Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon,
With the old Moon in her arms;
And I fear, I fear, my Master dear!
We shall have a deadly storm.
(Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence)
1
1Well! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made
2 The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,
3 This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence
4Unroused by winds, that ply a busier trade
5Than those which mould yon cloud in lazy flakes,
6Or the dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes
7Upon the strings of this Æolian lute,
8 Which better far were mute.
9 For lo! the New-moon winter-bright!
10 And overspread with phantom light,
11 (With swimming phantom light o'erspread
12 But rimmed and circled by a silver thread)
13I see the old Moon in her lap, foretelling
14 The coming on of rain and squally blast.
15And oh! that even now the gust were swelling,
16 And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast!
17Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed,
18 And sent my soul abroad,
19Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give,
20Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live!
2
21A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
22 A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
23 Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
24 In word, or sigh, or tear—
25O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood,
26To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd,
27 All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
28Have I been gazing on the western sky,
29 And its peculiar tint of yellow green:
30And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye!
31And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
32That give away their motion to the stars;
33Those stars, that glide behind them or between,
34Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:
35Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew
36In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
37I see them all so excellently fair,
38I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!
3
39 My genial spirits fail;
40 And what can these avail
41To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
42 It were a vain endeavour,
43 Though I should gaze for ever
44On that green light that lingers in the west:
45I may not hope from outward forms to win
46The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
4
47O Lady! we receive but what we give,
48And in our life alone does nature live:
49Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
50 And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
51Than that inanimate cold world allowed
52To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
53 Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
54A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
55 Enveloping the Earth—
56And from the soul itself must there be sent
57 A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
58Of all sweet sounds the life and element!
5
59O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me
60What this strong music in the soul may be!
61What, and wherein it doth exist,
62This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,
63This beautiful and beauty-making power.
64 Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given,
65Save to the pure, and in their purest hour,
66Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower,
67Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power,
68Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower
69 A new Earth and new Heaven,
70Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud—
71Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud—
72 We in ourselves rejoice!
73And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,
74 All melodies the echoes of that voice,
75All colours a suffusion from that light.
6
76There was a time when, though my path was rough,
77 This joy within me dallied with distress,
78And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
79 Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:
80For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
81And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
82But now afflictions bow me down to earth:
83Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth,
84 But oh! each visitation
85Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
86 My shaping spirit of Imagination.
87For not to think of what I needs must feel,
88 But to be still and patient, all I can;
89And haply by abstruse research to steal
90 From my own nature all the natural man—
91 This was my sole resource, my only plan:
92Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
93And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.
7
94Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind,
95 Reality's dark dream!
96I turn from you, and listen to the wind,
97 Which long has raved unnoticed. What a scream
98Of agony by torture lengthened out
99That lute sent forth! Thou Wind, that rav'st without,
100 Bare crag, or mountain-tairn, or blasted tree,
101Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb,
102Or lonely house, long held the witches' home,
103 Methinks were fitter instruments for thee,
104Mad Lutanist! who in this month of showers,
105Of dark brown gardens, and of peeping flowers,
106Mak'st Devils' yule, with worse than wintry song,
107The blossoms, buds, and timorous leaves among.
108 Thou Actor, perfect in all tragic sounds!
109Thou mighty Poet, e'en to frenzy bold!
110 What tell'st thou now about?
111 'Tis of the rushing of a host in rout,
112 With groans of trampled men, with smarting wounds—
113At once they groan with pain, and shudder with the cold!
114But hush! there is a pause of deepest silence!
115 And all that noise, as of a rushing crowd,
116With groans, and tremulous shudderings—all is over—
117 It tells another tale, with sounds less deep and loud!
118 A tale of less affright,
119 And tempered with delight,
120As Otway's self had framed the tender lay,—
121 'Tis of a little child
122 Upon a lonesome wild,
123Nor far from home, but she hath lost her way:
124And now moans low in bitter grief and fear,
125And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother hear.
8
126'Tis midnight, but small thoughts have I of sleep:
127Full seldom may my friend such vigils keep!
128Visit her, gentle Sleep! with wings of healing,
129 And may this storm be but a mountain-birth,
130May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling,
131 Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth!
132 With light heart may she rise,
133 Gay fancy, cheerful eyes,
134 Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice;
135To her may all things live, from pole to pole,
136Their life the eddying of her living soul!
