Page 13 - GALIET INSIGHT IN THE LIGHTNING: Coleridge IV

homeward journey towards that elemental, yet evanescent self, the child of his childhood, so innocent and luminous, on whom wonder and magic by nature was given, and on whose majestic imagination dwells a truth-revealing prophetic power. Wordsworth likens poetic imagination to an innocent child 3⁄4 journeying as ‘nature’s priest’ (IO, V, 74) 3⁄4 overflowing with sparks of wisdom, of insight. Imagination- as-a-child is the ‘best Philosopher,’ an ‘eye among the blind,’ a ‘mighty prophet,’ and a ‘seer blest!’ (IO, VIII, 110-115), whose lofty vision, “a higher power than fancy” (The Prelude, Book I, 77-78), neither fancy nor daydream, strikes the mind like a lightning flash upon contemplating nature’s symmetries, its forms and society’s ills, thus burning in its electric, sojourning valleys truth’s gleam. And though part of this splendid vision (IO, V, 74) will be dimmed in the poet’s youth “who daily farther from the east/Must travel,’ (IO, V, 73-74), imagination-as-a-child shall be gloriously regained by the worldly, forlorn poet as his expanding gaze, over time and space, glows with consummations of “absolute power and clearest insight/amplitude of mind” (The Prelude XIV, 190- 192) as all things, forms, thoughts become suffused with the light of “Reason in her most exalted mood” (The Prelude XIV, 193).
This sublime, innocent perspective will enable the poet to regain his lost paradise and find truth in those moments of blessed stillness, where the yearly angst and clamour of frenzy “seem moments in the being/Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake/To perish never” (IO, IX, 156-157).
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