The Transformative Power of the Imagination
Coleridge believed that a strong, active imagination could
become a vehicle for transcending unpleasant circumstances. Many
of his poems are powered exclusively by imaginative flights, wherein
the speaker temporarily abandons his immediate surroundings,
exchanging them for an entirely new and completely fabricated experience.
Using the imagination in this way is both empowering and surprising
because it encourages a total and complete disrespect for the confines
of time and place. These mental and emotional jumps are often well
rewarded. Perhaps Coleridge’s most famous use of imagination occurs
in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” (1797),
in which the speaker employs a keen poetic mind that allows him
to take part in a journey that he cannot physically make. When he
“returns” to the bower, after having imagined himself on a fantastic stroll
through the countryside, the speaker discovers, as a reward, plenty
of things to enjoy from inside the bower itself, including the leaves,
the trees, and the shadows. The power of imagination transforms
the prison into a perfectly pleasant spot.
The Interplay of Philosophy, Piety, and Poetry
Coleridge used his poetry to explore conflicting issues
in philosophy and religious piety. Some critics argue that Coleridge’s
interest in philosophy was simply his attempt to understand the
imaginative and intellectual impulses that fueled his poetry. To
support the claim that his imaginative and intellectual forces were,
in fact, organic and derived from the natural world, Coleridge linked
them to God, spirituality, and worship. In his work, however, poetry,
philosophy, and piety clashed, creating friction and disorder for
Coleridge, both on and off the page. In “The Eolian Harp” (1795),
Coleridge struggles to reconcile the three forces. Here, the speaker’s
philosophical tendencies, particularly the belief that an “intellectual
breeze” (47) brushes by and inhabits all
living things with consciousness, collide with those of his orthodox
wife, who disapproves of his unconventional ideas and urges him
to Christ. While his wife lies untroubled, the speaker agonizes
over his spiritual conflict, caught between Christianity and a unique,
individual spirituality that equates nature with God. The poem ends
by discounting the pantheist spirit, and the speaker concludes by
privileging God and Christ over nature and praising them for having
healed him from the spiritual wounds inflicted by these unorthodox
views.
Nature and the Development of the Individual
Coleridge, Wordsworth, and other romantic poets praised
the unencumbered, imaginative soul of youth, finding images in nature
with which to describe it. According to their formulation, experiencing
nature was an integral part of the development of a complete soul
and sense of personhood. The death of his father forced Coleridge
to attend school in London, far away from the rural idylls of his
youth, and he lamented the missed opportunities of his sheltered,
city-bound adolescence in many poems, including “Frost at Midnight”
(1798). Here, the speaker sits quietly by
a fire, musing on his life, while his infant son sleeps nearby.
He recalls his boarding school days, during which he would both
daydream and lull himself to sleep by remembering his home far away
from the city, and he tells his son that he shall never be removed
from nature, the way the speaker once was. Unlike the speaker, the
son shall experience the seasons and shall learn about God by discovering
the beauty and bounty of the natural world. The son shall be given
the opportunity to develop a relationship with God and with nature,
an opportunity denied to both the speaker and Coleridge himself.
For Coleridge, nature had the capacity to teach joy, love, freedom,
and piety, crucial characteristics for a worthy, developed individual.
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