reason, also, references to Coleridge poems (poem numbers) in the Bollingen Poetical Works begin afresh with each new chapter.
1.5
IDEAL CORE OF THE ONION
I have been describing what I do in the chapters that follow, and it might likewise help if I describe what I fail to do, or know I fail to do. As anyone must admit, usually in tears, an onion has no core. As this applies to the “Ancient Mariner,” it means one can say a great deal about the poem, and what went into its formation and how it appeared differently to many people at other times and places: in short, a lot of things that fit and that might prove in some way helpful; but the most important thing in the poem—the state of mind reached by its poetry—is beyond explanation. Coleridge emphasises the distinction involved in Chap. 14 of the Biographia (BL 2:13–18). Given the chaotic circumstances in which
that book was put together, it remains uncertain whether the chapter and the two following were written after or before Chap. 13, which contains the famous definition of Fancy and Imagination (and the chapters leading up to it); that is, whether the poem–poetry distinction is ur-text or an inserted supplement or link passage.9 Whatever the case, Chaps. 13 and 14 provide alternative formulations of the same argument. In Chap. 14, Coleridge describes the components of a poem functioning together like a well-organised mechanism, patterns of sound taking priority over matters of sight and so on, emphasising that the result might at the same time not necessarily be poetry. Thomas McFarland rephrases the distinction involved:
[I]t is my contention that though linguistic manipulation can generate a poem, it cannot generate poetry as such.10
Coleridge describes poetry as distinct from a poem, in terms of the poet’s mind, as a process of sublimation: a rhetorical tergiversation that affronted twentieth-century critics wary of “the intentional fallacy” and looking for consistency.11 Regrettable or otherwise, such is the limit of what I can demonstrate in Chaps. 2 and 3 when discussing the “supernatural”12 dimension of his poem: the quality he later called Imaginative or Touching Reason.
Coleridge wrote an amount of prose that provides plentiful means to furnish his own further explanation. The Order of the Mental Powers diagram, written into blank pages of a German history of philosophy (CM 5: 797–98), could be summoned to explain how an ordinary slow reading of a poem, reinterpreted by an Imaginative act, reaches meanings that ordinary understanding does not encompass. Gerald Janzen (“Notebook 55 as Contemplative Coda”) has shown how entries in the late “flypaper notebooks”—written in prose but surely poetry according to the Biographia definition—represent a calling of the soul and on the soul to complete the task of reaching God, a dialectical instinct that reaches back into Coleridge’s early maturity and perhaps before:
O Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live.13
Such explanations may appear reasonable to philosophers and theologians or may not, depending on their concept of the numinous. Coleridge fudges
the issue in the Biographia by couching the matter in secular terms— emphasising just the ideality and wholeness of mental activity—although it is quite clear from elsewhere in the book (e.g. the closing pages) that he is writing very much as a Christian. In Chap. 14, he quotes and rewrites stanzas of a late sixteenth-century poem to sum up in alchemical terms how the transmutation takes place (BL 2:17). But is his explanation good enough? Can good intentions suffice to turn a poem or literary prose into poetry if they are not good enough to reach heaven?
The question arises, is this not an old chestnut—do the sound patterns know they are expressive?—but it is not the same. The poetic mode of speech perception is easily understood, although the explanation by professional linguists can become complicated. The explanation involves the way patterns of sound within and between words interact with meaning thereby to affect the same meaning. The interaction works by conjunctive and echoing processes so as to supplement the ordinary (understood) meaning of words that remains alive when inflected by the sound. The meaning of “supernatural” in Coleridge’s literary discussion (e.g. BL 2:66–7) is quite specific and you could say a world apart. It contains not merely echoes that carry a trace of their cause but ethereal sounds that the echoes pick up from a different, outside source. The otherness of their new source is their Imaginative authority; and unless one recognises (allows) this as truth, one could be a deluded enthusiast overtaken by the heat of the moment. Coleridge, writing primarily for himself, always wrote with a particular church in view, and often with an even more particular interpretation of its doctrines, but it does not follow that his appeal is thereby limited. And if this is so, how to explore the challenge he presents in terms that a wider community of readers will understand? the something beyond the merely marvellous that is there to be felt?
The frustrated critic can only offer sober observations: call them comforts. For a start, the “Ancient Mariner” was written during a transitional period in its author’s development and differs from shorter, simpler poems written during the following decades that can also be reckoned supernatural in their implications. “Phantom” (667) is direct in its celebration of a numinous almost abstract Neoplatonic quality; “The Picture” (300) plays with the idea as if it was in part an obsession that could be shrugged off; “First Advent of Love” (574) employs a direct reference to Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil” (“gentle heart,” modified by Coleridge to “gentle mind”) to ensure its larger point is not lost.14 The list of comparisons could continue, but perhaps the most useful is the verse-letter to Sara Hutchinson
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Title: Royal fruit gelatin suggestions
Creator: Royal Baking Powder Company
Release date: September 17, 2023 [eBook #71670]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Royal Baking Powder Co, 1926
Credits: Lisa Corcoran, Stephen Hutcheson, Bob Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROYAL FRUIT GELATIN SUGGESTIONS ***
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A Revelation in Flavors
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The
Package,
The Utensils and Just How to Get Perfect Results
EACH package of Royal Fruit Flavored Gelatin weighs 3¼ ozs. and measures ½ cup or 8 tablespoons.