137 O simple spirit, guided from above,
138Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice,
139Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice.
"Dejection: An Ode" is English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's exploration of despair, joy, and imagination. Lost in a terrible "dejection"—a kind of numb, colorless hopelessness—the poem's speaker reflects that, when a person is in such a mood, the whole world looks blank and empty. It takes the complex powers of the "Imagination," the speaker continues, to make the outside world feel meaningful and beautiful. Coleridge first published "Dejection" in London's Morning Post newspaper in 1802.
Well then! If the ancient poet who wrote the fabulous old song about Sir Patrick Spence knew as much about weather as he seems to have, this evening—so calm at the moment—won't pass undisturbed by rougher winds than the ones that are slowly reshaping that cloud on the horizon, or the ones that seem to be crying as they play this wind-harp (though it would be much better if it stayed silent). Because, look! There's the new moon, wintery, ice-white, and covered over in a kind of ghostly light. (Yes, it's covered in ghostly light, but also has a thin thread of silver surrounding it.) And I see the old moon sitting in the new moon's lap, a sure sign that there's a storm coming. And, oh, I wish that the storm were gathering already, and the night rain was falling hard and loud. The sounds of such storms—which have often startled me from my seat, awing me and making my spirit go on strange journeys—might just do what they often do, and might break through my numb, deadening suffering and give it some kind of life.
I feel a numb despair, empty, dark, and dismal—a smothered, tiring, emotionless despair, which I can't even seem to make go away by talking about it, or by crying. Oh, my dear Lady! In this sickly, drained mood, I've been drawn away to other thoughts by the song of that little bird; this whole warm, calm evening long, I've been looking toward the sky in the west, which warns of a storm with its strange yellowish-green color. I'm still looking at that sky—but it's as if I'm not even seeing it. And look at those wispy clouds, in shreds and long rows—the ones that, as they move, make it look as if the stars are moving instead, gliding past in the background, sometimes shining and sometimes muted, but always visible. And look at the crescent moon, which seems to be growing right out of a pool of pure blue sky. I see all of these gorgeous sights—but I only see their beauty, I can't feel it.
My cheerfulness fails me; why would I ever have thought that beautiful sights alone could possibly lift this heavy, deadening pain from my heart? It would be useless for me to try to feel differently than I do; even if I stared forever at that strange green sunset light, I know I could never find, in the mere look of things, the vibrant feelings and animation I'm longing for: those have to come from inside.
Oh, my dear Lady! We only get what we give; only through our own feelings does the natural world seem alive and animated with meaning. It's our own minds that make nature look beautiful as a bride or terrible as a corpse. And if we want to see anything better and more meaningful than what the lifeless, chilly world gives to most of the poor suckers who live out isolated, worry-blighted lives, our own souls have to send out a kind of light, a glorious and holy light, a beautiful glowing cloud that wraps around the whole world. The soul has to create the sweetness and power of all sounds itself: every beautiful sound is animated by the soul.
Oh, you good-hearted Lady! You of all people don't have to ask me what that music of the soul is—or where it comes from, this shining, beautiful, misty light, which is both beautiful itself and the source of all beauty. It's joy, noble Lady—joy that only the spiritually pure, in their very purest moments, receive. Joy is life itself, and something that flows from life: it's like both a cloud and the rain that falls from that cloud. Joy is the energy which, when we marry ourselves to nature, we receive as a wedding gift: it creates a whole new world and a whole new heaven, one that people too caught up in greed or ego can't even dream of. Joy is the lovely voice we hear in beautiful sounds, joy is the shining cloud that envelops the earth—and joy comes from inside us! Everything that delights our ears or our eyes comes from that joy: every sweet melody we hear is just an echo of joy's voice, and every gorgeous color is just joy's light gently shining out into the world.
There was once a time when, even though I had plenty of struggles, the joy I felt made my unhappiness into a game. All my bad luck was just material out of which I could build happy daydreams. Back then, I had hope, which grew around me as closely as a vine, and which made me feel as if I already possessed all the fruits and flowers of my future happiness. But now, my sufferings weigh me down to the ground. I wouldn't care if they simply made me unhappy. But, oh, it's so much worse: every attack of the dejection I'm suffering now takes away the power nature gave me the day I was born: the world-shaping, meaning-making Imagination. You see, trying not to think about the feelings I can't help but have, and trying instead to be quiet and patient as much as possible, smothering my own natural feelings in obscure studies: this was the only thing I could think of to do, my only plan for dealing with my pain. But now, the numbness that I've been trying to force on one part of my feelings has infected all my feelings, like a disease; now, numbness has almost become my soul's usual state.
