The Eolian Harp Comments

A fantastic flight of imagery and marvolous style has made this poem a pleasure to read. Thanks for sharing it here.

This early poem by Coleridge is a deft and pitch-perfect expression of the visionary core of English Romanticism. In essence it details a pantheistic view of Life in which the sacred is not localized in theistic being, namely G-O-D, but permeates all beings and things. In the last stanza, Coleridge withdraws from this radical religious position because the woman he loves chides him for abandoning traditional Christian beliefs. Coleridge later endured a double tragedy: his opium use silenced his poetic voice, it's as if the dreams of opium simply swamped the dreams of poetry. But the Biographia Literaria, his prose account of his intellectual life, parallels Wordsworth's great epic poem, THE PRELUDE, which is subtitled THE GROWTH OF THE POETIC MIND. These two works are the pillars of English Romanticism, its highest intellectual expression, although not necessarily its most magical and visionary. Perhaps Shelley and Keats deserve praise for those aspects of Romanticism. The other tragedy is that Coleridge could not heal the rift between himself and Wordsworth. A friendship dashed, a collaboration severed, a fulfillment truncated. But Romanticism is all about aspiration, even if the full realization of the artist's goals falls short of expectation. And you have just read one of those aspirations - to see all life as one, an organic unity, as Coleridge puts it so succinctly, ONE INTELLECTUAL BREEZE, AT ONCE THE SOUL OF EACH AND GOD OF ALL. Oh, may we humans finally realize this Vision of Cosmic Unity in our age! !

Congrats for being selected.....Nice work...

Exquisite! ! Thanks for sharing this poem with us.