Page 15 - GALIET INSIGHT IN THE LIGHTNING: Coleridge IV

aiming to recover the ineffable gaze of that joyous child whose incandescent seeing restores the knowing of innocence that weds self and nature, soul and self, word and verse, verse and poem, poem and poet with poesy. As Paz asserts, “the poem of the poet is fused in the poem of the poem.”8
This blissful fusion, imagination’s precious gift, suggests not only a Heideggerean ecstatic and authentic existence, but also a communion, a reconciliation between same and other, part and whole, between the Dionysian and Apollonian spirit, between image and identity, immanence and transcendence, being-in-the-world and being-in-beingness as that “sentiment of Being that spreads over all that moves and all that seemeth still” (The Prelude, II, 401-402). These instances of phosphorescence, of truth-revealing presence, Wordsworth’s grasps with a “fullness of bliss” (IO, I, 41) and Coleridge with his immortal and gregarious “Joy, Lady! Is the spirit and the power/Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower/a new Earth and new Heaven” (DO, V, 67-70). Were both poets to lose imagination’s beauty-making power, they would surely then dwell, far, too far from the rivers of mirth, and near, too near, the existential abyss of Daedalus’ labyrinth.
Dejection and Redemption. The absence of imagination’s wings casts its dismal, sinister shadows in both poets. Outside the mansion of imagination, temporality, with all its ills, approaches us with its gigantic relentless steps: the majesty of every flower, of every hope, of every breath is forever crushed;
8 Paz, Octavio. La Otra Voz. Spain: Seix Barral, 2001. 27.
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