An external world and the mind in ‘ Dejection: An Ode ’

The two most famous lines of ‘Dejection: An Ode’ have generated a great deal of critical attention, ‘we receive but what we give / And in our life alone does Nature live’. They have been taken as ‘a monumental mark of the turn of English thought from empiricism to idealism’.133 Hailing the ode as one of the two greatest and most representative poems of the early nineteenth century, M. H. Abrams argues that ‘Coleridge’s theory of mind’ was ‘revolutionary’.134 The revolution or shift has been understood to occur between different pairs of terms by different critics: ‘idealism and empiricism (or associationism)’, ‘active and passive’, ‘inner and outer’, ‘Kant and Hartley’, ‘mind and nature’.135 _Yet,

some critics, including Murray Krieger and I. A. Richards, cast doubt on the integrity of these binaries. While the former regards the typical Coleridgean dichotomy of mind and nature as a ‘deceptive opposition’, the latter argues that

132

Scheuerle argues that this is ‘not a hymn but a questioning in which he wonders whether all living nature be but organic harps that receive but give nothing except passive tunes’, ‘A Reexamination of Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp”’, pp. 7-8.

133 _{Luther Tyler, ‘Losing “A Letter”: The Contexts of Coleridge’s “Dejection”’, ELH, 52 (1985),}

419-445 (p. 420).

134 _{The other one is Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the}

Lamp, pp. 66, 158.

it is just ‘linguistic illusion’.136 _{Although Coleridge seems to shift from}

empiricism to idealism and to develop hierarchical dualisms, attention must be paid to the tension between mind and nature developed in the poem. If we look closely at the interaction between them in the poem, we find that they influence each other in terms of creating meaning and it is hard to tell which of them is the primary cause for it.

In ‘Dejection: An Ode’, the poet reveals a desperate state of his mind in a confessional tone. It is a failure of his ‘genial spirits’ and his ‘shaping spirit of Imagination’, or, according to Andrew Keanie, a ‘depression’ in a psychological sense in that the poet is ‘trapped in a colorless consciousness’ and ‘removed from the real throb of the senses’, expressing ‘pure dullness’.137 _{Whether it is a}

depression or failure of imagination, the fatal consequence is that he cannot feel the beauty of nature. In Stanza II, the poet conveys ‘the sense of ‘A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear’ which is caused by the fact that he can ‘see’, but cannot ‘feel’, the beauty of ‘the balmy and serene eve’, ‘its peculiar tint of yellow green of the western sky’, ‘thin clouds’, ‘the stars’ and ‘crescent Moon’. Interestingly, referring to his past experience with an external nature, in Stanza I he voices hopes that she will bring back his ‘genial spirits’:

Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed, And sent my soul abroad,

Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give,

Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live! (ll. 17-20)

136

Tyler, ‘Losing “A Letter”’, p. 442, n. 11, 12; see, Murray Krieger, Theory of Criticism

(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 96-97; I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, 2nd edn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), Chapter 9.

Here it should be noted that external nature has been a stimulus to his ‘genial spirits’ in the past, and the poet is still yearning for the similar interaction. The Stanza II displays his desperate effort to retrieve the power through the act of gazing: ‘Have I been gazing on the western sky [. . .] And still I gaze.’

Yet, from Stanza III to VI, he proclaims that he abandons hope of such inspiration from an external nature but instead he turns to look within. Most of all, he concludes that it was ‘a vain endeavour’ to ‘gaze for ever on that green light in the west’ for ‘winning the passion and the life’, and realises that their ‘fountains are within’. He then makes the famous declaration:

O Lady! We receive but what we give

And in our life alone does Nature live (ll. 47-48)

For Coleridge, nature becomes a projection of the mind on the grounds that it cannot affect our feelings and emotions any more, and becomes dependent upon the mind in terms of its meanings. Therefore the inner ‘soul’ itself ‘must issue forth a light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud, enveloping the Earth’. Notably, ‘Joy’, which is given only ‘to the pure’, is thought of as ‘the spirit and the power’ which ‘wedding Nature to us gives in dower / A new Earth and new Heaven’. This new Earth and new Heaven does not correlate with an external world but is a sheer projection of the mind in that it is ‘undreamt of by the sensual’ but exists ‘in ourselves’.

But, after going through the painful experience of ‘a grief without a pang’, in stanza VII he appears to regain his ‘shaping spirit of Imagination

Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, Reality’s dark dream!

I turn from you, and listen to the wind, Which long has raved unnoticed. (ll. 94-97)

Overcoming ‘Reality’s dark dream’ or ‘dull pain’, the poet now can interact with an external world by noticing the power of ‘the wind’, which comes not from within, but ‘without’. As Barth pointed out, the poet ‘had projected his own feelings onto the wind – and so could hear only his own depression’ until stanza VI.138 _{But he became aware of the wind which is sensory and external, and his}

‘shaping spirit of Imagination’ began to mediate between the poet and nature, telling ‘a tale of less affright, and tempered with delight’. In fact, it is not clear whether it is the stimulus of an external nature, or the recovery of joy in himself, that enables the poet to turn away from ‘viper thoughts’ and to feel again the beauty of nature. Although it is difficult to define the source of the ‘A tale of less affright’, it is clear that it originates with the interaction between the mind and an external world.

