Assignment on :

Dejection:An ode
Subject:
19th Century Poetry

Submitted By:

Megastars

122, 123, 124, 126, 129

Submitted To:
Mam Farah

Submission Date:
29-08-2023

BS VI ( English 2020-2024 )
Govt Graduate College for Women, satellite town
Gujranwala.
 Dejection an ode
Introduction :
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ( 1772 – 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher,
and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic
Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets.

Coleridge wrote many outstanding poems out of which The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and
Kubla Khan are most notable. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases, including
"suspension of disbelief".Throughout his adult life, Coleridge had crippling bouts
of anxiety and depression; it has been speculated that he had bipolar disorder, which had not
been defined during his lifetime. His childhood was characterized by attention seeking,
which has been linked to his dependent personality as an adult. The complexities of
Coleridge’s life influenced his poetic writings heavily.Along with major romantic features
his poems reflect shortcomings of his life certain melancholic statements. Coleridge’s poetry
is replete with supernaturalism and romanticism.

Dejection: An Ode is the reflection of his despair in his personal life and his indication
concerning his declining power of imagination. Dejection: An Ode was composed when the
poet faced a lot of complexities in his life. Although Coleridge laments the fading of his
poetic power, this poem is considered as one of his best lyrics. The poet feels dejection and
grief over his loss of imagination and poetic ability. Similar to the beginning quote in which
Sir Patrick anticipates with fear the coming of a destructive storm and inevitable death, here,
Coleridge, at a quiet night, longs for a storm to stimulate his poetic power because he
believes that he has lost his creative power and happiness in life.

The poem begins with a stanza form an old folk ballad that tells of the courage of
Sir Patrick Spence in confronting a murderous storm. In this ballad which is about curse and
punishment, Sir Patrick is the best seafarer. He is ordered to navigate the king’s ship, but Sir
Patrick and the other mariners know that a caustic storm is approaching. The king orders a
deadly command by which they are approaching death. Consequently the king and all aboard
the ship die in the same way that Coleridge talks about the death of his imagination.

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.

In the quoted stanza the speaker predicts a storm because the night before he saw the new
moon, with the old moon in her arms, Coleridge sees contrast of the sharp, clear outline of
the new moon and the soft haziness of the old moon embraced in it.

The poem considered as a Pindaric ode in 340 lines inscribed to Sara Hutchinson, in 1802, in
the form of verse letter. Later in 1817 the abridged version of it, consisting of 139 lines, was
published by Coleridge. It was composed when the poet had a collection of complexities
such as physical and mental illness, addiction and family problems.This poem is often
compared with Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality and is known as one of
Coleridge’s greatest lyric poems. Samuel Taylor Coleridge starts writing this ode as a
response to Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode.

Earl Leslie Griggs observed that:

“Coleridge in writing this ode turned a poetic letter full of self-revelation and self-pity into a
work of art with a timeless and universal significance”.

Like a conversational poem, the ode starts on a quiet note, commenting on the weather,
which is calm at the moment, but is on to be stormy. The poet longs for the wind to start
blowing; he feels dull and hopes that the buffeting of the wind will arouse him and enliven
his soul. Thus, as well as being a natural force, the wind also represents the creative energy
or power that the poet has felt before but now lacks. In this way, the whole poem can be
considered as an invocation of that creative power which can be obtained by the power of
wind or storm.

The first stanza is a miniature of the poem. The first sixteen lines begin with an apparent
fear of the prospect of stormy winds: …winds, that ply a busier trade, that would be
destructive for the persona. From that apparent fear the poem moves to an apparent welcome
of self-destruction and death wish. It is at the last lines of this stanza that the poem presents a
fully expressed longing for the storm:

“And oh! That even now the guest were swelling,

And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast!”

He prefers an end to “this dull pain” so that he can “move and live”. He believes that he
would like to hasten the predicted, active, suffering because then he would have more energy
to do something to take his mind of it. In this way the reader is also reminded of the truth that
anticipation of suffering is often seems worse than the event itself.The overall spirit of these
lines is that the poet wants to rise from his deep slumber of barrenness and only a fierce
storm can perform the trick of firing his imagination.

In the second stanza, the poet describes his present grief. Here he creates a parallel between
the quiet evening before the storm and his own absence of feeling. He addresses a lady (Sara
Hutchinson) and gives his ode a dramatic function. Coleridge tells her that he has spent the
evening gazing at the sunset. He describes it but complains that he is merely seeing it, not
feeling it. He believes that he has experienced a mental decay from which there is no hope of
reversal. He is detached from nature, and emotionally dead to its influence. In other words, in
the second stanza the grief without a pang is defined in several ways, all of which more or
less plainly refer to the general paralysis of his feeling failure. The lady to whom Coleridge
addresses is his last hope. This lady has got a radiance that Coleridge cannot obtain
anymore. The persona believes that through this lady, he can regain joy.

