Banha Universityfaculty of Artsenglish Departmenta Guiding

Banha University Faculty of Arts English Department

A Guiding Model Answer for Third Grade Neo-Classical and Romantic Poetry Exam

June 4 (Year 2012) Faculty of Arts

Prepared by

Mohammad Badr AlDin Al-Hussini Hassan Mansour, Ph.D. University of Nevada, Reno (USA)

Banha University Second Term Faculty of Arts Year (2011-2012) English Department Time: 3 hours Third Grade Second Term Exam

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Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Poetry Exam

Respond to the following questions:

1. Discuss the varying characteristics of 18th and 19th century British poetry through a comparative analysis of the two poems, "London" by Samuel Johnson and William Blake? (Time Limit is 40 minutes; Grade is 4)

2. What is unconventional about the rhyming pattern of Shelley's sonnet "Ozymandias"? (Time Limit is 25 minutes; Grade is 3)

3. Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is a meditative lamentation of human mortality centered upon two poetic traditions: elegy and landscape. Elaborate? (Time Limit is 30 minutes; Grade is 4)

4. Explore the connections between the mythological, literal allusions, and theme in Alexander Pope's poem "Of the Characters of Women: An Epistle to a Lady"? (Time Limit is 25 minutes; Grade is 3)

5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's major poems turn on problems of self-esteem and identity. Exploring states of isolation and ineffectuality, they test strategies to overcome weakness without asserting its antithesis—that is a powerful self, secure in its own thoughts and utterances. This is evident in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," "The Eolian Harp," and "Frost at Midnight." Explicate the structural pattern in the three poems and comment on? (Time limit is one hour minutes; Grade is 6)

Good Luck Mohammad Al-Hussini Arab

2 Answers

Answer: Neoclassical literature, which dominated the first half of the eighteenth century in England, emphasized practical reason, formality, social conformity, emotional restraint, didactism, and submission to the authority of classical literary techniques. It was generally allied to political and religious conservatism as well. Its chief aim was to show to the world (that is, to mankind) a picture of itself for its own improvement and edification. Its chief ornament was art: puns, word-play, satiric description, and so forth. After 1789, when the social order in France turned upside down, life in eighteenth century England was transformed by political, economic, social, and technological innovations, and an expectation of the millennium arose in England, especially in liberal intellectual circles. The old rules of poetry were thrown off with the outworn social strictures—they seemed increasingly obsolete to younger and more audacious writers, who had absorbed the Enlightenment philosophy of humanism and freedom. A new aesthetic bloomed in their place; its ruling faculty was imagination. The world seemed made new, and poetry released from bondage. The Romantics abandoned the poetic theory of the century before. They wrote from a radically different philosophical base. They frequently stated that poems ought to be composed on the inspiration of the moment, thereby faithfully to record the purity of the emotion. In fact, the Romantics labored hard over their creations; they exerted themselves not to smoothness of meter but to preserving the grace of spontaneity while achieving precision in observation of natural and psychological phenomena. Poets saw themselves as charting hitherto unexplored reaches of human experience, extremes of joy and dejection, guilt and redemption, pride and degradation. They wrote meditations, confessions, and conversations, in which natural things were seen to abet internal states. In short, Romantic poetry represents a sharp movement away from the concerns and values of neoclassic poetry. Whereas the neoclassic poet is concerned with the mimetic relationship of poetry to the nature or reality that it imitates and with the pragmatic relationship of poetry to its audience, the Romantic poet focuses primarily on the expressive relationship of the poet to poetry. The neoclassic poet sees poetry as an imitation of nature designed to instruct and delight; the Romantic poet sees poetry as an expression of the creative imagination. In examining poetry, the neoclassic poet turns to matters of genre, techniques, conventions, and effects of poetry; the Romantic turns back to the poet, the imagination, and the creative process. When the Romantic poet does turn to the mimetic relationship, he focuses on the organic and beneficent qualities of nature, and when he looks at the pragmatic relationship, he is especially interested in the connection between feelings and moral response. As the world's first great capitalist metropolis, London in the revolutionary period presented itself as offering some privileged access to the future, to the way that the Western world in general might develop. A city existing, so to speak, partly in the future, London acquired an epistemological nontransparency. It became less of an

