Stevie Smith: Thoughts about the Person from Porlock

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Porlock Weir, Somerset: photo by Squirmella, 2004

Coleridge received the Person from Porlock

And ever after called him a curse,

Then why did he hurry to let him in?

He could have hid in the house.

It was not right of Coleridge in fact it was wrong

(But often we all do wrong)

As the truth is I think he was already stuck

With Kubla Khan.

He was weeping and wailing: I am finished, finished,

I shall never write another word of it,

When along comes the Person from Porlock

And takes the blame for it.

It was not right, it was wrong,

But often we all do wrong.

OS Map of Porlock, Somerset, 1937: image by Geni, 2006

May we inquire the name of the Person from Porlock?

Why, Porson, didn’t you know?

He lived at the bottom of Porlock Hill

So had a long way to go,

He wasn’t much in the social sense

Though his grandmother was a Warlock,

One of the Rutlandshire ones I fancy

And nothing to do with Porlock,

And he lived at the bottom of the hill as I said

And had a cat named Flo,

And had a cat named Flo.

I long for the Person from Porlock

To bring my thoughts to an end,

I am becoming impatient to see him

I think of him as a friend,

Often I look out of the window

Often I run to the gate

I think, He will come this evening,

I think it is rather late.

I am hungry to be interrupted

For ever and ever amen

O Person from Porlock come quickly

And bring my thoughts to an end.

Porlock Hill: photo by Matt Chapman, 2008

I felicitate the people who have a Person from Porlock

To break up everything and throw it away

Because then there will be nothing to keep them

And they need not stay.

Why do they grumble so much?

He comes like a benison

They should be glad he has not forgotten them

They might have had to go on.

These thoughts are depressing I know. They are depressing,

I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant,

Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting

To the purpose of One Above who is experimenting

With various mixtures of human character which goes best,

All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us.

There I go again. Smile, smile, and get some work to do

Then you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.

Bossington Green, Exmoor: photo by dahil ŧ, 2010

Kubla Khan, manuscript draft: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, between 1797 and 1816 (British Library)

Author's note on a manuscript copy of Kubla Khan:

This fragment with a good deal more, not recoverable, composed, in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of Opium taken to check a dysentery, at a Farm House between Porlock & Linton, a quarter of a mile from Culbone Church, in the fall of the year, 1797.

Author's note published with the poem in Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Pains of Sleep (1816) :

The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [i.e. Lord Byron], and, as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits.

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 confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: "Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed (sic) with a wall." The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Pieter van Dyke, 1795 (National Portrait Gallery)

Florence Margaret "Stevie" Smith: photo by Jane Bown, 1969 (National Portrait Gallery)

Stevie Smith: Thoughts about the Person from Porlock, from Selected Poems, 1962