by Coleridge · Cluster: Nationalism and Patriotism · Democracy · Liberty Political Freedom
Abstract
The stanza-by-stanza Argument to ‘France: An Ode’ explaining its movement from devotion to liberty through revolutionary hope and recantation to liberty rooted in God and Nature; paratext on freedom and disillusionment.
Connections
Motifs: Nature Themes & Concepts: Liberty Political Freedom, Disillusionment, Faith Historical References: French Revolution
Testo integrale / Full text
‘First Stanza. An invocation to those objects in Nature the contemplation of which had inspired the Poet with a devotional love of Liberty. Second Stanza. The exultation of the Poet at the commencement of the French Revolution, and his unqualified abhorrence of the Alliance against the Republic. Third Stanza. The blasphemies and horrors during the domination of the Terrorists regarded by the Poet as a transient storm, and as the natural consequence of the former despotism and of the foul superstition of Popery. Reason, indeed, began to suggest many apprehensions; yet still the Poet struggled to retain the hope that France would make conquests by no other means than by presenting to the observation of Europe a people more happy and better instructed than under other forms of Government. Fourth Stanza. Switzerland, and the Poet’s recantation. Fifth Stanza. An address to Liberty, in which the Poet expresses his conviction that those feelings and that grand ideal of Freedom which the mind attains by its contemplation of its individual nature, and of the sublime surrounding objects (see Stanza the First) do not belong to men, as a society, nor can possibly be either gratified or realised, under any form of human government; but belong to the individual man, so far as he is pure, and inflamed with the love and adoration of God in Nature.’ Title] The Recantation: an Ode. By S. T. Coleridge. 1798. 1828, 1829. R.: shook earth, air, and sea 1802. corrected.] that fleeing spot the mountain-snows 4{o}, P. R. conducted by this Country, and to the present Ministry and their supporters, has been omitted, and would have been omitted without remark if the commencing lines of the sixth stanza had not referred to it. VI Shall I with these my patriot zeal combine? No, Afric, no! they stand before my ken Loath’d as th’ Hyaenas, that in murky den Whine o’er their prey and mangle while they whine, Divinest Liberty! with vain endeavour 1798. To live amid the winds and move upon the waves 1798, 4{o}, P. R. To live among the winds and brood upon the waves 1802.