3 unproblematically known reality to be judged and more of a cognitive problem to be pondered. Samuel Johnson's Juvenalian satire London (1738), written somewhat in the tradition of earlier Tory Augustan satires like Swift's "A Description of the Morning" (1709) and "A Description of a City Shower" (1710), rails against the alleged crimes, vices, and follies of his adopted city; it provides a more bitter image of London than the works by Swift—arguably, indeed, the most memorable image of London to that point in English literature since the city comedy of Ben Jonson. It has sometimes been adversely criticized for its lack of a rigorous overall structure and also for its evident insincerity: for the later Dr. Johnson, the hero of Boswell's biography, is indeed about the last person one can imagine abandoning London for a rural retreat as the poem seems to recommend. But London actually operates on various levels of seriousness. Some lines seem to be written in a typically Augustan high-spiritedness of denunciation, and are, one assumes, not meant to be taken literally—"Prepare for Death, if here at Night you roam, / And sign your Will before you sup from Home—while others appear as deeply felt, and as thoroughly grounded in the author's personal experience, as anything that Johnson ever wrote. It is true that the poem is not very tightly organized; like much Augustan satire in heroic couplets, it moves from topic to topic without any strongly governing plan, and the poem as a whole is hardly more than the sum of its parts. Whether this is a fault, or merely an indication of the particular kind of poetry it is, the point to be stressed here is that the loose organization of London bespeaks a fundamental epistemological repose. If Johnson feels no need to impose any overall structure on his vision of the city, it is surely because he assumes that his experience of London is straightforward and shared in common with his readers. London, for Johnson, is still transparent; and, indeed, it is precisely this transparency that enables the poem's easy and absolute moral judgments, as the corruption of the modern city is sharply contrasted with the supposed moral purity that obtained in England under Alfred the Great or that still obtains among the rocks of Scotland and in other rustic regions. We might say that Johnson's London, whether in deadly earnest or somewhat affectedly, finds the city to be morally shocking—a cesspool of lies, snobbishness, cowardice, weakness, treason, and violence—but not productive of what Walter Benjamin, writing about another and later great urban center, would call epistemological shock. The situation is radically different when we turn to William Blake's poem also entitled "London" (1794), which is crucially different from Johnson's. The distance that separates Blake from Johnson is highlighted by the formal parallels between the two poems. In both cases, the speakers wander through the city and issue thunderous moral condemnations from their respective sociopolitical positions of Johnson's Tory radicalism and Blake's revolutionary proto-Marxism. But for Blake London is epistemologically as well as morally shocking, at once estranged and estranging. Johnson's easy empiricist certitude—his ability to take and understand London as he finds it—is gone, and with it the adequacy of his straightforward poetry of statement. In order to make sense of what he sees throughout the city, Blake must instead construct an intricate metonymic and metaphoric figural structure. London, for Blake, no longer speaks for itself as it did for Johnson; rather the marked city must be elaborately deciphered. At first, the poet's scheme of decipherment relies mainly on metaphor: the fearful cries of the Londoners are understood to signify mental repression as powerful

4 and despotic as manacles of actual steel. But in the course of the poem metonymy comes largely to supercede metaphor, as Blake's mode of understanding London relies less on mere similarity and more on actual systemic connection. It is slightly metaphorical to say that the chimney-sweeper's cry appalls the church building in the sense of making it whiter, since it is actually the sweeper's labor that does that; but it is metaphor at the very edge of metonymy, and it is a matter of full-fledged connection and causation to say that the cry appalls the church as an institution in the sense of startling and terrifying it, thereby directly, though synecdochically, suggesting the entire relationship between working class and ruling class. Somewhat similarly, there is a bit of metaphor in the role assigned to the harlot's curse in the final stanza. But the curse results from the woman's sexual and economic exploitation by the men of respectable society, and this exploitation quite directly turns the bridal carriage into a hearse blighted by venereal plagues; and it also infects the syphilitic infant, blind from birth. The nexus or oppression operates between the sexes and the generations as well as between the classes. Blake's tightly structured quatrains as well as his self-consciously elaborate poetic figures are signs of just how much intense intellectual labor is required to comprehend the city, which presents itself as a quasi-science-fictional problem, an entity new and estranging. Moreover, the dominance of metonymy helps to render the estrangement a properly cognitive one, as Blake, in a mere sixteen lines of tetrameter, performs or at least strongly suggests a thoroughly materialist analysis—on a level of rigor not matched until Marx himself—of the capitalist metropolis. It is once again useful to consider Johnson's London by way of contrast; for both poets find the sights of the city to be extraordinary. But these sights put no strain at all on Johnson's powers of observation and analysis. Johnson follows his own famous critical prescription about "the grandeur of generality." The capitalized abstract nouns, "Malice," "Rapine," and "Accident," function almost as personifications, and the "fell Attorney" is expanded (or reduced) to a type by being imaged as an carnivorous animal, just as the members of the rabble are de-individualized through the comparison with the fire. But Johnson is able to generalize because he is confident that he and his readers are unproblematically aware of the particulars on which the generalities are based; a falling house is a bad thing but not a mysterious thing. In contrast to Johnson, Blake employs metaphor lightly and provisionally, as a somewhat useful device that is decisively subordinated to the more fully cognitive figures of metonymy. But Blake's attempt to understand the systemic connections that define London, and thereby to achieve what later generations could recognize as a scientific analysis of British society, is based on a kind of radical materialism that was alien to Johnson's mind.