Get out of here, snaky, strangling thoughts—reality's awful nightmare! I turn away from you and instead listen to the wind, which has been howling away like a crazy person in the background without my noticing. What a tormented, drawn-out scream the wind-harp makes, as if it were being tortured! You, Wind, ranting and raving outside: barren rocks, or mountain lakes, or wind-bent trees, or pinewoods that no one has ever climbed to, or isolated houses that people say witches live in—any of those would be more suitable instruments for you than my wind-harp, you crazed lute-player! In this rainy month, when all the gardens are muddy and brown and little flowers are just starting to bloom, you, Wind, seem to be throwing a perverse, demonic Christmas party, howling worse than you would even in winter among the little sprouting plants. You actor, giving a perfect tragic performance! You powerful poet, caught up in a creative frenzy! What are you talking about now? You seem to be telling the story of a defeated army, whose soldiers moan and nurse painful wounds, now crying out and now shaking with cold. But, shush! The wind has stopped for a moment, leaving a deep silence, and that terrible noise like a fleeing crowd, full of cries and fearful shaking—it's all over now. Now, the storm is telling a different story, more quietly. It's a less frightening story, and one that's softened by a little bit of pleasure, as if it were one of the poet Otway's gentle songs. It's the story of a little kid lost in a desolate wilderness. She's not too far from home, but she can't find her way. Now, she moans with sadness and terror—and now, she screams, hoping her mother will hear her.
It's midnight now, but there's no chance I'm going to sleep any time soon. I hope my dear Lady won't go through these kinds of long, sleepless nights often! Visit her, kindly Sleep, on your healing wings. And may this mountain storm give birth to something new—or turn out to be a whole lot of fuss about nothing. May all the stars sparkle over my Lady's house, quiet as though they were watching over the earth as it sleeps. May my Lady wake up lighthearted, full of happy daydreams and with cheer in her eyes. May Joy raise her spirits, and may Joy give her voice its sound. May the whole world, from the north pole to the south, seem vibrantly alive to her—and may her life mingle with the world's life, so the two flow together like a stream! Oh, my pure, sweet spirit, guided by God: my dear Lady, my most fervently chosen friend, may you feel joy always and forever.
As the unhappy speaker of “Dejection: An Ode” looks out his window at a spectacular night sky, he knows that something is missing. In the depths of his “dejection” (a kind of bone-deep suffering that the poem hints has emerged from an unrequited love), he can’t seem to feel a thing about the awe-inspiring beauty before him. The real difference between a life of “worth” and a life of empty despair, he observes, isn’t about having good feelings versus having bad feelings. It’s about having the ability to feel at all. “Dejection” leaves this speaker completely out of touch with the world, unable to respond to what he sees right before his eyes.
The “pain” the speaker is suffering as he writes isn’t any kind of sharp, urgent agony. Rather, it’s “a grief without a pang” (that is, without a stab of pain)—a dreary, colorless experience of flat nothingness. The speaker can’t even break through his numbness with a “sigh” or a “tear”: there’s absolutely no relief from this kind of suffering, precisely because it stops him from really feeling anything, even true sorrow. A more straightforwardly acute pain, the speaker implies, would be far preferable to this nothingness.
Not only is the speaker’s “dejection” dull and unbreakable, but it also cuts him off from the whole world. Gazing out the window into a spectacular, stormy evening sky, the speaker is perfectly capable of noting all its qualities in vivid detail, right down to the “peculiar tint of yellow green” in the west where the sun has just set. But his numbness means that he can only “see, not feel” the strange beauty of the scene. His dejection works like an isolation chamber: he’s trapped inside himself, unable to connect to the world.
Worse still, the speaker blames himself for losing this connection. It’s by trying “not to think of what I needs must feel”—that is, to damp down painful emotions, like his impossible love for the “Lady” to whom this poem is addressed—that he’s gotten himself into this state, he believes. That one patch of enforced numbness has “infect[ed]” his whole “soul” like a terrible disease. There’s no way, the poem suggests, to cut off just a part of one’s feelings; a dejected emptiness has a nasty way of spreading and growing.
