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a d r i a n a c r ac i u n of, for example, Wordsworth and Coleridge In Bannerman’s ballad, which responds to an earlier poem by Coleridge, crusading knights are enthralled by the gaze of a captive Muslim woman, whose veil invites their scopophilia only to reverse it: But, from the Ladie in the veil, Their eyes they could not long withdraw, And when they tried to speak, that glare Still kept them mute with awe!25 Moments of gazing and unveiling literalize and eroticize Romantic poets’ accounts of poetic vision itself, from the Dark Ladie’s supernatural resistance to the attempts to unveil her, to Sappho and Psyche’s loving looks over the unclothed bodies of their lovers, to the poet’s terror as Moneta, “curtained in mysteries,” unveils in Keats’s The Fall of Hyperion (comp 1819; Canto I, l 289) The climactic scene in which Geraldine disrobes before a spellbound Christabel in Coleridge’s Gothic poem is one of the era’s best-known instances of such specularization of desire, one uniquely lesbian Coleridge’s demonization of (female) desire in “Christabel,” like Bannerman’s in her volume of ballads, Tales of Superstition, demonstrates the necessity of placing Gothic at the center of our understandings of Romanticism and sexuality Like his contemporaries Bannerman and Robinson, Coleridge distrusted the feminized and maternalized nature often visible in William Wordsworth’s “spousal verse.” The nightside of nature that Christabel inhabits suffuses her autoerotic and homoerotic experiences with a perversity immediately glimpsed by the poem’s outraged critics in 1816, who famously dubbed Coleridge’s masterpiece “the most obscene poem in the English language.” Unlike Wordsworth’s “Nutting,” which put feminized nature violently in its place, and concluded with a characteristic admonition to a “dearest maiden,” “Christabel” did not establish a narrative of (hetero)sexual maturation, or consummation, to contain the aggressive energies it revealed in the androgynous figures of Christabel and Geraldine The poem’s resistance against such heterocentric metanarratives is built into its formal structure as a heterogeneous fragment The numerous contemporary conclusions to “Christabel” published after 1816 – typically focused on unveiling the “true” sexuality that the ambiguous Geraldine embodies – attest to Gothic’s unique ability to frustrate the will to truth central to the expressive hypothesis of Romantic poetry Given its aura of perversity, it is telling that “Christabel” had to wait for Byron, a fearless reinventor of the Gothic, to help see it into print in 1816, long after an anxious Wordsworth had removed the poem from the 166 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008