The milk of paradise;: The effect of opium visions on the works of DeQuincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge,

104 Pages·1971·3.796 MB·English

by  M. H Abrams

THE MILK OF PARADISE

THE MILK OF
PARADISE
The Effect of Opium Visions on the
Works of DeQuincey, Crabbe, Francis
Thompson, and Coleridge
BY
M.H.ABRAMS
o
1971
OCTAGON BOOKS
New York
Copyright 1934 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Copyright © 1962 by M. H. Abrams
Author's note copyright © 1970 by M. H. Abrams
Reprinted 1971
by special arrangement with Harvard University Press, and M. H. Abrams,
and Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated
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TO MY TUTOR
ARTHUR COLBY SPRAGUE
"For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise1.
KUBIiA KHAN
CONTENTS
Author's Note, 1969 ix
Preface xv
THE MILK OF PARADISE 1
Appendix: Coleridge's Use of Opium
before 1798 51
Notes 61
Bibliography 81
Appendix to the Perennial Library
edition: 87
—George Crabbe,
"The World of Dreams" 89
"Sir Eustace Grey" 99
—Francis Thompson,
"Finis Coronat Opus" 113

AUTHOR'S NOTE
1 HIS little book began as an essay in a
sophomore survey course in English litera
ture at Harvard, and two years later was
expanded to its present form as a senior
thesis for honors. In the early 1930's the
subject of the effect of opium on imagina
tion was an exotic one, which appealed to
an undergraduate author precisely because
it lay outside the realm of his conceivable
experience. The passage of some thirty-five
years has made the subject unexpectedly
topical, now that drugs have become a
standard means to force an "expansion of
consciousness" by a direct assault upon the
nervous system.
Were I writing this essay now, I would
sharpen the discrimination between various
modes of experience affected by opium,
which in the present text are sometimes
grouped under the general term "vision" or
"dream." The drug may intensify or distort
sense-perception, especially audition and
the visual apprehension of space, structure,
light, and color. To be distinguished from
[ix]
AUTHORS NOTE
such perception of outer phenomena is the
reverie or intense daydream—the sequence
of fantasied images and experiences in the
partly autonomous and partly controlled
states of the waking mind which De Quin-
cey, in discussing his opium experiences,
called "trainees, or profoundest reveries."
In a note on a manuscript of "Kubla Khan"
which was not printed until 1934, just after
this essay had been published, Coleridge
wrote that the poem was "composed in a
sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of
Opium." In attributing the genesis of his
poem to a play of the waking fantasy
Coleridge was more precise than in his later
statement (in the Preface of 1816) that
"Kubla Khan" was composed "in a pro
found sleep, at least of the external senses,"
during which "all the images rose up before
him as things, with a parallel production of
the correspondent expressions, without any
sensation or consciousness of effort." Both
sense-perception and reverie are in turn to
be distinguished from dreams, nightmares,
and hallucinations. These last phenomena—
the subject-matter of De Quincey's "The
Pains of Opium" and Coleridge's "The Pains
[x]