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STEPPING WESTWARD

This and the preceding two exquisite poems of sympathy are far more justified, more recollected and sincere than is that more monumental composition, the famous poem of sympathy, Hartleap Well. The most beautiful stanzas of this poem last-named are so rebuked by the truths of nature that they must ever stand as obstacles to the straightforward view of sensitive eyes upon the natural world. Wordsworth shows us the ruins of an aspen-wood, a blighted hollow, a dreary place forlorn because an innocent creature, hunted, had there broken its heart in a leap from the rocks above; grass would not grow, nor shade linger there –

“This beast not unobserved by Nature fell,
His death was mourned by sympathy divine.”

And the signs of that sympathy are cruelly asserted to be these arid woodland ruins–cruelly, because the common sight of the day blossoming over the agonies of animals and birds is made less tolerable by such fictions. We have to shut our ears to the benign beauty of this stanza especially –

“The Being that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creature whom He loves.”

We must shut our ears because the poet offers us, as a proof of that “reverential care,” the visible alteration of nature at the scene of suffering–an alteration we are obliged to dispense with every day we pass in the woods. We are tempted to ask whether Wordsworth himself believed in a sympathy he asks us–upon such grounds!–to believe in? Did he think his faith to be worthy of no more than a fictitious sign or a false proof?

To choose from Wordsworth is to draw close a net with very large meshes–so that the lovely things that escape must doubtless cause the reader to protest; but the poems gathered here are not only supremely beautiful but exceedingly Wordsworthian.

YOUTH AND AGE

Close to the marvellous Kubla Khan–a poem that wrests the secret of dreams and brings it to the light of verse–I place Youth and Age as the best specimen of Coleridge’s poetry that is quite undelirious–to my mind the only fine specimen. I do not rate his undelirious poems highly, and even this, charming and nimble as it is, seems to me rather lean in thought and image. The tenderness of some of the images comes to a rather lamentable close; the likeness to “some poor nigh-related guest” with the three lines that follow is too squalid for poetry, or prose, or thought.

THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

This poem is surely more full of a certain quality of extreme poetry–the simplest “flower of the mind,” the most single magic– than any other in our language. But the reader must be permitted to call the story silly.

Page 265 (Are those her ribs through which the Sun)

Coleridge used the sun, moon, and stars as a great dream uses them when the sleeping imagination is obscurely threatened with illness. All through The Ancient Mariner we see them like apparitions. It is a pity that he followed the pranks also of a dream when he impossibly placed a star WITHIN the tip of the crescent.

Page 266 (I feer thee, ancient Mariner!)

The likeness of “the ribbed sea sand” is said to be the one passage actually composed by Wordsworth,–who according to the first plan should have written The Ancient Mariner with Coleridge–“and perhaps the most beautiful passage in the poem,” adds one critic after another. It is no more than a good likeness, and has nothing whatever of the indescribable Coleridge quality.

Coleridge reveals, throughout this poem, an exaltation of the senses, which is the most poetical thing that can befall a simple poet. It is necessary only to refer, for sight, to the stanza on “the moving Moon” at the bottom of page 267; for hearing, to the supernatural stanzas on page 271; and, for touch, to the line –