Before tonight I had never read any Coleridge, and I was really pleasantly surprised by how much I liked these poems (not to say I was expecting to hate them, but I thought they were very good). I wanted to focus on “The Eolian Harp” because I thought the first four stanzas were so charming and quintessentially Romantic, and the fifth stanza really sort of came out of left field.
The figurative language in the first four stanzas paint a vivid image of Sara, the narrator, and the nature around them. These stanzas have the classic Romantic glimmering language when talking about nature, just like a lot of Wordsworth. Lines like “The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main” and “How exquisite the scents / Snatched from yon bean-field!” really show the scene well, especially by playing on the different senses: the smell of flowers, the glitter of diamonds.
In these stanzas, Coleridge details how the wind causes the lute that sits on his windowsill to make music. The idea of nature—almost entirely on its own—creating music also seems very Romantic, especially Coleridge describing how when the wind gusts intensely, the notes shift in pitch and the music becomes more amazing: “its strings / Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes / Over delicious surges sink and rise.” Coleridge goes on to compare nature playing the lute to all things in nature. Just as the harp can be played by gusts of air, all of nature can be “played”—meaning have something beautiful come from it—if the right spirit compels them. Just as air is still, but gusts of wind cause music from the harp, the right surge can cause anything in nature to achieve beauty. I thought this metaphor was both simple yet captivating, and if the poem had ended after the fourth stanza, I wouldn’t have batted an eye.
In the fifth stanza, Coleridge turns to a critique of himself/the narrator for assuming he could understand the world as God understands it. To be honest, the stanza in general sort of perplexed me, and I wasn’t exactly sure what the point was, especially within the context of the poem. It felt really out of place, especially in a Romantic poem, but I suppose I don’t know enough about Coleridge to make that statement.
