Black Opium

Coleridge wrote his best poems in a poppyseed haze.
I’m not sure about those tiles, he said from my bathtub,
looking up at the ceiling. I had no idea what he was thinking:
my only experience with opium was the YSL perfume, that
pungent amber stuff that always sat on my mother’s dressing table.
And then later, the redesigned Black Opium, an awful
vanilla-sugar thing I wore to class with a scratch on my wrist,
angled and shallow like a cat might have done it. When I came
home, Coleridge was alight. He showed me the poem
he’d written, wet with tap-drip. I know it is but a Dream,
yet feel more anguish than if it were Truth, he told me.
In my own visions, cross-hatched and foggy though they are,
I can still make out the shape of you.

Cadence Chung
Originally published in Cordite Issue 114

I wrote this strange little poem while taking a course on Romantic poetry. In one lecture, we were shown a quote from one of Keats’ letters, describing a conversation he had with Coleridge:

‘I walked with him at his alderman-after dinner pace for near two miles I suppose. In those two miles he broached a thousand things [ . . . ]—Nightingales, Poetry—on Poetical sensation—Metaphysics—Different genera and species of Dreams—Nightmare—a dream accompanied [with] a sense of touch—single and double touch—A dream related—First and second consciousness—the difference explained between will and Volition—so many metaphysicians from a want of smoking the second consciousness—Monsters—the Kraken—Mermaids—Southey believes in them—Southey’s belief too much diluted—A ghost story—Good morning—I heard his voice as he came towards me—I heard his voice as he moved away—I had heard it all the interval—if it may be called so’ (letters, 15-16 April 1819).

My friend Jackson McCarthy and I thought this was the most hilarious little passage, even though I’m sure nobody else in the course did. It made me feel a fondness for Coleridge, an almost jovial sense of camaraderie with him. In my mind, he’d gone from a serious and canonical Romantic poet to a strange uncle, or a messy friend who would text you, drunk, at midnight, with details of the evening’s disastrous escapades. He seemed the sort of man who really could sit in my bathtub high out of his mind. A lot of my poetry interacts with canons in this way; I like to think of all those old poets and characters as my friends.

Talking about opium in the course made me think of my mum’s little bottle of the YSL perfume called Opium, which was a constant fixture in my childhood remembrances of her dressing-table, always in the background while she did her makeup. I don’t think she ever really used it — it was a tiny bottle that I think was genuinely from when the perfume first came out — and it absolutely reeked. I don’t think they make it like that anymore. The 2014 Black Opium is a disappointingly safe shadow of that original concoction; sweet and vanillary and with that unidentifiable chemical undertone that all modern designer perfumes seem to have. I’m sure you could say something there about mass production, evolving beauty standards, unoriginality under late capitalism, etc.

But anyway. The poem took me a while to figure out, especially in terms of what Coleridge would actually say to me. The final sentence was changed around 5 times. Jackson has now taught this poem twice in one of his guest lectures about ways to end poems, as an example of a volta. I’m pretty sure that term traces back to the verb ‘to turn’, but it also reminds one of voltage, to a sudden spark that creates a change. Black Opium is concerned with many things — perfume, dreams, visions — but then suddenly turns to the lyric, to the you that is there in the background of any poem.

Cadence Chung is a poet, mezzo-soprano, and composer, currently one of the resident artists at Te Pae Kōkako – The Aotearoa New Zealand Opera Studio. She has released three books: anomalia (Tender Press, 2022), Mythos: an Audio-Visual Anthology of Art by Young New Zealanders, (ed.) (Wai-te-Ata Press, 2024), and Mad Diva (Otago University Press, 2025). She also edits Symposia Magazine and the New Zealand Poetry Society’s quarterly magazine, a fine line.