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Filistovitch Alena
EN 3428 Romanticism
Spring 2001
Dr. A. Sakellari

The issue of discrepancy between the beginnings and the endings in Coleridges major
poems.
Coleridge was adept at starting poems but had serious difficulties
with endings, so that all his poems can be seen as unfinished or as
inapproprietely finished.
J.L.Lowers, The Road to Xanadu: A Study of the
Ways of Imagination.
There is an on-going discussion concerning the endings of Coleridges poems and
more specifically whether they subtract something, even among the best of his poems,
from the overall poetic achievement. While it is true that in most of his poems there
seems to be something problematic about the closing, what really needs to be
discussed is whether this so-called incompleteness does not make the poems, at least
his most successful, more interesting. What is more, it needs to be examined whether
this unfinishedness does not conform better to the notion of Romantic Imagination
and the spontaneous outpouring of emotions. J. Beer claims that this incompleteness
makes the work, in essence, more accomplished, which embodies the vast potential of
a theme and the inability to its being fully fulfilled (Beer, 34). This essay will try to
examine the above issues discussing a variety of poems ranging from the
Conversation Poems to the Visionary ones.
This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, for example, has all the basic characteristics of
the Conversation Poems like the tripartite rondo structure where the initial
description of a specific place or incident is followed by a flight of the imagination

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which engulfs the cosmos so that it returns to the starting place having acquired new
insight into the life of things like the poet in Tintern Abbey. In this specific case the
confined poet, due to some accident, laments his inability to wander through his
beloved countryside with his friends the Wordsworhs and Charles Lamb - and the
first lines are dominated by the poets bitterness, which makes him regard the bower,
where he has been confined, as a prison. Slowly, however, his imagination takes him
to his friends as he sees them in his mind walking through his familiar dell.
Interestingly enough, there is, in this first part, the ambivalent symbolism of the dell,
which, being dark, narrow, and deep, depicts the poets inner emotional state, which
has not been completely released from his emotional confinement (Abrams,118).
It is in the second part when he sees his friends emerging in the wide wide
Heaven that a kind of radiance is effected in his imagination that allows him to
forego his egoism and filled with friendship and a warm altruistic feeling he expresses
his joy for Charles Lamb, who has been pent up in London. Sharing his friends deep
joy as he is gazing round / on the wide landscape ... till all doth seem / less gross
he acquires a spiritual insight which makes him perceive the Almighty Spirit.
In the final part the liberating force of the imagination transforms the bower from a
prison to a soothing place. The poet has abandoned his egoism and his renewed
insight has taught him that Nature neer deserts the wise and pure and that the
diversity of nature can keep the heart responsive to Love and Beauty. It is this
insight that makes him bless the homeward-bound rook, which is reminiscent of the
Mariners blessing of the slimy sea creatures in The Rhime of the Ancient Mariner,
since no sound is dissonant which tells of Life.
This poem, which is believed to be one of the most successful of the
Conversation Poems, seems to possess a unified structure where the three parts of the

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rondo are smoothly intertwined producing a balanced poetic whole. Some critics
could claim, of course, that there is a sort of didactism creeping in the last lines of the
poem that could have been left out. On the whole, however, the poem should be seen
as celebrating the power of imagination, which cannot be confined in physical
boundaries.
In poems like the The Eolian Harp, the presence of the reproving Sarah, who
draws the poets imaginative flight to the ground, can be seen as making the poem
seem inappropriately finished. It is true that the Eolian harp on the window casement
which produces such a soft witchery of sound with melodies hovering on untamed
wing, makes his imagination soar to such heights that he communes with the
universal spirit of the One Life that permeates everything within us and abroad.
What is more, his flitting phantasies uncalled and undetained make his
imagination fly precariously beyond Christianity to a visionary dimension where all
of animated nature can be seen as organic Harps diversely framed. Seen in this
light, Saras reproof can be considered as undercutting the poems strength making the
poem resort to a sort of compromise. On the other hand, Sarahs presence could be
considered as another aspect of Coleridges personality related to his more down-toearth Christian morality that is in stark contrast to metaphysical wanderings of his
imaginative mind (Hill, 163). Seen from such a perspective, the poem can be seen as
depicting Coleridges personality divided in opposing strings of thought that needs the
psychological presence of Sara to check the extremity of his thoughts.
Similar comments have been made for one of Coleridges most famous poems,
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where the successful beginning with the Mariners
glittering eye transfixing the wedding guest as well as the reader, and his
subsequent spellbinding narration of his experience with the supernatural elements is

