Thursday, September 10, 2015

Coleridge

Did anyone else find Coleridge to be a tougher read than our other Romantic poets? I found him challenging.
In both poems I noticed that he used more 'high-brow' language than the other Romantic poets.  Words like "sequacious" and " desulatory," but he also uses forms and tenses of common words that I found somewhat confusing "boldlier" instead of boldly or "stilly" for still (all from The Eolian Harp).
I picked up on a lexicon of flight in The Eolian Harp- middle of the second stanza.  The words "floating witchery," "gales," "birds of Paradise," and "wing" all reflect a freedom from the limitations of gravity- flight of some kind.  I started thinking about how this fit into the poem overall and when I'm stuck on a poem I will often go back to the title.  Well... music (such as would come from a harp, Eolian or not) is often represented as floating through the air.  Think about cartoons, the music never falls out of the instrument and then marches over to the hearer.  Maybe Coleridge was trying to make his medium (a poem) match his subject (the music of a harp and its effect) by including flying and floating imagery.
Side note: if you don't have a footnote for this "cot" is a small house or cottage

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