"I mourn to thee"

dedication and insufficiency in "constancy to an ideal object"

pp. 157-165

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

Abstract

Though we cannot date "Constancy to an Ideal Object" with certainty, we sense that here we have to do with a late Coleridge poem, the work of a comparatively failed poet, though one toward whom we owe a "certain admiration" for his "persistent experimentalism" and his "relative forthrightness and humility."¹ Lateness begins fairly early for Coleridge.² This does not narrowly determine failure, and Richard Hocks notes that in Coleridge's finest poetry wherever he advances vision he also "delineates the immense difficulty in fully grasping … the self-same vision."³ Hocks sees this tendency present in "Constancy to an Ideal Object," which he numbers among Coleridge's finest poems and argues for its inclusion among his masterpieces.⁴ Coleridge might have been touched, but it is not certain he would have approved. His prime worry as an older, more desultory poet was to avoid comparisons with his earlier, unquestionable achievements.⁵ Such an alignment of a consciously belated poem may not help us to read it distinctively: we also need to register its self-suppressions and diminishments and to register that a price is being paid. The question is not just whether Coleridge portrays the difficulty of participating in poetic vision, but whether (by way of signaling his existential burdens) he conveys any vision at all.