"Fears in solitude"

reading (from) the dell

pp. 149-156

in: Peter Larkin, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

No one is surprised to learn that critical readings of "Frost at Midnight" outnumber those of "Fears in Solitude" by a ratio of nearly five to one over the last 30 years, despite the intimate connections between the two poems: they were composed within a few months of each other in the early part of 1798 and appeared together in Joseph Johnson's quarto pamphlet at the end of the same year. Whereas "Frost at Midnight" has established itself as one of the most technically assured of the "conversation" poems, the status of "Fears in Solitude" is far less certain in terms of critical reception. Coleridge himself seems to have reacted against this poem with something like embarrassment, applying to it in a later postscript the coyly punning motto "Sermoni proprior," the Horatian original of which can be cribbed as "lines nearer to prose"—and parts of the poem, Coleridge added, were "too tame even for animated prose" (CPW I.1 469). I want to show how the wavering animation of Coleridge's poem may derive from the pulsing circles or circuits of concern and context transmitted by the problematic figure of 'site" in "Fears in Solitude." It is the dell, a less than wholly definable or functioning space, which allows both fears and solitude to be "in" something, an entity that has to prefigure the scope of fear and solitude before they can operate upon one another.