The experience of “dejection,” the poem suggests, is terrible not because it’s excruciating, but because it’s isolating, numbing, deadening, insidious—and seemingly impenetrable. Lost in a wasteland of dull misery, the poem’s speaker can only try his best to remember what “Joy” felt like and to hold out a sliver of hope that, like the screams of a “little child” wandering through a storm, his cries for help might eventually be answered.
Joy, to the speaker of “Dejection,” is what makes an “inanimate cold world” into something of “higher worth.” In other words, joy is what makes life worth living. But joy isn’t something that the outside world bestows like a gift. Rather, the speaker insists, joy is something that comes from within—and more specifically from the imagination: the creative power to invest the world with one’s own sense of meaning and beauty. Joy, this poem ultimately suggests, moves from the inside out, not the outside in.
Reflecting on what’s missing in his current “deject[ed]” state, the speaker concludes that it’s not anything to do with the outside world. As he looks out at a wild and glorious storm, he realizes that it takes an inner “beautiful and beauty-making power” to make even the most astonishing sights seem to come to life.
That “power,” he declares, is his “shaping spirit of Imagination”: the ability to use his imagination to connect his own feelings and “passions” to what he sees around him (perhaps through writing poetry, for instance). Simply being able to see a reflection of his own inner life in the outside world is the most essential form of this power—an ability that “nature,” the speaker believes, “gave [him] at [his] birth.” This capacity is the exact opposite of numbing “dejection,” which cuts him off from feeling and experience.
The imagination is what produces “Joy,” this speaker explains—and “Joy” is far deeper than just a good mood. Rather, it’s a “fair luminous cloud,” an inner light that emerges from the “soul itself” and “envelop[s] the earth.” To feel joy is to feel as if one has, in some sense, absorbed the world with one’s imagination, making it part of one’s own “life”: “in our life alone,” the speaker observes, “does Nature live.” Without this relationship, in which the speaker’s imagination imbues the outside world with feeling, everything just looks “blank.”
Thus, when the speaker imagines the storm as a “Poet” and a “Lutanist” towards the end of the poem, there’s a sense that he might not be quite so dejected as he was at the beginning. By seeing the storm as an artist—in fact, as a poet just like himself—he seems to be finding his way back into an imaginative (and thus joyful) relationship to the world again.
Nature, in this poem as in many Romantic poems, is a sublime force: awe-inspiring, beautiful, and terrible all at once. But “Dejection” argues that nature’s might isn’t, well, completely natural; rather, nature draws much of its power from the way that people perceive it. It takes a human perspective, this poem suggests, to give nature its character and force.
The speaker spends much of his time in this poem watching a storm rolling in and charting his changing reactions to it. At first, he’s able to “see” the strange loveliness of the eerie, green-tinged dusk sky, but not to “feel” it. Even a truly spectacular display of natural beauty has no power in itself to pull him out of his funk. Much as he’d love the “outward forms” of the “inanimate cold world” to “startle [his] dull pain and make it live,” they don’t have that ability on their own.
But toward the end of the poem, the speaker begins to get into the swing of things, imagining the stormwind that has now broken over the countryside as a frenzied artist, a screaming voice, a rampaging army, and, most poignantly, a lost “little child” crying out for help. These personifications show him investing the outer world with his own buried feelings and experiences, from fear to rage to manic creativity to forlorn loneliness. It’s only because he’s able to experience the storm as an expression of feeling that he can really appreciate its power; without that kind of human connection, the poem suggests, nature remains “blank.”
Humanity and nature thus have a strange, reciprocal relationship: nature isn’t sublime in a vacuum! It takes a receptive human mind to transform natural power into beauty and meaning. As the speaker puts it, “in our life alone does nature live”: nature takes its color and character from the way that people see it.
“Dejection” presents itself as a rather abstract, philosophical poem about the relationship between people’s inner selves and the outside world. But just under the surface, it’s also about a particular and agonizing love. The speaker addresses the poem to a nameless “Lady” he can’t let himself think about too much, because “what he needs must feel” for her is so painful. In other words, his unrequited love for her has become a terrible burden. But that same love also seems to give him a sense of meaning and companionship. Unrequited love, this poem suggests, is an experience so overwhelming it can shape a heartbroken lover’s whole worldview.
