Coleridge, Dejection, and Eolian Harps

Gary Weissman '90 (English 32, 1988)

The Romantic image of the Aeolian lute that appears in "Dejection: An Ode" also appears in
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp" (1796). The Aeolian lute and the Eolian harp are
names for the same instrument, which produces music when the wind blows on its musical
chords. Both poems are in first-person, and the narrator's voice is clearly that of the poet. The two
poems use the same imagery; the breeze represents the creative power of nature acting as a muse
for the poet, and the harp represents the poet who responds to nature by creating poetry.
Coleridge wonders about his individuality in "The Eolian Harp," asking what if he is only another
harp treated by nature in the same way as all other harps.
The question of the poet's relation to nature arises in the ode as well. Coleridge supplies
somewhat of an answer in his later poem when he writes, in effect, that each Eolian harp gives
and takes differently from nature. However, Coleridge, having figured this, finds himself faced
with a new dilemma, also expressed figuratively with the image of the harp. In "Dejection: An
Ode" the harp's music reflects Coleridges dejection with rakes and moans "which better far were
mute."
The solution to the current problem in each poem is found, to some degree, outside the poet, in
the silent audience the poet addresses. Coleridge turns to Sara Fricker in the earlier poem, and
later to Sara Hutchinson, leaving both poems somewhat open-ended. The solution offered in the
poems is that the problem itself is an egotistical one, and that Coleridge must think of someone
else to gain a wider perspective and relieve himself of the dilemma.

Cycles in Tennyson and Coleridge

Gary Weissman '90 (English 32, 1988)
The Lady of the Lake catches Excalibur when Bedivere throws the sword into the water, in "The
Passing of Arthur" (1833-1869) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The returning of the sword to the lake
concludes the cycle that began when King Arthur first took it from the water.
In "Dejection: An Ode" Coleridge also emphasizes the cycle of nature giving to man and man
giving back to nature. Nonetheless, Tennyson's epic poem takes a much different form than
Coleridge's ode, but both works seriously address the struggle of the individual to restore order in
a situation of chaos by coming to terms with nature. This coming to terms takes the form of
recognizing and fulfilling a cycle of giving and taking from nature. Coleridge plays the part of
both King Arthur and Bedivere; he is like Arthur in that his health and happiness are passing
away, and like Bedivere because, by means of writing the ode, he gives back to nature,
symbolically throwing Excalibur back in the lake.

Theme and Subject in Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Age and Youth

The Agony of Penance in "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (lines 582-585)
"I Gotta Tell You This": Compulsive Storytelling in "Rime" and Great Expectations
The Hope in Nature-as-Mother in "Dejection"
Coleridge, Dejection, and Eolian Harps
Tennyson, Coleridge, Loss, and Death
The Poem as a Vehicle of Meditation in Tennyson and Coleridge
Association in "Kubla Khan"

Age and Youth in Coleridge and Wordsworth

Andrew Frumovitz, Semester II, 1990
He holds him with his glittering eye-The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years' child:
The Mariner hath his will.
These lines, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) relates
directly to Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey". Thematically, both works express the wisdom of the
aged passed on to the naivete of the young. The ancient mariner has confronted a stranger, a
young wedding-guest, "next of kin" to the bridegroom on his way to indulge in the merriment.
The youth's being interrupted on his way to frivolity places him in a position of carelessness,
without either responsibility or knowledge. Yet the mariner's "glittering eye," expressing a deep,
magical sense of purpose holds the youth, focuses his attention as a child of "three years'" on a
parent's lesson. The mariner then tells his tale of humanity, and leaves the youth to ponder the
lesson:
He [the Wedding-Guest] went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.
When the mariner has gone, the youth is unable to just forget or accept the tale and go onto the
party. Becoming a wiser and more somber of the world, the wedding-guest is deeply moved by
the story. So too does William Wordsworth express the theme of a young person's coming of age,
losing their childish absentness for knowledge of a perhaps more melancholy life, in Lines
Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey. The poetic structure revolves around an older
brother's returning after five years to a place of natural beauty, and forewarning his sister of
viewing the nature with unbridled passion.

