Where to begin...
Okay so this poem is kinda all over the map to me. All the stanzas are different in tempo and it's super bizarre to read aloud. Once you think you have found a good rhythm, BOOM, Coleridge changes it up on you. It may be aptly titled "Or A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment" because out loud it sounds fragmented and drugged...
However, moving on the the content of the actual poem... I think Coleridge kinda follows suit with his fellow writers during the romanticism period, well in the beginning anyway. This first stanza seems more like an ode to how beautiful that nature of ones home can actually be. But then he kinda loses it.. The poem turns dark and you can almost picture the storm clouds rolling in over this beautiful place as it starts to rain..
" A savage place! as holy and enchanted/As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted/by woman wailing for her demon lover" Like seriously, why does it always have to be a woman's fault?!?
I'm not sure where he is going with the "ancestral voices prophesying war" but I think this may be some kind of punishment for a man taking pleasure in beautiful things such as the beauty offered by nature as well as the beauty offered by women. I could be completely off here but this is just how I'm reading it as some kind of internal war going on in the poet himself.
Then again, it could have just been a crazy dream from a bad trip that someone tried to write down.
Ashlee Moore
Ashlee when I read the poem aloud I thought that I was off beat and felt like I was going crazy! I have noticed that the lines describing the river had a different rhythm from the rest of the poem. I kept on reading and realized that Coleridge was also following the same styles as other writers during the Romanticism period. The second stanza describes this magnificant garden, but it is isolated by walls. This made me think of past poems like "The Garden of Love" and how it connected with the garden of Eden. I think during the Romanticism period a lot of writers including Coleridge symbolized religion in their writing a lot which helps me understand the connections in poems a little bit better. Then the poem turns dark and Coleridge kinda loses me yet again. I do agree that Coleridge is portraying a message that there is punishment for finding pleasure in beauty. Like you said, whether it is beauty of nature of beauty from a female. Everytime I read a poem from the Romanticism period it is either gentle and soft when talking about beauty and god or other poems are the exact opposite. Some poems express such struggle between the narrator and the joys and pleasures they have had in the past. Moreover, I always feel like the narrator is saddened from some type of constraints. Maybe I'm reading this poem totally wrong, but your response helped me understand it a little better!
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