by Coleridge · Cluster: Melancholy · Suffering · Pain and Suffering
Abstract
A sonnet of grateful tribute to the poet Bowles, whose tender verse healed the speaker’s melancholy youth; themes of poetry’s consolation, sympathy, and the imagination.
Connections
Motifs: Music and Song Themes & Concepts: Artist and Society, Imagination, Melancholy, Friendship Forms & Genres: Sonnet
Testo integrale / Full text
FIRST VERSION, PRINTED IN ‘MORNING CHRONICLE’, DECEMBER 26, 1794
My heart has thank’d thee, BOWLES! for those soft strains,
That, on the still air floating, tremblingly
Wak’d in me Fancy, Love, and Sympathy!
For hence, not callous to a Brother’s pains
Thro’ Youth’s gay prime and thornless paths I went; 5
And, when the darker day of life began,
And I did roam, a thought-bewilder’d man!
Thy kindred Lays an healing solace lent,
Each lonely pang with dreamy joys combin’d,
And stole from vain REGRET her scorpion stings; 10
While shadowy PLEASURE, with mysterious wings,
Brooded the wavy and tumultuous mind,
Like that great Spirit, who with plastic sweep
Mov’d on the darkness of the formless Deep!
VIII