39“The white Eddy-rose... obstinate in resurrection”
Coleridge Imagining
O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live:
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!ature comes alive through human out-
reach, for Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834). William Blake is more abso-
lute: “Where man is not, nature is barren.” Yet the rapt detail in Coleridge ’s
notebooks gives lakes and streams, hills and woods a life of their own. His
conjugal image involves give-and-take, “we receive but what we give,” that
word “but” meaning “only” and also “just.”
Coleridge goes on:
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the Earth.
Then he gives this light a name:
Joy, lady! is the spirit and the power,
Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower
A new Earth and new Heaven.So strong is the feeling, it reverses biblical Apocalypse—“And I saw a new
heaven and a new earth”—making earth first.
At heart, Coleridge sees Joy “wedding Nature to us” as a poet ’s calling, that
“shaping spirit of Imagination” which serves us all. After the American and French
revolutions, he and Wordsworth set about grounding poetry in the common pas-
sions of humankind in contact with nature—a fresh declaration of human rights.
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