In the third stanza, the poet continues his lament that mere “outward forms” cannot generate
the passion that drives his creativity. As he says:

My genial spirits fail;

And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
Here he believes that nobody, even nature can help him. Subsequently any spontaneous
movement of feeling, even a sharp pang of grief, would be welcome, and yet he is totally
incapable of it. After two stanzas he describes what he has lost is joy and gives a
philosophical explanation of its loss.

In the fourth Stanza, he explains that the creative imagination makes nature beautiful. A
“glory” in the poet’s soul animates the “cold world” of material objects. Here, Coleridge uses
the metaphor of a marriage to explain the relationship of poet and nature. The poet is the
bridegroom. Here he employs in a highly organic way the symbols which were perpetually
associated in his mind with the poetic experience, light and wind. This stanza may be read as
an objective description of the poetic relation between man and nature and the work of art.
By reading this stanza, one realizes that this stanza is not just an objective description of the
poetic relation between man and nature, but it is also the reflection of real experiences and
failures of his life. It also constitutes a metamorphosis of his earlier beliefs regarding the
poetic experience.

In the fifth stanza, He believes that the soul itself must issue forth and wed nature in order to
create. Coleridge says that the imagination can harmonize with reason and emotion, and
therefore be able to create, only for a few people in their purest hour.He says that
imagination cannot always create, but it can always idealize and unify, that is, it can connect
seemingly contradictory ideas or emotions in a meaningful way. Here, the poet is still talking
to the lady and wishes her the joy that results from the wedding of nature and the soul. This
heavenly joy is a special gift that makes the natural world beautiful and glorious.

Here the lady is associated with joy that can regenerate nature. The wedding metaphor that
is used in this stanza is an integral element of the whole section of the poem. Joy is the spirit
and the power which give us the new earth and heaven. It can also represent Coleridge’s idea
about imagination. In other words, joy is that frame of mind which enables us to desire and
consummate a personal union with an inanimate object and in doing so to cause the object to
come alive.

In stanza six, the poet looks back on his youth as a time of joy and hope. The past years that
the poet concerns are childhood memories.These lines contain the saddest thought ever
written by the poet. In these lines, the poet mourns the loss of his powers of imagination. He
is utterly sorrowful that he has lost the essentials of poetry – hope, and joy. Coleridge
remembers his early years when he had hoped for a bright future. At that time he was not
happy, but he had hoped to get out of his misfortunes. Although his life had been hard, his
heart was full of inner joy. This joy had enabled him to get over his misfortunes. It had
stimulated his imagination and thus made him happy.

But now afflictions bow me down to earth:

Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth;

In the seventh stanza, the poet rouses himself to the “viper thoughts” of depression. He
becomes aware that the calm weather described at the beginning of the poem has been
replaced by a wild storm.
Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind,
Reality's dark dream!
I turn from you…
The wind is shrieking through the landscape and is creating a crazy music in the Aeolian
harp that is framed in a window of his cottage.As Coleridge puts that Thou Actor, perfect in
all tragic sounds!. He imagines that the wind is telling a sad, violent story, perhaps of an
orphan girl lost in a storm. The sounds alternate between screams and moans, inspiring
terror and pathos. It is in this stanza that the poet has recovered his poetic creativity for
limited moments. At the end of this stanza the poet’s reference to lost girl depicts the
childhood sufferings of poet’s himself.
Upon a lonesome wild,
Not far from home, but she hath lost her way;

The final stanza brings us to midnight. The dejected poet cannot sleep. He prays for sweet
sleep for the lady and wishes her joy. He hopes she will enjoy the uplifting, joyful spirit that
has abandoned him.
The closing lines of the ode restore the calm of the opening, but the calm has been
transferred to the lady. 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.”

Conclusion:
"Dejection is a remarkable poetic exploration of the complexities of human emotions and the
transformative power of nature. Composed during a period of personal struggle, this
introspective work delves into the depths of melancholy, drawing readers into the poet's
inner world as he grapples with feelings of despondency and the longing for inspiration.
Through vivid imagery and lyrical introspection, Coleridge crafts a deeply personal
reflection on the interplay between emotions, nature, and creative expression. In this ode, the
poet contemplates the intimate relationship between his emotional state and the external
world, offering readers a profound meditation on the ebb and flow of the human spirit.