Geraldine (Christabel Poem)

Christabel is a long narrative ballad by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in two parts. The first part was reputedly written in 1797, and the second in 1800. Coleridge planned three additional parts, but these were never completed. Coleridge prepared for the first two parts to be published in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, his collection of poems with William Wordsworth, but left it out on Wordsworth's advice. The exclusion of the poem, coupled with his inability to finish it, left Coleridge in doubt about his poetical power. It was published in a pamphlet in 1816, alongside Kubla Khan and The Pains of Sleep.

Coleridge wrote Christabel using an accentual metrical system, based on the count of only accents: even though the number of syllables in each line can vary from seven to twelve, the number of accents per line rarely deviates from four.

from The Blue Poetry Book (1891), ed. Andrew Lang; illus. H. J. Ford and Lancelot Speed. London, Longmans, Green and Co.]]

The story of Christabel concerns a central female character of the same name and her encounter with a stranger called Geraldine, who claims to have been abducted from her home by a band of rough men.