The Complete Poems

The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a prescribed text for HSC English Extension 1, studied through the Literary Worlds elective. Coleridge (1772-1834) was, with William Wordsworth, the founder of English Romanticism, and the five set poems trace an arc from communion with nature to doubt about the mind's place in it.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was, with William Wordsworth, the founder of English Romanticism, and the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 that the two produced together is usually taken to open the movement. The poems that matter most for this elective were written in a concentrated few years around the turn of the nineteenth century - the annus mirabilis of 1797-98 that produced "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", "Frost at Midnight" and "This Lime-tree Bower my Prison", with "Kubla Khan" drafted in the same period and "Dejection: An Ode" following in 1802.

The prescribed selection is those five poems. Two are conversation poems - meditative blank-verse addresses that begin in a confined present and widen into a vision of nature as living language. Two are the great poems of the strange and the sublime: "The Rime" imagines a sailor who violates the natural order by killing an albatross and is punished by a nature turned hostile and alive with a will of its own, while "Kubla Khan" sets an emperor's ordered pleasure-garden against an unmeasured, erupting wildness. And "Dejection: An Ode" is the poem in which the whole structure of communion is put under interrogation and found wanting. The arc of the selection runs from a confident communion with the non-human to a chastened doubt about whether nature has any life the mind does not lend it - written at the hinge where the natural world stopped being God's ordered book and started to become a problem, and staging that crisis in the construction of the verse itself.

The conversation poems build nature as a living language. "Frost at Midnight" opens on an active, almost sacramental presence - "The Frost performs its secret ministry, / Unhelped by any wind." - and figures the created world as "that eternal language, which thy God / Utters", so the human place in nature is that of a reader learning to construe a world that means. "This Lime-tree Bower my Prison" turns confinement into communion, insisting "That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure": the high-water mark of Coleridge's pantheist faith, and the claim the later poems test to destruction.

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" stages the breaking of that bond. The killing is severed from any motive - "With my cross-bow / I shot the ALBATROSS." - the blunt monosyllables making the crime absolute, and the dead bird replaces the crucifix, "Instead of the cross, the Albatross / About my neck was hung.", fusing the moral and the ecological: to wrong the natural world is a sin requiring penance. Redemption arrives involuntarily, "A spring of love gushed from my heart, / And I blessed them unaware", so reverence for the living is an instinct the soul recovers rather than a duty it performs.

Against human order Coleridge sets the sublime. In "Kubla Khan" the sacred river runs "Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.", and the earth itself becomes a straining body, "As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing", its energy erupting beyond any human governance. In "The Rime" the sublime becomes solitude and stasis - "Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide wide sea!" - scale itself the punishment, the smallness of the self measured against the size of the world.

"Dejection: An Ode" then withdraws the consolation. The poet confesses "I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!", splitting perception from emotion, and states the elective's darkest proposition outright: "we receive but what we give, / And in our life alone does Nature live". The communion of the earlier poems is exposed as projection, and the failure is diagnosed as the loss of "My shaping spirit of Imagination." - the ecological crisis reframed as a crisis of the mind, with the question of whether nature has a life of its own held open rather than settled.

• New and Selected Poems, Volume One
• Birthday Letters
• Life on Mars
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
• Northanger Abbey
• The Hare with Amber Eyes
• Memento
• HSC English resources