Coleridge’s Poems Imaginative Journeys essay

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is one of the best literary magicians, who skillfully use the poetic word to take a reader into the farthest and the most incredible worlds unavailable in our everyday life. Following the best traditions of the Romanticism, he creates a wonderful journey under the effect of mysterious inspiration, with the hand of intuition.

Firstly, “This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison” offers us the route from sad remembrances in the bower to the land of “the roaring dell, o’erwooded, narrow, deep, And only speckled by the mid-day sun”; carries on to the “dark green file of long lank weeds, That all at once (a most fantastic sight!) Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge Of the blue clay-stone”.

Meanwhile, In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” we get into the other reality by means of the story of the old Mariner, told to the Wedding-Guest. The teller begins the trip with going southward, when “The Sun came up upon the left, Out of the sea came he! And he shone bright, and on the right Went down into the sea”. Then the ship crosses the Line “And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he Was tyrannous and strong: He struck with his o’ertaking wings, And chased us south along”. The storm leads them to the South Pole “And ice, mast-high, came floating by, As green as emerald”. Describing how the Sun rises and falls, Coleridge gives us the impression of the earth going round and makes us feel all the calamities of the severe and heartless sea.

Then, “Frost at Midnight” presents an escape from the solitude and oppressing silence to the half-sleep recollections of the narrator’s childhood with “the old church-tower” and “bells, the poor man’s only music”, depicting marvellous landscapes such as “lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountain”.

In “Kubla Khan, or a Vision in a Dream” we become the travelers through the dream of the story-teller along the Alph, the sacred river, to the Mount Abora in the beautiful surroundings of Xanadu. We lead all the way of the stream to meet the charming girl with “her symphony and song” and to drink “the milk of Paradise”.

In this way the thoroughly selected metaphors and similes become the author’s main means of transport to present us with fairy imaginative journeys.



Leave a Reply