2. What is unconventional about the rhyming pattern of Shelley's sonnet "Ozymandias"? (Time Limit is 25 minutes; Grade is 3)

Answer: "Ozymandias" is a sonnet composed by the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and named for its subject, with the Greek name of the Egyptian king Ramses II, who died in 1234 b.c.e. The poem follows the traditional structure of the fourteen-line Italian sonnet, featuring an opening octave, or set of eight lines, that presents a conflict

5 or dilemma, followed by a sestet, or set of six lines, that offers some resolution or commentary upon the proposition introduced in the octave. The poem is conventionally written in iambic pentameter (that is, ten syllables per line of coupled unstressed then stressed sounds), so the poem's subject matter is framed both by the structural and metrical constraints chosen by the poet. The Italian sonnet presents the poet with the challenge of using an utterly familiar form in an innovative or provocative way. The chief variables within this form involve rhyme scheme. The traditional Italian sonnet features an abba, abba, cde, cde rhyme scheme, each letter representing a different end rhyme that is repeated in pattern. In "Ozymandias," Shelley chooses to forgo the conventional scheme and employs a more eccentric abab, acdc, ece, fef pattern that creates the immediate effect of a woven tapestry of sound and rhythm that helps to underscore the poem's essential irony. As the reader's expectations are unmet, the very syntax forced by the unusual rhyme of the poem creates tension that matches that of the theme. Each line of the poem, from first to last, reveals successively one more layer of the narrative's essential irony. Shelley's sonnet is remarkable for its spare and stark imagery. The poet is determined to re-create the barren desert landscape, the poetic counterpoint to the morbid and deserved fate of Ozymandias, the pompous fool. To do so requires that he carefully circumscribe his choice of descriptors to connote neither grandeur nor panoramic vista, but rather singular loneliness and constrained, fragmented solitude. Hence such modifiers as "trunkless," "Half-sunk," "shattered," "decay," and "wreck" serve his purpose well. Consequently, the compression of the sonnet form, the unconventional rhyme scheme, the point of view chosen for reader entry, and the carefully wrought diction of the poem achieve the effect the poet was seeking. Amid vast stretches of unbroken sameness, the traveler—followed by the poet, then the reader—comes upon a bleak personage whose severed limbs and head first shock and dismay, then elicit reluctant mockery for the egotism of its subject.

Answer: Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," which is placed in a long tradition of meditative poems that focus on human mortality, can best be understood in relation to two poetic traditions that were prevalent in the first half of the 18th century. The first is the elegiac tradition. An elegy is a sustained and formal poem setting forth the poet's meditations on death or another solemn theme, and it is often occasioned by the death of a particular person. The second tradition is the "landscape" tradition, in which the poet embodies his metaphysical or philosophical musings in the countryside or in nature. A subdivision of landscape poetry, the "graveyard school," tries to achieve an atmosphere of pleasing melancholy by contemplating death and immortality—usually in a graveyard at night. Graveyard poets were fond of dwelling on owls, hearses, and other images of death.

