On Fri, 21 Apr 2000, Robin Hamilton wrote:
> 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
I'd agree--but ad that the "Ode" version adds another layer of
intertextuality precisely because it is an "Ode." Holmes in Coleridge:
Early Visions does a nice compare and contrast: "The movement of the verse
in the first version is swift and spontaneous, a true letter, and the tone
is simultaneously exalted and self-pitying; while in 'Dejection' the verse
is cunningly shaped into eight irregular stanzas, and the outpouring of
grief is carefully controlled and led into a climax of joy and blessing.
The first version overwhelms the reader with its intimacy, its torrent of
lament and letting-go, which is both shocking and compulsive. The final
version holds the reader in an act of high, rhetorical attention, around
the proposition that external nature cannot heal the poet (as Wordsworth
believed it could) whose own powers were failing" (319).
Holmes, nevertheless, believes the "letter" is closer to Coleridge's true
imaginative life.
Best,
David Latane
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