The speaker directs all his reflections on his “dejection” and “Joy” to a “Lady” whom he clearly thinks the world of. He sees her as “pure of heart,” “virtuous,” and, generally speaking, an ideal confidant. She doesn’t need to “ask of [him]” what joy is like, he declares: in his eyes, she might as well be the very embodiment of that precious feeling. Alone in his numb sorrow, he nevertheless seems to feel as if she’s right there with him—a “friend” who can understand him.
But, of course, she’s not really there, and there are hints that the speaker’s feelings for her are part of what made him this dejected in the first place. Trying “not to think of what [he] needs must feel”—that is, trying his best not to focus on his longing for his beloved, perhaps because she can’t or won’t love him back—seems to have shut all the speaker’s feelings down. That effort has backfired, leaving him unable to feel much of anything; instead, he suffers a dull “grief without a pang.”
The speaker’s experience of impossible or unrequited love thus both causes and mirrors his suffering. Because he can’t let himself indulge his feelings for his “Lady,” he becomes cut off from the world—and being cut off from the world, the poem suggests, itself feels a lot like a kind of broken relationship!
However, the speaker’s deep respect, admiration, and love for his “Lady” remains intact through all this struggle. When he closes the poem by praying that she’ll never go through anything like his own dreadful “dejection,” it’s clear that his love for her endures, no matter how hard he tries to bury it. He “must” feel for her, even when he can’t feel much else.
Well! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made
The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,
This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence
Unroused by winds, that ply a busier trade
Than those which mould yon cloud in lazy flakes,
"Dejection" begins with a cry. "Well!" the speaker starts, and as the poem develops, it's hard to tell whether his outburst is excited, resigned, thoughtful, or some strange combination of all those feelings.
But one thing the speaker's informal "Well!" makes clear is that this will be an intimate poem. Grand epics don't start with an everyday "Well!": they kick off with a "Sing, o Muse" or a "Hwaet!" Already, readers can feel that this ode will bring them right up close to the speaker and his inner life.
Here at the beginning, the speaker is indeed doing something pretty everyday: looking out his window at a "tranquil" night, an evening stirred by breezes that, sculptor-like, "mould" the clouds into "lazy flakes." But all that calm, this speaker believes, is only the prelude to a storm—a personified wind who, the speaker says with a touch of ominous understatement, "pl[ies] a busier trade" than gentle cloud-moulding.
He guesses that a storm is coming, not because he's reading a barometer, but because he's familiar with a "grand old ballad": the ancient Scottish tale of Sir Patrick Spence, an unfortunate (and incompetent) sea captain. Lines from that ballad form the poem's epigraph—lines in which a sailor warns Sir Patrick of disaster. The sight of the "new Moon" holding the "old Moon in her arms," the sailor says, threatens a "deadly storm."
The speaker of "Dejection," it seems, is a person who lives more in the world of old songs than the world of weather reports. And perhaps he's also a person who sees nature as a dangerous, magical place. The eerie image of the new moon cradling the old is easier to imagine as a personification than a description of a natural phenomenon: it might take readers a moment to grasp that what the speaker is literally seeing above him is a crescent moon that still shows the outlines of the full moon.
In just a few lines, then, the reader knows this much:
Or the dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes
Upon the strings of this Æolian lute,
Which better far were mute.
Unlock all 327 words of this analysis of Lines 6-8 of “Dejection: An Ode,” and get the Line-by-Line Analysis for every poem we cover.
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Get LitCharts A+ For lo! the New-moon winter-bright!
And overspread with phantom light,
(With swimming phantom light o'erspread
But rimmed and circled by a silver thread)
I see the old Moon in her lap, foretelling
The coming on of rain and squally blast.
And oh! that even now the gust were swelling,
And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast!
Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed,
And sent my soul abroad,
Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give,
Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live!
A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear—
O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood,
To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd,
All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
Have I been gazing on the western sky,
And its peculiar tint of yellow green:
And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye!
And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
That give away their motion to the stars;
Those stars, that glide behind them or between,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:
Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
I see them all so excellently fair,
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!
My genial spirits fail;
And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live:
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the Earth—
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!
O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me
What this strong music in the soul may be!
What, and wherein it doth exist,
This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,
This beautiful and beauty-making power.
Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given,
Save to the pure, and in their purest hour,
Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower,
Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power,
Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower
A new Earth and new Heaven,
Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud—
Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud—
We in ourselves rejoice!
And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,
All melodies the echoes of that voice,
All colours a suffusion from that light.
There was a time when, though my path was rough,
This joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:
For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
But now afflictions bow me down to earth:
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth,
But oh! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination.
For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all I can;
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man—
This was my sole resource, my only plan:
Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.
Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind,
Reality's dark dream!
I turn from you, and listen to the wind,
Which long has raved unnoticed. What a scream
Of agony by torture lengthened out
That lute sent forth!
Thou Wind, that rav'st without,
Bare crag, or mountain-tairn, or blasted tree,
Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb,
Or lonely house, long held the witches' home,
Methinks were fitter instruments for thee,
Mad Lutanist!
who in this month of showers,
Of dark brown gardens, and of peeping flowers,
Mak'st Devils' yule, with worse than wintry song,
The blossoms, buds, and timorous leaves among.
Thou Actor, perfect in all tragic sounds!
Thou mighty Poet, e'en to frenzy bold!
What tell'st thou now about?
'Tis of the rushing of a host in rout,
With groans of trampled men, with smarting wounds—
At once they groan with pain, and shudder with the cold!
But hush! there is a pause of deepest silence!
And all that noise, as of a rushing crowd,
With groans, and tremulous shudderings—all is over—
It tells another tale, with sounds less deep and loud!
A tale of less affright,
And tempered with delight,
As Otway's self had framed the tender lay,—
'Tis of a little child
Upon a lonesome wild,
Nor far from home, but she hath lost her way:
And now moans low in bitter grief and fear,
And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother hear.
'Tis midnight, but small thoughts have I of sleep:
Full seldom may my friend such vigils keep!
Visit her, gentle Sleep! with wings of healing,
And may this storm be but a mountain-birth,
May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling,
Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth!
With light heart may she rise,
Gay fancy, cheerful eyes,
Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice;
To her may all things live, from pole to pole,
Their life the eddying of her living soul!
O simple spirit, guided from above,
Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice,
Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice.
The stormwinds that rattle this poem are a symbol for emotion—especially painful emotion.
Towards the end of the poem, the storm that's been threatening finally breaks. In it, the speaker hears not the power of nature, but distinctly human sorrows: the "groans" of a defeated army and the "screams" of a "little child" lost in the wilderness. These images suggest that the speaker is taking this storm pretty personally, seeing it as a symbolic outward expression of his own feelings of defeat and abandonment. Emotion, the poem's storm symbolism suggests, works upon hapless people like rough winds work on an "Aeolian lute."
The allusions in "Dejection" connect this poem both to old tradition and to the speaker's relationships.
Coleridge's first allusions refer to the poem's epigraph, which consists of lines taken from the "grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence":
The "Æolian lute" that the speaker keeps returning to, meanwhile, refers to Aeolus, a classical god of the winds; wind-harps named for this god were a common parlor toy in the 18th and 19th centuries. The speaker seems to relate to this lute, seeing himself as similarly at the mercy of the "winds" of feeling.
But the poem's most important allusions are to the work of William Wordsworth, Coleridge's close friend and frequent collaborator. In fact, this whole poem is a response to Wordsworth's great "Intimations of Immortality" ode:
In making its reply, this poem sometimes directly quotes the Immortality Ode:
The poem's final allusion might also have more to do with Wordsworth than it would first appear. When the speaker imagines the winds telling the story of a lost "little child," he suggests that story sounds like the work of "Otway," a 17th-century poet and playwright. But that story sounds an awful lot more like the plot of another of Wordsworth's poems, "Lucy Gray," than anything Otway ever wrote.
The poem's allusions thus make it clear that Coleridge is dealing with matters both timeless and deeply personal.
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Yesterday evening.
"Dejection: An Ode" is, as its title suggests, an ode—a lyrical exploration of a particular subject. This ode wanders far and wide from its stated theme, however: this poem isn't just about "Dejection," a kind of depressive numbness, but also about its opposite, "Joy," an all-embracing communion with the world.
