Themes
The Transformative Power of the
Imagination
Coleridge
believed that a strong, active imagination could become a vehicle for
transcending unpleasant circumstances. Many of his poems are powered
exclusively by imaginative flights, wherein the Speaker temporarily
abandons his immediate surroundings, exchanging them for an entirely new and
completely fabricated experience. Using the imagination in this way is both
empowering and surprising because it encourages a total and complete disrespect
for the confines of time and place. These mental and emotional jumps are often
well rewarded. Perhaps Coleridge’s most famous use of imagination occurs in
“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” (1797), in
which the speaker employs a keen poetic mind that allows him to take part in a
journey that he cannot physically make. When he “returns” to the bower, after
having imagined himself on a fantastic stroll through the countryside, the
speaker discovers, as a reward, plenty of things to enjoy from inside the bower
itself, including the leaves, the trees, and the shadows. The power of
imagination transforms the prison into a perfectly pleasant spot.
The Interplay of Philosophy,
Piety, and Poetry
Coleridge
used his poetry to explore conflicting issues in philosophy and religious
piety. Some critics argue that Coleridge’s interest in philosophy was simply
his attempt to understand the imaginative and intellectual impulses that fueled
his poetry. To support the claim that his imaginative and intellectual forces
were, in fact, organic and derived from the natural world, Coleridge linked
them to God, spirituality, and worship. In his work, however, poetry,
philosophy, and piety clashed, creating friction and disorder for Coleridge,
both on and off the page. In “The Eolian Harp” (1795),
Coleridge struggles to reconcile the three forces. Here, the speaker’s
philosophical tendencies, particularly the belief that an “intellectual breeze”
(47) brushes by and inhabits all living things with consciousness,
collide with those of his orthodox wife, who disapproves of his unconventional
ideas and urges him to Christ. While his wife lies untroubled, the speaker
agonizes over his spiritual conflict, caught between Christianity and a unique,
individual spirituality that equates nature with God. The poem ends by
discounting the pantheist spirit, and the speaker concludes by privileging God
and Christ over nature and praising them for having healed him from the
spiritual wounds inflicted by these unorthodox views.
Nature and the Development of
the Individual
Coleridge,
Wordsworth, and other romantic poets praised the unencumbered, imaginative soul
of youth, finding images in nature with which to describe it. According to
their formulation, experiencing nature was an integral part of the development
of a complete soul and sense of personhood. The death of his father forced
Coleridge to attend school in London, far away from the rural idylls of his
youth, and he lamented the missed opportunities of his sheltered, city-bound
adolescence in many poems, including “Frost at Midnight” (1798). Here, the speaker sits quietly by a fire, musing on his life,
while his infant son sleeps nearby. He recalls his boarding school days, during
which he would both daydream and lull himself to sleep by remembering his home
far away from the city, and he tells his son that he shall never be removed
from nature, the way the speaker once was. Unlike the speaker, the son shall
experience the seasons and shall learn about God by discovering the beauty and
bounty of the natural world. The son shall be given the opportunity to develop
a relationship with God and with nature, an opportunity denied to both the
speaker and Coleridge himself. For Coleridge, nature had the capacity to teach
joy, love, freedom, and piety, crucial characteristics for a worthy, developed
individual.
Motifs
Conversation Poems
Coleridge
wanted to mimic the patterns and cadences of everyday speech in his poetry.
Many of his poems openly address a single figure—the speaker’s wife, son,
friend, and so on—who listens silently to the simple, straightforward language
of the speaker. Unlike the descriptive, long, digressive poems of Coleridge’s
classicist predecessors, Coleridge’s so-called conversation poems are short,
self-contained, and often without a discernable poetic form. Colloquial,
spontaneous, and friendly, Coleridge’s conversation poetry is also highly
personal, frequently incorporating events and details of his domestic life in
an effort to widen the scope of possible poetic content. Although he sometimes
wrote in Blank Verse, unrhymed Iambic Pentameter,
he adapted this metrical form to suit a more colloquial rhythm. Both Wordsworth
and Coleridge believed that everyday language and speech rhythms would help
broaden poetry’s audience to include the middle and lower classes, who might
have felt excluded or put off by the form and content of neoclassicists, such
as Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and John Dryden.
