by Coleridge · Cluster: Imagination · Fragment · Heroic Couplet
Abstract
An epigram on the poet’s imagination, whose ‘gifted ken’ sees phantoms of sublimity in coals and pipe-smoke, a miniature ars poetica of the shaping imagination.
Connections
Topoi: Poet as Prophet Motifs: Eyes and Sight, Fire Themes & Concepts: Imagination, Sublime, Artist and Society Forms & Genres: Epigram
Testo integrale / Full text
The poet in his lone yet genial hour
Gives to his eyes a magnifying power:
Or rather he emancipates his eyes
From the black shapeless accidents of size —
In unctuous cones of kindling coal, 5
Or smoke upwreathing from the pipe’s trim hole,
His gifted ken can see
Phantoms of sublimity.
1800.