Describing The Indescribable in Christabel

How do we describe an emotion? Happiness, sadness, and fear, all simply words which we tie to certain “feelings,” observable by bodily functions -- flushed cheeks, tears, goosebumps, the production and distribution of certain hormones. As humans our emotions manifest as art, but when the chosen medium is through language, how accurate are our descriptions of the actual substance of emotion? We may do our best with our words in this way, but it is also the silence between them that speaks. Words limit us to what we can describe, and therefore we are unable to explore what is past the limits of our consciousness. In his poem, Christabel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge uses the void between his lines of imagery to haunt his reader with supernatural powers, witches, and the darkness that is characteristic of Gothic poetry. He uses plot, manipulation and rhetorical questions to portray emotions and feelings to his reader without having to experience them, describing the supposed “indescribable.”

Christabel is emotionally inclusive, in that it involves the reader with the use of increasing curiosity, confusion, and fear that gives the reader sympathy for the main character as she becomes bewildered and weakened by the events of the story. Christabel has ventured from her bed late at night, into the dark woods. She is innocent, impressionable, as “she kneels beneath the huge oak tree, and in silence prayeth she." The use of the imagery of the “huge oak tree” paired with the “silence” of her prayers is effective, the contrast between the largeness of the tree and the little girl who prays beneath it, a beautiful and haunting image. Coleridge speaks through this, warning his reader of the powerlessness of Christabel. In this way, Coleridge uses the silence of the woods to help his reader to focus in, away from the woods, and to the girl who will be changed for the worse.

The poet carries on, and as he does, he highlights Christabel’s naivety further. She hears “bleak” moaning in the forest, the first sounds he mentions since introducing his main character. The use of the word “bleak” should be indicative in itself of the danger about to befall Christabel, but she cannot see it. Here, Coleridge uses contrast of imagery again to portray Christabel’s innocence. The word “bleak” is cold, charmless. However, when he speaks of Christabel, he accentuates her “ringlet curl” and “the lovely lady’s cheek," indicative of her purity and childlike aesthetic. Christabel seems dramatically out of place, a gentle child in the harshest and loneliest environment, yet surprisingly unafraid of the darkness. Coleridge uses this contrast to make the reader uneasy. Unease appears to be a typical goal of many Gothic poems, keeping the reader anxious through by keeping them uncertain of the plot and outcome of the stories they tell.

What makes this poem emotionally inclusive is the way Coleridge makes the reader feel increasingly like Christabel throughout his writing of her story. Throughout the first half, Christabel is very much active; even as she allows Geraldine to manipulate her, she speaks, makes her own decisions, is coherent in these decisions. Her innocence is an active part of her character, however frustrating this may be to the reader as we watch her tread an increasingly dangerous path of the supernatural. In this way, the reader is separated from her, with the advantage of the outsider’s perspective. However, the further on Coleridge takes the reader, the less we ourselves can understand, the more bewildered we become. By the end of his poem, the reader may also feel cursed by Geraldine, unable to make a decision about how we would have done things differently. To be bewildered is a strange feeling, one of being out of control, confused. Coleridge atmospherically manages to make the reader feel the same way that Christabel is feeling, without using blatant confusion like poets such as e.e.cummings.

Instead, he uses the things he can’t say to upset the power of the reader, the balance between the characters and ourselves. He breaks us down, until we can no longer decipher a clear message. Many times throughout Christabel, Coleridge lets us in on half-secrets. When Christabel first hears the moaning in the woods, he says, “but what it is she cannot tell.” The use of the word “it” implies that there is something inhuman about these sounds, indicating a possibility of threat to Christabel - but then he introduces the seemingly-human Geraldine. Later on in the poem, in Christabel’s bedroom, Geraldine undresses in the light of the moon. Setting the sexual homo-erotic connotation aside, Coleridge implies some kind of mark on the bosom of Geraldine which was “A sight to dream of, not to tell!” Here, the word “dream” is effective as it presents evidence that a part of Geraldine is something of unearthly origin, somehow supernatural and “dream-like.” It is interesting that Coleridge uses the word “dream” also, as the word “nightmare” would usually be used for a sight that was frightening, implying that Christabel did not mind the sight of the naked Geraldine. However, the cruelest half-secret of them all occurs at the climax of this poem. Christabel takes a turn for the worst, under Geraldine’s curse, “she stood, in a dizzy trance.” Coleridge then writes the most unforgivable tease: “She said: and more she could not say: For what she knew she could not tell, O'er-mastered by the mighty spell. ”And again, “I ween, she had no power to tell Aught else: so mighty was the spell.” Christabel has experienced something which she cannot verbalize, and somehow that mere fact is enough to help the reader to understand how she feels. As aforementioned, we are now just as upset by these events as she is; we too “O’er-mastered by the mighty spell," unable to put into words or even understand what has happened. Without having to explain it, the narrator encloses information about the spell through Christabel’s silence. Once again, Coleridge uses a lack of words to describe what only silence can: the fear of the unknown, and the power that it has to reduce humans who can be so arrogant as to think that we exist as the highest beings of this world, into impotent specks. In this way, Coleridge makes us feel dumbstruck, as if “in a dizzy trance.”

Throughout Christabel, Coleridge asks more questions than he answers. When Christabel enters the castle with Geraldine, her wolf moans angrily in her sleep - which is apparently out of character - and Coleridge asks “For what can ail the mastiff bitch?”, leaving the question hanging in midair, unanswered and suspenseful. After entering Christabel’s bedroom, the two girls talk about Christabel’s late mother, whose spirit is nearby. Geraldine warns off the spirit by using her “power” to “bid thee flee.” It is evident from this event that Geraldine has the ability to communicate with the dead. Coleridge follows it up with three questions:“Alas! what ails poor Geraldine? Why stares she with unsettled eye? Can she the bodiless dead espy?”Coleridge uses the boundary between the living and dead to keep the reader from yet another secret. He gives the reader a clue, yet takes it away just as quickly by resisting to answer the questions he asks. The repetition of the word “ails”, and the parallel structure between this line and the one about the “mastiff bitch” implies similarities between Geraldine and the dog. Geraldine’s “hollow voice” and “cries” are her version of howling at the moon.

Coleridge creates this sinister, unearthly atmosphere, a classic characteristic of Gothic poetry. These rhetorical questions could also be interpreted as the writer’s own confusion. Does Coleridge even know the answers to his own questions? Has he also become perplexed by Geraldine, just as the dog, Christabel and his reader? Does he understand the darkness of which he has written? He never fully allows the reader into the spiritual world he hints about, but maybe he doesn’t even have access to it himself. Coleridge may be being somewhat cautious, afraid that getting too close to this spiritual world will give him the same curse which Geraldine gives Christabel. Christabel allows Geraldine into her castle - she even goes as far as to carry her in, highlighting her blatant naive willingness. Christabel allows herself to be manipulated, to be taken over by Geraldine’s magic. Coleridge gives himself and his reader a way out, by leaving questions unanswered as a shelter and boundary from “the dark side”, while leaving us in the dark about the truth, which feels evermore haunting. It is relatively easy to describe the science behind being afraid: our heart-rate increases, our hair stands on end, we get goosebumps, we begin to sweat. However, the mental feeling of terror is much more difficult to put into words: that sense that someone is walking behind you, that feeling that logic cannot explain. Throughout Christabel, Coleridge uses the same silence we hear on our way down a dark, deserted corridor, to convey a feeling which is undefinable and intangible.