Banha University
Faculty of Arts
English Department
A Guiding Model Answer for
Third Grade
Neo-Classical and Romantic Poetry Exam
June 4 (Year 2012)
Faculty of Arts
Prepared by
Mohammad Badr AlDin Al-Hussini Hassan Mansour, Ph.D.
University of Nevada, Reno (USA)
Banha University
Faculty of Arts
English Department
Third Grade
Second Term
Year (2011-2012)
Time: 3 hours
Second Term Exam
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Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Poetry Exam
Respond to the following questions:
1. Discuss the varying characteristics of 18th and 19th century British poetry
through a comparative analysis of the two poems, "London" by Samuel
Johnson and William Blake? (Time Limit is 40 minutes; Grade is 4)
2. What is unconventional about the rhyming pattern of Shelley's sonnet
"Ozymandias"? (Time Limit is 25 minutes; Grade is 3)
3. Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is a meditative
lamentation of human mortality centered upon two poetic traditions: elegy and
landscape. Elaborate? (Time Limit is 30 minutes; Grade is 4)
4. Explore the connections between the mythological, literal allusions, and theme
in Alexander Pope's poem "Of the Characters of Women: An Epistle to a
Lady"? (Time Limit is 25 minutes; Grade is 3)
5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's major poems turn on problems of self-esteem and
identity. Exploring states of isolation and ineffectuality, they test strategies to
overcome weakness without asserting its antithesis—that is a powerful self,
secure in its own thoughts and utterances. This is evident in "This Lime-Tree
Bower My Prison," "The Eolian Harp," and "Frost at Midnight." Explicate the
structural pattern in the three poems and comment on?
(Time limit is one hour minutes; Grade is 6)
Good Luck
Mohammad Al-Hussini Arab
2
Answers
1. Discuss the varying characteristics of 18th and 19th century British poetry
through a comparative analysis of the two poems, "London" by Samuel
Johnson and William Blake? (Time Limit is 40 minutes; Grade is 4)
Answer:
Neoclassical literature, which dominated the first half of the eighteenth century
in England, emphasized practical reason, formality, social conformity, emotional
restraint, didactism, and submission to the authority of classical literary techniques. It
was generally allied to political and religious conservatism as well. Its chief aim was to
show to the world (that is, to mankind) a picture of itself for its own improvement and
edification. Its chief ornament was art: puns, word-play, satiric description, and so
forth. After 1789, when the social order in France turned upside down, life in
eighteenth century England was transformed by political, economic, social, and
technological innovations, and an expectation of the millennium arose in England,
especially in liberal intellectual circles. The old rules of poetry were thrown off with
the outworn social strictures—they seemed increasingly obsolete to younger and more
audacious writers, who had absorbed the Enlightenment philosophy of humanism and
freedom. A new aesthetic bloomed in their place; its ruling faculty was imagination.
The world seemed made new, and poetry released from bondage.
The Romantics abandoned the poetic theory of the century before. They wrote
from a radically different philosophical base. They frequently stated that poems ought
to be composed on the inspiration of the moment, thereby faithfully to record the purity
of the emotion. In fact, the Romantics labored hard over their creations; they exerted
themselves not to smoothness of meter but to preserving the grace of spontaneity while
achieving precision in observation of natural and psychological phenomena. Poets saw
themselves as charting hitherto unexplored reaches of human experience, extremes of
joy and dejection, guilt and redemption, pride and degradation. They wrote
meditations, confessions, and conversations, in which natural things were seen to abet
internal states.
In short, Romantic poetry represents a sharp movement away from the concerns
and values of neoclassic poetry. Whereas the neoclassic poet is concerned with the
mimetic relationship of poetry to the nature or reality that it imitates and with the
pragmatic relationship of poetry to its audience, the Romantic poet focuses primarily on
the expressive relationship of the poet to poetry. The neoclassic poet sees poetry as an
imitation of nature designed to instruct and delight; the Romantic poet sees poetry as an
expression of the creative imagination. In examining poetry, the neoclassic poet turns
to matters of genre, techniques, conventions, and effects of poetry; the Romantic turns
back to the poet, the imagination, and the creative process. When the Romantic poet
does turn to the mimetic relationship, he focuses on the organic and beneficent qualities
of nature, and when he looks at the pragmatic relationship, he is especially interested in
the connection between feelings and moral response.