In this respect, it is not fair to view the two famous lines simply as a manifesto for the shift from empiricism to idealism. They need to be understood in terms of the context of the process of poetic inspiration of which they only form a part. As Andrew Keanie points out, the poem is ‘not primarily Coleridge’s formal recognition of his inability to win ‘from outward forms [. . .] The passion and the life, whose fountains are within’. Rather it suggests his

138

awareness of the ubiquity of his melancholy in himself.139 _{Paradoxically, in spite}

of this melancholy or ‘a grief without a pang’, Coleridge manages to ‘make his negative emotions poetically viable’.140 _{One of the reasons for his capability is}

that the poet’s declaration of the deadness of his poetic imagination ‘could not disguise the apparent accuracy of the self-assessment’.141 _{In consequence, his}

expression of the hope for regaining his poetic imagination through his interaction with nature in Stanza I already presupposes the returning of the power in Stanza VII. If we understand the poem as the process of retrieving his genial spirits, rather than a shift from empiricism to idealism, it can be argued that the famous two lines reflect partly the state of the poet’s failure to interact with nature owing to melancholy, or depression, or ‘dull pain’.

If ‘The Eolian Harp’ is questioning whether the mind is dependent solely upon sensory and external experience, ‘Dejection: An Ode’ is concerned with whether nature has its own independent reality or it is just a projection of the mind. Whereas the former is associated with empiricism, the latter is often dealt with in the context of idealism. One of the tantalising issues in Coleridge is that there is no clear boundary between empiricism and idealism, between nature and the mind, in terms of the source for creating meanings. Strikingly, the poet himself is aware of this tension, and his impressive letter to James Gillman in 1825 communicates spiritedly a battle between two rival artists, the Mind and Nature:

139 _{Keanie, ‘Coleridge’s Capable Negativity’, p. 283.} 140

J. C. C. Mays, ‘Coleridge’s Love: “All he can manage, more than he could”’, in Coleridge’s Visionary Languages: Essays in Honour of J. B. Beer, ed. by Tim Fulford and Morton Paley (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), p. 58.

141

In Youth and early Manhood the Mind and Nature are, as it were, two rival Artists, both potent Magicians, and engaged, like the King's Daughter and the rebel Genie in the Arabian Nights' Enternts., in sharp conflict of Conjuration — each having for it's object to turn the other into Canvas to paint on, Clay to mould, or Cabinet to contain. For a while the Mind seems to have the better in the contest, and makes of Nature what it likes; takes her Lichens and Weather-stains for Types & Printer's Ink and prints Maps & Fac Similes of Arabic and Sanscrit Mss. on her rocks; composes Country-Dances on her moon-shiny Ripples [. . .] But alas! alas! that Nature is a wary wily long-breathed old Witch, tough-lived as a Turtle and divisible as the Polyp, repullulative in a thousand Snips and Cuttings, integra et in toto! She is sure to get the better of Lady MIND in the long run, and to take her revenge too — transforms our To Day into a Canvass dead-colored to receive the dull featureless Portrait of Yesterday [. . .] she mocks the mind with it's own metaphors, metamorphosing the Memory into a lignum vitae Escrutoire to keep unpaid Bills & Dun's Letters in, with Outlines that had never been filled up.142

This is a wry account of how the poet has been struggling between the mind and nature or between subject and object. His personal defeat sounds pessimistic in that ‘the mind, having once been the master, has become the slave’. 143 As Abrams put it, ‘Coleridge implicitly describes his having succumbed, with the passage of time, to the actuality in his own experience of a concept of the mind in perception against which his own philosophy of the active, projective, and creative mind had been a sustained refutation.’144

Although this summary expresses ‘the stream of pessimism that all [some essential shaping and organizing power] was lost’, John Beer points out how

142 _{CL V}

, pp. 497-498.

143

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 459.

144

Coleridge paradoxically describes this perpetual struggle ‘imaginatively’ and how ‘his mind was ranging as vividly as before’.145

It is arguable whether Coleridge was able to integrate these two rival artists finally into unity or became an idealist by abandoning empiricism. He wrote to Thomas Poole in 1801: ‘If I do not greatly delude myself, I have not only completely extricated the notions of Time, and Space; but have overthrown the doctrine of Association, as taught by Hartley, and with it all the irreligious metaphysics of modern Infidels — especially, the doctrine of Necessity.’146

This passage has been taken by critics to suggest that Coleridge was enthusiastic about Hartley for a few years but he later criticised his association theory for its mechanical and materialistic aspects.147 _{Thus in studies of Coleridge the}

thought of Hartley is often regarded as the idea which influenced Coleridge for a few years and then disappeared later.

What all this shows is that Coleridge never completely ceased to vacillate between the mind and nature or between idealism and empiricism. What matters in the middle of the tension is the significance of nature as a sensory experience. Whether it is the primary or secondary cause creating meaning, the poet associates the materiality of nature with the power of imagination. Hartley’s theory of sensory experience still remains in his later years.148 _Over

and against the idealistic perspective, Coleridge had to admit that he could not avoid the feeling that the interpretation of nature was only a human

145 _{J. Beer,}

‘The Paradoxes of Nature in Wordsworth and Coleridge’, Wordsworth Circle, 40 (2009), 4-9 (p. 9).

146 _{CLII, p. 707.} 147

See, J. A. Appleyard, ‘Coleridge and Criticism: I. Critical Theory’, in S. T. Coleridge, ed. by R. L. Brett (London: Bell, 1971), pp. 123-146 (p. 128).

148

See, David S. Miall, ‘“I See It Feelingly”: Coleridge’s Debt to Hartley’, in Coleridge’s Visionary Languages, p. 151; Haven, ‘Coleridge, Hartley, and the Mystics’, pp. 480, 487.

perception.149 _{For him, that limitation, however, is not necessarily subject to a}

chasm between human perception and external nature in the sense that the materiality of nature matters even in his later years in terms of its relationship with humanity and God.