6 In the first three stanzas, Gray sets the scene for his private and quiet meditations. He is looking out from a country churchyard at a rural scene, but the sights and sounds of this rural world of men and beasts fade away. Although the scene is beautiful, life is not joyous, and Gray reflects that this day dies just like the one before it, as the plowman plods wearily home. The poet is alone, but he is not tired. The text gives a sense of the vitality of his solitude and of the stillness of the scene by describing the few things that remain to disturb it: the tinkling of the cattle who have returned home, the drone of the beetle, and the sound of an owl from the church tower. With these descriptions, Gray creates the backdrop for his melancholy reflections about eternal truths. In the next four stanzas, Gray uses the churchyard scene to invoke important images: the strength of the elms, death as symbolized by the graves, and the comfort provided by the yews shading bodies that sleep. The poet begins by reflecting that death for the humble and lower class means a cessation of life's simple pleasures: waking up to the songs of birds, sharing life with a wife and children, and enjoying hard and productive work. Gray reflects on the death that comes after a normal life span. In the next four stanzas, the poet addresses the upper classes—those with ambition, grandeur, power, nobility, and pride—and exhorts them not to mock the poor for their simplicity or for not having elaborate statues on their graveyard memorials. He tells the living upper classes that ultimately it does not matter what glory they achieve or how elaborate a tombstone they will have. They will die just like the poor. The eight stanzas that follow provide the central message of the poem: The poor are born with the same natural abilities as members of the upper classes. Who can say what humble people might have accomplished in the great world had they not been constrained by their condition and their innate powers not been frozen by "Chill Penury." Gray implies that the innocence and beauty of these souls, wasted in their isolated rural environment, and resembling hidden deserts and ocean caves, could have flourished in better circumstances. The churchyard graves may also contain the remains of a person who had the ability to become a great scholar, a generous national leader, or a man who could have been a great poet but is in the end no more than a "mute inglorious Milton." Gray goes on to speculate, however, that poverty may have prevented some dead men from doing not good but evil; now death has made them "guiltless" of shedding blood; they have not been able to slaughter, to refuse mercy, to lie, or to wallow in luxury and pride. Far from the "ignoble strife" of the great world, the village people have led "sober" and "noiseless" lives. Gray implies that, even though the village dead have accomplished nothing in the world, on balance they may be morally superior to their social betters. Gray returns to the churchyard in the next section, remarking on the graves' simple markers with their badly spelled inscriptions, names, and dates. Some bear unpolished verses or consoling biblical texts; some are decorated with "shapeless sculpture." Gray is touched that such grave markers show the humanity these dead people share with all men and women (including the famous who took paths of glory). Those who remain can sense that the dead "cast one long lingering look" back on what they were leaving and were comforted by at least one loved one. Gray reflects that the voice of general human nature can be heard crying from these graves. In the last line of this section, Gray reflects that what he has learned will apply to himself and his readers:

7 The "wonted fires" of his life and those of his readers will continue to burn in the ashes of all graves. This more personal line provides a transition to the next six stanzas, where it seems that Gray is addressing himself when he writes. Gray imagines an old farmer, who is described as a "hoary-headed swain," replying to this question in lines 98 to 116. The farmer's story describes Gray as a man who does not fit into either of the classes described earlier; he is neither a poor man nor a man of noble achievement. He is a wanderer, a man who vigorously meets the sun at dawn, yet later lies by a favorite tree and gazes listlessly at a brook. He mutters his fancies, resembling a madman or a hopeless lover. He is everything that Gray's contemporaries thought a poet should be— a man of exquisite sensibility, unfit for the world's work, meditative, and sad. The farmer recounts that he saw the poet's funeral procession to a church, presumably the one where the poem is set. He does not seem to have helped arrange the funeral nor, unlike the reader, can he read the epitaph that concludes the poem. Perhaps Gray, in indicating that the poet chose to be buried where people of his class are not usually buried, intended to reinforce that the poem's theme applies to all humankind. In the three stanzas of the epitaph, Gray speaks of his grave being "upon the lap of Earth" and not inside the church. He accords himself modest praise and justifies his life as worthwhile. Despite his "humble birth," he was well educated. Gray describes himself as generous and sincere, for which his reward was not worldly fame or fortune (the "paths of glory") but Heaven "recompense," undoubtedly the "friend" mentioned in line 124. The epitaph concludes by telling the reader not to ask more about the poet's virtues and frailties but to leave him to God. The poem moves from a meditation in a particular place upon the graves of the poor to a reflection on the mortality of all humankind and on some of the benefits of being constrained by poverty. The poem alludes to the wish of all people not to die and to the ways in which each is remembered after death. Gray concludes by imagining his own death and how he hopes to be remembered. One reason for the long popularity of Gray's elegy lies in the universal chord he managed to strike not only with the thoughts he expressed but, perhaps even more important, with the progression he gave those thoughts. In this elegy, as the speaker passes a country churchyard, he stops for a moment to consider the significance of the strangers buried there and reflects on his own life and priorities. The graveyard functions as a memento mori, a device intended to remind the speaker of his own mortality. The first four stanzas present images of twilight settling over a solitary figure in a small country churchyard. The first line, "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day," expresses the inevitable presence of death in three words: tolls' knell, and parting. Stanza 4 concludes the opening picture and leaves no doubt about the subject of the meditation: "Each in his narrow cell forever laid, / The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep." The next four stanzas continue the theme of death as the end of all individuals by listing the activities the dead used to do but do "no more." The repetition of "no more" and "For them no more" emphasizes the fact that all human activity leads to the grave. Numerous images throughout the poem reinforce this theme—the tolling bell, the darkening day, and the neglected graves. The reader sees the world through the eyes of a single figure who is humankind, who sees the truth and sees the destiny of all. Their fate is our own. Thus one has both