The Agony of Penance in Rime of the Ancient Mariner (lines

582-585)
Ken Herndon, English 32, 1989
The mariner in Coleridge's poem, we find, has been condemned to retell his story to anyone he
can make listen. Constantly reciting this tale of sin is an "agony" which will not be relieved until
the story has been completely told. Whether this penance was placed on him from within or from
without is uncertain, but obvious is the fact that in order to purge the sin from his system, he felt
compelled to tell his story.
This penance could very well be the same motivation for Pip's retelling of his childhood from the
vantage point of a later stage in life. For Pip, the protagonist and narrator of Great Expectations
experienced an event similar to the mariner's shooting of the Albatross -- he left his rightful home
with Joe for false expectations in the gentlemen's world of London. Indeed, a certain degree of
guilt followed him throughout the book, which, although not explicitly stated, may have been
relieved upon the termination of the final chapter, that is, in the form of the novel itself. In these
ways, although their respective literary techniques are quite different (one a poem, the other a
novel), the two works in question run parallel courses both in terms of subject matter and in form.
Coleridge, like Wordsworth, felt a great loss with the "betrayal" of the revolutionaries in France
and the Reign of Terror, and spoke of this metaphorically as a loss of the innocence of idealistic
childhood. Dickens saw the despair around him in London among the poor and the corruption of
the gentlemen's class and wondered what had happened to their innocence.

I Gotta Tell You This" : Compulsive Storytelling in "Rime"

and Great Expectations
Julie Cohen '92 (English 32, 1988)
A feature common to Great Expectations, Waterland, and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
is compulsive storytelling. They explore the themes of storytelling as analysis, justification, and
unification and ultimately lead to a questioning of the texts themselves. The Ancient Mariner is
forced by some sort of divinely imposed heartburn to recite his tale of terror to random listeners.
The waylaid wedding-guest has no desire to hear the Mariner's tale, but he is held by the
Mariner's glittering eye and "cannot choose but hear."
Pip similarly tells his tale in a fashion that shows he is very aware he is telling a story; in chapter
37 he speaks of giving a chapter to Estella -- illuminating that the form of his story is very much
on his mind. The reader is held by Pip's glittering eye -- his distinctive point of view -- and
becomes a captive listener to Pip's tale he must tell in order to analyze his past. The Mariner's
explanation of why he is telling his story is in response to a question from the wedding-guest:
"What manner of man art thou--?" Storytelling, say both Coleridge and Dickens, is a means of
establishing identity. To use a concept from Waterland, man is the animal who tells stories.

These urges arise from a need to become responsible for past actions -- the Mariner's killing of
the albatross, Pip's folly in his rejection of Joe (among other things his bad infuence on Herbert,
his snobbery to Biddy, etc.). Responsibility was a particularly important area of Victorian concern
-- the responsibility of man for himself and others gave birth the Dickens's urges to social reform
in England.

The Hope in Nature-as-Mother

In Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode, strophe 4, 11. 47-55, both the most hopeful and the most
arcane of Dejection: An Ode, Coleridge propounds the solution to his spiritual drougnt (even if
he is unable to take advantage of it himself) but leaves the reader wondering about what kind of
oasis he can possibly be talking. Coleridge believes that nature contains some numinous power
source which humans can tap if they realize that to receive they mus first give ov their own
selves. The soul must be induced to "issue forth/A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud," the
arbiter of human-nature relations, but Coleridge never idicates how one does this. His emphatic
mode of address--"O Lady"--demonstrates the importance of such a mystical union, but it
remains unavailable to the reader because Coleridge is "waxing poetic" (albeit in an aesthetically
pleasing manner) rather than systematically explaining a new spirituality.
If Coleridge cannot therefore be accused of a didactic approach to poetry, neither is he a feminist
polemicist. In fact, just the opposite: this passage's personification of nature as female betrays an
attitude which feminist theologians have called the ethic of the eternal feminine. Nature is an allencompassing, nourishing, compassionate presence, the stereotypical bourgeois mother writ
large. Coleridge also inherits from the Greeks the tendancy to see psyche--"the soul herself"--as a
feminine aspect of human being.
If I fault this passage for its sexist constructions, I can at least support its overall positive outlook:
even if nature is mommy, at least she cares, and actively desires spiritual intercourse with her
children. This is the ode's most hopeful moment, and the only indication within the poem itself
that the blessing at the end could be at all effectual.

