Page 23 - GALIET INSIGHT IN THE LIGHTNING: Coleridge IV

And how does Wordsworth recollect?
By being and dwelling in the poem of the poem and the poesy of the poesy, his seminal imagination dwells in the fullness or clearness of existence and distinctness, pure, absolute being, as he forms creation by touching the forms of earth and heaven.
Howsoever, God is his Ariadne and imagination his golden chord; howsoever, Hermes is both, his psychopompos and messenger divine; howsoever, the rainbow is his hyper-link, ever weaving forgetting and remembering those “glories he hath known” (IO, VI, 84), once in God’s dwelling, that splendid “imperial palace” (IO, VI, 85) where sublime imagination, in timelessness lost, becomes “the soul that rises with us, our life’s Star” (IO, V, 59), and shining its light, guides the poet homewards, to his light-house, beyond the “shades of the prison-house” (IO, V, 67) the labyrinthine web of distortions, shadows, reflections in waters, in mirrors: images of doubt, fear, dejection and indifference. Imagination’s “shadowy recollections,” are thus a “fountain of light” (IO, IX, 151) and the source of imperishable truths as symbolic of “the immortal sea” (IO, IX, 164) for “nature yet remembers/What was so fugitive” (IO, IX, 132-133).
Though images, nature and his “life’s Star” are instrumental in forming Wordsworth’s versifying imagination, Coleridge privileges his rising soul over the forms of nature. The poetic- spirit within shapes and unfolds its heavenly song longer and louder than any form (DO, VI, 86) though, paradoxically, Moon and wind are ever-present in the poet’s poem,
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