An Ode and a Sonnet: Comparative Study

In a passing observation on Coleridge’s Ode To ‘Dejection’, T.S. Eliot (The Useof Poetry and the Use of Criticism) states that it is ‘one of the saddest of confessions’. It is a verse-letter addressed to Sara Hutchinson written on April 4th 1802. It is ‘Sudden, fitful and terrifying’, the most moving grief-stricken letter; a (personal) confession:

A grief without a pang, void, dark, and dear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear­ 

It is smothering, hopeless and desperate, anguish of the first magnitude.

Coleridge reminisces a time of joy with which he ‘dallied with distress’; When hope grew around him like the twining vine.

All over; afflictions have bowed him; each visitation suspends his ‘shaping spirit of imagination’ most cherished of nature’s gift.

Like a Viper, ‘reality’s dark dream’ coils around; making him squeal in ‘devil’s yule’. It is worse than a ‘wintry song’; a scream of agony by torture lengthened out’.

The winter-bright New Moon heaving in her lap the old Moon; foretelling coming-on of rain and squally blast forms the ground of the poet’s mood.

Abstruse meandering excursions (in philosophical abstracts) have robbed him of ‘the natural man’; a part infecting the whole.

This dejection - ODE draws to an end with a benison for - ‘devoutest of my choice’–

With light heart may she rise,
Gay fancy, cheerful eyes,
Joy lift her spirit attune her voice;
To her may all things live, from pole to pole
Their life the eddying of her living Soul:

Almost seven decades later, there comes another anguished confession in Sonnet form, addressed by Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, written on 22nd April 1989. Now, it is the turn of the Victorian Jesuit - poet to bemoan in lagging lines, his ‘winter-world’.

It is an anguished cry longing for ‘one rapture of an inspiration’. The Octave states the problem straight - ‘the window of an insight lost’; the sestet renders the explanation the desertion of ‘the sire of muse’, with bitter sighs:

The fine delight that father thought:
The strong spur, live and lancing like the blow pipe flame,
Breaths once and, quenched faster than it came
Leaves yet the mind a mother of immortal song.

The gestation of the patient mind - mother of immortal song - gets accentuated:

Nine months she then, nay years, nine years she long
Within her wears, bears, cares and combs the same:
The widow of an insight lost she lives, with aim
Now known and hand at work now never wrong.

His winter-world yearns for ‘one rapture of an inspiration; resulting in ‘lagging lines with at ‘the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation’.

Sharp and keen awareness of the willow-wisp nature of ‘strong spur’, quenching faster than it came wraps him in utter dejection. Though lacking the fine delight that fathers thought ‘the mind, the window of an insight’ – still patiently mothers and combs.

Coleridge’s ODE and Hopkins Sonnet, two different verse forms reflect the same existential predicament. In this insipid winter-world, the two over sensitised lapse into the mood, devoid of grace, bliss scarcely breathes.

The addressee in the ‘ODE’ is a lady whereas in the Sonnet, it is poet-friend. Both of them bemoan, frankly and passionately, confessing the utter desertion of inspiring flash ‘phantom light’.

Coleridge’s ‘ODE’ is clinical in its analysis of his pathetic condition, void of ‘one rapture of inspiration’ frustration is writ large, gets expatiated. Unlike this Coleridgean ‘ODE’, there is cool consolation in Hopkin’s Sonnet. Though there is keen sense of the ‘absence of the fine delight’, there is comfort in this consolation that the ‘window of insight’ is still there ‘to wear, bear care and comb’.

Poetic sensibility in Hopkins’ Sonnet, is controlled and directed by the austere and rigorous religious regimen; where as Coleridge gets overwhelmed with detestable dejection.