Tennyson, Coleridge, Loss, and Death

Gary Weissman '90 (English 32, 1988)
Feeling dejected and unable to sleep, Tennyson rereads letters he has received from his dead
friend, Arthur Hallam, in stanza 95 of In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850). Tennyson's elegy is
written in first-person and the narrator is the poet himself, just as in "Dejection: An Ode". Like
Coleridge, Tennyson finds himself reminiscing about the past when he is dejected. Upon
rereading Hallam's letters, Tennyson enters a trance and feels his friend's soul flash on his own,
winding them together. Tennyson finds that his solution is the same one as Coleridge's; relief
from dejection can be found in a person outside of the poet. This person is his dead friend, who
has never truly died in memory and spirit. Like "Dejection: An Ode," section 95 develops from
despair to hope. The earlier sense of loss is relieved when the poet reclaims something in the
other person.

While Tennyson is dejected over the tragic death of his close friend, Coleridge is dejected
because he has lost his health, youthful joy, and creativity. Coleridge considers loss and death on
more personal terms because his own life is in question. Tennyson deals with a more factual and
unchangable case of loss and death because Hallam is literally dead. Therefore, the solution both
poets arrive at yeild different results. Tennyson, by turning to Hallam, learns to accept his death
and make due with what Hallam has left him in the form of letters and memories of time they
spent together. This solution, to some degree, is unavoidable because it is the most rational and
positive way of dealing with the death of a friend. The poem charts Tennyson's arrival to this
somewhat anticipated conclusion. The solution to Coleridge's problem is more complex and,
indeed, he does not arrive at a fulfilling answer. For both Tennyson and Coleridge the strongest
solutions do not to exist within their poems, but in the actually writing of their poems, as if
writing poetry is the best thera

The Poem as a Vehicle of Meditation in Tennyson and

Coleridge
Keylan Qazzaz, '90 (English 32, 1988)
In "In Memoriam: A. H. H.", Alfred, Lord Tennyson explores his doubts and confusion about
things such as death, the afterlife, the meaning of life, and the role of the individual in the world.
As in Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," the poem serves as medium for his ponderings and
sorrows. One theme the two poems contain concerns a poet's moment of contact with an
inspirational force. Tennyson experiences this moment when Arthur Hallam's soul touches him as
he reads Hallam's letters:
So word by word, and line on line,
The dead man touched me from the past,
And all at once it seemed at last
The living soul was flashed on mine,
And mine in this was wound. (Section 95, ll. 33-37)
Tennyson experiences the moment, Coleridge longs for it:
Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed And sent my soul
abroad,
Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give,
Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live! (lines17-20)
Both authors make themselves the speaker, and acknowlege the personal nature of the thoughts.
Coleridge and Tennyson speak of losses in their lives, deaths of parts of themselves.

Association in "Kubla Khan"

Chris Drummond '93 (English 32, 1989)

In "Kubla Khan," Samuel Taylor Coleridge employs a superficially loose and disjointed
construction which is actually carefully designed to trigger associations of imagery that produce
mental echoes of juxtaposed impressions ("Coleridge's Intellectual Debts"). The lack of a
consistent rhyme scheme, the uneven division of stanzas, and the use of iambic meter with a
varying number of feet all contribute to a sense of disorientation, which in turn facilitates the
process of mental echoing. The most important element of this effect, however, are the images
themselves:
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover! (Norton 2, p. 354)
In a mere five lines, Coleridge evokes a rush of impressions encompassing such disparate
subjects as sex, nature, and religion. Unable to integrate this apposition of imagery rationally, the
conscious mind gives way to the subconscious process of association, thus leaving the reader
with a series of fantastic and mysterious impressions that are felt rather than understood.
( Follow for text of poem)

Kubla Khan; Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment

The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of pt and deserved celebrity,
and, as far as the author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on
the grounds of any supposed poetic merits.
In the summer of the year 1797, the author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse
between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In
consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which
he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of
the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: "Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be
built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a
wall." The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external
senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less
than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the
images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions,
without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a
distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote
down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unforunately called out by a
person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his
room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague
and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or
ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a
stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!

