Christabel

Christabel is a narrative poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in two parts. The first was reputedly composed in 1797 and the second in 1800; Coleridge planned three further parts but never completed them. He prepared the poem for the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, the collection he shared with William Wordsworth, but left it out on Wordsworth's advice. It was finally published in 1816, in a pamphlet alongside Kubla Khan and The Pains of Sleep. The poem uses an accentual metre, counting only stresses: although lines vary between seven and twelve syllables, they rarely contain more than four accents.

The story centres on Christabel, a young woman who goes into the woods one night to pray beneath a great oak. There she meets Geraldine, who claims to have been seized by men on horseback. Moved by pity, Christabel takes her back to her father's castle, Sir Leoline's. Supernatural signs, such as a dog moaning in its sleep and torch flames suddenly flaring up again, suggest that something is wrong. When Geraldine undresses, she reveals a disturbing mark on her breast and side, and the two spend the night together. Sir Leoline becomes captivated by his guest, and while Christabel begins to sense her visitor's malign nature, the poem breaks off.

Modern criticism stresses the poem's thematic coherence compared with fragmentary works such as Kubla Khan, and the tension between its rigid form and its mystical content. Geraldine takes on a proto-vampiric role, with deceptive beauty, a revealing bodily mark and a physical encounter that leaves her victims weakened. The relationship between the two women, possibly erotic, has invited feminist and lesbian readings.

Its influence was considerable. Byron and Shelley were struck by it, and at the Villa Diodati in 1816 the poem helped inspire the ghost-story contest that produced Frankenstein and Polidori's The Vampyre. Edgar Allan Poe drew on it in "The Sleeper", and Le Fanu's Carmilla is widely read as a debt to it, with parallels in the visiting figure, the motherless heroines and the weakness that follows their shared nights. Its female-centred imagery and unfinished state have also made it a lasting reference point for later writers and artists.