Each package of 3¼ ozs. calls for two cups or one pint water or other liquid and makes over one pint jelly, or sufficient to serve six persons.
In order to save time and shorten the cooling process, one cup boiling water is used to dissolve the gelatin and one cup cold water or other liquid to cool it, but if preferred, the two cups boiling water can be added at once.
If you desire to use a portion of a package at any time, dissolve two level tablespoons Royal Fruit Flavored Gelatin in ½ cup boiling
water and this amount can be moulded in a custard cup and is sufficient for one large serving.
When a portion of a package of Royal Fruit Flavored Gelatin is left, close tightly as possible and keep in a dry place until ready to use.
Utensils for Measuring, Dissolving, Moulding and Chilling
Royal Fruit Flavored Gelatins
Kettle for boiling water
Bowl for holding the Gelatin
Measuring cup
Spoon for stirring
Mould or bowl or cup for setting the Gelatin
IN MEASURING the liquid it is important to use the standard measuring cup holding ½ pint or its equivalent, as the consistency of the finished Gelatin depends upon the amount of water or other liquids used.
Stir the mixture well after boiling water is added so all will be dissolved. Then add cold water.
For Whipped Desserts the rotary egg beater is best and saves much time.
Moulds
THERE are on the market, tin, aluminum and china moulds in varying shapes and sizes. If there is no mould at hand, ordinary bowls, custard cups or even plain cups can be used very successfully for moulding Royal Fruit Flavored Gelatins.
Chilling
THE quickest way to chill Royal Fruit Flavored Gelatins is in the ice box. To shorten the stiffening process still further, set mould in pan filled with cracked ice, rock salt and water
In cold weather, the mould, covered, can be placed on outside window sill. Royal Fruit Flavored Gelatins chilled in this way will stiffen in a remarkably short time; in some cases in one-half to threequarters of an hour.
Removing Gelatin From Moulds
DIP mould very quickly into bowl or pan of hot water Loosen carefully from sides of mould with a knife; place plate or serving dish over top and quickly turn upside down. The mould can then be lifted carefully without spoiling the shape or design.
How Served
ROYAL Fruit
Flavored Gelatins are complete in themselves and really do not require any garnishings. However, they are delicious served with whipped or plain cream, custard, marshmallow or fruit sauces, recipes for which are included in this booklet.
Royal Lemon
You’ll find Royal Lemon delightful in its refreshing deliciousness.
Orange Lemon Jelly
1 package Royal Orange Gelatin
1 package Royal Lemon Gelatin
2 cups boiling water
2 cups cold water
PUT Royal Lemon and Orange Gelatins into large bowl. Mix well; add boiling water and stir until dissolved; add cold water. Pour into moulds; chill until firm and serve plain or with sliced fruit. Bananas are very good. Serves 12.
Cider Jelly
1 package Royal Orange or Lemon Gelatin
⅛ teaspoon salt
2 cups sweet cider
HEAT 1 cup cider to boiling. Pour over Royal Orange or Lemon Gelatin and salt; stir until dissolved. Add 1 cup cold cider. Pour into moulds and chill until firm. As a relish, serve plain. As a dessert, serve plain or with whipped cream. Serves 6.
Coffee Jelly
1 package Royal Lemon Gelatin
1 cup boiling water
1¼ cups strong coffee
D
ISSOLVE Royal Lemon Gelatin in boiling water. Add coffee which has been very carefully strained from any coffee grounds.
Pour into mould; chill until firm. Serve with sweetened whipped cream. Serves 6.
Jellied Custard
Tomato Jelly Salad
1 package Royal Lemon Gelatin
1⅔ cups strained tomato juice
¼ cup vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
⅛ teaspoon pepper
⅛ teaspoon cloves
1 teaspoon onion juice
¼ teaspoon paprika
HEAT tomato juice to boiling, and pour over Royal Lemon Gelatin. Stir until thoroughly dissolved; add vinegar and seasonings. Pour into moulds. Serve with mayonnaise on lettuce leaves. Serves 6.
Orange Charlotte Russe
1 package Royal Lemon Gelatin
2 cups boiling water
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup orange juice
Sections of pulp from 2 oranges well drained from juice
1 cup cream, whipped
ISSOLVE Royal Lemon Gelatin and salt in boiling water. Add orange juice. Cool by setting bowl in pan of very cold water until mixture begins to thicken. Beat with egg beater until light and frothy. Fold in whipped cream and sections of orange pulp free from any skin. Place in mould and chill thoroughly.
If desired, the mould may be decorated with the orange sections, instead of moulding them in the dessert. Serves 10.
Jellied Custard
1 package Royal Lemon Gelatin
1 cup boiling water
1 egg
¼ cup sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
2 cups milk
D MAKE a soft custard of the last four ingredients as follows:—Beat egg slightly, add sugar and salt; mix well. Pour on milk and cook in double boiler stirring until it thickens sufficiently to coat the spoon. Cool.
