The Romantic Concealment of Desire: Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s Poetic Voices

Manuel Botero Camacho

doi:10.21071/ltap.v6i6.14040

Abstract

    The present study poses an interpretation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” and William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” so as to evince the subject of desire as the ulterior motif of these texts, even though the poetic voices of these works attempt to conceal such a theme. This reading interprets both poems as compositions that share the same thematic line as William Blake’s “The Book of Thel” and John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Consequently, the close reading of the poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge will be presented.   

Highlights

Throughout these pages, an analysis of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” and William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” will be proposed
In order to highlight the theme of desire as the ulterior motif of the poems’ speakers over other traditional understandings, two other works will be briefly discussed in the introduction, William Blake’s “The Book of Thel” and John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
The present study has proposed a reading of Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” and Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” that depart from the canonical interpretations, which have mostly focused on the biographical facts surrounding the composition and the poets’ praise of Nature, central to the poetics of Romanticism

Summary

Introduction

Throughout these pages, an analysis of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” and William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” will be proposed. Read under this light, there can be found in the descriptions of nature some nuances that subtly present sexual overtones, some of the most evident ones including “the deep and gloomy wood” and the “sounding cataract”; the kind of metaphors that can later be found in the third canto of Byrons “Childe Harolds Pilgrimage” (34-36) It is the time of maturity, of accepting that the years of passion have passed as claimed by the narrator, who in spite of losing youth’s “dizzy raptures” and its “aching joys” has received abundant rewards. It is not very convincing that he would say to her that, in those future moments that he foreshadows, she should think of him concerning these juvenile pleasures

Conclusion

Works Cited