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Unit 18: The Triumph of Romanticism (Melancholy in Poetry of the Age)

In spite of his normal optimism Wordsworth often expresses himself on the misfortunes inevitable Notes
to the human predicament. In his years of maturity he was particularly aware of them. For example,
he says in Tintern Abbey:
For I have learned
To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing often times
The still, sad music of humanity
Thus even his mysticism is not without a chastening element of melancholy.
Wordsworth’s political disillusionment was also responsible for some utterances of melancholy.
The French Revolution (1789) fired him as it did a large number of young hearts throughout
Europe, with new hopes of the deliverance of humanity from the shackles of age-old tyranny. The
fall of the Bastille was for them an incident to rave over. Recalling the days of the Revolution,
Wordsworth writes:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
Later on, however, with the Reign of Terror and the rise of Napoleon, his enthusiasm for the
slogan “liberty, fraternity, and equality” declined steeply. He felt that the Revolution was not
Nature-but man-made. The ensuing melancholy feelings drove him straight away to the lap of
Nature who nursed his wounds and healed them up. Momentary moods of depression, however,
continued visiting him as ever. In Resolution and Independence he describes one such moment in
the following lines where he represents himself as absorbed in “untoward thoughts”:
We poets in our youth begin in gladness:
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.
This mood does not, however, continue for long, for study of the fortitude of an extremely old
leech-gatherer comes to him with the message of a new hope.
Wordsworth’s emotional career was calculated to arouse melancholy feelings. His ill-fated alliance
with a French girl sent him brooding; but his poetry is surprisingly free from the expression of
melancholy bred purely by subjective causes.

18.2 Coleridge

Coleridge went through the same vicissitudes of political feelings as Wordsworth. He and his
poetry are, however, much more melancholy than Wordsworth and his poetry because he could
not find the same “healing power” in Nature as Wordsworth did. No doubt, to start with, Coleridge
felt identically with Wordsworth that “Nature did never betray the heart that loved her.” But later
on, this Wordsworthian panacea stopped working for Coleridge’s peculiar ailment. In the Ode to
Dejection Coleridge sets forth his contradictory view of Nature which he regards not as a spirit
capable of leading even the most cheerless man to a heaven of joy, but as something essentially
external, which only mirrors a man’s mood, be it of joy or sorrow. Says he:
O Lady! —we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live;
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud.
What makes Nature look cheerful is the inner joy peculiar to every man, present in some, absent
in most. He says, accordingly:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life whose fountains are within
This “passion and the life” are internal, having nothing to do with Nature or anything external

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