8 the living, contemplating human destiny and death, and the dead, whose destiny is all too clear. These two merge later in the poem, beginning in stanza 24, where, suddenly, the speaker imagines himself dead and buried, and the reader is invited to read his epitaph. In the face of inevitable doom, the speaker holds out the hope for immortality by making a friend of Heaven and by believing that, dead, he rests in "The bosom of his Father and his God." Gray makes clear that neither social position nor wealth will stave off death. The poem's speaker also reflects on the limitations imposed on the poor and lower classes, contending that among the men buried in the cemetery there could have been a great poet or politician, if only he had been provided the opportunity. Caught between the city and country worlds, the speaker in the "Elegy" is on a voyage of self-discovery as he ponders his own inevitable death and mourns his own unrealized potential. In the end, the speaker rejects the benefits of the wealthy, educated world that he comes from—ambition, grandeur, fame—and identifies with the simple, uneducated, and unheralded dead that inhabit the quiet country graveyard.

Answer: Coleridge's major poems turn on problems of self-esteem and identity. Exploring states of isolation and ineffectuality, they test strategies to overcome weakness without asserting its antithesis—a powerful self, secure in its own thoughts and utterances, the potency and independence of which Coleridge feared would only exacerbate his loneliness. His reluctance to assert his own abilities is evident in his habitual deprecation of his own poetry and hyperbolic praise of William Wordsworth's. It is evident as well in his best verse, which either is written in an unpretentious "conversational" tone or, when it is not, is carefully dissociated from his own voice and identity. Yet by means of these strategies, he is often able to assert indirectly or vicariously the strong self he otherwise repressed. Writing to John Thelwall in 1796, Coleridge called the first of the conversation poems, "The Eolian Harp," the "favorite of my poems." It dates some version of the text six weeks before his marriage to Sara Fricker. "The Eolian Harp" anticipates a future in which Coleridge and Sara will sit together by their "Cot o'ergrown / With white- flower'd Jasmin." Significantly, Sara remains silent throughout the poem; her only contribution is the "mild reproof" that "darts" from her "more serious eye," quelling the poet's intellectual daring. Yet this reproof is as imaginary as Sara's presence itself. At the climax of the poem, meditative thought gives way to the need for human response; tellingly, the response he imagines and therefore, one must assume, desires, is reproof. "The Eolian Harp" establishes a structural pattern for the conversation poems as a group. Coleridge is, in effect, alone, "and the world so hush'd! / The stilly murmur of the distant Sea / Tells us of silence." The eolian harp in the window sounds in the

