The Poetry of Nature

Abstract

When Wordsworth and Coleridge, accompanied by Dorothy, set out for the Valley of Stones late one November afternoon in 1797, they were already well-acquainted with one another’s idea of poetry. Having been neighbours since July of that year, they had visited each other daily and enjoyed ‘the most unreserved intercourse’.¹ Their conversations, Coleridge records, ‘had turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathies of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination’. [BLC II 5.] Coleridge is seeking to illustrate this process more precisely when he suggests that these two ‘cardinal points’ might be co-ordinated in one image: ‘The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sun-set diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both’. In this analogy, the ‘accidents of light and shade’ signify the imagination at work, ‘modifying’ the familiar landscape — which is not only, of course, natural scenery, but also objects or events present to the senses — Westminster Bridge at dawn, a beggar on Cumberland roads, a girl reaping by herself in the Highlands.