This City now doth like a garment wear All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. In his first splendour, valley, rock or hill; "IT IS A BEAUTEOUS EVENING, CALM AND FREE Ir is a beauteous evening, calm and free; Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here, If thou appear untouched by solemn thought, Thy nature is not therefore less divine. 66 THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US THE world is too much with us: late and soon, We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! N 5 10 5 10 5 It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. SCORN not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned, It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faery-land To struggle through dark ways; and, when a damp SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834) IO 5 ΙΟ Of all the poets who helped to usher in the Romantic movement, none was more original and brilliant than Coleridge. Possessed of a magnetic presence, a penetrating mind, a profound spiritual insight, and a wonderful influence over most of those with whom he came into contact, he had a native genius which ought to have placed him among the first of English authors. But, as Carlyle well expresses it, "To the man himself Nature had given, in high measure, the seeds of a noble endowment; and to unfold it had been forbidden him." For of all figures in our English pantheon of poets, none has been so weak of will, so destitute of executive force, so incapable of sustained effort, as this great dreamer. The early part of his life was filled with vague plans for social revolution; the last with a constant struggle against a craving for opium. His work was fragmentary to a singular degree. Much of his poetry is unworthy of his capabilities. As a matter of fact, nine-tenths of what he did write has very properly been forgotten. But the part that is good, most of it written during a single twelve-month when the poet was twenty-five years old, is marvellous, ranking with the best in English poetry. The imagery, the metre, the felicity of phrase, the novelty, the suggestiveness, the splendid creative inspiration, are of the highest, the inevitable order. But Coleridge was not gifted with poetic faculties alone. Critic, philosopher, theologian, journalist, lecturer, sparkling conversationist, he was all these, but all marred by the fatal flaw. Carry into action his splendid theories, or bring to a completion his brilliant designs, he could not. Yet, in spite of his frailties, he must be remembered as one of the most potent agencies in revolutionizing the English taste for literature and in changing the current of English critical and philosophical thought. He had the gift of firing others to do what he could not do himself. Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb, Hazlitt, Scott - all have acknowledged their great debt to the inspiration received from Coleridge. 1772-1804. - Coleridge was born at the village of Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire, October, 1772. His father, a clergyman and schoolmaster, died when the boy was only eight years old. Two years later he entered Christ's Hospital, a free school in London, where he was a schoolmate of that most delightful of essayists, Charles Lamb. At the age of nineteen he was enrolled at Jesus College, Cambridge, but left three years later without taking a degree. About this time he met the poet Southey, then a student at Oxford, and the two young men formed wild schemes of a socialist colony in America, an undertaking which was subsequently given up for lack of funds. In 1795 Coleridge and Southey married sisters, and the former at length settled down in Somersetshire, where he became intimate with Wordsworth and united with him in writing the Lyrical Ballads. To this year, 1797-1798, belong The Ancient Mariner and the first part of Christabel; also Kubla Khan, a short and very beautiful fragment, composed (its author asserts) in a dream. Though he had written some verse before he met Wordsworth, this was the high-water mark of Coleridge's poetry. The next year, with Wordsworth and his sister, Coleridge went to Germany, where he learned the language, became interested in German philosophy, and began to translate Schiller's Wallenstein. In 1801, at the age of twenty-eight, he made his home in the Lake district near Wordsworth and Southey. Here, just as life was opening her richest possibilities, he unfortunately took for an attack of rheumatism a quack medicine containing opium. The opium habit was henceforward to be his curse. 1804-1834. — Abandoning his family to the care of Southey, Cole ridge spent the next dozen years in roaming hither and thither, in England or on the continent, writing, lecturing, dreaming, fighting his terrible habit. In these years his writing was mostly of the critical kind. In 1816, at the age of forty-four, he placed himself in the family of a London physician, who undertook to help him overcome his appetite for opium. That year proved to be a second period of activity: it witnessed the production of the Biographia Literaria, his most notable prose work. The rest of his life was spent at the home of this good Mr. Gillman. Though unproductive of much published work, this was nevertheless a season of great influence and inspiration for the many "young, inquiring men," who were wont to gather around the oracle to listen to his wonderful and prophetic utterances concerning problems of philosophy and theology. Coleridge died in July, 1834. His best poems are undoubtedly those which were written during his early manhood, while he was enjoying the companionship of Wordsworth. Kubla Khan and Christabel, while in certain passages of an almost unearthly beauty, are after all only fragments. But the ballad of Love, the Hymn before Sunrise, and the ode on France are both highly poetical and complete. His masterpiece, The Ancient Mariner, in its combination of mystery and sublimity, of marvellous descriptive power and half-hidden spiritual truth, stands undoubtedly first of the consciously artistic ballads of English literature. THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER IN SEVEN PARTS Argument How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country. An ancient Mariner meeteth three Gal lants bidden to a weddingfeast, and detaineth one. PART I It is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three. "By thy long gray beard and glittering eye, "There was a ship," quoth he. "Hold off! unhand me, gray-beard loon!" Eftsoons his hand dropt he. He holds him with his glittering eye — The Wedding-Guest stood still, And listens like a three years' child: The Mariner hath his will. The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone: And thus spake on that ancient man, The bright-eyed Mariner. "The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared, Merrily did we drop Below the kirk, below the hill, 10 The WeddingGuest is spellbound by the eye of the old 15 seafaring man, and constrained to hear his tale. 20 |