Commentary on Eolian Harp

            Coleridge’s Eolian Harp is a conversation poem that extends farther metaphorically than just a conversation; within the poem Coleridge discusses religion and sex.  The first stanza is Coleridge talking to his fiancée directly, telling her that it is relaxing to sit with her beside their cottage smelling flowers and watching dusk fade into night.  Coleridge tells of the sea and its murmur, a sound which “tells us of silence.”  The second stanza describes the harp and its metaphors:  the harp is caressed by the wind as a maid is by her lover, saying sweet chastisements to him; the harp sounds notes like elves gently floating on fairy breezes or the footless birds of Paradise, which is a metaphor for sex.  The stanza then switches to Coleridge’s musing about a universal soul and how it is possible to not love all things in this world.  The next stanza compares Coleridge’s thoughts to the harp; that is, when Coleridge is napping on a sunny hill and thoughts flood his passive brain he feels similar to harp, who is played at the wind’s whimsy.  The next stanza is Coleridge’s thoughts on pantheism, his idea that perhaps all animate objects are simply Eolian Harps played by a universal soul.  The final stanza has Coleridge abandoning this idea because of Sara’s rebuke and returning to traditional Christian ideals.

Commentary on Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

            Unlike the Coleridge poem above, Wordsworth’s Lines is a deeply personal poem, addressed to no one but Wordsworth himself.  Wordsworth opens the poem with a stanza describing the area around Tintern Abbey; it is summer there and very secluded.  Wordsworth likens the scattered farms to hermit dwellings.  The next stanza describes how the memory of this place has sustained him while he has been in dark moods and in crowded cities, and has perhaps been the inspiration for some of his small acts of kindness.  The next stanza is a short one that says if what he has stated within the last stanza is untrue, the area around the Wye has at least lifted his spirit during times of hardship.  The fourth stanza is Wordsworth musing on how he has grown as a man, using his perceptions of this area to describe it; he goes from his boyhood through adolescence to his present state.  He says that his senses can now pick up more than Nature here, can sense the sad state of humanity.  He contrasts this with the sublime presence he feels here, and says that because of this presence he still loves this place and Nature herself for she is his moral anchor.  Wordsworth does begin to address someone else in the next stanza; he talks to his sister Dorothy, who still possesses Wordsworth’s youthful joy for places like this.  He ends the poem by telling Dorothy that after she has matured and become like him, he hopes that she will remember the memories they created here and use this place as an inspiration like he has.