Poem: Christabel

Overview
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel is a Gothic-tinged narrative poem published in 1816 and left intentionally unfinished, consisting of two parts composed years earlier. Set around Sir Leoline’s castle, it tells of Christabel, a sheltered young woman whose nocturnal act of charity admits the enigmatic Geraldine into her home and into her father’s favor, unleashing an unsettling undercurrent of enchantment, eroticism, and betrayal. The poem’s power lies in its charged ambiguities, who or what Geraldine is, what precisely transpires in the bedchamber, and whether innocence can recognize or articulate its own peril.

Part I: The forest and the chamber
At midnight, while the castle sleeps and omens disturb the air, owls calling, the mastiff moaning, Christabel slips beyond the walls to pray in secret for her absent beloved. Beneath a great oak she encounters Geraldine, a noblewoman in apparent distress who claims she has been abducted by rough men and abandoned near the castle. Christabel, moved by pity, leads her through the liminal darkness back to safety; along the way nature seems disordered, and the household dog howls as if warning them.

In Christabel’s chamber, the poem’s eerie intimacy deepens. Geraldine complains of exhaustion, and Christabel offers to share her bed. As the stranger disrobes, the narrator alludes to a “sight to dream of, not to tell,” suggesting something uncanny on Geraldine’s body. Before they sleep, Geraldine fixes Christabel with a hypnotic stare, imposing a spell of silence that will keep the girl from revealing what has happened. When a maternal spirit, an aura of Christabel’s dead mother, seems to rise to protect her, Geraldine banishes it with a chilling invocation. The two lie down together, the scene hovering between protection and violation, prayer and profanation.

Part II: The morning and the warning
By morning, Christabel awakens subdued and estranged from herself, bound by the charm and unable to speak the truth. Sir Leoline, delighted to receive a guest of noble birth, hears Geraldine claim she is the daughter of his estranged friend, Sir Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine. The coincidence pierces his old griefs: he and Roland quarreled in youth, and he seizes this chance for reconciliation, vowing to escort Geraldine home with honor.

Bracy the bard arrives with a visionary warning. He recounts a dream of a tender dove ensnared by a bright green serpent, an allegory transparent to the reader but opaque to Sir Leoline. Christabel, sensing the truth in the dream, involuntarily shudders at Geraldine’s presence and tries to signal danger, yet the spell makes her appear petulant and ungrateful. Geraldine, all artful faintness and injured dignity, deepens the father’s misreading. Sir Leoline, affronted by his daughter’s seeming discourtesy to their guest and bewitched by the prospect of mending his youthful rupture, rebukes Christabel and commits to ride in state with Geraldine. The narrative breaks here, unresolved, with charity turned to peril and paternal judgment gone awry.

Themes and ambiguity
The poem explores innocence under siege, the seductions of the uncanny, and the blindness of authority. Gendered power circulates in veiled forms: Geraldine’s beauty and vulnerability mask predation; Christabel’s purity brings both grace and peril; the father’s chivalric code becomes a vehicle for deception. Religious and natural signs, prayer at the oak, the mother’s protecting spirit, the hissing fire, stage a contest between benediction and blight. Coleridge keeps Geraldine’s nature unreadable: witch, vampire, demon, or merely a dark double to Christabel’s light. Silence and speech become moral tests, as the very charm that prevents exposure makes innocence complicit in its own endangerment.

Form and atmosphere
Composed in flexible accentual lines with haunting assonance and shifting stresses, Christabel established a distinctive cadence that influenced later Romantic verse. The narrator’s hovering presence and the poem’s prismatic images build an atmosphere where the domestic becomes uncanny and hospitality shades into possession. The fragmentary ending intensifies the spell, leaving readers suspended in the very uncertainty that governs Christabel’s fate.