Page 19 - GALIET INSIGHT IN THE LIGHTNING: Coleridge IV

what other piercing and hungry hours beset their poetic souls? In Wordsworth, echoes stir, the fulminant winds stir “from the fields of sleep” (IO, III, 28), either symbolic of vales of dreams or the shades in Hades, or Kurnugi’s dark shade-house of dreary death,12 latitude in the abyss, how those ancestral voices stir,
They stir
trance trance trance trance trance trance in the heart of blue
and how their haunting voices haunt even more in Coleridge, how, first, he must hear and tell of the breast-tearing “groans, of trampled men, with smarting/wounds” (VII, 112-133) before he tells a “tale of less affright/And tempered with delight” (VII, 118-119) of a child on his way home, whose screams merge with the groans and deep wounds of whose, whose? Odysseus’s wounds, Priam’s and Hecuba’s wounds, Dido’s and Aeneas’ wounds; our lost Ithacas and Troys and Carthages and Romes; our enduring homelessness that tears too whose yearning breast? We, Ovids, tempest-tossed, eternally in exile 3⁄4 O Tristia, Tristia, Tristia 3⁄4 us, mourning our paradises lost, our lands lost, our beings lost. Blind. Deconstructed. Blasted bones. Of presence and essence devoid. No longer in nature, ever absent, ever missing from the simple spark of to kalov: beauty’s forms. And “to die, to sleep,” in these sick hours, and “by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir
12 Dalley, Stephanie. Myths from Mesopotamia. Epic of Gilgamesh. London: Oxford University Press, 1998. 95.
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