The poem is broken into eight irregular stanzas, each exploring a new development in the speaker's thoughts. Like most odes, this one doesn't stick to a particular stanza form or length. It also doesn't use any predictable meter or rhyme scheme. Instead, it shapes itself to fit the speaker's thoughts. Some stanzas are long and meandering; others are short and sweet.
But this shapeshifting ode does model itself on another great poem: William Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." Coleridge wrote "Dejection" in response to the first few stanzas of Wordsworth's poem and often alludes to its language and its themes. Coleridge deeply admired Wordsworth, but didn't always agree with him. Where Wordsworth argues that people lose their ability to perceive nature's inherent "glory" as they grow up, Coleridge counters that, in fact, nature's "glory" is in large part a creation of the human imagination, and flows from the inside out, not the outside in.
Like most odes, "Dejection" doesn't use a predictable meter. The poem is mostly iambic: that is, it uses iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm.
But whenever the speaker fancies, the poem switches between lines of iambic pentameter (five iambs in a row) and lines of iambic trimeter (three iambs in a row). Sometimes it even throws in a line of iambic hexameter (six iambs, also known as an alexandrine), for flavor!
Here's a typical example of the poem's metrical games, quoted from the beginning of the third stanza:
My gen- | ial spir- | its fail;
And what | can these | avail
To lift | the smoth- | ering weight | from off | my breast?
The speaker starts with two lines of iambic trimeter—lines that feel blunt and heavy as the dull suffering the speaker describes. Then, he launches into a longer, more fluid line of iambic pentameter.
Such longer lines often trace the speaker's more reflective, philosophical thoughts on his situation, as in lines 45-46:
I may | not hope | from out- | ward forms | to win
The pass- | ion and | the life, | whose foun- | tains are | within.
Here, the speaker pairs a line of iambic pentameter with a drawn-out alexandrine, drawing particular attention to this declaration of one of the poem's central ideas.
Iambic rhythms like these are common in English-language poetry; English naturally falls into an iambic pattern a lot of the time, and a steady iambic pulse can feel hypnotic as a heartbeat. But this poem, like a lot of iambic poetry, also sometimes breaks its rhythm for emphasis. Take a look at lines 71-72, for instance:
Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud—
We in ourselves rejoice!
These lines don't use any standard pattern of feet. But both lines start with a trochee, the opposite foot to an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm—a choice that means the words "Joy" and "We" sing out. The strong spondee—DUM-DUM—of "sweet voice" is similarly emphatic and, well, joyful.
Overall, then, the poem's meter is flexible, expressive—and as emotive as the speaker is dejected.
"Dejection" plays with its rhyme scheme in the same ways it plays with its meter, varying patterns of rhyme for emotional and musical effect.
For just one example, take a look at the rhyme scheme in the fourth stanza, which runs like this:
AABCBBCBCDCD
Examined closely, this rhyme scheme almost works like the outline of an essay!
The two A rhymes work like a thesis statement:
O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live:
Then, the speaker develops his point across the lines with B and C rhymes, declaring that experiencing any life of "higher worth" than meaningless struggle and anxiety requires that the "soul itself must issue forth" the glorious light of joy. Finally, he introduces a second supporting point by weaving a D rhyme in: sweet singing, he adds, is another metaphor for this joy.
The rhymes here thus help to trace the development of the speaker's thoughts—and just plain sound lovely. This poem of deep feeling is also a poem of profound philosophical insight, and the music of these lines suggests that thought and feeling, for this speaker, might be pretty closely knitted together.
This poem's speaker is almost certainly Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself. Not only does the speaker express Coleridge's philosophical convictions about the creative work of the "Imagination," he suffers from Coleridge's own "dejection"—and his heartbreak.
The first draft of this poem was called "Letter to Sara Hutchison," and spoke directly to the woman with whom Coleridge was deep in unrequited love. "Dejection" was a revised version intended for publication. Less personal and less revealing, it's addressed to an anonymous "Lady" rather than "Sara"—but it's still very much Coleridge's own story.
Whether or not the reader knows this background, they might well guess that this poem's speaker is a suffering poet. The speaker's sense of the power of the imagination (and his habit of seeing his own feelings reflected in tempests and wind-harps) mark him out as a visionary and passionate soul.