9 breeze and reminds him of "the one Life within us and abroad, / Which meets all motion and becomes its soul." This observation leads to the central question of the poem: "And what if all of animated nature / Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd, / That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps / Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, / At once the Soul of each, and God of all?" Sara's glance dispells "These shapings of the unregenerate mind," but, of course, it is too late, since they have already been expressed in the poem. For this reason, the conflict between two sides of Coleridge's thought— metaphysical speculation and orthodox Christianity—remains unresolved. If the poem is in any way disquieting, it is not because it exemplifies a failure of nerve, but because of the identifications it suggests between metaphysical speculation and the isolated self, religious orthodoxy and the conventions—down to the vines covering the cottage—of married life. Coleridge, in other words, does not imagine a wife who will love him all the more for his intellectual daring. Instead, he imagines one who will chastise him for the very qualities that make him an original thinker. To "possess/ Peace, and this Cot, and thee, heart-honour'd Maid!," Coleridge must acknowledge himself "A sinful and most miserable man, / Wilder'd and dark." Happiness, as well as poetic closure, depends upon this acceptance of diminished self-esteem. Even so, by embedding an expression of intellectual strength within the context of domestic conventionality, Coleridge is able to achieve a degree of poetic authority otherwise absent in the final lines of the poem. The ability to renounce a powerful self is itself a gesture of power: the acceptance of loss becomes—as in other Romantic poems—a form of strength. The structure of "The Eolian Harp" can be summarized as follows: a state of isolation (the more isolated for the presence of an unresponsive companion) gives way to meditation, which leads to the possibility of a self powerful through its association with an all-powerful force. This state of mind gives place to the acknowledgment of a human relationship dependent on the poet's recognition of his own inadequacy, the reward for which is a poetic voice with the authority to close the poem. This pattern recurs in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison." The poem is addressed to Charles Lamb, but the "gentle-hearted Charles" of the text is really a surrogate for the figure of Wordsworth, whose loss Coleridge is unwilling to face head- on. Incapacitated by a burn—appropriately, his wife's fault—Coleridge is left alone seated in a clump of lime trees while his friends—Lamb and William and Dorothy Wordsworth—set off on a long walk through the countryside. They are, like Sara in "The Eolian Harp," there and yet not there: their presence in the poem intensifies Coleridge's sense of isolation. He follows them in his imagination, and the gesture itself becomes a means of connecting himself with them. Natural images of weakness, enclosure, and solitude give way to those of strength, expansion, and connection, and the tone of the poem shifts from speculation to assertion. In a climactic moment, he imagines his friends "gazing round / On the wide landscape," until it achieves the transcendence of "such hues / As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes / Spirits perceive his presence." As in "The Eolian Harp," the perception of an omnipotent force pervading the universe returns Coleridge to his present state, but with a new sense of his own being and his relationship with the friends to whom he addresses the poem. His own isolation is now seen as an end in itself. "Sometimes / 'Tis well to be bereft of promised good," Coleridge argues, "That we may lift the soul, and contemplate / With lively joy the joys we cannot share."

10 "Frost at Midnight," the finest of the conversation poems, replaces the silent wife or absent friends with a sleeping child (Hartley—although he is not named in the text). Summer is replaced by winter; isolation is now a function of seasonal change itself. In this zero-world, "The Frost performs its secret ministry, / Unhelped by any wind." The force that moved the eolian harp into sound is gone. The natural surroundings of the poem drift into nonexistence: "Sea, and hill, and wood, / With all the numberless goings-on of life, / Inaudible as dreams!" This is the nadir of self from which the poet reconstructs his being—first by perception of "dim sympathies" with the "low-burnt fire" before him; then by a process of recollection and predication. The "film" on the grate reminds Coleridge of his childhood at Christ's Hospital, where a similar image conveyed hopes of seeing someone from home and therefore a renewal of the conditions of his earlier life in Ottery St. Mary. Yet even in recollection, the bells of his "sweet birth-place" are most expressive not as a voice of the present moment, but as "articulate sounds of things to come!" The spell of the past was, in fact, a spell of the imagined future. The visitor the longed for turns out to be a version of the self of the poet, his "sister more beloved / My play-mate when we both were clothed alike." The condition of loss that opens the poem cannot be filled by the presence of another human being; it is a fundamental emptiness in the self, which, Coleridge suggests, can never be filled, but only recognized as a necessary condition of adulthood. Yet this recognition of incompleteness is the poet's means of experiencing a sense of identity missing in the opening lines of the poem. "Frost at Midnight" locates this sense of identity in Coleridge's own life. It is not a matter of metaphysical or religious belief, as it is in "The Eolian Harp" or "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," but a function of the self that recognizes its own coherence in time. This recognition enables him to speak to the "Dear Babe" who had been there all along, but had remained a piece of the setting and not a living human being. Like the friends of "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," who are projected exploring a landscape, the boy Hartley is imagined wandering "like a breeze / By lakes and sandy shores." The static existence of the poet in the present moment is contrasted with the movement of a surrogate. This movement, however, is itself subordinated to the voice of the poet who can promise his son a happiness he himself has not known. In all three poems, Coleridge achieves a voice that entails the recognition of his own loss—in acknowledging Sara's reproof or losing himself in the empathic construction of the experience of friend or son. The act entails a defeat of the self, but also a vicarious participation in powerful forces that reveal themselves in the working of the universe, and through this participation a partial triumph of the self over its own sense of inadequacy. In "Frost at Midnight," the surrogate figure of his son not only embodies a locomotor power denied the static speaker; but he is also, in his capacity to read the "language" uttered by God in the form of landscape, associated with absolute power itself.