ANALYSIS OF The Pains of Sleep
BIOGRAPHY (1772-1834)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Devon on the 21 October
1772. He was the youngest of ten members family and a brilliant student. In
October 1791, his studies were interrupted after continuous success because his
first love, Mary Evans, rejected him. Two years later, he decided to join the
army, the 15th Regiment of Light Dragons, when the revolution in
France was imminent. Coleridge, after left the army, returned to the University
of Cambridge but he abandoned his studies without obtaining a degree. He
engaged Sara Fricker and started to write in a political journal The
Watchman in 1795.
In 1797 Coleridge began his friendship with William
Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. The first collaboration between both poets
was Lyrical Ballads (1798).
During this time he wrote Osorio, made several
contributions to the newspaper The Morning Post, Limetree Bower My
Prision, The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Frost at Midnight, France: an Ode,
The Nightingale, Fears in Solitude and Christabel.
In 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworths travelled Germany to
improved their German, and for Coleridge to study German philosophy and
science.
Coleridge was in London working for The Morning Post
and translating the German play The Death of Wallenstein.
In 1802, he met and fell in love of Wordsworth’s sister
wife, Sara Hutchinson.
In the earliest 1800, he became frequently ill, he took
laudanum (liquid opium) to pass the pain as much as his contemporaries, and
became and addict which influenced his works.
From 1808 to 1810 he produced 27 numbers of his periodical The
Friends.
In 1816 ,a doctor friend took care of him and took under
control Coleridge addiction. The greater part of Coleridge’s philosophical and
critical writings belongs to this period The Statesman’s Manual (1817), On
Method (1818) and Aids to Reflection (1825).
He became a member of the Royal Society of Literature in
1824.
A revival of Coleridge and Wordsworth friendship took place
in 1828, and he published his collected Poetical Works, and in 1830 his On
the Constitution of Church and State.
Coleridge died on 25 July
COLERIDGE’S TIMES
The life of S.T. Coleridge contemplates a wide range of the
history. In his 62 years of life, he saw and lived important historical events
that influenced him such as the French Revolution, the execution of King Louis
XVI and the radical leader Robespierre or the rising of the Romantic period.
He was born in 1772, two years after of his beloved friend
Wordsworth. Britain declared the war against Holland and William Blake wrote Songs
of Innocence in
Blake wrote Songs of Experience one year later.
His lecture in Bristol, which was published in The
Friend (Essay XVI), makes clear that he had not a revolutionary vision in
1795, although he was immersed in radical circles.
During the next three decades England suffered the
consequences of the Napoleonic Wars. The cities of the Industrial Revolution
were overcrowded with peasant families that had run away from the countryside
and the soldiers that had came back after the war had finished. All these
factors helped radicals to ask for a parliamentary reform, but Coleridge
disagreed with them because he thought that Reformation would have increased
the power of commercial interests in Parliament, and he rejected the Reform
Bill and the philosophy of the liberal reformers. His idea was that Parliament
should have represented the ‘idea of state’. He explains his idea in The
Constitution of Church and State. The State should have been permanent and
progressive, it had to distinguish between the landers and
manufactures-merchants interests, and the state had had other component: ‘the
National Church’ and the ‘Clerisy’ which would have contributed with spiritual
and education.
We are able to say that from all the historical events he
saw and lived, the French Revolution and the Reform Bill were the two more
important factors that influenced his life and writings.
The Romanticism covers a period of time between 1757, when
Blacke was born, and 1850 when Wordsworth died. Coleridge is considered as one of
the great Romantic poets. The aim of these Romantic was to project in their
works the potential of human life, a vision of their ideal life and state (as
Coleridge did in The Constitution of Church and State.). Their artistic
interest was on nature, man and nature were the same thing without
distinctions.
Coleridge says in his Theory of Life that the
purpose of live is to produce “the highest and most comprehensive
individuality”.
The poetry of his times is imaginative, symbolic and
mythological and goes against all the philosophy of the moment.
THE PAINS
OF SLEEP
by:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,
In humble trust mine eye-lids close,
With reverential resignation
No wish conceived, no thought exprest,
Only a sense of supplication;
A sense o'er all my soul imprest
That I am weak, yet not unblest,
Since in me, round me, every where
Eternal strength and Wisdom are.
But yester-night I prayed aloud
In anguish and in agony,
Up-starting from the fiendish crowd
Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:
A lurid light, a trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,
And whom I scorned, those only strong!
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
Still baffled, and yet burning still!
Desire with loathing strangely mixed
On wild or hateful objects fixed.
Fantastic passions! maddening brawl!
And shame and terror over all!
Deeds to be hid which were not hid,
Which all confused I could not know
Whether I suffered, or I did:
For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe,
My own or others still the same
Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame.
So two nights passed: the night's dismay
Saddened and stunned the coming day.
Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me
Distemper's worst calamity.
The third night, when my own loud scream
Had waked me from the fiendish dream,
O'ercome with sufferings strange and wild,
I wept as I had been a child;
And having thus by tears subdued
My anguish to a milder mood,
Such punishments, I said, were due
To natures deepliest stained with sin,--
For aye entempesting anew
The unfathomable hell within,
The horror of their deeds to view,
To know and loathe, yet wish and do!
Such griefs with such men well agree,
But wherefore, wherefore fall on me?
To be loved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed.
ANALYSIS
This poem can be considered as a very personal confession.
It is included in what G.M. Harper first called “conversation poems”. The
speaker is Coleridge himself and this type of poems are addressed to his
beloved friends (Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth…). The poem defines a Coleridge
in a particular state of mind at a particular time. The Pains of Sleep
was conceived in a trip along Scotland with his friends Wordsworth and Dorothy
Wordsworth, in a time that Coleridge was trying to abandon his opium addiction.
The poem shows the agony that he experienced in his particular struggle to
overcome his addiction.
The poem is divided in three paragraphs, which represent
three different nights, with its own atmosphere, so the reader almost
visualised it. He used the tetrameter iambic to slow down the poem to increase
the sense of pain and agony that he is suffering.
With moving lips or bended knees;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,
In humble trust mine eye-lids close,
Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:
A lurid light, a trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,
And whom I scorned, those only
strong!
Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:
A lurid light, a trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,
And whom I scorned, those only
strong!
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
Still baffled, and yet burning still!
And whom I scorned, those only
strong!
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
Still baffled, and yet burning still!
Desire with loathing strangely mixed
On wild or hateful objects fixed.
…..
Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame.
own loud scream
Had wake me from the fiendish dream
…….
I wept as I had been a child;
To natures deepliest stained with
sin.
The last four verses are written in a different tone. He
does not identificate himself with this kind of men
And Whom I love, I love indeed.
The poem has a circular structure, it begins and ends with
a sense of calm.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
www.starpulse.com/Notables/Coleridge,_Samuel_Taylor/
www.online-literature.com/coleridge
MY OTHER WORKS: FOSTER’S A PASSAGE TO INDIA
Academic
year 2007/2008
28. Noviembre 2007
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Eva Timón Mc Guinness
Universitat de València Press