Published: 22 November 2019
Last updated: 5 March 2024
TWO HUNDRED AND TWO years ago, on November 19, 1817, the great English Romantic poet and famed opium addict Samuel Taylor Coleridge, author of Christabel, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, entered the Ashkenazi Orthodox synagogue in Aldgate, London.
Age 43, Coleridge was not at his best. Impoverished, detached from his wife and his literary soul mate (“Wordsworth has given me up”), the poet was ready to “place himself in a private madhouse.”
Indeed, he was hospitalised in friends’ households, first with John Morgan and his family, and later with James Gillman’s family in Moreton House, where Gillman—Coleridge’s friend, physician, and biographer—closely observed the poet’s narcotic habits.
Two doors away, in Church House, 10 South Grove, lived Hyman Hurwitz, who would become one of the first professors of Hebrew in Britain. A year after moving to Highgate, Coleridge encountered Hurwitz, and for the next 20 years the two met almost every day and shared their work, until Coleridge’s death in 1834.
The event that Coleridge was about to participate in at the synagogue was a performance of a collaboration by the two men, titled Kinat Yeshurun, a Hebrew dirge also known as Israel’s Lament.
FULL STORY Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hebrew poet (Tablet)
Illustration: Tablet
