Daffodils

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (my favorite of the two) ushered in the English period of the Romantic movement in poetry and literature with their publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798.

The simplicity of their poetic diction, the enduring imagery and vividness that permeates their works, along with the mystical and sometimes ominous subjects their musings revolve around, has made their poetry both incredible and incredibly accessible and relatable to the layperson. These two poets have produced works that are not only beautiful and mesmerizing, but also honest and bold enough so as to reach out and touched gently on the Woeful and Dreadful in ways that are, in literary terms, beyond reproach. These poets are, in short, Homeric monuments.

Wordsworth, who was born on this day in 1770, was the first poet of the Romantic period in England that I read, and I was drawn to him immediately! His Lucy poems are eerily intriguing, steeped in total mystery and riddled with an acute sense of melancholy and lament (far from the mere pastoral musings of a naturalist poet that many have predicated upon him). His poem, Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802, which describes the beauty of a serene London morning from the quite perspective of the Westminster Bridge, is one of my favorite poems of all time- and probably one of his more popular ones.

Of his more popular works, I find it remarkable (and very embarrassing the more I contemplate it) that though I'm a fan of the works of Wordsworth, I only recently became acquainted with what's deemed one of his finest poems, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, also simply known as Daffodils.

To commemorate his date of birth, I'd like to share that poem with you. The rhyme scheme is simple: ababcc per stanza; the meter, a smooth eight syllables per line (iambic tetrameter); and the imagery, sublime. Trust me, you'll dig it. Let me know what you think.


Daffodils

I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden Daffodils;
Beside the Lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

 

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:-
A Poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company:
I gazed---and gazed---but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.

Poetry and Idealism

Toward the end of 1798 Coleridge, along with his buddy Wordsworth, took a trip that would land him in Germany for two years where he would study its language and its philosophical giants- including Kant and the transcendental idealism he espoused.

From Kant to Fichte to Schleiermacher, German philosophy was dominated by idealism- the doctrine that our cognitive faculties actively impose subjective properties upon the world it perceives, so much so that it can never know reality as it is, but only as it appears. Some have gone as far as to deny objective reality altogether.

Proponents of this philosophical movement swelled in Germany through the 18th and 19th century and heavily influenced that period's well known zeit geist ... romanticism.

That lead me to conclude that Coleridge- a contemporary of Kant- was not only cognizant of German idealism, but also swayed in one form or another by it.

According to transcendental idealism, we can never experience objective reality in its purity (Kant calls this purity of things things in-themselves, or noumenon). In order for a person (like a poet) to experience anything, there must exist, as a pre-condition to that experience, a cognitive aspect capable of organizing the sense-data.

Therefore, one’s never truly influenced by nature’s beauty directly, because nature’s beauty in its purity is only known through pre-existing cognitive filters; and these filters don't just passively receive sense-date, they aggressively mold it to correspond to its own structure. Therefore, by virtue of these filters, we lose reality in its purest form.

This has lead some idealists to concluded that what a person really perceives is not reality at all, but only an idea of it. Others, like the more radical solipsists, have concluded that all we're really perceiving is ourselves, that it is the mind ‘positing’ ideas in such a way that we believe there to be an objective reality, when in fact there's not.

Now try to imagine selling this to a poet- especially a poet of the romantic period! That Coleridge knew of these prevailing philosophies, and that he stood in modest antipathy toward them, is evident to me from a poem he wrote entitled, To Nature.


To Nature

It may indeed be phantasy, when I
Essay to draw from all created things
Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings ;
And trace in leaves and flowers that round me lie
Lessons of love and earnest piety.
So let it be ; and if the wide world rings
In mock of this belief, it brings
Nor fear, nor grief, nor vain perplexity.
So will I build my altar in the fields,
And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be,
And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields
Shall be the incense I will yield to Thee,
Thee only God ! and thou shalt not despise
Even me, the priest of this poor sacrifice



Of the Poem (Parameters and Summary)

Parameters

The poem can be broken up in a couple ways to be better understood. It can be broken up into two quatrain and two tercets (i.e. an octave and a sestet) so that it represents something similar to an Italian sonnet- which seems to be the pattern Coleridge employed here (i.e. abba, clearly an Italian quatrain). Or we can divide the poem up so that its contents are easily seen. In that case the poem would look like this:

It may indeed be phantasy, when I
Essay to draw from all created things
Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings ;
And trace in leaves and flowers that round me lie
Lessons of love and earnest piety.

So let it be ; and if the wide world rings
In mock of this belief, it brings
Nor fear, nor grief, nor vain perplexity.