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said to have been destroyed by the moralistic stanzas. On the one hand, it is true that
the inclusion of these stanzas guides the reader towards a certain reading that the poet
thinks appropriate. This issue becomes more problematic from the fact that Coleridge
himself has admitted the intrusion of the moral didactism in the poem. Replying to
criticisms that there was no moral in the poem he claimed that in [his] own
judgement the poem had too much. He even went on to say that its chief fault
was the intrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader in a work of such
pure imagination (Hill, 203). So, the question that arises from this is why Coleridge
did not alter or even remove the stanzas in the subsequent revisions of the poem. One
possible answer is that the stanzas can be seen as an integral part of the Mariners
dramatic monologue and not as the words of the poet himself since the Mariners
moral conforms to Coleridges belief in the One-Life notion. Nevertheless, despite the
fact that these stanzas tend to point towards this specific reading of the poem, they
have not prevented critics from proposing alternative readings of the poem like the
one that sees the Mariner as Coleridges guise symbolising his imaginative insight
into life and his ability to express it in captivating verse.
Probably the one poem that can be called indisputably unfinished is Christabel
since Coleridge never finished it. But even in this case what needs to be examined is
whether the poem is effective or not. The poem employs some of the typical elements
found in Gothic literature in an effective way that manages to build up the tension as
the poem goes on. There is the castle, the wandering lady at midnight looking for the
betrothed knight under a full moon which yet looks both small and dull, and
most of all the enigmatic presence of Geraldine, the suggestive incidents of her
evilness like her reluctance to pray and mainly her snake eyes and the mystery
concerning her bosom. All this, which culminates in putting Christabel under her

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spell, is counteracted at the end of the second part with the commentary on the
estrangement between Sir Lioline and Christabel and of course, as mentioned above,
there is the issue of the poem being unfinished.
However, despite this failing of Coleridges to finish the poem, which could be
attributed to his inability or perhaps fear of confronting the images that his
imagination created under the influence of opium, the poem could be characterised as
effective. Geraldines presence has raised many discussions over the interpretation of
her inscrutable presence. She has been interpreted as a demon lover, a sort of vampire
or even an erring mortal expiating a past sin. It is no coincidence, for example, that
Shelley is said to have suffered a nightmare of a woman with eyes on her breast after
Byron had read the poem to him( Abrams, 298).
Finally, even the poem that has been considered as the culmination of Coleridges
poetic achievement, Kubla Khan, is incomplete. According to Coleridge himself the
poem is only a fragment of a vision he had after having taken opium. Regardless of
the disputable issue whether the poet actually composed the poem in a state of sleep
or reverie, it is the unfinishedness or, better, the vagueness that makes the poem great
and because of this ambiguity there have been an enormous amount of interpretations.
It has been interpreted, for example, as a poem about the creative process where the
subconscious river of the imagination surges on the surface of consciousness only
to be lost again in the sea of the subconsciousness (Lowes, 86). In this way it could
be said that the poet had a flash of imaginative insight about Kubla Khans failed
attempt to construct a sort of earthly paradise and, in the second part, there is his futile
attempt to communicate the essence of a vision he had about an Abyssinian maid. In
other words, the poet has drunk the milk of Paradise but it is impossible to convey
the essence of his taste; the reader has to guess or to feel what the taste was. There

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have even been Freudian interpretations like Robert Graves who thought that the
poem is Coleridges unconscious longing to shun the mazy complications of life by
retreating to a bower of poetry, solitude and opium where he would be able to evade
the reproofs of his wife and the gloomy prophecies of addiction uttered by the
ancestral voices of Lamb and Charles Lloyd (Hill, 32). All the interpretations,
however, cannot explain every facet of the poem, which, in effect, defies any attempt
at rational analysis. Kublan Khan is the kind of poem that invites the reader to be
carried away by its imaginative, poetic force.
In conclusion, it could be said that, firstly, this incompleteness observed in
Coleridges poems does not diminish the effect they have on the reader and, secondly,
it makes them even more interesting in certain ways. There are cases where due to the
unfinishedness opposing tensions concerning Coleridge and his inner life are revealed
or made prominent making us aware of the wider processes that are involved in the
making of poetry and any artistic pursuit in general. His inability to finish poems like
Christabel shows us the fascination we feel in the presence of supernatural, abnormal
phenomena and, of course, the fear or awe which prevents us from delving into these
states of mind in depth. Finally, if the poems are seen from a philosophical point of
view, since Coleridge himself was one of the major philosophers of his time, they
point to the fact that there can never be a last word in the world of ideas.

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Works Cited
Abrams M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp. New York: Oxford Univesity Press, 1971.
Beer, John. Coleridge the Visionary. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Coleridge, S. T. Selected Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Hill, J. S. A Coleridge Companion. London: Macmillan Press, 1983.
Lowes, J.L. The Road to Xandu: A Study in the Ways of Imagination. Boston:
Routledge, 1964.