As the world's first great capitalist metropolis, London in the revolutionary
period presented itself as offering some privileged access to the future, to the way that
the Western world in general might develop. A city existing, so to speak, partly in the
future, London acquired an epistemological nontransparency. It became less of an
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unproblematically known reality to be judged and more of a cognitive problem to be
pondered.
Samuel Johnson's Juvenalian satire London (1738), written somewhat in the
tradition of earlier Tory Augustan satires like Swift's "A Description of the Morning"
(1709) and "A Description of a City Shower" (1710), rails against the alleged crimes,
vices, and follies of his adopted city; it provides a more bitter image of London than the
works by Swift—arguably, indeed, the most memorable image of London to that point
in English literature since the city comedy of Ben Jonson. It has sometimes been
adversely criticized for its lack of a rigorous overall structure and also for its evident
insincerity: for the later Dr. Johnson, the hero of Boswell's biography, is indeed about
the last person one can imagine abandoning London for a rural retreat as the poem
seems to recommend. But London actually operates on various levels of seriousness.
Some lines seem to be written in a typically Augustan high-spiritedness of denunciation,
and are, one assumes, not meant to be taken literally—"Prepare for Death, if here at
Night you roam, / And sign your Will before you sup from Home—while others appear
as deeply felt, and as thoroughly grounded in the author's personal experience, as
anything that Johnson ever wrote.
It is true that the poem is not very tightly organized; like much Augustan satire
in heroic couplets, it moves from topic to topic without any strongly governing plan,
and the poem as a whole is hardly more than the sum of its parts. Whether this is a
fault, or merely an indication of the particular kind of poetry it is, the point to be
stressed here is that the loose organization of London bespeaks a fundamental
epistemological repose. If Johnson feels no need to impose any overall structure on his
vision of the city, it is surely because he assumes that his experience of London is
straightforward and shared in common with his readers. London, for Johnson, is still
transparent; and, indeed, it is precisely this transparency that enables the poem's easy
and absolute moral judgments, as the corruption of the modern city is sharply contrasted
with the supposed moral purity that obtained in England under Alfred the Great or that
still obtains among the rocks of Scotland and in other rustic regions. We might say that
Johnson's London, whether in deadly earnest or somewhat affectedly, finds the city to
be morally shocking—a cesspool of lies, snobbishness, cowardice, weakness, treason,
and violence—but not productive of what Walter Benjamin, writing about another and
later great urban center, would call epistemological shock.
The situation is radically different when we turn to William Blake's poem also
entitled "London" (1794), which is crucially different from Johnson's. The distance that
separates Blake from Johnson is highlighted by the formal parallels between the two
poems. In both cases, the speakers wander through the city and issue thunderous moral
condemnations from their respective sociopolitical positions of Johnson's Tory
radicalism and Blake's revolutionary proto-Marxism. But for Blake London is
epistemologically as well as morally shocking, at once estranged and estranging.
Johnson's easy empiricist certitude—his ability to take and understand London as he
finds it—is gone, and with it the adequacy of his straightforward poetry of statement. In
order to make sense of what he sees throughout the city, Blake must instead construct
an intricate metonymic and metaphoric figural structure. London, for Blake, no longer
speaks for itself as it did for Johnson; rather the marked city must be elaborately
deciphered. At first, the poet's scheme of decipherment relies mainly on metaphor: the
fearful cries of the Londoners are understood to signify mental repression as powerful
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and despotic as manacles of actual steel. But in the course of the poem metonymy
comes largely to supercede metaphor, as Blake's mode of understanding London relies
less on mere similarity and more on actual systemic connection. It is slightly
metaphorical to say that the chimney-sweeper's cry appalls the church building in the
sense of making it whiter, since it is actually the sweeper's labor that does that; but it is
metaphor at the very edge of metonymy, and it is a matter of full-fledged connection
and causation to say that the cry appalls the church as an institution in the sense of
startling and terrifying it, thereby directly, though synecdochically, suggesting the entire
relationship between working class and ruling class. Somewhat similarly, there is a bit
of metaphor in the role assigned to the harlot's curse in the final stanza. But the curse
results from the woman's sexual and economic exploitation by the men of respectable
society, and this exploitation quite directly turns the bridal carriage into a hearse
blighted by venereal plagues; and it also infects the syphilitic infant, blind from birth.
