Christabel (poem)

Christabel (poem)

Christabel is a long narrative poem 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, but on the advice of William Wordsworth it was left out; 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 aimed to write Christabel using an accentual metrical system, based on the count of only accents: even though the number of syllables in each verse can vary from four to twelve, the number of accents per line never deviates from four.