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imagination in Coleridge’s “Dejection: an Ode,” 6 will eulogize Wordsworth’s ideals of joy, the beautiful and the sublime, not too distant from his beloved ‘spring’ where “all the earth is gay” and “land and sea/Give themselves to jollity, and with the heart of May/Doth every Beast keep holiday” (IO, III, 29-33).
Coleridge’s joy is as sublime as imagination; imagination, too, as ‘spirit,’ a ‘music,’ a ‘beauty-making power’ that irradiates beautiful ‘light,’ a ‘glory,’ a ‘fair luminous mist’ (DO, V, 60– 63) that, in wedding mortals to nature, endows them with a new, rejoicing cosmos: a cosmos whose “melodies are the echoes of that voice,” and whose “colours, a suffusion from that light” (DO, V, 70-75).
And just as Wordsworth’s joy arises neither from delight nor liberty nor hope, nor the conventional or nomos, but from phusis, the same feminine joy that Coleridge, too, adores and celebrates, both poets revere the bursting energy, “the green fuse that drives the flower,’7 that opens up imagination’s seeds: the soul and spirit, beneath a Moon-lit gaze in Coleridge; and spirit and the first affections and recollections of childhood, in Wordsworth 3⁄4 “fountain of light of all our day...master light of all our seeing” (IO, IX, 152-153).
Innocence & Insight: Being. This joy, this imagination, this light, 3⁄4 a cynosure 3⁄4 will elucidate the weary poet’s
6 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Coleridge, Samuel. Dejection: An Ode. New York: McMillan Publishing Co. 1973. 488
7 Thomas, Dylan. Collected Poems 1934-1952. New York: New Directions, 1957. 10
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