E212: British Literature since 1760

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Study Questions

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"Frost at Midnight"

1. How is the child (i.e. the speaker when he was a child) the "father of the man" in this poem, to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth?

2. What is the "stranger"? What effect did it have upon the speaker as a child, and what effect does it have upon him now, as he utters the poem?

3. What is "the eternal language that thy god utters" (60-61)? How is God a poet?

4. What is the speaker's hope for his child as that child grows up? How should the child's growing up differ from the speaker's?

5. What is the "secret ministry of Frost," and why is it "quietly shining to the quiet moon"?

"Dejection: an Ode"

1. What relationship between mind and nature does this poem posit -- that is, what is the relationship between the speaker's mind and nature at present, and what should it be? How do the speaker's ideas concerning this relationship invoke the basic claim of Kant's philosophical idealism, as we shall discuss it in class?

2. What is the significance of the stormy weather in this poem?

3. Meyer Abrams divides the "Greater Romantic Lyric" into three stages -- a description of the natural scene, an analysis of that scene and the problem about which it reminds the speaker, and an emotional or "affective" resolution of the problem. Does the speaker resolve his problem in this poem? Explain.

Edition: Abrams, M.H. et al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2. Seventh edition. New York: Norton, 2000.