Coleridge’s earlier Frost at Midnight was a model for Tintern, giving landscaped
reflection a new poetic intensity and psychic depth. The thought of the two friends
was at this time almost indistinguishable. Both poems offer the doctrine of Nature
now associated with Wordsworth, Coleridge’s in a finely articulated psychological,
philosophical and religious form. Wordsworth felt ‘A presence that disturbs me’:a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.These are the accents of faith – but in what? Coleridge is always Christian, but
Wordsworth as yet acknowledges no God outside natural phenomena: ‘the mighty
world / Of eye and ear, – both what they half create, / And what perceive.’ The
Nature which asks his co-operation is his anchor, nurse, guide, guardian and the
‘soul / Of all my moral being’.Tintern has an emotional weight which makes
Coleridge’s more perfect poem seem magically light.
In Frost at Midnight, Coleridge’s gaze at the fire in the cottage in Devon turns
back to a daydream of his schooldays in London, where he had dreamed of his
infancy in Devon; and then forward to the hopes he has for his sleeping child. In this
imaginative reverie, ‘Fancy’ makes ‘a toy of Thought’. Imagination was for the
Romantics a means of access to truths which were psychic not rational. As Tintern
ends,Wordsworth confides his hopes to his sister Dorothy. In an opening verse-
paragraph of spellbinding natural description, each poet confides in the reader. We
are drawn into intimacy and identification with the poet-speaker.
Poems in Two Volumes (1807) has memorable poems: Resolution and
Independence, the Immortality Ode, ‘The Solitary Reaper’, the Elegiac Stanzas on Peele
Castle,and some Miltonic sonnets, but also the ominous Ode to Duty, ‘Stern
Daughter of the Voice of God!’ Wordsworth asks Duty to give him ‘the spirit of self-
sacrifice’ and ‘the confidence of reason’. His return to Grasmere in 1799 after ‘five
years, / And the length of five long winters’ (Tintern) was a retreat to base to recover
from the crushing of his political dreams by the Terror and of his first love by the
war with France. At home, he reconstructed himself, renewing memories of his
natural upbringing and dealing with other traumatic memories. In 1802 he had
already asked ‘Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the
dream?’ (Immortality Ode).But as, after 1807, public recognition arrived, poetic
inspiration departed. He wrote new poems and rearranged old poems, publishing in
1814 a Prospectus to an intended philosophical poem,The Recluse. It beg ins ‘On
Man,on Nature, and on Human Life, / Musing in solitude ...’, lines heavy with
dutiful unenthusiasm for philosophy. In his great decade, Wordsworth had always
preferred prosiness to ‘inane and gaudy phraseology’. One 1806 poem begins ‘Spade!
with which Wilkinson hath tilled his lands’. But his verse now became almost
unifor mly flat.
Wordswor th’s reputation was to be transformed by a poem published in 1850 as
The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind; its working title had been ‘the poem to
Coleridge’. It is a blank-verse memoir in fourteen books, first drafted in two parts in
1799, expanded to thirteen books by 1805 and tinkered with for forty-five years.
Critics usually prefer 1805 to 1850, and readers rightly respond to the freshness of
the two-part Prelude of 1799,with its boat-stealing and night-skating episodes. In232 7 · THE ROMANTICS: 1790–1837