by Coleridge · Cluster: Melancholy · Suffering · Pain and Suffering
Abstract
A late allegorical lyric of despair: the blind Arab figure and a garden-bower vision in which Hope lies dead and Love’s kiss only revives death, on lost love and melancholy.
Connections
Archetypes: Outsider, Lover Motifs: Garden, Ruins the Abbey, Flowers Themes & Concepts: Melancholy, Unrequited Frustrated Love, Grief and Loss Forms & Genres: Allegory
Testo integrale / Full text
Like a lone Arab, old and blind,
Some caravan had left behind,
Who sits beside a ruin’d well,
Where the shy sand-asps bask and swell;
And now he hangs his agéd head aslant, 5
And listens for a human sound — in vain!
And now the aid, which Heaven alone can grant,
Upturns his eyeless face from Heaven to gain; —
Even thus, in vacant mood, one sultry hour,
Resting my eye upon a drooping plant, 10
With brow low-bent, within my garden-bower,
I sate upon the couch of camomile;
And — whether ‘twas a transient sleep, perchance,
Flitted across the idle brain, the while
I watch’d the sickly calm with aimless scope, 15
In my own heart; or that, indeed a trance,
Turn’d my eye inward — thee, O genial Hope,
Love’s elder sister! thee did I behold,
Drest as a bridesmaid, but all pale and cold,
With roseless cheek, all pale and cold and dim, 20
Lie lifeless at my feet!
And then came Love, a sylph in bridal trim,
And stood beside my seat;
She bent, and kiss’d her sister’s lips,
As she was wont to do; — 25
Alas! ‘twas but a chilling breath
Woke just enough of life in death
To make Hope die anew.