Ode on a Grecian URL

Many of the hebdomadals I received last Friday were just fantastic - so many of you immediately grasped the meditative pace and investigative ambition of these assignments. I'd just like to share two of the many great ones that came in.

Erin from 301 has a wonderfully precise close reading of "Frost at Midnight" - detailed without being overlong:

I chose to write about Coleridge’s poem Frost at Midnight, lines 44-64. The first break in this stanza actually comes mid-sentence in line 51, Coleridge switches from talking to his sleeping child to reflecting on his own upbringing. Then in line 54 he switches back to talking to his child, and in line 60 Coleridge switches the direction of the poem from nature to the divine. The words ‘babe’ and ‘my’ tend to crop up in the first division that was delineated (lines 44-51) as well as the third segment of the poem (lines 54-59). Those two sections of the poem are when Coleridge is talking to his sleeping child. In the second section of the poem (lines 51-53) the words ‘I’ and ‘reared’ indicate that the poet isn’t talking to the child anymore but about his own childhood. The nature to divine switch can be found by examining such words as: lakes, shores, mountain (lines 55-58), eternal, God, Himself, Great universal Teacher, and spirit (lines 60-64). As one reads the text you get a sense of the life Coleridge wishes for his child to have, a life of “lovely shapes and sounds intelligible” instead of a life “’mid cloisters dim” as he had. Through nature Coleridge hopes that his child will grow closer to God and that God “shall mould Thy spirit”, yet another wish for how his child grows up.

Observe particularly the last two sentences there, into which Erin fits a good deal of lingual detail.

Following in Evie's vein from last week, Jessica (301) offers a creative, conversational meditation on imagination and "Eolian Harp":

I want to write a poem about a blue tree. I’ve never seen one – to my knowledge they don’t exist. I’ve never heard someone talk about blue trees or ponder quietly about their mythological importance. No, I daresay a poem about a blue tree could be my own original creation, just because I want to create it. But would it be poetry? Aristotle claims that poets are imitators, that everything and anything a poet writes “necessarily” imitates one of three specific objects: things as they once were or now are; things as people say or suppose they were or are; or things as they ought to be. Yet despite his notable interest in the infiniteness of the universe, Aristotle falls short of consistency and fails to realize the infiniteness of those within the universe and the artistic capabilities of imagination.

Romanticism embraces, to what I’m sure is Aristotle’s rather exquisite dismay, radical concepts like “feelings” and “imagination,” tied, ironically, into the permanence of science and omnipresence of nature. Be that as it may, Aristotle believed in the truth of imitation – in the direct representation of life through art – while the Romantics believed in pleasure and the beauty of reason. Do the two coincide? Are they mutually exclusive? In John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, it’s written that “beauty is truth, truth beauty” – but what is “truth” in the aesthetic of poetry, and in the mind of the poet? Is it only an imitation of life as our five senses reveal and conformity confirms, or the reasoning of one’s own self and imagination?

Though with no definite answer in clear sight (for some critics will question infinitely), the text in Samuel Coleridge’s Eolian Harp can reveal a few aspects of the Romantic interest in poetic imagination. To wit: though Coleridge admittedly daydreams – “whilst through my half-closed eye-lids I behold... many a thought uncalled and undetained, and many idle flitting phantasies” – allowing his mind to wander where it will, he invariably watches where it goes, often developing coincidences of thought into original revelations about life. In Eolian Harp, his thoughts converge on the idea that “all of animated nature” could be like any number of “organic harps diversely framed,” emboldened to think as they’re swept by “one [vast] intellectual breeze.”

Coleridge’s intimations of the infinite interconnectedness of nature, paired with his own harp metaphor, are no more truth than tangible – (think blue trees) – yet manifestly reflect the self-engineered art of a true poet’s imagination, Aristotle’s imitations be damned.