COLERIDGE IMAGINING 45ever overpowered by the Stream rushing down in upon it, and still obstinate
in resurrection it spread up into the Scollop, by fits & starts, blossomingin a
moment into a full flower.The verbs bear the force—ran, overpowered, rushing, spread up, blossoming.
The nouns—Eddy-foam, Shape, Stream, Scollop, flower—give it form. It takes
the mind ’s eye to see a white rose blossoming: energy taking shape, exact yet
full of the stream’s momentum, spent yet contained.
A robust climber, Coleridge in the Alps had recently called glacial falls
“Motionless torrents!” Others, such as Wordsworth at Simplon Pass, have found
this paradox compelling. One morning the Pequod’s crew watch Moby-Dick
powerfully breach—he “hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air”—and
Melville calls this “a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness.” In his last poem,
“Crossing the Bar,” Tennyson imagines “such a tide as moving seems asleep.”
For Yeats the Easter 1916 revolt or resurrection is a stone that must “trouble the
living stream” until “a terrible beauty is born.” Clearly this flux taking form
answers a human need.
Is it true that “we receive but what we give, / And in our life alone does Na-
ture live”? Nature has its own life, often lending us images of private or public
struggle, “obstinate in resurrection.”
Wedding nature to us, his “shaping spirit of Imagination” seeks a spring on
a heath. His inner eye creates a “Shape, an exact white rose” out of river water
breaking up. Suffering pain as he did, Coleridge couldn’t help adding a final
thought to this notebook entry, “It is the life that we live,” as if anything human
or poetic might have its obstinate blossoming rose.