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Historically interpretations of Christabel have been of two sorts: one which has interpreted the poem in terms of genre, and the other which has explained it in terms of psychological phenomena. But neither approach has really taken hold. The poem, like the other poems of Coleridge's supernatural trilogy, Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, is as enigmatic after explication as it was before. All three poems have a coruscating quality about them; each critic sees them differently, depending on how he holds them.
But Christabel and Kubla Khan pose an especially interesting problem because both are unfinished. Here we can see the actual threads in the unraveled edge of fabric, and to any psychological critic where a poet stops weaving is as important as where he begins. Disregardnig for the time being what Coleridge himself said on this subject, usually a poem is broken off in midcomposition because the poet is either getting too close to or too far away from his poem. Coleridge would have us believe the latter is true, but I suspect and intend to prove the former must have been the case.
With Kubla Khan Coleridge contended that the poem was wrenched away from his opium-drugged mind by the untimely knocking on the door by the infamous “man from Porlock.” When he returned to his desk, “all the rest [of the poem] had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but alas, without the restoration of the latter.”1 Coleridge never makes this deus ex machina claim with Christabel. Instead he insisted,
the reason for my not finishing Christabel is not that I don't know how to do it—for I have, as I always had, the whole plan entire from beginning to end in my mind,