Then all the charm

Is broken -- all that phantom world so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each misshape[s] the other. Stay awhile,
Poor youth! who scarcely dar'st lift up thine eyes -The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon
The visions will return! And lo, he stays,
And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms
Come trembling back, unite, and now once more
The pool becomes a mirror.
[From Coleridge's The Picture; or, the lover's Resolution, lines 91-100]
Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the author has frequently purposed to finish
for himself what had been originally, as were, given to him. [I shall sing a sweeter song today]:
but the tomorrow is yet to come. As a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of a very
different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease.
In Xanadu did KubIa Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chafly grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And `mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

And `mid this tumult KubIa heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!
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 honeydew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Literary relations

Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- Literary Relations: Sources,

Influences, Analogues, Intertextuality

Coleridge's Intellectual Debts

Age and Youth in Coleridge and Wordsworth
"I Gotta Tell You This": Compulsive Storytelling in "Rime" and Great Expectations
Tennyson, Coleridge, Loss, and Death
Cycles in Tennyson and Coleridge
The Poem as a Vehicle of Meditation in Tennyson and Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" and P. B. Shelley's "Mont
Blanc"
Coleridge, Tennyson, and Tithonus

Austen, Coleridge, and the New Philsophy

Coleridge's Intellectual Debts

Glenn Everett, Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee at Martin
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's greatest intellectual debts were first to William Godwin's Political
Justice, especially during his Pantisocratic period, and to David Hartley's Observations on Man,
which is the source of the psychology which we find in "Frost at Midnight." Hartley argued that
we become aware of sensory events as impressions, and that "ideas" are derived by noticing
similarities and differences between impressions and then by naming them. Connections resulting
from the coincidence of impressions create linkages, so that the occurrence of one impression
triggers those links and calls up the memory of those ideas with which it is associated (See
Dorothy Emmet, "Coleridge and Philosophy," in Writers and Their Background: S.T.
Coleridge, ed. R.L. Brett [1972], p. 199).
But far more important than native British influences was his trip to Germany in 1798-99, where
he encountered the work of Kant, Schiller, Lessing, Schelling, and A.W. Schlegel. Many of the
points made in his Lectures on Shakespeare first appeared in the works of Lessing and Schlegel,
and the important Chapter 13 of the Biographia Literaria is substantially indebted to Kant,
Fichte, and especially Schelling, whom he has been accused of plagiarizing. In any case,
Coleridge is the point of contact between the English and continental Romantic movements.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "This Lime-Tree Bower My

Prison" and P. B. Shelley's "Mont Blanc"
W. Glasgow Phillips (English 32, Autumn 1990)
My gentle-hearted Charles! . . . Thou has pined
And hungered after Nature, many a year,
In the great City pent, winning thy way
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
And sad calamity!
Both Coleridge and Shelley were influenced by the writings of William Godwin, a social
philosopher and the author of Political Justice, which was published in 1793 (Context 32,
Godwin), and these poems work in the context of his philosophy. Godwin was a proponent of
atheism, anarchy, personal freedom, and small, self-contained communities. This poem by
Coleridge shows some of Godwin's influence of the poet, at least in that it shows the desire to
leave the "City." Though Coleridge was evidently mistaken in the belief that Lamb hated the city
and yearned for the country (Norton p. 333), it is evident from this passage and the rest of the
poem that Coleridge himself wished for an idyllic life in harmony with nature. In fact, he formed

