Page 11 - GALIET INSIGHT IN THE LIGHTNING: Coleridge IV

pathos and ethos, and those infinite verbs, sounds and words into complex forms of breath and being. Breath and being that in imagination blossoms. Breath and being that beautifies and reveals truth. Breath and being that gathers maturity and insight to return to infancy. Breath and being that redeems from dejection, from labyrinths and Platonic caverns. Breath and being that forms and shapes spirit into oneness: luminosity and joy 3⁄4 a wind.
Light & Joy. Imagination’s wings beautify and glorify, illumine and reveal, and, if they were a scented flower, their fragrance, truth. Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality: an Ode” 5 sings of imagination’s prodigious power to embellish objective reality and the seen with an aura of ‘celestial light’ (IO, I, 4), which suffuses nature and all things with a “visionary gleam” (IO, IV, 56).
It is imagination’s subliminal, transforming power, flooding existence with omniscience and presence, that transcends everything quotidian, everything mundane and immortalizes nature, its forms and existence, with all its afflictions and strife, pain and toils, bloodshed and slaughter, with the “glory and the freshness of a dream” (IO, I, 5). Only imagination alters Wordsworth’s polluted, maturing gaze; only imagination is the fountain of his ‘perpetual benediction’ (IX, 135): bliss, a joy. Joy that, once aroused too by the poetic
5 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Wordsworth, W. Intimations of Immortality: an Ode. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 258.
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