by Coleridge · Cluster: Money and Gold · Poverty · Imprisonment
Abstract
A reproachful sonnet-like address rebuking C. Lloyd’s self-indulgent melancholy by confronting him with real poverty, war and social injustice, urging active sympathy for mankind.
Connections
Motifs: Grave Themes & Concepts: Melancholy, Social Injustice, Poverty, War and its Cost Forms & Genres: Sonnet
Testo integrale / Full text
C. LLOYD WHO ABANDONED HIMSELF TO AN INDOLENT AND CAUSELESS MELANCHOLY
Hence that fantastic wantonness of woe,
O Youth to partial Fortune vainly dear!
To plunder’d Want’s half-shelter’d hovel go,
Go, and some hunger-bitten infant hear
Moan haply in a dying mother’s ear: 5
Or when the cold and dismal fog-damps brood
O’er the rank church-yard with sear elm-leaves strew’d,
Pace round some widow’s grave, whose dearer part
Was slaughter’d, where o’er his uncoffin’d limbs
The flocking flesh-birds scream’d! Then, while thy heart 10
Groans, and thine eye a fiercer sorrow dims,
Know (and the truth shall kindle thy young mind)
What Nature makes thee mourn, she bids thee heal!
O abject! if, to sickly dreams resign’d,
All effortless thou leave Life’s commonweal 15
A prey to Tyrants, Murderers of Mankind.
1796.