The nexus or oppression operates between the sexes and the generations as well as
between the classes.
Blake's tightly structured quatrains as well as his self-consciously elaborate
poetic figures are signs of just how much intense intellectual labor is required to
comprehend the city, which presents itself as a quasi-science-fictional problem, an
entity new and estranging. Moreover, the dominance of metonymy helps to render the
estrangement a properly cognitive one, as Blake, in a mere sixteen lines of tetrameter,
performs or at least strongly suggests a thoroughly materialist analysis—on a level of
rigor not matched until Marx himself—of the capitalist metropolis.
It is once again useful to consider Johnson's London by way of contrast; for both
poets find the sights of the city to be extraordinary. But these sights put no strain at all
on Johnson's powers of observation and analysis. Johnson follows his own famous
critical prescription about "the grandeur of generality." The capitalized abstract nouns,
"Malice," "Rapine," and "Accident," function almost as personifications, and the "fell
Attorney" is expanded (or reduced) to a type by being imaged as an carnivorous animal,
just as the members of the rabble are de-individualized through the comparison with the
fire.
But Johnson is able to generalize because he is confident that he and his readers
are unproblematically aware of the particulars on which the generalities are based; a
falling house is a bad thing but not a mysterious thing. In contrast to Johnson, Blake
employs metaphor lightly and provisionally, as a somewhat useful device that is
decisively subordinated to the more fully cognitive figures of metonymy. But Blake's
attempt to understand the systemic connections that define London, and thereby to
achieve what later generations could recognize as a scientific analysis of British society,
is based on a kind of radical materialism that was alien to Johnson's mind.
2. What is unconventional about the rhyming pattern of Shelley's sonnet
"Ozymandias"? (Time Limit is 25 minutes; Grade is 3)
Answer:
"Ozymandias" is a sonnet composed by the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley
and named for its subject, with the Greek name of the Egyptian king Ramses II, who
died in 1234 b.c.e. The poem follows the traditional structure of the fourteen-line
Italian sonnet, featuring an opening octave, or set of eight lines, that presents a conflict
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or dilemma, followed by a sestet, or set of six lines, that offers some resolution or
commentary upon the proposition introduced in the octave.
The poem is conventionally written in iambic pentameter (that is, ten syllables
per line of coupled unstressed then stressed sounds), so the poem's subject matter is
framed both by the structural and metrical constraints chosen by the poet.
The Italian sonnet presents the poet with the challenge of using an utterly
familiar form in an innovative or provocative way. The chief variables within this form
involve rhyme scheme. The traditional Italian sonnet features an abba, abba, cde, cde
rhyme scheme, each letter representing a different end rhyme that is repeated in pattern.
In "Ozymandias," Shelley chooses to forgo the conventional scheme and
employs a more eccentric abab, acdc, ece, fef pattern that creates the immediate effect
of a woven tapestry of sound and rhythm that helps to underscore the poem's essential
irony. As the reader's expectations are unmet, the very syntax forced by the unusual
rhyme of the poem creates tension that matches that of the theme.
Each line of the poem, from first to last, reveals successively one more layer of
the narrative's essential irony. Shelley's sonnet is remarkable for its spare and stark
imagery. The poet is determined to re-create the barren desert landscape, the poetic
counterpoint to the morbid and deserved fate of Ozymandias, the pompous fool. To do
so requires that he carefully circumscribe his choice of descriptors to connote neither
grandeur nor panoramic vista, but rather singular loneliness and constrained, fragmented
solitude. Hence such modifiers as "trunkless," "Half-sunk," "shattered," "decay," and
"wreck" serve his purpose well.
