tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post76745268847102820..comments2024-03-28T19:56:32.848-05:00Comments on Anecdotal Evidence: `To You I Gave My Whole Weak Wishing Heart'Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08436175583386298032noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-33824436895829691082010-10-22T16:49:24.216-05:002010-10-22T16:49:24.216-05:00Montaigne would have quickly established himself a...Montaigne would have quickly established himself as king of the blogosphere. Another diverting exercise is to wonder which writer would post the best comments.Jordanian Joehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09435863911222208802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-20232077127826301602010-10-21T14:04:30.024-05:002010-10-21T14:04:30.024-05:00It's a diverting exercise, wondering which wri...It's a diverting exercise, wondering which writers would have made good bloggers. Byron, i think, would have been superb, if you've ever read his letters.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-73855609904960304742010-10-21T10:22:56.340-05:002010-10-21T10:22:56.340-05:00The differences in approach of the four English po...The differences in approach of the four English poets to which you’ve linked here demonstrates the difference sufficiently between Romantic and pre-Romantic love poetry. For all their philosophizing, Donne, Drayton and Greville are responding to the behavior of an actual person. Coleridge by contrast at least makes an effort to separate out the concept of love from his own physical experiences. In so doing, he creates in the reader an understanding of Ideal (or Sublime) Love – not earthly lust but the life force that drives us and makes the universe tick. To do this he finds a vibrational frequency ever-so-slightly higher than the war of dogma Donne engages in, the rich shock of Greville that his formerly attentive lover has moved her attentions elsewhere, and the pitiful plaint of the victim Drayton assumes. The farewell gesture of Coleridge, similarly, is not to an actual lover but to the illusion that one can, in the intimacies of flesh and heart, know this higher love. For all the feelings of union, it stays just a hemi-quaver beyond. As with Kubla Khan, his imaginary paradise he had to leave unfinished, Coleridge steps right up to the good stuff, the aerie pinnacle that maketh flesh disrobe, but his work is ultimately about the threshold – the mind balking before the totalizing presence of the higher truth.WAShttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-75127849967472747732010-10-21T05:22:30.884-05:002010-10-21T05:22:30.884-05:00According to Earnest Hartley Coleridge’s edition o...According to Earnest Hartley Coleridge’s edition of the Collected Poetical Works, Farewell to Love was modelled on Sonnet LXXIV of Coelica and ‘was inscribed on the margin of Charles Lamb's copy of Certain Learned and Elegant Works of the Right Honourable Fulke Lord Brooke . . . 1633, p. 284.’ (This may be a mistake for p. 234, where sonnet LXXIV is printed).<br /><br />'Cælica'. Sonnet LXXIV.<br />Farewell sweet Boy, complaine not of my truth;<br />Thy Mother lov'd thee not with more devotion;<br />For to thy Boyes play I gave all my youth<br />Yong Master, I did hope for your promotion.<br />While some sought Honours, Princes thoughts observing,<br />Many woo'd Fame, the child of paine and anguish,<br />Others judg'd inward good a chiefe deserving,<br />I in thy wanton Visions joy'd to languish.<br />I bow'd not to thy image for succession,<br />Nor bound thy bow to shoot reformed kindnesse,<br />The playes of hope and feare were my confession<br />The spectacles to my life was thy blindnesse:<br />But Cupid now farewell, I will goe play me,<br />With thoughts that please me lesse, and lesse betray me.<br /><br />Coleridge is likely to have come across Greville early, if not at Christ’s Hospital then certainly at Cambridge, where he would have been aware that Greville had attended the same college (Jesus) two hundred years before him. ‘Library cormorant’ that he was, he wouldn't have had far to travel to feed on a copy of ‘Certain Learned and Elegant Works ...’Eric Thomsonnoreply@blogger.com