Delight in the Natural World
Like
the other romantics, Coleridge worshiped nature and recognized poetry’s
capacity to describe the beauty of the natural world. Nearly all of Coleridge’s
poems express a respect for and delight in natural beauty. Close observation,
great attention to detail, and precise descriptions of color aptly demonstrate
Coleridge’s respect and delight. Some poems, such as “This Lime-Tree Bower My
Prison,” “Youth and Age” (1834), and
“Frost at Midnight,” mourn the speakers’ physical isolation from the outside
world. Others, including “The Eolian Harp,” use images of nature to explore
philosophical and analytical ideas. Still other poems, including “The
Nightingale” (ca. 1798),
simply praise nature’s beauty. Even poems that don’t directly deal with nature,
including “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” derive some
symbols and images from nature. Nevertheless, Coleridge guarded against
the Pathetic Fallacy, or the attribution of human feeling
to the natural world. To Coleridge, nature contained an innate, constant
joyousness wholly separate from the ups and downs of human experience.
Prayer
Although
Coleridge’s prose reveals more of his religious philosophizing than his poetry,
God, Christianity, and the act of prayer appear in some form in nearly all of
his poems. The son of an Anglican vicar, Coleridge vacillated from supporting
to criticizing Christian tenets and the Church of England. Despite his criticisms,
Coleridge remained defiantly supportive of prayer, praising it in his notebooks
and repeatedly referencing it in his poems. He once told the novelist Thomas de
Quincey that prayer demanded such close attention that it was the one of the
hardest actions of which human hearts were capable. The conclusion to
Part 1of Christabel portrays Christabel in prayer, “a
lovely sight to see” (279). In
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the mariner is stripped of his ability to
speak as part of his extreme punishment and, consequently, left incapable of
praying. “The Pains of Sleep” (1803)
contrasts the speaker at restful prayer, in which he prays silently, with the
speaker at passionate prayer, in which he battles imaginary demons to pray
aloud. In the sad poem, “Epitaph” (1833),
Coleridge composes an epitaph for himself, which urges people to pray for him
after he dies. Rather than recommend a manner or method of prayer, Coleridge’s
poems reflect a wide variety, which emphasizes his belief in the importance of
individuality.
Symbols
The Sun
Coleridge
believed that symbolic language was the only acceptable way of expressing deep
religious truths and consistently employed the sun as a symbol of God. In “The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge compares the sun to “God’s own head” (97) and, later, attributes the first phase of the mariner’s
punishment to the sun, as it dehydrates the crew. All told, this poem contains
eleven references to the sun, many of which signify the Christian conception of
a wrathful, vengeful God. Bad, troubling things happen to the crew during the
day, while smooth sailing and calm weather occur at night, by the light of the
moon. Frequently, the sun stands in for God’s influence and power, as well as a
symbol of his authority. The setting sun spurs philosophical musings, as in
“The Eolian Harp,” and the dancing rays of sunlight represent a pinnacle of
nature’s beauty, as in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.”
The Moon
Like
the sun, the moon often symbolizes God, but the moon has more positive
connotations than the sun. In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the sun and
the moon represent two sides of the Christian God: the sun represents the
angry, wrathful God, whereas the moon represents the benevolent, repentant God.
All told, the moon appears fourteen times in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,”
and generally favorable things occur during night, in contrast to the horrors
that occur during the day. For example, the mariner’s curse lifts and he
returns home by moonlight. “Dejection: An Ode” (1802)
begins with an epitaph about the new moon and goes on to describe the beauty of
a moonlit night, contrasting its beauty with the speaker’s sorrowful soul.
Similarly, “Frost at Midnight” also praises the moon as it illuminates icicles
on a winter evening and spurs the speaker to great thought.
Dreams and Dreaming
Coleridge
explores dreams and dreaming in his poetry to communicate the power of the
imagination, as well as the inaccessible clarity of vision. “Kubla Khan” is
subtitled “A Vision in a Dream.” According to Coleridge, he fell asleep while
reading and dreamed of a marvelous pleasure palace for the next few hours. Upon
awakening, he began transcribing the dream-vision but was soon called away;
when he returned, he wrote out the fragments that now comprise “Kubla Khan.”
Some critics doubt Coleridge’s story, attributing it to an attempt at
increasing the poem’s dramatic effect. Nevertheless, the poem speaks to the
imaginative possibilities of the subconscious. Dreams usually have a
pleasurable connotation, as in “Frost at Midnight.” There, the speaker, lonely
and insomniac as a child at boarding school, comforts himself by imagining and
then dreaming of his rural home. In his real life, however, Coleridge suffered
from nightmares so terrible that sometimes his own screams would wake him, a
phenomenon he details in “The Pains of Sleep.” Opium probably gave Coleridge a
sense of well-being that allowed him to sleep without the threat of nightmares.
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NOTES PREPARED FROM INTERNET SITES
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