Consequently, the compression of the sonnet form, the unconventional rhyme
scheme, the point of view chosen for reader entry, and the carefully wrought diction of
the poem achieve the effect the poet was seeking. Amid vast stretches of unbroken
sameness, the traveler—followed by the poet, then the reader—comes upon a bleak
personage whose severed limbs and head first shock and dismay, then elicit reluctant
mockery for the egotism of its subject.
3. Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is a meditative
lamentation of human mortality centered upon two poetic traditions: elegy
and landscape. Elaborate? (Time Limit is 30 minutes; Grade is 4)
Answer:
Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," which is placed in a
long tradition of meditative poems that focus on human mortality, can best be
understood in relation to two poetic traditions that were prevalent in the first half of the
18th century. The first is the elegiac tradition. An elegy is a sustained and formal poem
setting forth the poet's meditations on death or another solemn theme, and it is often
occasioned by the death of a particular person. The second tradition is the "landscape"
tradition, in which the poet embodies his metaphysical or philosophical musings in the
countryside or in nature. A subdivision of landscape poetry, the "graveyard school,"
tries to achieve an atmosphere of pleasing melancholy by contemplating death and
immortality—usually in a graveyard at night. Graveyard poets were fond of dwelling on
owls, hearses, and other images of death.
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In the first three stanzas, Gray sets the scene for his private and quiet
meditations. He is looking out from a country churchyard at a rural scene, but the sights
and sounds of this rural world of men and beasts fade away. Although the scene is
beautiful, life is not joyous, and Gray reflects that this day dies just like the one before
it, as the plowman plods wearily home. The poet is alone, but he is not tired. The text
gives a sense of the vitality of his solitude and of the stillness of the scene by describing
the few things that remain to disturb it: the tinkling of the cattle who have returned
home, the drone of the beetle, and the sound of an owl from the church tower. With
these descriptions, Gray creates the backdrop for his melancholy reflections about
eternal truths.
In the next four stanzas, Gray uses the churchyard scene to invoke important
images: the strength of the elms, death as symbolized by the graves, and the comfort
provided by the yews shading bodies that sleep. The poet begins by reflecting that
death for the humble and lower class means a cessation of life's simple pleasures:
waking up to the songs of birds, sharing life with a wife and children, and enjoying hard
and productive work. Gray reflects on the death that comes after a normal life span.
In the next four stanzas, the poet addresses the upper classes—those with
ambition, grandeur, power, nobility, and pride—and exhorts them not to mock the poor
for their simplicity or for not having elaborate statues on their graveyard memorials. He
tells the living upper classes that ultimately it does not matter what glory they achieve
or how elaborate a tombstone they will have. They will die just like the poor.
The eight stanzas that follow provide the central message of the poem: The poor
are born with the same natural abilities as members of the upper classes. Who can say
what humble people might have accomplished in the great world had they not been
constrained by their condition and their innate powers not been frozen by "Chill
Penury." Gray implies that the innocence and beauty of these souls, wasted in their
isolated rural environment, and resembling hidden deserts and ocean caves, could have
flourished in better circumstances. The churchyard graves may also contain the remains
of a person who had the ability to become a great scholar, a generous national leader, or
a man who could have been a great poet but is in the end no more than a "mute
inglorious Milton." Gray goes on to speculate, however, that poverty may have
prevented some dead men from doing not good but evil; now death has made them
"guiltless" of shedding blood; they have not been able to slaughter, to refuse mercy, to
lie, or to wallow in luxury and pride. Far from the "ignoble strife" of the great world,
the village people have led "sober" and "noiseless" lives. Gray implies that, even
though the village dead have accomplished nothing in the world, on balance they may
be morally superior to their social betters.
Gray returns to the churchyard in the next section, remarking on the graves'
simple markers with their badly spelled inscriptions, names, and dates. Some bear
unpolished verses or consoling biblical texts; some are decorated with "shapeless
sculpture." Gray is touched that such grave markers show the humanity these dead
people share with all men and women (including the famous who took paths of glory).