a plan to live in a utopian community (modeled on Godwin's ideas of such a community) with
eleven other gentlemen and their wives in the wilds of Pennsylvania. Shelley, as well, was
influenced in no small fashion by Godwin; Godwin's daughter became his wife and editor.
Godwin's influence is also evident in "Mont Blanc," in that the poem reflects Shelley's atheism
(he believes in a "Power," but definitely not in a personal God which might redeem him in the
Christian fashion).
"Mont Blanc" is written in the genre of the "local" poem, which meditatively describes the place
in which the speaker is situated. "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" is written in the form of a
"conversation poem," a poem in which the speaker addresses his lines to a listener within the
poem, generally a listener who has little voice of his own. Coleridge's poem takes on the tone of a
"local" poem in the final stanza, when the speaker intimately describes what he has seen from his
post in the little grove. It is similar to Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" in that it combines these two
genres.

Coleridge, Tennyson, and Tithonus

Gary Weissman '90 (English 32, 1988)
The immortal Tithonus lives forever like thought without substance in "Tithonus" (1860) by
Tennyson. Because Eos forgot to obtain for him the gift of immortal youth, his body withers and
deteriorates, and he becomes a shadow, a dream of what he once was. "Tithonus" is told in firstperson like Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," but the narrator is not the poet. Instead, the speaker
in Tennyson's Victorian poem is the protagonist of the Greek myth on which the poem is based.
Tithonus exists in solitude, roaming the world.
"Dejection: An Ode" also concerns theme of loss and change through time. Coleridge, having lost
his health, youthful joy, and creativity, has died in the same symbolic sense as has Tithonus,
although both men continue to exist among the living. Both poets express the same tribulations,
but Coleridge expresses them himself, while Tennyson does so through the guise of myth. Both
poems are open-ended, creating the feeling that Tithonus will live and Coleridge will lie awake
forever. Therefore, both Tithonus and Coleridge express a longing for the past and a
dissatisfaction for the present conditions. Coleridge, wishing for sleep, pursues the same desire
Tithonus has for death.

"Dejection: An Ode"
Glenn Everett, Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee at Martin
Genre: Ode.
Form: 139 lines in eight sections.
Metre: iambic. Lines vary from 3 to 6 feet.
Rhyme scheme: primarily couplets, with some abba and abab groups.

1. When Coleridge wrote this poem, he had just seen the first four stanzas of Wordsworth's
"Immortality" ode. How does it respond to that poem? Just glancing at the titles, we see that one
poem is about intimations of immortality recalled from childhood and the other about mental
depression. Where do the poems touch? How much agreement and disagreement about the nature
of poetic perception do you find?
2. If "we receive but what we give" and the speaker "may not hope from outward forms to win/
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within," is there any hope for him? Does anything
within the poem suggest a solution?
3. Some readers feel that although parts of this ode are brilliant, it does not achieve artistic unity-even in comparison with "Kubla Khan." Do you agree?
4. This poem was condensed for publication from verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth's
sister-in-law, with whom Coleridge was in love. Composed in 1802, it is almost the last great
poem that he wrote, and in it he bemoans the loss of his creative powers. His problem was an
opium addiction which he could not shake and for which he felt both self-pity and enormous
guilt. (At the time, laudanum was as readily available as aspirin and used for such minor
discomforts as headaches and dyspepsia.) Coleridge went out of his way to obscure these
biographical facts. Does the poem need a context, or was he right?

Student Commentary on the Poem

Coleridge, Dejection, and Eolian Harps

The Hope in Nature-as-Mother in "Dejection"
Cycles in Tennyson and Coleridge
The Poem as a Vehicle of Meditation in Tennyson and Coleridge
Suffering in Coleridge and Wordsworth
Coleridge, Tennyson, and Tithonus

