Comparison of a True Fragment to a Complete Fragment

1. Introduction:

It was in the Romantic era that fragment poems became especially popular. In this essay I intend to demonstrate two of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s framents which are still curiosities for the audience.

First of all, a very important question has to be asked: �How do we know that a fragment is truly a fragment?’ For one, it is surely one or more parts are missing from the whole, or there is no whole at all, just a few written lines with seemingly no importance at all. In the case of both Christabel and Kubla Khan it is made evident for the reader that they are only fragments since Coleridge informs his audience right before they would start reading either piece. This note from the poet is extremely important because it makes the fragments true and complete. We do not need to guess or analyze the poet’s intentions, they are clearly given and understandable.

Still, it is necessary to analyze these fragments a bit further even if they seemingly have nothing to say. Although, many people try to guess what the story might have been if completed, how it would have ended, et cetera, these poems should be appreciated the way they are. It is this uncompleteness which gives them an aura of mystery and leave space for the imagination.

2. Analysis of Christabel

Christabel was written by Coleridge in two parts at two different times. In his Preface, Coleridge tells the reader that he wrote the first part in 1797 and the second part in 1799, two years later. This is already an unusual way of composing poetry, two years is a long time, enough for providing the poem with a fragmentary structure.

In many cases, Christabel’s reviewers actually “finish” the poem by inventing identities for the most baffling characters, motivations for the ambiguous or inconsistent, explanations for the ominous opening of the poem, and a conclusion to resolve the internal tensions. Christabel is compared to “a mutilated statue, the beauty of which can only be appreciated by those who have knowledge or imagination sufficient to complete the idea of the whole composition”.1

Christabel in the eye of most critics is seen as either a gothic romance or a tragedy conforming to Aristotle’s rules. One might observe, for example, that parts 1 and 2 and their respective conclusions structurally resemble the prologue, parode, episode, and stasimon Aristotle includes among tragedy’s components. The resemblance suggests that the projected parts, 3, 4, and 5, would have made up the exode, or slow denouement. Typically, the exode demonstrates how the recognitions and reversals undergone in the course of the drama shape the fortunes of the main characters, in turn modifying the conditions that initially defined the characters’ range of narrative options. Coleridge forecasts part 3 as Christabel’s “song of Desolation”; it makes sense to assume that the rest of the poem would depict the effect of her sorrow on those around her and, chiefly, on her father, her sole companion. His “rage and pain, shame and sorrow” – that is, his remorse – rather than Christabel’s or Geraldine’s, would logically occupy the last two sections 2.

Christabel, though in certain obvious respects a gothic heroine, lacks the characterological purity and the passivity associated with that literary type. Christabel is shown to assimilate the evil impressed upon her and even to generate it. Nor does the author imply that his heroine will recover her innocence once Geraldine is banished or exposed. This is to say, Christabel collaborates in a manner and to an extent unusual in gothic romance. Moreover, in romance, the function typically performed by the evil agent is to unite the lady with her lover by making him aware of her needs.3 In Christabel, however, we note that the heroine is betrothed from the outset; her knight need not, then, prove his mettle to win her, nor is he sent for at the critical moment, Christabel’s transformation. Further, and most tellingly, the rift between Leoline and Roland is extraneous to the romance structure. Its sole purpose would be to generalize the revival effected by Christabel’s marriage. Coleridge’s preparation is surely too elaborate and extraordinary for such a negligible service. The reviewers, almost all of whom isolate the passage describing the falling out of the two friends, seem to have sensed the structural centrality of this representation.

Christabel, a true fragment, invites us to interpret what is there before us with reference to what might precede and follow the truncated text. We best explain the inconsistencies noted above by constructing a before-and-after roughly conforming to the laws of classical tragedy (its narrative and affective material and principles)