Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘Christabel’ takes place in April, ‘a month before the month of May’ (line 21). It is a chilly night, and Baron Leoline’s only child Christabel, who ‘had dreams all yesternight / Of her own betrothed knight’ (lines 27-28), leaves the warmth of her bed to go to the woods to pray for the well-being and safety of the man she is supposed to marry. The woods are a furlong, or about...
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘Christabel’ takes place in April, ‘a month before the month of May’ (line 21). It is a chilly night, and Baron Leoline’s only child Christabel, who ‘had dreams all yesternight / Of her own betrothed knight’ (lines 27-28), leaves the warmth of her bed to go to the woods to pray for the well-being and safety of the man she is supposed to marry. The woods are a furlong, or about an eighth of a mile (220 yards), from the castle (line 26). Christabel is kneeling to pray beneath an oak tree that is bare of leaves (lines 33-36) when she hears a soft moan, the source of which she cannot immediately ascertain, but after crossing herself, she goes around the oak tree and
There she sees a damsel bright,
Drest in a silken robe of white,
That shadowy in the moonlight shone:
The neck that made that white robe wan,
Her stately neck, and arms were bare;
Her blue-veined feet unsandl'd were,
And wildly glittered here and there
The gems entangled in her hair. (lines 58-65)
So it is on a chilly night in April in the woods, about 220 yards behind the castle, huddled on the ground behind a large oak tree, that Christabel meets the ‘damsel bright.’
No comments:
Post a Comment