One Poem from the English of Coleridge*

A Harp2

*after Harry Gilonis’ Two Poems from the English of the Wordsworths, his found and erasure response to I Wondered Lonely as a Cloud, incorporating text from Dorthy Wordsworth’s Journal, and erasing the word ‘daffodil’ from the found poem.

I have always liked An Eolian Harp for Coleridge’s pantheistic reverie, realised empathetically and emphatically in these words from the second section

‘O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere—’

and I have then despised the seemingly grovelling retraction of these feelings after being reproached by Sara for, as she judges it, his lack of humble piety.

I acknowledge Coleridge’s eventual/actual orthodox Christian faith, but I also chose to ignore this whenever reading An Eolian Harp, and I thank Gilonis for pointing the way to how I can subvert the poem’s final section today.

 

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