By Morchard Bishop. Originally printed in the Times Literary Supplement, Friday 10th May 1957, p.293.
“In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confined of Somerset and Devonshire. …” It is innecessary to complete quotation, for everyone knows what happened next: “the Author” took his “anodyne,” as “prescribed,” fell asleep, and composed his “Vision in a Dream“—the supreme example of the magical in English poetry, the fragment of Kubla Khan.
Coleridge, who wrote the above prefatory passage in 1816 (or at any rate dated it that year), was not invariable accurate about times and seasons, and his grandson, Ernest Harley Coleridge, has demonstrated pretty conclusively that the year of Kubla Khan was 1798,1 not 1797; the month of its composition, probably, being May. I note this little discrepancy at once because it may help, by analogy, to render rather less binding another quite definite assertion that Coleridge later made about his poem; on a manuscript of Kubla Khan belonging to Lord Crewe, Sir Edmund Chambers discovered a note which stated that the poem was written “at a Farm House between Porlock and Linton, a quarter of a mile from Culbone Church, in the fall of the year, 1797.”
This precise pin-pointing of the farm in relation to Culbone Church led Mr. Geoffrey Grigson, in a broadcast talk of August 18, 1948, to suggest that the lonely farmhouse was Ash Farm, which, at the present time, is the only one lying within the required radius; and, in the absence of other data, this supposition seemed an entirely reasonable one. In 1952, however, a piece of new evidence became available in the shape of an unused entry in the original manuscript2 of Henry Nelson Coleridge’s Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which Miss Kathleen Coburn, the editor of Coleridge’s Note-Books, very kindly communicated to the present writer. This entry represents Coleridge as saying, under the date September 26, 1830: “I wrote Kubla Khan in Brimstone Farm between Porlock and Ilfracombe—near Culbone.”
Now this observation, which for some reason H. N. Coleridge did not include in the printed text of his Table Talk, is not quite as helpful as it looks, for there is no record, either in the Tithe Apportionments or the Land Tax Assessments for the relevant period, of any farm in the neighbourhood that goes by the name of Brimstone. Culbone was, and is, a very sparsely populated parish; and in 1840, the farthest back that the Tithe Apportionments can be consulted, it contained only seven buildings upon wihch tithe was levied. These were the Parsonage House and six farms which went, respectively, by the names of Silcombe, Withycombe, Twitchin, and Higher, Middle and Lower Broomstreet. Though the Parsonage House is now, and has been for many years, a farm, it was not one in 1798, and I think we can rule it out of the reckoning; and , of the remainder, Withycombe and two of the Broomstreets no longer exist, while Twitchin, though still the name of a dwelling, is now a relatively small and apparently recent building. Silcombe also now bears upon its porch the date 1866, and it is very doubtful if any of the original building remains. This leaves of the farms that were in Culbone parish in the year 1798 only the one large farm that is now known simply by the name of Broomstreet.
Now though “Broomstreet” is not the same as “Brimstone,” it will at once be perceived that there is a resemblance between the two words that renders tempting enough the endeavour to identify them. It is, in addition, possible that one of three things might have happened: Coleridge himself could have, so many years after the event, confused the name; or H. N. Coleridge could have misheard it or made a slip in his transcript of the conversation; or finally Coleridge could, in his playful fashion, have decided that Brimstone was an altogether happier name for the place than Broomstreet. He was, after all, the joint author of The Devil’s Thoughts; and everyone who is at all familiar with his style of humour is aware that he was much given to jocular, and even diabolical, nicknames.
