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Fears in Solitude
Read by Kit Wright
Fears in Solitude - Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Read by Kit Wright
'Fears in Solitude' is one of Coleridge's conversation poems, as they're called - rather one-sided conversations, I think he was that kind of conversationalist - but it's a useful term. They are in a way close to prayer and confession. This one hasn't, over the centuries and particularly at the time, been as well received as the others. He got quite a lot of stick for it, particularly his rather vacillating, equivocating lack of resolution in the face of the French threat of Bonaparte I think. I think it's a much more interesting and honest poem than that and I think it's beautiful the way it comes round to its conclusion at the end here which is ...
'Fears in Solitude' is one of Coleridge's conversation poems, as they're called - rather one-sided conversations, I think he was that kind of conversationalist - but it's a useful term. They are in a way close to prayer and confession. This one hasn't, over the centuries and particularly at the time, been as well received as the others. He got quite a lot of stick for it, particularly his rather vacillating, equivocating lack of resolution in the face of the French threat of Bonaparte I think. I think it's a much more interesting and honest poem than that and I think it's beautiful the way it comes round to its conclusion at the end here which is echoed in a number of his other conversation poems.
Fears in Solitude
Such have I been deemed –
But, O dear Britain! O my Mother Isle!
Needs must thou prove a name most dear and holy
To me, a son, a brother, and a friend,
A husband, and a father! who revere
All bonds of natural love, and find them all
Within the limits of thy rocky shores.
O native Britain! O my Mother Isle!
How shouldst thou prove aught else but dear and holy
To me, who from thy lakes and mountain-hills,
Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas,
Have drunk in all my intellectual life,
All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts,
All adoration of God in nature,
All lovely and all honourable things,
Whatever makes this mortal spirit feel
The joy and greatness of its future being?
There lives nor form nor feeling in my soul
Unborrowed from my country! O divine
And beauteous island! thou hast been my sole
And most magnificent temple, in the which
I walk with awe, and sing my stately songs,
Loving the God that made me! – May my fears,
My filial fears, be vain! and may the vaunts
And menace of the vengeful enemy
Pass like the gust, that roared and died away
In the distant tree: which heard, and only heard
In this low dell, bowed not the delicate grass.
But now the gentle dew-fall sends abroad
The fruit-like perfume of the golden furze:
The light has left the summit of the hill,
Though still a sunny gleam lies beautiful,
Aslant the ivied beacon. Now farewell,
Farewell, awhile, O soft and silent spot!
On the green sheep-track, up the heathy hill,
Homeward I wind my way; and lo! recalled
From bodings that have well-nigh wearied me,
I find myself upon the brow, and pause
Startled! And after lonely sojourning
In such a quiet and surrounded nook,
This burst of prospect, here the shadowy main,
Dim tinted, there the mighty majesty
Of that huge amphitheatre of rich
And elmy fields, seems like society –
Conversing with the mind, and giving it
A livelier impulse and a dance of thought !
And now, belov’d Stowey! I behold
Thy church-tower, and, methinks, the four huge elms
Clustering, which mark the mansion of my friend;
And close behind them, hidden from my view,
Is my own lowly cottage, where my babe
And my babe’s mother dwell in peace! With light
And quickened footsteps thitherward I tend,
Remembering thee, O green and silent dell!
And grateful, that by nature’s quietness
And solitary musings, all my heart
Is softened, and made worthy to indulge
Love, and the thoughts that yearn for human kind.
Recording commissioned by the Poetry Archive, shared here with kind permission of the reader.