Suffering in Coleridge and Wordsworth

Chris Drummond '93 (English 32, 1989)
In "Dejection: An Ode," Coleridge bemoans his loss of vitality, joy, and poetic creativity. Among
other things, Coleridge has become separated from the innocent experience of nature he had as a
youth. "There was a time," Coleridge writes, "when, though my path was rough / This joy within
me dallied with distress" (Norton 2, p. 376). Now, however, Coleridge looks at the wonders of
nature, only to "see, not feel, how beautiful they are!" (Norton 2, p. 375). Coleridge, however,
does not fault nature for this change. Instead, he recognizes that man's experience of the world is
necessarily subjective:
O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live:
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud! (Norton 2, p. 376)

For Coleridge, beauty truly lies in the eye of the beholder. Unfortunately, his misery is of such an
intensity that it has become self-perpetuating, with Coleridge becoming depressed because of his
depression. Inextricably caught in the throes of utter gloom, Coleridge cannot make the mental
shift necessary to shed nature's "shroud" and don her "wedding garment." Instead, Coleridge must
comfort himself with the happiness of Sara Hutchinson, writing of the woman he loves, "To her
may all things live, from pole to pole, / Their life the eddying of her living soul!" (Norton 2, p.
378)
In "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," Wordsworth explains how he comes to
terms with his suffering. As with Coleridge, Wordsworth has become separated from the innocent
child's experience of nature, for he "cannot paint / What then I was" (Norton 2, p. 153). Likewise,
Wordsworth also recognizes that this change is not in nature itself, but rather in the way that we
view nature, noting that the world is an interpretation "Of eye, and ear, --both what they half
create, / And what perceive" (Norton 2, p. 154). In addition, Wordsworth, like Coleridge, recieves
consolation from a lady, specifically his sister Dorothy.
Seeing how the joy of nature passes on to future generations, Wordsworth consoles himself with
the fact that his sister will experience the world as he once did. Certainly, Wordsworth receives a
greater degree of comfort than Coleridge. Still, the two resemble each other in the way they value
another person's happiness above their own.

Tintern Abbey"
Glenn Everett, Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee at Martin
Genre: Greater Romantic Lyric.
Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme: 159 blank verse lines in five verse paragraphs.
1. The actual title of this piece is "Lines"the rest is subtitle. Wordsworth frequently gives us very
precise information about the circumstances in which he composed his poems. Why does he
locate this poem so precisely in time and space?
2. Compare this poem based on Wordsworth's contemplation of the landscape near Tintern Abbey
with Keats's ode based on his contemplation of a Grecian Urn. Of course the poems differ, but
what differences can you attribute to the difference in type of subject? (You might also compare
"Tintern Abbey" with a poem like "Ode to a Nightingale," where the object is natural rather than
a manmade work of art.)
3. Throughout the first half of the poem, we hear about the poet's joy in revisiting this particular
site and what his recollection of it has meant to him during the PAST five years. Now he stands
there again,
not only with the sense
Of PRESENT pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts

That in this moment there is life and food

For FUTURE years.
But this re- visiting turns out not to be a simple recharging of his esthetic batteries. Time has
passed, and he has changed. Try to summarize line 66-110: what has he lost, and what is the
"abundant recompense" for that loss?
4. "I have learned/ To look on nature, not as in the hour/ Of thoughtless youth; but hearing
oftentimes/ The still sad music of humanity . . . ." He looks on nature and hears the music of
humanity? How? What are the intermediate steps in this association? What is that music?
5. "Romantic writers, though nature poets, were humanists above all, for they dealt with the nonhuman only insofar as it is the occasion for the activity which defines man: thought, the process
of intellection." Do you think this statement is true of Wordsworth? Which poems would you use
to illustrate your argument?
6. In both "Tintern Abbey" and "Dejection," the last verse paragraph speaks of the poet's most
intimate personal relationship. Why? What has such an association got to do, in either poem, with
"the shaping power of imagination"? Is there anything in the poem that accounts for this
movement?
7. John Stuart Mill credits this poem by Wordsworth with teaching him that there was real,
permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation, and that such contemplation does not separate
one from mankind but felicitates an interest in common feelings and the common destiny of
human beings. Do you find this to be true of the poem? Which sections do you think he was
talking about? Might this have something to do with Hartley's associationism ?

