The underlying life power against which he has transgressed is envisaged as a power corresponding to the influx of the sun’s energy into all living creatures, thereby binding them together in a joyful communion. Knowledge leads to more questions. Who wrote the long poem The Waste Land? Lifespan: October 21, 1772 – July 25, 1834. These elements include characters, plot, conflict and resolution, setting and action. The placing of it at the beginning of Lyrical Ballads was evidently intended to provide a context for the sense of wonder in common life that marks many of Wordsworth’s contributions. Whether the summer clothe the general earth . (The child himself, after all, comes from melding two different genetic lines.) Everyone else has gone to bed, and his infant son Hartley sleeps by the low fire. At the end, the imagined future and the physical present merge. Katherine Robinson earned a BA from Amherst College, an MFA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Equally important in the poetic life of Wordsworth was his 1795 meeting with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge imagines God’s “language” suffusing “all things”—a kind of linguistic connective tissue that underlies the land and, once we understand it, allows our minds to meld with nature. The “tufts of snow” on the winter branch evoke white sprays of apple blossoms that, in spring, will cover the tree. Coleridge describes the leaping film as “unquiet,” a word of negation that contains quiet and is created from its own opposite. While these speculations were at their most intense, he retired to a lonely farmhouse near Culbone, Somersetshire, and, according to his own account, composed under the influence of laudanum the mysterious poetic fragment known as “Kubla Khan.” The exotic imagery and rhythmic chant of this poem have led many critics to conclude that it should be read as a “meaningless reverie” and enjoyed merely for its vivid and sensuous qualities. . Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved, An old English word for frost, rime, survived in rural northern English dialects, and in the late 18th century, around the time Coleridge was writing, it came into use once again—mostly among poets. Romanticism was then adopted in England. This “extreme” silence dissolves the boundaries of the self and draws the poet toward something distant. An examination of the poem in the light of Coleridge’s psychological and mythological interests, however, suggests that it has, after all, a complex structure of meaning and is basically a poem about the nature of human genius. Coleridge explores how the individual mind mirrors the natural world and shows how patterns repeat at different scales, revealing universal elements underlying landscapes, thought structures, frost crystals, and poetry. Himself in all, and all things in himself. The poem’s final stanza evokes the ouroboros-like progression of seasons and unifies them through metaphor. Heard only in the trances of the blast, Coleridge envisions that his son will. . Because it sounded like rhyme, it provided fodder for symbols and wordplay. Shall hang them up in silent icicles, In this case, the distance is temporal; watching the “stranger,” the poet recalls old memories and also vividly imagines his son’s future. The icicles decking the house replicate the distant moon, and the poem’s branching, reiterating patterns reproduce the frost’s intricate designs. Eventually, however, a chance sight of water snakes flashing like golden fire in the darkness, answered by an outpouring of love from his heart, reinitiates the creative process: he is given a brief vision of the inner unity of the universe, in which all living things hymn their source in an interchange of harmonies. Occurring in the context of the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, and the social, political, and economic changes that occurred following the Augustan Age, Romanticism moved away from an emphasis on the importance of an empirical, materilal worldview and looked to the imagination and nature as sources of insight. Romanticism also touched more academic disciplines, including education and both the social and natural sciences. The poem begins by evoking a repeated birdcall in the winter silence: “The Frost performs its secret ministry, / Unhelped by any wind. Ring in the new year with a Britannica Membership, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Taylor-Coleridge, Spartacus Educational - Biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Victorian Web - Biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Academy of American Poets - Biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Poetry Archive - Biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poetry Foundation - Biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up), “On the Constitution of the Church and State”. Winter replicates spring; the image similarly erodes boundaries between plants and animals: tufts—of blossoms, of snow—evoke tufts of feathers on the redbreast’s belly. . Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Coleridge evokes ice turning to water, a change that serves only to illustrate how different forms are composed of the same material. Just as clouds imitate the landscape, Coleridge’s metaphor turns his son into the world he will inhabit. His own consciousness is consequently affected: the sun, previously glorious, is seen as a bloody sun, and the energies of the deep are seen as corrupt. Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores . Omissions? Midnight is the witching hour, the moment when one day becomes another, when one thing transforms into another. . With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags In the poem’s imagined future, Hartley becomes like the animating wind racing across mountains and shores. Emeritus Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge; Emeritus Professor of English Literature, University of Cambridge.

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