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pained and dull soul, in a “wan and heartless mood,” (DO, II, 5) may live again (DO, I, 21), may resurrect sharing, across time, Paz’s epiphany that “poetry is resurrection,”15 and poem of poesy and song of song whose word is timeless spirit. It is from Coleridge’s ‘dear Lady,’ the crescent Moon 3⁄4 from whose cheerful eyes “all things may live, from pole to pole” (DO, VIII, 135) 3⁄4 and from one’s soul that imagination, the windy music of the soul (DO, V, 60), muses and enchants. It is the Moon too, that mutes the “dull sobbing draft” (DO, I, 6) of the Aeolian lute and harps.
Shaping Spirit & Hand. Just as for Wordsworth imagination is a “forming hand” (The Prelude, II, 363), for Coleridge it is his “shaping spirit” (DO, VI, 86). Imagination, though rebellious and self-spirited, is the mind-light that forms and bestows radiance on all things (The Prelude, II, 369-370). It is also God’s mind reflected in the spirit of nature with its ‘‘soul of Beauty and enduring life’ (The Prelude, VII, 766-67) transcending all things. Its essence: rapture, an evergreen ‘forest’ of ‘majestic floods’, whose ‘shining cliffs’ and ‘cerulean’ beings, as pure as sublunary ether,16 shall endure for all times (The Prelude, VI, 463-468); never once perishing and for ever and ever immortal. Yet, this revealing mind-light is also deep knowing, a sempiternal memory of things forgotten, a Platonic contemplation that reminds the poet that, “all learning is a recollection, a remembrance.”17
15 Paz, Octavio. La Otra Voz. Spain: Seix Barral, 2001.
16 Ether, the classical rotating, permanent and unchanging 5th element in the sublunary sphere that has no opposites, fills up empty space and propagates light. Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.
17 Plato. Complete Works. Meno. Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 2001.
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