by Coleridge · Cluster: Swords and Weapons · Power and Corruption · Tyrant
Abstract
Fragments comparing the sun to a temporising tyrant, on crime corrupting conscience, on the divine Trinity in nature, and a lament for a dead woman; politics, conscience and grief.
Connections
Archetypes: Tyrant Motifs: Sun Themes & Concepts: Power and Corruption, Conscience, Grief and Loss, Divine Love Forms & Genres: Fragment Historical References: Napoleonic Wars the Navy
Testo integrale / Full text
The Sun with gentle beams his rage disguises,
And, like aspiring Tyrants, temporises —
Never to be endured but when he falls or rises.
? S. T. C. Undated. Now first published from an MS.
Thicker than rain-drops on November thorn.
Undated. Now first published from an MS.
His native accents to her stranger’s ear,
Skill’d in the tongues of France and Italy —
Or while she warbles with bright eyes upraised,
Her fingers shoot like streams of silver light
Amid the golden haze of thrilling strings.
Undated. First published from an MS. in 1893.
Each crime that once estranges from the virtues
Doth make the memory of their features daily
More dim and vague, till each coarse counterfeit
Can have the passport to our confidence
Sign’d by ourselves. And fitly are they punish’d
Who prize and seek the honest man but as
A safer lock to guard dishonest treasures.
? S. T. C. Undated. First published in Lit. Rem., i. 281. First
collected P. and D. W., 1877, ii. 365.
Where’er I find the Good, the True, the Fair,
I ask no names — God’s spirit dwelleth there!
The unconfounded, undivided Three,
Each for itself, and all in each, to see
In man and Nature, is Philosophy.
Undated. First published from an MS. in 1893.
A wind that with Aurora hath abiding
Among the Arabian and the Persian Hills.
Undated. First published from an MS. in 1893.
I [S. T. C.] find the following lines among my papers, in my own
writing, but whether an unfinished fragment, or a contribution to some
friend’s production, I know not: —
What boots to tell how o’er his grave
She wept, that would have died to save;
Little they know the heart, who deem
Her sorrow but an infant’s dream
Of transient love begotten;
A passing gale, that as it blows
Just shakes the ripe drop from the rose —
That dies and is forgotten.
O Woman! nurse of hopes and fears,
All lovely in thy spring of years,
Thy soul in blameless mirth possessing,
Most lovely in affliction’s tears,
More lovely still than tears suppressing.
Undated. First published in Allsop’s Letters, Conversations, &c. First
collected P. and D. W., 1877, ii. 373.