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Literary Passion · Keswick, Cumbria (Cumberland)

Greta Hall — Coleridge, Opium & 'Asra'

Under one Keswick roof: a poet drowning in laudanum, a marriage in ruins, and a hopeless love for his best friend's sister-in-law.

StatusDocumented history
Date1800–1803 (Coleridge's residence)
The peopleSamuel Taylor Coleridge, Sara Hutchinson ('Asra'), Sara Fricker Coleridge, Robert Southey
The siteGreta Hall, Main Street, Keswick (home of Coleridge and later Southey)
Coordinates54.60130, -3.13800 (confidence 4/5)

The story

Coleridge took this house above Keswick in 1800, and later Robert Southey filled it with family. Coleridge's own life there was misery: an unhappy marriage to Sara Fricker, a deepening opium habit, and a hopeless, almost certainly unconsummated love for Sara Hutchinson — sister of Wordsworth's wife — whom he coded in his notebooks as "Asra". The record of that love is his own great crisis poem. On 4 April 1802 he wrote a 340-line verse letter addressed openly to Sara; over the following months he cut it nearly in half, replaced "Sara" with "Lady", removed the personal references, and published the depersonalised remnant as "Dejection: An Ode" — on Wordsworth's wedding day. The full letter stayed unpublished until 1937. In 1810 his friendship with Wordsworth collapsed after Basil Montagu passed on some wounding remarks, and it never fully mended.

More stories at this spot

The dream before the wedding

The night before William married, Coleridge dreamed of Dorothy — but transformed, unrecognisable, a heavy woman with thick limbs. "If I did not know you to be Dorothy," the dream-Coleridge said, "I never should suppose it." It is a small, eerie thing, recorded in the circle's papers, and it sits oddly close to the wedding-ring passage: two of the men who loved Dorothy's wild, ardent quality seem to have sensed, that autumn, that something was ending.

Sources

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