David:
> This I think is a matter of taste.
I'd (partly) agree, but possibly a matter which goes beyond the particular
poem. I almost lost a good friend over repeated arguments over "Which
version of Dejection?" As the friend was a novelist rather than a poet,
I'd have +expected+ him to be more relaxed over form, but ...
> The letter is more spontaneous and
> confessional,
Indeed, indeed, indeed ... Maybe even Confessional, if we read the letter
version in the context of Lowell, Berryman, etc.
> but I prefer "Dejection: An Ode" to the letter,
> though I'm very glad to have it, because I cherish the controlled
distance
> from the churn, as well as the formal patterns of the firmer butter that
> results.
Though that rather begs the question of "Dejection: A Letter" already
having been churned. I think there's much artistic control and
manipulation even in the earliest extant version -- but a DIFFERENT (and
more unusual -- certainly, for the time) control than in the various "Ode"
versions.
> What lines were you thinking of?
In my first Dawn of Youth that Fancy stole
With many secret Yearnings on my Soul.
At eve, sky-gazing in 'ecstatic fir'
(Alas! for cloister'd in a city School
The Sky was all, I knew, of Beautiful)
At the barr'd window often did I sit,
And oft upon the leaded School-roof lay,
And to myself would say ...
No high-romantic mountains and lakes, but a London school roof -- closer to
Blake than Wordsworth.
But especially the section beginning, "My little Children are a Joy, a Love
...", with the lines:
There have been hours when feeling how they bind
And pluck out the Wing-feathers of my Mind,
Turning my Error to Necessity,
I have half-wish'd they never had been born!
Also, of course, we lose the mysterious "guileless letter", which further
erodes the context of the original poem which Coleridge performs in
rewritting as an "Ode".
This would link into the way that the "Ode" version destroys the whole
+context+ of the original poem (which isn't simply 'biographical
background' but is deliberately built-in by Coleridge in "Dejection: A
Letter") -- Coleridge's response to hearing Wordsworth read "The
Immortality Ode", and his feelings for Sara.
Robin Hamilton
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