"A VISION IN A DREAM" - SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
"A VISION IN A DREAM" - SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw;
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
He is celebrated for his masterly use of imagination, exploration of the supernatural, and profound contributions to modern literary theory.
Coleridge was born in Devonshire and educated at Jesus College, Cambridge. In his youth, he attempted to establish a utopian egalitarian society called "Pantisocracy" with Robert Southey. Plagued by chronic neuralgic pain, he developed a severe lifelong addiction to opium (laudanum), which heavily strained his family life, finances, and literary output. He spent his final decades under the medical care of Dr James Gillman in Highgate, London, refocusing his energies on philosophy and theology before passing away from heart and lung complications.
The last ten lines of Frost at Midnight were chosen by Harper as the "best example of the peculiar kind of blank verse Coleridge had evolved, as natural-seeming as prose, but as exquisitely artistic as the most complicated sonnet.
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (born October 21, 1772, Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, England—died July 25, 1834, Highgate, near London) was an English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher. His Lyrical Ballads, written with William Wordsworth, heralded the English Romantic movement, and his Biographia Literaria (1817) is the most significant work of general literary criticism produced in the English Romantic period.
Coleridge was the youngest of 10 children born to John Coleridge and Ann Bowden (or Bowdon) Coleridge. He came from a modest family background; in a letter to a friend in 1797, the poet described himself as “a genuine sans-culotte, my veins uncontaminated with one drop of gentility.” Coleridge’s father was vicar of Ottery St. Mary, a bucolic English market town, and headmaster of the local grammar school.
As a child, Coleridge was already a prodigious reader, immersing himself in romances and Eastern tales, such as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, with a morbid fascination. In 1781, his father died suddenly, and in the following year, Coleridge entered Christ’s Hospital in London, where he completed his secondary education. In 1791, he entered Jesus College, Cambridge. At both school and university, he continued to read voraciously, particularly works of imagination and visionary philosophy. His poetic self-characterization as a student was “library-cormorant,” a reference to a bird that symbolizes gluttony and greed in many literary works. Coleridge was remembered by his schoolmates for his eloquence and prodigious memory. In his third year at Cambridge, oppressed by financial difficulties, he went to London. He enlisted as a dragoon (a soldier who fights both on horseback and on foot) under the assumed name of Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. Despite his unfitness for military life, he remained until discovered by his friends; he was then brought out by his brothers and restored to Cambridge.
A sansculotte (from the French sans-culotte, meaning “without breeches”) was a militant supporter of the French Revolution. Such supporters presented themselves as members of the poorer classes or leaders of the common people, as opposed to the aristocracy, who wore breeches. During the Reign of Terror, some educated people adopted the label to demonstrate their patriotism.
On his return, he was restless. The intellectual and political turmoil surrounding the French Revolution had set in motion intense and urgent discussion concerning the nature of society. Coleridge now conceived the design to circumvent the disastrous violence that had destroyed the idealism of the French Revolution by establishing a small utopian society that would organize itself and educate its children according to better principles than those prevailing in the surrounding society. A chance meeting with the poet Robert Southey led the two men to plan such a “pantisocracy” (from the Greek pant-, meaning “all,” and isokratia, meaning “equal rule”) and to set up a community by the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. To this end, Coleridge left Cambridge for good and set up with Southey as a public lecturer in Bristol.
In October 1795, Coleridge married Sara Fricker, daughter of a local schoolmistress, swayed partly by Southey’s suggestion that he was under an obligation to her because she had been refusing the advances of other men. Shortly afterward, Southey defected from the pantisocratic scheme, leaving Coleridge married to a woman whom he did not really love. In a sense, his career never fully recovered from this blow. If there is a makeshift quality to many of its later events, one explanation lies in his constant need to reconcile his intellectual aspirations with his family's financial needs.
During this period, however, Coleridge’s intellect flowered extraordinarily as he embarked on an investigation of the nature of the human mind, joined by William Wordsworth, with whom he had become acquainted in 1795. Together they entered upon one of the most influential creative periods of English literature. Coleridge’s intellectual ebullience and his belief in the existence of a powerful “life consciousness” in all individuals rescued Wordsworth from the depression into which recent events had cast him and made possible the new approach to nature that characterized Coleridge’s contributions to Lyrical Ballads (which was to be published in 1798).
