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and Gilgamesh’s cry for immortality beckons and resonates through the fallen walls of crumbling centuries. Coleridge’s “reality’s dark dream” (DO VII, 95) grips us, haunts us and breaks us all. With him we suffer the dark nights of labyrinths and Tenebrae, with him we asphyxiate and despair and stomach Kierkegaard’s sickness unto death, with him we toil and toil, like Sisyphus. It is in this impassioned state of grief, inertia and dejection that his birth-given imagination is suspended (DO, VI, 85), hurling and bowing the poet down to earth (DO, VI, 82). And then, just as Theseus awaits for Ariadne’s golden chord, he awaits for his Lady’s redeeming silver thread: creativity’s lightning.
Wordsworth, too, once he gazes at that particular Tree in that single field (IO, IV, 51-52), symbolic, perhaps, of the Tree of Knowledge’s loss of immortality in the ever-green fields of Eden’s Garden, feels dejected and longs to retrieve his imaginary vision, his lost paradise, as his haunting verse “Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” (IO, IV, 56-57) reverberates, ominously, in Kafka’s shattering lines ‘where is the eternal spring?’9 And where is the exit from this bewildering riddle, this saturnine maze?
Though Coleridge’s innocent child is second to the Moon’s and wind’s dazzling creative powers, Wordsworth’s mytho- magic chord out of the labyrinth is entwined not only with
9 Kafka, Franz. Conversation with Max Brody including journal entries. Movie: Kafka, A Biography.
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