Reclaiming Coleridge
If more of us reclaim Coleridge’s transcendent respect for our world, we’d be living in a much healthier place indeed.
The brutal isolation of lockdowns has made us subservient to the vices of technology across the past year. Indeed, too often have I relied on technology to maintain social bonds, to entertain, and to educate myself during this pandemic. The never-ending news cycles of Covid, Afghanistan, and migrant crises which appear on our screens daily tend to grip the mind and torture the soul.
There’s nothing healthy, even as an aspiring journalist, about being constantly wrapped up in this sort of news. For me, the effect of this onslaught has been total disillusionment with the political world. Disillusionment with politics is entirely normal, and for one to stay sane when politics is seemingly the only thing, one must get a little romantic.
My antidote of choice against the poisons of news and technology has been to delve into the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. With an arresting sense of respite, Coleridge’s poems, essays and letters have greeted me much like an old friend – his observations of the natural world have had this particular impact on me. Escaping into the depths of his lucid musings on the way the light of the sun might bounce off water, or reflecting on the “sudden charm which accidents of light and shape, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known or familiar landscape”, sends your mind into peace.
Coleridge, being a proponent of Romanticism, was always in tune with the transcendence of nature – something which is hard to comprehend after being locked within the confines of urban living for a lengthy period of time. Coleridge shows us that nature, in its never-ending motion of change, humbles us to the sublime – not dissimilar from the observations of Burke and Wordsworth.
In the spacey incantations of nature which Coleridge conjures in my mind, I am able to escape into a relative peace and comfort, knowing that the world out there cares very little for our petty squabbles over foreign diplomacy. Coleridge himself had a great Wandering Englishman trope about him, being a keen hiker who often wandered alone through the Lake District and Scottish Highlands. In his time as a walker he observed locals in small hamlets, remarking on their “unrememberableness” as people who were isolated from the big issues of the day.
Being a romantic isn’t a trained discipline rather than an ingrained disposition, but if more of us reclaim Coleridge’s transcendent respect for our world, we’d be living in a much healthier place indeed. Come to peace with your humbling insignificance, and go for a wander through the Lake District.