It seemed, therefore, to the writer that an investigation on the spot was called for; and consequently, in the May of 1955, he went to Culbone to examine the problem over the actual ground. The results yielded by this process were decidedly significant. It had, of course, long been known that one of Coleridge’s favourite excursions was the walk from Nether Stowey to the Valley of Rocks at Lynton. Both upon the famous occasion when he, Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth had set out on the November journey which had resulted in the compsition of The Ancient Mariner, and upon that described by Hazlitt in his essay, My First Acquaintance with Poets, had had made this jaunt; and, as both Smith’s Somerset map of 1804 and Walker’s of 1835 make clear, the shortest and incomparably the most beautiful way in which to perform the relevant portion of the walk is to take the track that leads up from Porlock Quay (or Weir, as it is now called) along the cliff-edge past Culbone church to Yenworthy (which Smith called Yeanor, and Walker, Yannery). This track, which both maps indicate as passing on the seaward side of the Culbone church (though the present path passes it on the landward), is the obvious route for a poetical pedestrain; and if we assume, as is reasonable, that Coleridge took it certain deductions ensue. One of them is that Ash Farm (which, in fact, is in the parish of Porlock3 and not that of Culbone) is right off the route, and can only be apporached from it with exertion; and much the same proviso applies to Silcombe. Still more does it apply to the now-vanished Withycombe Farm, which lay in a deep valley some miles off, between Oare and Oareford. It is true, however, that the track in question ran directly past the now dwindled and rebuilt Twitchin, and I therefore think it cannot be certainly proved that this was not the farm of the Vision.
Even so, there are other indications, apart from the verbal similarity of Brimstone and Broomstreet, which make the latter a far more likely choice than Twitchin; and the chief of these is Coleridge’s own phrase in his printed preface to Kubla Khan: “a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confined of Somerset and Devonshire.” For the foot-passenger, who has proceeded westward for several miles closely shut in by the hanging woods of the cliff-path, turns inland at last just before he reaches Broomstreet and, crossing open land, sees the farmhouse lying “lonely” before him, with the bleak slopes of Exmoor, which for a long time have been hidden, rising behind it; and, what is more, at a bare mile from the county boundary. Though it is considerably over the specified “quarter of a mile from Culbone Church,”4 Broomstreet, in every other respect, would seem to be (save possibly for the now transform Twitchin) the first logical stopping-place for a traveller who takes the footpath-way from Porlock Weir to the Devonshire border.
In 1798 this farm was in the possession of a certain John Red (the similarity to Blackmore’s “John Ridd” will be noted), and what I think may have happened was that Coleridge, on one of his earlier journeys to Lynton, had got into conversation with this man, or perhaps had even had a meal or stayed the night in his house. When he left Nether Stowey on the occasion of the writing of Kubla Khan, he had certainly already established relations with his host at whatever farmhouse he stayed, for the arrival of the “person on business from Porlock” implies that he had left a direction behind him.
And even for this “person from Porlock,” Broomstreet is a rational solution, for a short farm track rom the Porlock-Lynton main road now leads, and it may be presumed led also in 1798, down to the farm; so that “the person” would be under no necessity of travelling by the tortuous and difficult cliff-path. He could have come on a horse.
Broomstreet, though it has been considerably enlarged, still has a part (that to the left as you face it) which is older than 1798; and in this part is the old kitchen, which the courtest of the present occupier, Mrs. Ernest Richards (herself before marriage a Miss Red), allowed me to see. It is a large, low oak-beamed room with sporting guns on the rafters, great copper pans on the walls, and a solid old table by the window that looks as thought it had been there for centuries. The outer door leads directly into this room, and a “person from Porlock” would undoubtedly have constituted a major distraction to anyone composing at the table by the window.
Without claiming beyond peradventure that this kitchen at Broomstreet was the scene of the writing of Kubla Khan, I think there is reasonable likelihood that it was. Moreover, though Professor Lowes in his the Road to Xanadu has so expertly traced the imagery of the poem back to a variety of literary sources, I would venture to add to his findings the single suggestion that no one who takes the cliff-path from Porlock to Broomstreet, as I did on a very wet May morning, can do so without encountering a plenitude of “deep romantic chasms,” and innumerable glimpses of “a sunless sea.”
1The fact that Elisabeth Schneider, in her Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan (Chicago, 1953), puts a case for 1799, while E. L. Griggs in his Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1956) returns to the autumn of 1797, has little relevancy to the matter of this article.
2Now in the Library of Victoria University, Toronto, by whose permission the entry is now for the first time printed.
3It should be added, parenthetically, that none of the farms in the western part of Porlock parish has, or had in 1798, a name that bears any resemblance whatever to "Brimstone"; and this is important, for the western boundary of Porlock parish runs right up to the stream immediately to the east of Culbone church.
4The actual distance must be between 1½ and 2 miles.