Those who remain can sense that the dead "cast one long lingering look" back on what
they were leaving and were comforted by at least one loved one. Gray reflects that the
voice of general human nature can be heard crying from these graves. In the last line of
this section, Gray reflects that what he has learned will apply to himself and his readers:
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The "wonted fires" of his life and those of his readers will continue to burn in the ashes
of all graves.
This more personal line provides a transition to the next six stanzas, where it
seems that Gray is addressing himself when he writes. Gray imagines an old farmer,
who is described as a "hoary-headed swain," replying to this question in lines 98 to 116.
The farmer's story describes Gray as a man who does not fit into either of the classes
described earlier; he is neither a poor man nor a man of noble achievement. He is a
wanderer, a man who vigorously meets the sun at dawn, yet later lies by a favorite tree
and gazes listlessly at a brook. He mutters his fancies, resembling a madman or a
hopeless lover. He is everything that Gray's contemporaries thought a poet should be—
a man of exquisite sensibility, unfit for the world's work, meditative, and sad.
The farmer recounts that he saw the poet's funeral procession to a church,
presumably the one where the poem is set. He does not seem to have helped arrange the
funeral nor, unlike the reader, can he read the epitaph that concludes the poem. Perhaps
Gray, in indicating that the poet chose to be buried where people of his class are not
usually buried, intended to reinforce that the poem's theme applies to all humankind.
In the three stanzas of the epitaph, Gray speaks of his grave being "upon the lap
of Earth" and not inside the church. He accords himself modest praise and justifies his
life as worthwhile. Despite his "humble birth," he was well educated. Gray describes
himself as generous and sincere, for which his reward was not worldly fame or fortune
(the "paths of glory") but Heaven "recompense," undoubtedly the "friend" mentioned in
line 124. The epitaph concludes by telling the reader not to ask more about the poet's
virtues and frailties but to leave him to God.
The poem moves from a meditation in a particular place upon the graves of the
poor to a reflection on the mortality of all humankind and on some of the benefits of
being constrained by poverty. The poem alludes to the wish of all people not to die and
to the ways in which each is remembered after death. Gray concludes by imagining his
own death and how he hopes to be remembered. One reason for the long popularity of
Gray's elegy lies in the universal chord he managed to strike not only with the thoughts
he expressed but, perhaps even more important, with the progression he gave those
thoughts.
In this elegy, as the speaker passes a country churchyard, he stops for a moment
to consider the significance of the strangers buried there and reflects on his own life and
priorities. The graveyard functions as a memento mori, a device intended to remind the
speaker of his own mortality. The first four stanzas present images of twilight settling
over a solitary figure in a small country churchyard. The first line, "The curfew tolls the
knell of parting day," expresses the inevitable presence of death in three words: tolls'
knell, and parting. Stanza 4 concludes the opening picture and leaves no doubt about
the subject of the meditation: "Each in his narrow cell forever laid, / The rude
forefathers of the hamlet sleep." The next four stanzas continue the theme of death as
the end of all individuals by listing the activities the dead used to do but do "no more."
The repetition of "no more" and "For them no more" emphasizes the fact that all human
activity leads to the grave. Numerous images throughout the poem reinforce this
theme—the tolling bell, the darkening day, and the neglected graves.
The reader sees the world through the eyes of a single figure who is humankind,
who sees the truth and sees the destiny of all. Their fate is our own. Thus one has both
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the living, contemplating human destiny and death, and the dead, whose destiny is all
too clear. These two merge later in the poem, beginning in stanza 24, where, suddenly,
the speaker imagines himself dead and buried, and the reader is invited to read his
epitaph. In the face of inevitable doom, the speaker holds out the hope for immortality
by making a friend of Heaven and by believing that, dead, he rests in "The bosom of his
Father and his God."
Gray makes clear that neither social position nor wealth will stave off death.
The poem's speaker also reflects on the limitations imposed on the poor and lower
classes, contending that among the men buried in the cemetery there could have been a
great poet or politician, if only he had been provided the opportunity.
