Summary
The speaker recalls a poem that tells the tale of Sir
Patrick Spence: In this poem, the moon takes on a certain strange
appearance that presages the coming of a storm. The speaker declares
that if the author of the poem possessed a sound understanding of
weather, then a storm will break on this night as well, for the
moon looks now as it did in the poem. The speaker wishes ardently
for a storm to erupt, for the violence of the squall might cure
his numb feeling. He says that he feels only a ‘dull pain,” “a grief
without a pang”—a constant deadening of all his feelings. Speaking
to a woman whom he addresses as “O Lady,” he admits that he has been
gazing at the western sky all evening, able to see its beauty but
unable fully to feel it. He says that staring at the green sky will
never raise his spirits, for no “outward forms” can generate feelings:
Emotions can only emerge from within.
According to the speaker, “we receive but what we give”:
the soul itself must provide the light by which we may hope to see
nature’s true beauty—a beauty not given to the common crowd of human
beings (“the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd”). Calling the Lady
“pure of heart,” the speaker says that she already knows about the
light and music of the soul, which is Joy. Joy, he says, marries
us to nature, thereby giving us “a new Earth and new Heaven, / Undreamt
of by the sensual and the proud.”
The speaker insists that there was a time when he was
full of hope, when every tribulation was simply the material with
which “fancy made me dreams of happiness.” But now his afflictions
press him to the earth; he does not mind the decline of his mirth,
but he cannot bear the corresponding degeneration of his imagination, which
is the source of his creativity and his understanding of the human
condition, that which enables him to construct “from my own nature
all the natural man.” Hoping to escape the “viper thoughts” that
coil around his mind, the speaker turns his attention to the howling
wind that has begun to blow. He thinks of the world as an instrument
played by a musician, who spins out of the wind a “worse than wintry
song.” This melody first calls to mind the rush of an army on the
field; quieting, it then evokes a young girl, lost and alone.
It is midnight, but the speaker has “small thoughts” of
sleep. However, he hopes that his friend the Lady will be visited
by “gentle Sleep” and that she will wake with joyful thoughts and
“light heart.” Calling the Lady the “friend devoutest of my choice,”
the speaker wishes that she might “ever, evermore rejoice.”
Form
The long ode stanzas of “Dejection” are metered in iambic
lines ranging in length from trimeter to pentameter. The rhymes
alternate between bracketed rhymes (ABBA) and couplets (CC) with
occasional exceptions.
Commentary
In this poem, Coleridge continues his sophisticated philosophical
exploration of the relationship between man and nature, positing
as he did in “The Nightingale” that human feelings and the forms
of nature are essentially separate. Just as the speaker insisted
in the earlier poem that the nightingale’s song should not be called
melancholy simply because it sounded so to a melancholy poet, he
insists here that the beauty of the sky before the storm does not
have the power to fill him with joy, for the source of human feeling
is within. Only when the individual has access to that source, so
that joy shines from him like a light, is he able to see the beauty
of nature and to respond to it. (As in “Frost in Midnight,” the
city-raised Coleridge insists on a sharper demarcation between the
mind and nature than the country-raised Wordsworth would ever have
done.)