Austen, Coleridge, and the New Philsophy

Megan Lynch, English 32 1998
The beginning of the nineteenth century witnessed a philosophical shift from empiricism to
emotionalism. Philosophers of the new school, including Lord Shaftesbury and Adam Smith,
argued for the equivalency of feeling with reason, since it was the emotion of sympathy which
provided the basis for moral behavior. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had been at Cambridge and
had the privilege of being surrounded by intellectuals, fully immersed himself in this new
philosophy. Jane Austen lacked the benefit of intellectual company and thus was less acquainted
with the philosophical movements of her time. Coleridge's philosophical release enabled him to
utilize profound imagery and intensely convey human suffering in his poetry. Austen's relative
seclusion contributed to a restraint in her writing, a lack of imagery, and thus a less convincing
portrait of suffering.
Coleridge's philosophical influences were both British and continental. From his homeland,
William Godwin and David Hartley inspired him. He derived from Hartley the notion that "ideas
are derived from noticing similarities and differences between impressions and then by naming
them" (Everett, Glenn. Coleridge's Intellectual Debts. Context 32). Coleridge also had the

privilege of travel. He found meaning in philosophical works by Kant, Schiller, Lessing,

Schelling, and A.W. Schlegel while visiting Germany. Through these philosophical influences,
Coleridge fully embraced the ideal of privileging the emotions, and thus was able to convey
emotion with vivid imagery. In 1834's "Dejection: An Ode," he delves into the experience of
suffering:
A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear.
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word, sigh, or tear
With mere suggestion, Coleridge's words at once give the reader a general sense of his misery
and narrate the poet's loss of creative energy. Encoded in the poem is his surrender to opium
addiction; his grief lacks "a pang" and is "stifled, drowsy" because of his abuse of laudanum.
"Void, dark, and drear" give insight into the sorry state of Coleridge's emotions, while the
"natural outlet relief" that he lacks is his vanquished creative energy. In this manner Coleridge
eloquently describes a personal experience with human suffering. He wholeheartedly involves
himself in a theme which is universal with the intensity of his work.
Jane Austen lacked both the philosophical exposure and travel experience of Coleridge. She lived
all of her life in Hampshire and Bath, England, mainly involved in family circles. Although her
writing coincided with Emotionalist philosophy, Austen's work lacks the imagery and intensity
which was so integral in the poetry of Coleridge. This creates a hindrance to her ability to convey
suffering in an intense and personal way. In 1813's Pride and Prejudice, she writes with some
distance on Jane's suffering over the potential loss of Bingley's affections:
Elizabeth chose for her employment the examination of all the letters which Jane
had written to her since her being in Kent. They contained no actual complaint,
nor was there any revival of past occurrences, or any communication of present
suffering. But in all, and in almost every line of each, there was a want of that
cheerfulness which had been used to characterize her style, and which, proceeding
from the serenity of a mind at ease with itself, and kindly disposed towards every
one, had been scarcely ever clouded. Elizabeth noted every sentence conveying
the idea of uneasiness, with an attention which it had hardly received on the first
perusal (Austen 122).
Austen's writing evokes no mental images of Jane's condition for the reader. No imagery is used
to convey intense suffering. Austen even seems to de-emphasize Jane's unhappiness, reminding
the reader that she possesses "a mind at ease with itself." Austen's rhetorical choices are anything
but intense; Jane's condition is described as "a want of cheerfulness" and "uneasiness." Austen's
writing, shielded from philosophical engagement, lacks the mechanisms to convey the nature of
Jane's suffering intensely.
Experience with profound philosophical works was a great influence upon Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. He became intellectually free to utilize emotionally suggestive imagery and reveal his
personal struggles with profound suffering. Jane Austen was still immersed in a culture of
restraint. The emotions of her characters come across as superficial because, lacking

philosophical grounding, she did not possess the tools to enliven the feelings of her characters.
Though both Coleridge and Austen address suffering in their work, Coleridge takes the approach
of plunging the reader with him into the abyss, while Austen writes with restraint.