Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
ROMANTIC ADAPTATIONS: WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, STEVENS
I still have had
Thy after-sojourn in the self-same place
Present before my eyes, have played with times
(I speak of private business of the thought)
And accidents as children do with cards,
Or as a man, who, when his house is built,
A frame locked up in wood and stone, doth still
In impotence of mind by his fireside
Rebuild it to his liking. I have thought
Of thee, thy learning, gorgeous eloquence,
And all the strength and plumage of thy youth,
Thy subtle speculations, toils abstruse
Among the schoolmen, and Platonic forms
Of wild ideal pageantry, shaped out
From things well-matched, or ill, and words for things –
The self-created sustenance of a mind
Debarred from Nature's living images,
Compelled to be a life unto itself,
And unrelentingly possessed by thirst
Of greatness, love, and beauty.
In The Prelude Wordsworth expresses doubts about Coleridge's idealist imagination. Wordsworth observes his friend has introspected to the extent that the ‘actual world’, as Stevens calls it, no longer influences Coleridge's imagination. Coleridge lives on the ‘self-created sustenance of a mind / Debarred from Nature's living images, / Compelled to be a life unto itself’. But in charging Coleridge with relinquishing his talent to ‘Platonic forms of wild ideal pageantry’ Wordsworth checks his own tendency toward conceiving Coleridge's life in the abstract.
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