Dissolve Royal Lemon Gelatin in boiling water. Cool; when it begins to thicken, add the custard; pour into moulds. Chill until firm. Serve with Fruit Sauce.
For variation, add ½ cup any preserved fruit with the custard, using the syrup drained from the fruit as a sauce. Serves 12.
Apricot Whip
1 package Royal Lemon or Orange Gelatin
1 cup boiling water
⅛ teaspoon salt
¾ cup apricot pulp
½ cup apricot juice
DISSOLVE Royal Gelatin in boiling water; add salt, apricot pulp and juice and chill by setting in cracked ice or very cold water. When almost set, beat with egg beater until stiff enough to hold its shape. Pile lightly in sherbet glasses lined with lady fingers or in small moulds and chill until firm.
Canned, sweetened, fresh or stewed apricots may be used. Serves 6.
Sunshine Salad
1 package Royal Lemon Gelatin
1 cup boiling water
1 cup canned grated pineapple well drained from juice
1 cup cold water
1 cup grated carrot
D
ISSOLVE Royal Lemon Gelatin in boiling water; add cold water. Chill until it begins to thicken. Add grated carrot and pineapple. Chill in small moulds until firm. Serve on lettuce with mayonnaise. This is particularly good for children. Serves 6.
Pineapple Marshmallow Jelly
1 package Royal Lemon Gelatin
1 package Royal Cherry Gelatin
2 cups boiling water
2 cups cold water
6 slices canned pineapple, diced
12 marshmallows, cut in small pieces
D
ISSOLVE Royal Lemon and Cherry Gelatins in boiling water; add cold water and cool; add fruit, drained from juice, and marshmallows. Chill, stirring occasionally while thickening to prevent fruit from settling. When set, serve in sherbet glasses. Serves 12.
Pineapple Bavarian Cream
1 package Royal Lemon Gelatin
1 cup boiling water
⅛ teaspoon salt
1 cup canned pineapple juice
1 cup grated pineapple
1 cup cream, whipped
DISSOLVE Royal Lemon Gelatin in boiling water; add salt and pineapple juice. Set in pan of cracked ice or very cold water and chill until mixture begins to thicken. Beat with egg beater until very frothy. Fold in grated pineapple and whipped cream. Blend well; place in moulds and chill. Serves 10.
Jellied Fudgy Apples
½ cup sugar
1 cup water
6 apples peeled and cored
1 package Royal Lemon Gelatin
1 cup cold water
1 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon butter
¼ cup milk
BOIL together sugar and water for about 10 minutes. Add apples and cook until tender but not broken. When done, drain and arrange in one large or six small moulds. Measure boiling syrup, add boiling water to make one cup. Pour over Royal Lemon Gelatin and stir until dissolved. Add one cup cold water. Cool. Prepare fudge by boiling together brown sugar, butter and milk to 238° F., or until a soft ball forms when tested in cold water. Fill centers of apples with fudge mixture. When it has cooled, pour gelatin mixture over apples to fill mould. Chill until firm. Serve with Whipped Cream.
½ cup chopped walnuts or pecans may be added to fudge mixture if desired. Serves 6.
Cherry Angelica
1 package Royal Lemon Gelatin
1 cup boiling water
1 cup cold water
10 maraschino cherries, chopped fine
⅔ cup angelica, chopped fine
DISSOLVE Royal Lemon Gelatin in boiling water; add cold water. Chill; when mixture begins to thicken, stir in cherries and angelica. Pour into moulds and chill until firm or line the moulds as follows:—Set moulds in pan of cracked ice. Pour in small amount of cold but still liquid Royal Gelatin. Tip and turn moulds to coat entire surface with the mixture. Arrange on this very thin strips of angelica and bits of cherries to form a design. Add remainder of gelatin mixture, carefully so design will not be disturbed. When all is added, chill until firm. Serves 6.
Pineapple Marshmallow Jelly
Royal Orange
And in Royal Orange you will find an ideal flavor with which to serve fresh fruits.
Apricot Fruit Mould
1 package Royal Orange Gelatin
1¾ cups apricot juice
½ cup water
½ cup canned apricots, sliced
½ cup canned cherries, halved and stoned
HEAT apricot juice to boiling. Pour over Royal Orange Gelatin and stir until dissolved. Add water. Chill until mixture begins to thicken, then fold in fruit well drained from juice. Pour into one large or eight small moulds and chill until firm. Serve with cream. Serves 8.
Rhubarb Royal
1 package Royal Orange Gelatin
1 cup boiling water
1 lb rhubarb
1½ cups cold water
½ cup sugar
WASH rhubarb and cut into 1-inch pieces. Do not remove the skin. Place in shallow pan. Add ½ cup cold water to sugar and pour over rhubarb. Bake in slow oven (250° F.) until tender but unbroken. Baste occasionally with the syrup in the pan. Dissolve Royal Orange Gelatin in boiling water; add 1 cup cold water Chill. Just as it begins to thicken fill eight small moulds ½ full, arrange rhubarb pieces on it and fill moulds with remainder of the gelatin. Chill until firm. Serve plain or with cream. Serves 8.
