Page 14 - GALIET INSIGHT IN THE LIGHTNING: Coleridge IV

Coleridge, too, implies that imagination is more powerful than fancy and that maturity is also a return to infancy. Fancy is an escape; it is a happy-dream maker, whose mother is misfortune and its child, fastidious hope (DO, VI, 78-80). Hope that too hesitates in Pandora’s jar, casting its deceitful shadow where “fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine” (DO, VI, 81), hurling the poet from his own-most soul: fount of luminosity from whose sweet voice and light all melodies and colours flow (DO, VI, 70-75). Neither his inviolate Lady-Moon, nor starry sky, nor any forms of nature, so truth- revealing to Wordsworth, will reveal truth to Coleridge as powerfully, as deeply, as his soul-light. Yet afflictions and grief, imaginary kindling to Wordsworth, shall not ignite nor set aflame Coleridge’s heart: rather, they will conceal and submerge his “shaping spirit of Imagination” (DO, VI, 85). However, this lush spirit, as vivid and harmonious in Wordsworth, does suggest that Coleridge’s journey to maturity is also a return to infancy’s hearth. As soon as the orphic wind whistles its paean chant on the Aeolian strings, imagination tells of “a little child/Upon a lonesome wild/Not far from home,” who has lost the way. Yet, this lost child, by virtue of imagination’s creative melodies, hopes to return to her dwelling place (VII, 117-123).
Both poems suggest that the journey to maturity is also a return to infancy, home and mother’s bosom. This magic return to one-self, a circular lost-and-found paradise, embracing self with the other, earth with cosmos, reveals the celestial essence of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poems whereby their verses become their very own-most selves, ever
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