With this exquisite
poem, in which Coleridge's style is seen in its most faultless union of his
finest qualities, compare this passage from a letter to Lady Beaumont,
about a year earlier: "Though I am at present sadly below even _my_
par of health, or rather unhealth, and am the more depressed thereby from
the consciousness that in this yearly resurrection of Nature from her
winter sleep, amid young leaves and blooms and
twittering
nest-building
birds, the sun so gladsome, the breezes with such healing on their wings,
all good and lovely things are beneath me, above me, and everywhere around
me, and all from God, while my incapability of enjoying, or, at best,
languor in receiving them, is directly or indirectly from myself, from past
procrastination, and cowardly impatience of pain.
Coleridge - Poems
114. _The Nightingale_. The persons supposed to take part in this
"conversation poem" are of course William and Dorothy Wordsworth.
p. 134. _A Day-Dream_. "There cannot be any doubt, I think, that the
'Asra' of this poem is Miss Sarah Hutchinson; 'Mary,' her sister (Mrs.
Wordsworth); 'our sister and our friend,' Dorothy and William Wordsworth."
(DYKES CAMPBELL.)
p. 142. _Work without Hope_. "What could be left to hope for when the
man could already do such work?" asks Mr. Swinburne.
With this exquisite
poem, in which Coleridge's style is seen in its most faultless union of his
finest qualities, compare this passage from a letter to Lady Beaumont,
about a year earlier: "Though I am at present sadly below even _my_
par of health, or rather unhealth, and am the more depressed thereby from
the consciousness that in this yearly resurrection of Nature from her
winter sleep, amid young leaves and blooms and
twittering
nest-building
birds, the sun so gladsome, the breezes with such healing on their wings,
all good and lovely things are beneath me, above me, and everywhere around
me, and all from God, while my incapability of enjoying, or, at best,
languor in receiving them, is directly or indirectly from myself, from past
procrastination, and cowardly impatience of pain.
" It was always upon some
not less solid foundation that Coleridge built these delicate structures.
p. 147. _Phantom_. This, almost Coleridge's loveliest fragment of
verse, was composed in sleep, like "Kubla Khan," "Constancy to an Ideal
Object," and "Phantom or Fact?" There is a quality, in this and some other
poems of Coleridge, which he himself has exquisitely rendered in the
passage on Ariel in the lectures on Shakespeare: "In air he lives, from air
he derives his being, in air he acts; and all his colours and properties
seem to have been obtained from the rainbow and the skies. There is nothing
about Ariel that cannot be conceived to exist either at sunrise or sunset:
hence all that belongs to Ariel belongs to the delight the mind is capable
of receiving from the most lovely external appearances. "Coleridge is the
Ariel of English Poetry: glittering in the song from "Zapolya," translucent
in the "Phantom," infantine, with a note of happy infancy almost like that
of Blake, in "Something Childish, but very Natural." In these poems, and in
the "Ode to the Rain," and the "Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath,"
there is a unique way of feeling, which he can render to us on those rare
occasions when his sensations are uninterrupted; by thought, which clouds
them, or by emotion, which disturbs them. He reveals mysterious intimacies
with natural things, the "flapping" flame or a child's scarcely more
articulate moods. And in some of them, which are experiments in form, he
seems to compete gaily with the Elizabethan lyrists, doing wonderful things
in jest, like one who is for once happy and disengaged, and able to play
with his tormentor, verse.
p. 153. _Forbearance_. "Gently I took that which urgently came" is
from Spenser's "Shepherds' Calendar": "But gently tooke that ungently
came.