Caught between the city and country worlds, the speaker in the "Elegy" is on a
voyage of self-discovery as he ponders his own inevitable death and mourns his own
unrealized potential. In the end, the speaker rejects the benefits of the wealthy,
educated world that he comes from—ambition, grandeur, fame—and identifies with the
simple, uneducated, and unheralded dead that inhabit the quiet country graveyard.
5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's major poems turn on problems of self-esteem and
identity. Exploring states of isolation and ineffectuality, they test strategies to
overcome weakness without asserting its antithesis—that is a powerful self,
secure in its own thoughts and utterances. This is evident in "This Lime-Tree
Bower My Prison," "The Eolian Harp," and "Frost at Midnight." Explicate the
structural pattern in the three poems and comment on?
(Time limit is one hour minutes; Grade is 6)
Answer:
Coleridge's major poems turn on problems of self-esteem and identity. Exploring
states of isolation and ineffectuality, they test strategies to overcome weakness without
asserting its antithesis—a powerful self, secure in its own thoughts and utterances, the
potency and independence of which Coleridge feared would only exacerbate his
loneliness. His reluctance to assert his own abilities is evident in his habitual
deprecation of his own poetry and hyperbolic praise of William Wordsworth's. It is
evident as well in his best verse, which either is written in an unpretentious
"conversational" tone or, when it is not, is carefully dissociated from his own voice and
identity. Yet by means of these strategies, he is often able to assert indirectly or
vicariously the strong self he otherwise repressed.
Writing to John Thelwall in 1796, Coleridge called the first of the conversation
poems, "The Eolian Harp," the "favorite of my poems." It dates some version of the text
six weeks before his marriage to Sara Fricker. "The Eolian Harp" anticipates a future in
which Coleridge and Sara will sit together by their "Cot o'ergrown / With whiteflower'd Jasmin." Significantly, Sara remains silent throughout the poem; her only
contribution is the "mild reproof" that "darts" from her "more serious eye," quelling the
poet's intellectual daring. Yet this reproof is as imaginary as Sara's presence itself. At
the climax of the poem, meditative thought gives way to the need for human response;
tellingly, the response he imagines and therefore, one must assume, desires, is reproof.
"The Eolian Harp" establishes a structural pattern for the conversation poems as
a group. Coleridge is, in effect, alone, "and the world so hush'd! / The stilly murmur of
the distant Sea / Tells us of silence." The eolian harp in the window sounds in the
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breeze and reminds him of "the one Life within us and abroad, / Which meets all motion
and becomes its soul." This observation leads to the central question of the poem: "And
what if all of animated nature / Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd, / That tremble
into thought, as o'er them sweeps / Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, / At once the
Soul of each, and God of all?" Sara's glance dispells "These shapings of the
unregenerate mind," but, of course, it is too late, since they have already been expressed
in the poem. For this reason, the conflict between two sides of Coleridge's thought—
metaphysical speculation and orthodox Christianity—remains unresolved. If the poem
is in any way disquieting, it is not because it exemplifies a failure of nerve, but because
of the identifications it suggests between metaphysical speculation and the isolated self,
religious orthodoxy and the conventions—down to the vines covering the cottage—of
married life. Coleridge, in other words, does not imagine a wife who will love him all
the more for his intellectual daring. Instead, he imagines one who will chastise him for
the very qualities that make him an original thinker. To "possess/ Peace, and this Cot,
and thee, heart-honour'd Maid!," Coleridge must acknowledge himself "A sinful and
most miserable man, / Wilder'd and dark." Happiness, as well as poetic closure,
depends upon this acceptance of diminished self-esteem. Even so, by embedding an
expression of intellectual strength within the context of domestic conventionality,
Coleridge is able to achieve a degree of poetic authority otherwise absent in the final
lines of the poem. The ability to renounce a powerful self is itself a gesture of power:
the acceptance of loss becomes—as in other Romantic poems—a form of strength.
The structure of "The Eolian Harp" can be summarized as follows: a state of
isolation (the more isolated for the presence of an unresponsive companion) gives way
to meditation, which leads to the possibility of a self powerful through its association
with an all-powerful force. This state of mind gives place to the acknowledgment of a
human relationship dependent on the poet's recognition of his own inadequacy, the
reward for which is a poetic voice with the authority to close the poem.
