by Coleridge · Cluster: Ghosts · Ghost · Death and Love
Abstract
A melancholy sonnet-ballad telling of lovers killed in a duel with the woman’s brother, her grief-driven death, and her lingering ghost, framed by the speaker’s reverie of memory at her tomb.
Connections
Archetypes: Ghost Motifs: Ghosts, Grave, Memory Themes & Concepts: Romantic Love, Grief and Loss Forms & Genres: Sonnet, Narrative Poem
Testo integrale / Full text
Within these wilds was Anna wont to rove
While Harland told his love in many a sigh,
But stern on Harland roll’d her brother’s eye,
They fought, they fell — her brother and her love!
To Death’s dark house did grief-worn Anna haste, 5
Yet here her pensive ghost delights to stay;
Oft pouring on the winds the broken lay —
And hark, I hear her—’twas the passing blast.
I love to sit upon her tomb’s dark grass,
Then Memory backward rolls Time’s shadowy tide; 10
The tales of other days before me glide:
With eager thought I seize them as they pass;
For fair, tho’ faint, the forms of Memory gleam,
Like Heaven’s bright beauteous bow reflected in the stream.
? 1790.