The Romantics: John Keats and Samuel T. Coleridge
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The
Romantics: John Keats and Samuel T. Coleridge
The Romantic Period in England had six major poets, William Wordsworth, Lord
Byron, Percy Shelley, William Blake, John Keats, and Samuel Coleridge. For the
purpose of this essay, the focus will only be on Keats and Coleridge. Although
they were contemporaries, they each have very different styles of writing as is
evident in their poetry. In “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” an exemplary example
of a conversation poem, the reader is able to see Coleridge’s thought process
of how he realizes nature is everywhere around oneself, as long as all
“facult[ies] of sense and…the heart [are] awake to Love and Beauty”. In doing
so, Coleridge states to the reader that at the beginning of the poem he was
lacking these emotions, becoming oblivious to nature that surrounded him. In
“The Day Is Gone, and All Its Sweets Are Gone”, Keats not only expresses
the fundamental meaning of poetry as defined by William Wordsworth
in Lyrical Ballads, written in 1802 in which he writes the
following:
“Poetry…takes its
origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion
is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the
tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion…is gradually produced, and
does itself exist in the mind…upon [which the mind will] be in a state of
enjoyment”
but the reader is also able to
determine Keats feelings of love and beauty are present from the start of the
poem as opposed to Coleridge who must find it within himself to turn these
receptors of love and beauty on. Both poets are able to convey and define,
through their imagination what love and beauty are and how it affects their
relationship with nature. These views and ideas however are different and this
is demonstrated through the different use of structure, and each author’s
use of imagination in each poem.
In “This Lime-tree Bower my Prison”, Samuel T. Coleridge writes of how he is
not able to attend a nature walk with his friends due to a foot injury caused
by hot milk being spilled on him. The poem is his mental journey confined in
words and his realization that nature is all around him when one is open to
nature with all of our senses. .............
In “The Day is Gone, and All Its
Sweets are Gone” by John Keats, the poet is literally writing of how he misses
the beauty and love that a woman provides him. He will not be able to see
the woman’s beauty and feel her love until the next day and he must sleep alone
through the night with just the mere memories of her appearance and her effect
on him. In this poem, it is quite easy to see that it is a woman of which
is being written about, likely one that he might have been seeing at the time.
But as has been seen in Keats’ previous poems, “To Autumn”, there is a tendency
to personify nature into a human being. In “The Day is Gone and All Its Sweets
are Gone”, Keats personifies the day as a woman and in doing so demonstrates to
the public his view that love, beauty and nature are always there and it never
abandons.
For both poets the
structure of each poem is representative of what goes on in their mind. In
“This Lime-tree Bower My Prison” there are three stanzas each of twenty lines
or so each. Being one of eight’s Coleridge’s conversation poems the reader is
able to see characteristics of such poetry, “begin[ning] with a description of
the landscape…evok[ing] a paired thought…and in the course [of the poem]
the speaker achieves an insight that resolves an emotional problem…[and] ends
where it began...but with a deeper understanding” (M.H. Abrams) of the situation.
And in this poem it is exactly what can be seen. From the very beginning, “This
lime-tree bower [has become]my prison! I have lost/[All] beauties and
feelings” (Coleridge 2-3), the dilemma that Coleridge faces is that
nature is imprisoning him, not typical of what one would expect from a poet
quite like Coleridge. Coleridge also admits that he has no feeling of
admiration or inspiration by nature. In the second stanza Coleridge is drawing
upon his imagination what it would be like to be with his friends on the walk
and writes “So my friend/ struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,
silent with swimming sense”(38-39). He must use his imagination to get him out
of his physical state of being under a tree and escape using past memories of
nature in order to be content. Finally in the third stanza we see
Coleridge admitting to Charles Lamb that “Nature ne’er deserts the wise and
pure”. In this last stanza the poet comes to realization that he never needed
to go on the walk in order to experience nature, for nature is everywhere
around him.
....................
Keats’ structure of the poem is reflective of not only his intellectual
capabilities for being able to say what Coleridge managed to say in three long
stanzas but he is able to fit in he must in fourteen lines. This can be
compacted into fourteen lines because Keats knows where he is able to find
beauty and love and he spends no time in lamenting, or grieving their loss or
absence. Keats poem appears to fit the criteria of a conversation poem in that
from the beginning he is setting up the landscape for his reader. In the second
and third line of the poem it is painting the reader an image of a beautiful
woman, with a “sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand….warm breath, light whisper”.
There is a sort of “paradise” that this woman invokes in him when he is with
her. In the middle part of the poem from line 5-9, the reader is given the
problem of the poem “faded the sight of beauty,…voice, warmth, whiteness”
(Keats 6-7) as the day has come to an end. Like Coleridge he too has lost
something from his life, but he does project negativity toward nature for Keats
knows that according to “Love’s Missal”, she is scheduled to be back in his
life the next day or very soon, and for now her mere memory will suffice for
the night. Like in Coleridge’s poem, Keats too has come to an understanding at
the end in which accepts his situation, but with Keats his tone never changed
from depressed, sad or remorseful but it stays constant throughout because he
already knows there is no need to mourn, having her image vividly present in
his mind.
Imagination plays a huge part for both of these poets. For Coleridge, the mind
is what provides him with the escape from reality to a place of enjoyment and
happiness. Coleridge being a position in which he is not allowed to go on the
nature walk he starts to imagine the nature he sees as a place where one would
not even want to go in order to downplay his sadness and situation. He writes
that they had entered an “o’verwooded, narrow, deep” valley “only speckled by
the sun” where there was a “branchless ash…with a few poor yellow leaves”
(Coleridge 12-15). What he is doing in this part is making nature seem a cold,
barren place where the sun barely gets through to the earth. What this tells of
Coleridge once again is that since his emotions of beauty and love are not open
at the moment he perceives nature as a dead landscape that his friends are
treading through. In the second stanza, Coleridge’s imagination has reached a
level in which he is no longer aware of his physical body but he is on the
actual trip with his friends and his attitude starts to change of nature. He is
deep within his own mind and memory and he is recalling what he has seen before
such as the “glorious Sun” and “blue Ocean” and it makes him remember that
these things were felt because he was observant and open. In the last stanza
after he has his realization he comes back to his actual physical state and he
begins to notice everything in nature that is around him even the smallest of
things such as the bee. Imagination was what set Coleridge free, and the this
was a very important concept among the Romantics, that the mind was the only
place that could not be limited or enclosed no matter what the actual reality
was.
.................
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