This pattern recurs in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison." The poem is
addressed to Charles Lamb, but the "gentle-hearted Charles" of the text is really a
surrogate for the figure of Wordsworth, whose loss Coleridge is unwilling to face headon. Incapacitated by a burn—appropriately, his wife's fault—Coleridge is left alone
seated in a clump of lime trees while his friends—Lamb and William and Dorothy
Wordsworth—set off on a long walk through the countryside. They are, like Sara in
"The Eolian Harp," there and yet not there: their presence in the poem intensifies
Coleridge's sense of isolation. He follows them in his imagination, and the gesture itself
becomes a means of connecting himself with them. Natural images of weakness,
enclosure, and solitude give way to those of strength, expansion, and connection, and
the tone of the poem shifts from speculation to assertion. In a climactic moment, he
imagines his friends "gazing round / On the wide landscape," until it achieves the
transcendence of "such hues / As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes / Spirits
perceive his presence."
As in "The Eolian Harp," the perception of an omnipotent force pervading the
universe returns Coleridge to his present state, but with a new sense of his own being
and his relationship with the friends to whom he addresses the poem. His own isolation
is now seen as an end in itself. "Sometimes / 'Tis well to be bereft of promised good,"
Coleridge argues, "That we may lift the soul, and contemplate / With lively joy the joys
we cannot share."
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"Frost at Midnight," the finest of the conversation poems, replaces the silent
wife or absent friends with a sleeping child (Hartley—although he is not named in the
text). Summer is replaced by winter; isolation is now a function of seasonal change
itself. In this zero-world, "The Frost performs its secret ministry, / Unhelped by any
wind." The force that moved the eolian harp into sound is gone. The natural
surroundings of the poem drift into nonexistence: "Sea, and hill, and wood, / With all
the numberless goings-on of life, / Inaudible as dreams!" This is the nadir of self from
which the poet reconstructs his being—first by perception of "dim sympathies" with the
"low-burnt fire" before him; then by a process of recollection and predication. The
"film" on the grate reminds Coleridge of his childhood at Christ's Hospital, where a
similar image conveyed hopes of seeing someone from home and therefore a renewal of
the conditions of his earlier life in Ottery St. Mary. Yet even in recollection, the bells of
his "sweet birth-place" are most expressive not as a voice of the present moment, but as
"articulate sounds of things to come!" The spell of the past was, in fact, a spell of the
imagined future. The visitor the longed for turns out to be a version of the self of the
poet, his "sister more beloved / My play-mate when we both were clothed alike." The
condition of loss that opens the poem cannot be filled by the presence of another human
being; it is a fundamental emptiness in the self, which, Coleridge suggests, can never be
filled, but only recognized as a necessary condition of adulthood. Yet this recognition
of incompleteness is the poet's means of experiencing a sense of identity missing in the
opening lines of the poem.
"Frost at Midnight" locates this sense of identity in Coleridge's own life. It is
not a matter of metaphysical or religious belief, as it is in "The Eolian Harp" or "This
Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," but a function of the self that recognizes its own
coherence in time. This recognition enables him to speak to the "Dear Babe" who had
been there all along, but had remained a piece of the setting and not a living human
being. Like the friends of "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," who are projected
exploring a landscape, the boy Hartley is imagined wandering "like a breeze / By lakes
and sandy shores." The static existence of the poet in the present moment is contrasted
with the movement of a surrogate. This movement, however, is itself subordinated to
the voice of the poet who can promise his son a happiness he himself has not known.
In all three poems, Coleridge achieves a voice that entails the recognition of his
own loss—in acknowledging Sara's reproof or losing himself in the empathic
construction of the experience of friend or son. The act entails a defeat of the self, but
also a vicarious participation in powerful forces that reveal themselves in the working of
the universe, and through this participation a partial triumph of the self over its own
sense of inadequacy. In "Frost at Midnight," the surrogate figure of his son not only
embodies a locomotor power denied the static speaker; but he is also, in his capacity to
read the "language" uttered by God in the form of landscape, associated with absolute
power itself.
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