The poem is certainly inspired by Coleridge's own home in the Lake District, a beautiful part of Northern England renowned as the cradle of English Romantic poetry. The speaker, sheltering indoors from a gathering storm, never says much about the room around him; he pays far more attention to the strange lights, sparkling stars, and raging winds of the world outside his window. But his mention of an "Æolian lute"—a wind-harp, a common parlor toy in the 19th century—suggests that he's sitting in his own living room or study, somewhere peaceful, perhaps lit and warmed by a fire.
Of course, these comfortable surroundings can't give the speaker any real consolation; his thoughts are far away, and he's looking out the window into the world, not inward at his home. Cut off by his "dejection," he at first feels far away from everything; then, when the storm breaks, he almost seems to be part of the wind and rain himself.
The speaker's disconnect from his own immediate surroundings is all part of this poem's evocation of numb, isolated dejection—but also its wild Romantic visions. The imagination, this poem's setting suggests, can both plant people more firmly where they stand, and carry them far away.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was one of the most brilliant, inspired, and tormented of the English Romantic poets. A big personality and bigger talker, Coleridge privately suffered from self-doubt, bone-deep loneliness, and (eventually) opium addiction. For a time, he found balance and friendship with the more grounded and temperate William Wordsworth; the inspired collaboration between these two poets would produce Lyrical Ballads, a book often credited as the founding text of English Romanticism.
In Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge and Wordsworth took on two sides of the Romantic coin. Wordsworth's poetry focused on everyday country life and the wisdom of the natural world; Coleridge's work was wild and magical, populated by strange spirits. Both of these attitudes were deeply Romantic in their way: the Romantic poets believed both that poetry should be plainspoken and down-to-earth, and that it should also explore the outer reaches of the imagination.
This poem, written several years after Lyrical Ballads appeared in 1798, is also a kind of conversation with Wordsworth. "Dejection" is Coleridge's response (and rejoinder) to Wordsworth's famous "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." In that ode, Wordsworth argues that people lose touch with nature's inherent power and glory as they grow up; here, Coleridge uses a similar form to reply that whatever glory nature has must rather come from "within."
First published in The Morning Post, a London newspaper, "Dejection" eventually appeared in Coleridge's 1817 collection Sibylline Leaves.
This poem draws on a complex and agonizing episode in Coleridge's own life. Always a man of speedy (and often ill-judged) enthusiasms, Coleridge rushed into marriage as a young man, choosing for his bride his friend Robert Southey's sister-in-law, Sara Fricker. The idea was that the Southeys and the Coleridges would emigrate to America together and start an idealistic egalitarian community they called a "Pantisocracy." But these plans fell through almost immediately, leaving the Coleridges trapped in a deeply unhappy marriage. The two would eventually separate—a rare and scandalous choice in their time.
Poor Coleridge didn't learn much from this debacle. Instead, he played out a similar pattern again, this time with a different friend's sister-in-law: another Sara, Sara Hutchison, sister of William Wordsworth's wife Mary. Coleridge worshiped the Wordsworths, and it's possible that a longing to be part of their happy family inspired a good deal of his passion for this second Sara, for whom he would write his famous "Asra" poems (see what he did there?).
Sara Hutchinson didn't return Coleridge's feelings—and even if she had, it would have been 19th-century social suicide to pursue a relationship with a still-married man. But along with the rest of Wordsworth's family, she cared deeply about Coleridge and remained his good friend, a situation that gave Coleridge both comfort and enduring pain.
"Dejection" is the second, considerably toned-down draft of a poem Coleridge wrote for Sara. The first version, "Letter to Sara Hutchison," is much more explicit about the identity of that mysterious "Lady"—and about Coleridge's agonized longing for her. The more measured, reflective "Dejection" was Coleridge's way of transforming his pain into philosophy.
The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence — Listen to the folk song Coleridge alludes to in the first lines of the poem. The words of this old ballad are more than a little relevant to the story Coleridge tells!
A Reading of the Poem — Listen to the actor Sir Ralph Richardson reading the poem aloud.
Coleridge's Legacy — Read biographer Richard Holmes's overview of Coleridge's poetic career.
Coleridge and "Asra" — Learn more about "Asra," the beloved "Lady" to whom Coleridge addresses this poem.
A Coleridge Biography — Visit the British Library's website to learn more about Coleridge's life and work.
The Asra Poems — Read a collection of Coleridge's "Asra" poems—including the intimate, tormented "Letter to Sara Hutchinson," the first version of "Dejection: An Ode."