by Coleridge · Cluster: Dreams · Moon
Abstract
A cluster of epigrams and fragments on the domestic pleasures of the cottage, love, the moon, a dead beloved, and the nightmare of death-in-life; mixes retreat with melancholy.
Connections
Topoi: Pastoral Retreat Motifs: Moon, Dreams Themes & Concepts: Romantic Love, Grief and Loss, Mortality Forms & Genres: Fragment, Epigram
Testo integrale / Full text
The Pleasures sport beneath the thatch;
But Prudence sits upon the watch;
Nor Dun nor Doctor lifts the latch!
1799. First published from an MS. in 1893. Suggested by Lessing’s
Sinngedicht No. 104.
In the lame and limping metre of a barbarous Latin poet —
Est meum et est tuum, amice! at si amborum nequit esse,
Sit meum, amice, precor: quia certe sum mage pauper.
‘Tis mine and it is likewise yours;
But and if this will not do,
Let it be mine, because that I
Am the poorer of the Two!
Nov. 1, 1801. First published in the Preface to Christabel, 1816.
First collected 1893.
Names do not always meet with LOVE,
And LOVE wants courage without a name.
Dec. 1801. Now first published from an MS.
The Moon, how definite its orb!
Yet gaze again, and with a steady gaze —
‘Tis there indeed, — but where is it not? —
It is suffused o’er all the sapphire Heaven,
Trees, herbage, snake-like stream, unwrinkled Lake,
Whose very murmur does of it partake!
And low and close the broad smooth mountain is more a thing
of Heaven than when distinct by one dim shade, and yet
undivided from the universal cloud in which it towers infinite
in height.
? 1801. First published from an MS. in 1893.
Such love as mourning Husbands have
To her whose Spirit has been newly given
To her guardian Saint in Heaven —
Whose Beauty lieth in the grave —
(Unconquered, as if the Soul could find no purer Tabernacle, nor place
of sojourn than the virgin Body it had before dwelt in, and wished to
stay there till the Resurrection) —
Far liker to a Flower now than when alive,
Cold to the Touch and blooming to the eye.
Sept. 1803. Now first published from an MS.
[THE NIGHT-MARE DEATH IN LIFE]
I know ‘tis but a dream, yet feel more anguish
Than if ‘twere truth. It has been often so:
Must I die under it? Is no one near?
Will no one hear these stifled groans and wake me?
? 1803. Now first published from an MS.
Bright clouds of reverence, sufferably bright,
That intercept the dazzle, not the Light;
That veil the finite form, the boundless power reveal,
Itself an earthly sun of pure intensest white.
1803. First published from an MS. in 1893.