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The pains of sleep by samuel taylor coleridge analysis
The critical summary of Wordsworth and Coleridge
The critical summary of Wordsworth and Coleridge
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Hazlitt wryly observed in 1816 that "the fault of Mr. Coleridge is that he comes to no conclusion." This is never more evident than in Coleridge 's three fragment poems, all of which are offered to the public as emphatically unresolved, exemplifying an anxiety that runs throughout Coleridge 's entire poetic career.
Fragment poems were an increasingly popular genre in the early nineteenth century, and attempts to mimic the structure were often poorly done: the construction of the 'fragment ' was heavily relied upon to create meaning in otherwise lacklustre poetry. Yet there are examples of it done well, and none more emblematic of how evocative and powerful the form can be than Coleridge 's Christabel collection. Coleridge 's poetry captures
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The pervasive "sense of intolerable wrong" that cuts through the entirety of the poem suggests an awareness within the poet-persona that he is unable to tap into his creative potential and therefore cannot express his suffering: rather than using the vehicle of music to translate his interior workings into poetry, he can only observe the anonymous "trampling throng". Andrew Allport has observed that 'Kubla Khan ' and 'The Pains of Sleep ' are "two sides of the same experience", although whether that experience is taking opium or the act of writing is unclear: perhaps because they are inextricably tangled together in the poems of Christabel. The connection Coleridge draws explicitly between the two, with 'The Pains of Sleep ' "describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease", heightens the self-conscious presence of the poet in both poems and appears to find him wanting. By drawing our attention to this act of self-condemnation, Coleridge is purposely claiming failure as the achievement of Christabel and emphasising the unstable interior world which all three poems inhabit: they are all in the process of becoming, but the poet and the reader are both aware that this process will not reach …show more content…
The Christabel collection is thus riddled with the anxiety of irresolution that runs through the majority of Coleridge 's poetic career, and this is never more pronounced than in the case of 'Kubla Khan '. Thomas McFarland claims 'Kubla Khan ' is "as fully terminated as any poem in the language": this in turn suggests that to define the poem as a fragment must be a thematic and biographical comment rather than a structural observation. Yet the use of the word 'terminated ' suggests a rather ominous, self-contained resolution which 'Kubla Khan ' does not
Ryan reminds us of the suggestive power of poetry–how it elicits and rewards the reader’s intellect, imagination, and emotions. I like to think that Ryan’s magnificently compressed poetry – along with the emergence of other new masters of the short poem like Timothy Murphy and H.L. Hix and the veteran maestri like Ted Kooser and Dick Davis – signals a return to concision and intensity.
... Works Cited Everett, Nicholas. From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian Hamilton.
69. Print. Strand, Mark, and Eavan Boland. The Making of a Poem: a Norton Anthology of Poetic
...J. and Vivienne J. Rundle, ed. The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory. Orchard Park: Broadview Press,1999.
“The Sleep” by Caitlin Horrocks is a short story, written in the first person. In this short story the Rasmussen family lives in a small town called Bounty, which seems to be someplace that is very dark and cold in the winter season, most likely someplace north. The Rasmussen family are going through hard times with the sudden death and the tragic loss of Al’s wife and their children’s mother. The family decides to take the winter season off from work and school in order to sleep, Al seem to believe that this will help heal the family. The people of Bounty see how well the sleep worked for the Rasmussen family, so some of them decide to do the same thing the next winter season. People usually sleep when they are depressed, the
Furthermore, Wordsworth’s assertion of feelings as the effects of an action or a situation, which means that actions should influence the emotions of the character and not the other way around, is dissimilar to The Raven’s character’s feeling of desperation in which he succumbed to his distress. However, the lesson derived from the bizarre workings of the human mind in preferring more devotion to the pain for the sake of “preserving the memory,” as “The Raven” illustrates, exposes to us how a particular person behaves towards grief. The statement thus proves in relation to Coleridge’s statement of the readers’ elicitation of the poem is more significant than the poem itself (in reference to his emphasis on the importance of the “Return”). Another variation between Wordsworth and Coleridge is that the former claims that the writer must bring the language near to the language of men, whilst the latter believes that the language of poetry should beautiful and elevated. “The Raven” in this case
To fully understand this poem, the reader would find it helpful to know what led Coleridge to write it. Coleridge grew up with English essayist Charles Lamb in school and the two were close friends (Merriman.) In their later years, however, the two rarely saw each other as Coleridge lived in the country side and Lamb lived in the city, where he cared for his mentally ill sister (Merriman.) On one of the rare days Lamb went to visit him, Coleridge planed to go on a walk through the scenic area surrounding his house with Lamb and some other friends, but before they left, Coleridge’s wife accidentally dropped boiling milk on his foot and he was unable to participate in the walk (Benzon.) While the others gallivanted across the countryside, Coleridge sat in his garden and wrote this poem.
