Further, from google:
With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots,
Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots;
Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clue,
Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw.
Note:
An instance of Coleridge's habit of annotating books, this quatrain was
first printed in his Literary Remains (1836) from a note on Alexander
Chalmers' Works of the English Poets (21 volumes, 1810), V. Coleridge and
Charles Lamb were largely responsible for reviving an interest in Donne in
the nineteenth century.
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/coleridg12.html
HARTLEY COLERIDGE (1796-1849) wrote a poem on Donne, "Brief was the reign of
pure poetic truth ..." which inter alia quotes a line from his father's (?)
quatrain.
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/hcoler1.html
From _Biographia Literaria_:
"One great distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly between even the
characteristic faults of our elder poets, and
the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we
find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and
genuine mother English, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in language
the most fantastic and arbitrary."
(Almost immediately afterwards, Coleridge plays a neat spin on Johnston:
"Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry
to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the
glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or
rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of
abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the
head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery." )
"The vividness of the descriptions or declamations in Donne or Dryden, is as
much and as often derived from the force and fervour of the describer, as
from the reflections, forms or incidents, which constitute their subject and
materials."
"A deceptive counterfeit of the superficial form and colours may be
elaborated; but the marble peach feels cold and heavy, and children only put
it to their mouths. We find no difficulty in admitting as excellent, and the
legitimate language of poetic fervour self-impassioned, Donne's apostrophe
to the Sun in the second stanza of his PROGRESS OF THE SOUL.
"Thee, eye of heaven! this great Soul envies not;
By thy male force is all, we have, begot.
In the first East thou now beginn'st to shine,
Suck'st early balm and island spices there,
And wilt anon in thy loose-rein'd career
At Tagus, Po, Seine, Thames, and Danow dine,
And see at night this western world of mine:
Yet hast thou not more nations seen than she,
Who before thee one day began to be,
And, thy frail light being quench'd, shall long, long outlive thee."
Or the next stanza but one:
"Great Destiny, the commissary of God,
That hast mark'd out a path and period
For every thing! Who, where we offspring took,
Our ways and ends see'st at one instant: thou
Knot of all causes! Thou, whose changeless brow
Ne'er smiles nor frowns! O! vouchsafe thou to look,
And shew my story in thy eternal book," etc.
(Find-ed from the Guttenberg text of the BL.)
Robin
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