So will I build my altar in the fields,
And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be,
And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields
Shall be the incense I will yield to Thee,
Thee only God ! and thou shalt not despise
Even me, the priest of this poor sacrifice

Rhyme Scheme: abbacbbcefefgg
Meter: loose (revolves round, but is not, a pentameter)

Summary

Lines 1 though 5:

The poet contends that- despite the possibility of it being untrue- that nature is inherently symbolic and suggestive and beautiful in and of herself, that this beauty is self-contained. He draws "from all created things" the deepest of joys, tracing out lessons and meaning from nature as if he were reading a book.

Lines 6 through 8:

Resolute that this is so, the poet clings to his belief regardless of how the world may mock.

Lines 9 through 14:

In the remaining lines the poet concludes with imagery that depicts nature as God’s temple, and the poet himself as priest. Notice the how he also utilizes- very intentionally- religious terminology and concepts borrowed from theology (especially lines 9 through 14).

created things- line 2
inward joy- line 3
love and piety- line 5
my altar- 9
my fretted dome- 10
incense- line 12
God alone- line 13
priest- line 14
sacrifice- line 14

It’s beautiful. It’s almost as if- and I may be pushing too hard here- as if the poet not only denies the notion that the human mind constructs* reality, but posits audaciously the independent and objective reality of both God and nature in the face of idealism (e.g. line 2, created things).

What say you?


*This is actually what solipsists contend- neither Kant, nor idealism in general, hold this belief.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge*

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a leader of the British Romantic movement, was born on October 21, 1772, in Devonshire, England. His father, a vicar of a parish and master of a grammar school, married twice and had fourteen children. The youngest child in the family, Coleridge was a student at his father's school and an avid reader. After his father died in 1781, Coleridge attended Christ's Hospital School in London, where he met lifelong friend Charles Lamb. While in London, he also befriended a classmate named Tom Evans, who introduced Coleridge to his family. Coleridge fell in love with Tom's older sister Mary.

Coleridge's father had always wanted his son to be a clergyman, so when Coleridge entered Jesus College, University of Cambridge in 1791, he focused on a future in the Church of England. Coleridge's views, however, began to change over the course of his first year at Cambridge. He became a supporter of William Frend, a Fellow at the college whose Unitarian beliefs made him a controversial figure. While at Cambridge, Coleridge also accumulated a large debt, which his brothers eventually had to pay off. Financial problems continued to plague him throughout his life, and he constantly depended on the support of others.

En route to Wales in June 1794, Coleridge met a student named Robert Southy. Striking an instant friendship, Coleridge postponed his trip for several weeks, and the men shared their philosophical ideas. Influenced by Plato's Republic, they constructed a vision of pantisocracy (equal government by all), which involved emigrating to the New World with ten other families to set up a commune on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. Coleridge and Southey envisioned the men sharing the workload, a great library, philosophical discussions, and freedom of religious and political beliefs.

After finally visiting Wales, Coleridge returned to England to find that Southey had become engaged to a woman named Edith Fricker. As marriage was an integral part of the plan for communal living in the New World, Coleridge decided to marry another Fricker daughter, Sarah. Coleridge wed in 1795, in spite of the fact that he still loved Mary Evans, who was engaged to another man. Coleridge's marriage was unhappy and he spent much of it apart from his wife. During that period, Coleridge and Southey collaborated on a play titled The Fall of Robespierre (1795). While the pantisocracy was still in the planning stages, Southey abandoned the project to pursue his legacy in law. Left without an alternative plan, Coleridge spent the next few years beginning his career as a writer. He never returned to Cambridge to finish his degree.

In 1795 Coleridge befriended William Wordsworth, who greatly influenced Coleridge's verse. Coleridge, whose early work was celebratory and conventional, began writing in a more natural style. In his "conversation poems," such as "The Eolian Harp" and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," Coleridge used his intimate friends and their experiences as subjects. The following year, Coleridge published his first volume of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, and began the first of ten issues of a liberal political publication entitled The Watchman. From 1797 to 1798 he lived near Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, in Somersetshire. In 1798 the two men collaborated on a joint volume of poetry entitled Lyrical Ballads. The collection is considered the first great work of the Romantic school of poetry and contains Coleridge's famous poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

That autumn the two poets traveled to the Continent together. Coleridge spent most of the trip in Germany, studying the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Jakob Boehme, and G.E. Lessing. While there he mastered the German language and began translating. When he returned to England in 1800, he settled with family and friends at Keswick. Over the next two decades Coleridge lectured on literature and philosophy, wrote about religious and political theory, spent two years on the island of Malta as a secretary to the governor in an effort to overcome his poor health and his opium addiction, and lived off of financial donations and grants. Still addicted to opium, he moved in with the physician James Gillman in 1816. In 1817, he published Biographia Literaria, which contained his finest literary criticism. He continued to publish poetry and prose, notably Sibylline Leaves (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825), and Church and State (1830). He died in London on July 25, 1834.


*Biography from Poets.org