poems contain elements of dejection at one point; however, presence of that dejection is tested in Coleridge's case, and. increased within the Frost and Thomas poems. It is incredibly ironic. that the one poem that was an ode to dejection turned out to be the most positive of the three. WORKS CITED Coleridge, Samuel Taylor.
Allison, Barrows, Blake, et al. eds. The Norton Anthology Of Poetry . 3rd Shorter ed. New York: Norton, 1983. 211.
...ous allegory represents Christian ideals such as sin, forgiveness, and prayer. In addition, Coleridge’s use of language and form contribute to the message conveyed in the text. The form fluctuates throughout the text by use of different rhyme schemes, loose meter, and stanzas in length varying four to nine lines. The variety of form could be representative the array of interpretations of this text. Coleridge conveys profound religious meaning by using symbolic language with interpretive representations. Although his use of elevated language possibly narrowed the audience, that could have been his intentions due to the complexities of this philosophical poem. In the end, Coleridge’s depiction of the Mariner’s journey ultimately conveys the Christian ideal, which is to love and appreciate all creatures created by God, whether Albatross or snake.
Magnuson, Paul. "The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons & The Wordsworths in 1802." Criticism 4(2001):451. eLibrary. Web. 11 Mar. 2014.
It is believed that “Kubla Khan” was created by Coleridge when he was in a deep sleep that was induced by the use of opiates which were prescribed for dysentery. He fell asleep while reading Purcha’s Pilgrimage about building of Kubla Khan’s palace and garden. When he woke up from experiencing the dream in which he created the poem he began writing it down. He was part way through writing the poem and was interrupted by a person from the nearby town of Porlock. After this interruption he was unable to complete the poem because his access to the dream was lost. The unfinished work was not published for three decades. Much mystery has enshrouded “Kubla Khan” and it’s meaning due to the circumstances of it’s creation. The poem itself is as mystical and interesting as the story behind its creation.
While Coleridge describes the process of creating Romantic poetry and encourages poets to use the combination of nature and imagination in this process, Keats is more focused on reality and is well aware of the limitations of the Grecian urn. With the poets’ admiration of nature present in both poems …… to be completed.
In two works by Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, both works regard the imagination as vitally important. In the Ancient Mariner, the imagination (or rather, the lack of it) condemns the Mariner to a kind of hell, with the fiends of sterility, solitude, and loneliness: “’God save thee, Ancient Mariner, from the fiends that plague thee thus! Why look’st thou so?’ ‘With my crossbow I shot the Albatross’”. In Kubla Khan, the imagination of an external being, the narrator that Coleridge created, the ideal critic, can create a masterpiece that far outstrips the meager piece of work that even the emperor of a huge, rich civilization can produce: “I would build that dome in air, a sunny dome! Those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, and all should cry, Beware! Beware!” In Kubla Khan, the imagination can even make people fear an otherwise inconsequential event, sequence, or organism.
Coleridge successfully illustrates the qualities of imagination in his poem, Kubla Khan, through the sound of words, the creative content and his ability to create and recreate. Coleridge turns the words of the poem into a system of symbols that are suspended in the reader’s mind. Coleridge uses creative powers to establish the infinite I AM, a quality of the primary imagination. Coleridge mirrors his primary and secondary imagination in the poem by taking apart and recreating images. The qualities of imagination discussed in the poem exist independently but also work together to create an imaginative world. It is important to understand how the poem works to achieve these qualities, but also how the poem works to bring the reader back to reality. The powers and qualities of imagination are present in Kubla Khan and it is through Coleridge’s extraordinary writing that the reader is able to experience an imaginative world, in which we alternate between reality and imagination.