by Coleridge · Cluster: Melancholy · Suffering · Pain and Suffering
Abstract
Fragments of weary longing for death (adapted from a Scots ballad), a tropic-tree idol image, love, soul-and-body reflection and birdsong; despair set against tenderness.
Connections
Motifs: Death, Winter Themes & Concepts: Melancholy, Mortality, Romantic Love, Self-Knowledge Forms & Genres: Fragment Historical References: Eastern Religion Comparative Religion
Testo integrale / Full text
Come, come thou bleak December wind,
And blow the dry leaves from the tree!
Flash, like a love-thought, thro’ me, Death!
And take a life that wearies me.
Leghorn, June 7, 1806. First published in Letters of S. T. C., 1875,
ii. 499, n. 1. Now collected for the first time. Adapted from Percy’s
version of ‘Waly, Waly, Love be bonny’, st. 3.
Marti’mas wind when wilt thou blaw,
And shake the green leaves aff the tree?
O gentle death, when wilt thou cum?
For of my life I am wearie.
As some vast Tropic tree, itself a wood,
That crests its head with clouds, beneath the flood
Feeds its deep roots, and with the bulging flank
Of its wide base controls the fronting bank —
(By the slant current’s pressure scoop’d away
The fronting bank becomes a foam-piled bay)
High in the Fork the uncouth Idol knits
His channel’d brow; low murmurs stir by fits
And dark below the horrid Faquir sits —
An Horror from its broad Head’s branching wreath
Broods o’er the rude Idolatry beneath —
1806-7. Now first published from an MS.
Let Eagle bid the Tortoise sunward soar —
As vainly Strength speaks to a broken Mind.
1807. First published in Thomas Poole and His Friends, 1888, ii. 195.
The body,
Eternal Shadow of the finite Soul,
The Soul’s self-symbol, its image of itself.
Its own yet not itself.
Now first published from an MS.
Or Wren or Linnet,
In Bush and Bushet;
No tree, but in it
A cooing Cushat.
May 1807. Now first published from an MS.
The reed roof’d village still bepatch’d with snow
Smok’d in the sun-thaw.
1798. Now first published from an MS. Compare Frost at Midnight, ll.
69-70, ante, p. 242.
And in Life’s noisiest hour
There whispers still the ceaseless love of thee,
The heart’s self-solace } and soliloquy.
commune }
1807. Now first published from an MS.
You mould my Hopes you fashion me within:
And to the leading love-throb in the heart,
Through all my being, through my pulses beat;
You lie in all my many thoughts like Light,
Like the fair light of Dawn, or summer Eve,
On rippling stream, or cloud-reflecting lake;
And looking to the Heaven that bends above you,
How oft! I bless the lot that made me love you.
1807. Now first published from an MS.
And my heart mantles in its own delight.
Now first published from an MS.
The spruce and limber yellow-hammer
In the dawn of spring and sultry summer,
In hedge or tree the hours beguiling
With notes as of one who brass is filing.
1807. Now first published from an MS.