Coleridge retired to a lonely farmhouse near Culbone, Somersetshire, and, according to his own account, composed under the influence of laudanum the mysterious poetic fragment known as “Kubla Khan.” The exotic imagery and rhythmic chant of this poem have led many critics to conclude that it should be read as a “meaningless reverie” and enjoyed merely for its vivid and sensuous qualities. An examination of the poem in the light of Coleridge’s psychological and mythological interests, however, suggests that it has, after all, a complex structure of meaning and is basically a poem about the nature of human genius. The first two stanzas show the two sides of what Coleridge elsewhere calls “commanding genius”: its creative aspirations in time of peace, as symbolized in the projected pleasure dome and gardens of the first stanza; and its destructive power in time of turbulence, as symbolized in the wailing woman, the destructive fountain, and the voices prophesying war in the second stanza. In the final stanza, the poet writes of a state of “absolute genius” in which, if inspired by a visionary “Abyssinian maid,” he would become endowed with the creative, divine power of a sun god—an Apollo or Osiris subduing all around him to harmony by the fascination of his spell.
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Coleridge explored the same range of themes less egotistically in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” composed during the autumn and winter of 1797–98. For this, his most famous poem, he drew upon the ballad form. The main narrative tells how a sailor who has committed a crime against the life principle by slaying an albatross suffers from torments, physical and mental, in which the nature of his crime is made known to him. The underlying life power against which he has transgressed is envisaged as a power corresponding to the influx of the sun’s energy into all living creatures, thereby binding them together in a joyful communion. By killing the bird that hovered near the ship, the mariner has destroyed one of the links in this process. His own consciousness is consequently affected: the sun, previously glorious, is seen as a bloody sun, and the energies of the deep are seen as corrupt.
All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.…
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch’s oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.
Frost at Midnight
Coleridge, meanwhile, was developing a new, informal mode of poetry in which he could use a conversational tone and rhythm to give unity to a poem. Of these poems, the most successful is “Frost at Midnight,” which begins with the description of a silent frosty night in Somerset and proceeds through a meditation on the relationship between the quiet work of frost and the quiet breathing of the sleeping baby at the poet’s side. The poem concludes in a resolve that his child shall be brought up as a child of nature, so that the sympathies that the poet has come to detect may be reinforced throughout the child’s education.
Despite this, there also appear signs of a slow revival, principally because for the first time Coleridge knew what it was to be a fashionable figure. A course of lectures he delivered during the winter of 1811–12 attracted a large audience; for many years, Coleridge had been fascinated by William Shakespeare’s achievement, and his psychological interpretations of the playwright’s chief characters were new and exciting to his contemporaries. During this period, Coleridge’s play Osorio, written many years before, was produced at Drury Lane with the title Remorse in January 1813.
Coleridge quotes -
- On Thirst: "Water, water, everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink.
- On Imagination: "Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception.
- Love is flower-like; Friendship is like a sheltering tree.
Romanticism, attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century.
Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.
Romanticism in English literature began in the 1790s with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Notable Works: “Biographia Literaria,” “Christabel,” “Dejection: An Ode,” “Frost at Midnight,” “Kubla Khan,” “Lyrical Ballads,” “On the Constitution of the Church and State,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) is predominantly recognized as the "poet of nature," an English Romantic poet who elevated the natural world to a spiritual and philosophical level. His work, notably poems like "Tintern Abbey" and "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," presents nature as a living, breathing teacher, healer, and nurturing force for the human spirit.
Stirred simultaneously by walks in the English countryside and by his relationships with his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, and poet-critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth wrote most of his major works during the “great decade” of 1797–1808, including “Tintern Abbey,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” “The Solitary Reaper,” “Resolution and Independence,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” and The Prelude".
William Wordsworth produced some of the greatest English poems of the late 1700s and early 1800s and revolutionized English-language poetry. In contrast to the decorum of much 18th-century verse, he wanted to relate “situations from common life” in “language really used by men,” embodying “the spontaneous overflow of feelings…recollected in tranquility.” Wordsworth famously outlined these principles in the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), a collection of poems published with fellow English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”.
LYRICAL BALLADS
Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798.
Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. The immediate effect on critics was modest, but it became and remains a landmark, changing the course of English literature and poetry.
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