An ode dejection
- 2. "Dejection: An Ode" is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1802. The poem in its original form was written to Sara Hutchinson, a woman who was not his wife, and discusses his feelings of love for her. The various versions of the poem describe Coleridge's inability to write poetry and living in a state of paralysis, published editions remove his personal feelings and mention of Hutchinson. Background During this time in 1802, Coleridge was separated from his family and he eventually returned home during March. The relationship between him and his wife was restarted and they had a daughter in December However, of the poems he intended to write about Hutchinson, he managed to complete one and an early draft was sent to her in a letter on 4 April 1802. The original draft was titled "Letter to Sara Hutchinson", and it became Dejection when he sought to publish There are many differences between the versions beyond the original being 340 lines and the printed 139 as they reflect two different moments in Coleridge's emotional struggle. Also, passages describing his childhood and other personal matters were removed between versions. It was published in the 4 October 1802 Morning Post . This date corresponding to Wordsworth's wedding to Mary Hutchinson and Coleridge's own wedding anniversary. The poem was grouped with the Asra poems, a series of poems discussing love were dedicated to Hutchinson. Eventually, Coleridge cut himself off from Hutchinson and renounced his feelings for her, which ended the problems that resulted in the poem.
- 3. “Dejection” was written in 1802 but was originally drafted in the form of a letter to Sara Hutchinson, the woman Coleridge loved. The much longer original version of the poem contained many of the same elements as “The Nightingale” and “Frost at Midnight,” including the same meditation on his children and their natural education. This version also referred explicitly to “Sara” (replaced in the later version by “Lady”) and “William” (a clear reference to Wordsworth). Coleridge’s strict revision process shortened and tightened the poem, depersonalizing it, but the earlier draft hints at just how important the poem’s themes were to Coleridge personally and indicates that the feelings expressed were the poet’s true beliefs about his own place in the world.
- 4. The story of Sir Patrick Spence, to which the poet alludes in the first stanza, is an ancient Scottish ballad about a sailor who drowns with a boatload of Scottish noblemen, sailing on orders from the king but against his own better judgment. It contains lines that refer to the moon as a predictor of storms, which Coleridge quotes as an epigraph for his ode: “Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon / With the old Moon in her arms; / And I fear, I fear, my Master dear! / We shall have a deadly storm.”
- 5. Form The long ode stanzas of “Dejection” are metered in iambic lines ranging in length from trimeter to pentameter. The rhymes alternate between rhymes (ABBA) and couplets (CC) with occasional exceptions.
- 6. Commentary In this poem, Coleridge continues his sophisticated philosophical exploration of the relationship between man and nature, positing as he did in “The Nightingale” that human feelings and the forms of nature are essentially separate. Just as the speaker insisted in the earlier poem that the song should not be called melancholy simply because it sounded so to a melancholy poet, he insists here that the beauty of the sky before the storm does not have the power to fill him with joy, for the source of human feeling within. Only when the individual has access to that source, so that joy shines from him like a light, is he able to see the beauty of nature and to respond it. (As in “Frost in Midnight,” the city-raised Coleridge insists on a sharper demarcation between the mind and nature than the country-raised Wordsworth would ever have done.)
- 7. Coleridge blames his desolate numbness for sapping his creative powers and leaving him without his habitual method of understanding human nature. Despite his insistence on the separation between the mind and the world, Coleridge nevertheless continues to find metaphors for his own feelings in nature: His dejection is reflected in the gloom of the night as it awaits the storm.