A little distance from the prow Those crimson shadows were: I turned my eyes upon the deck— Oh, Christ! what saw I there!
Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat, And, by the holy rood! A man all light, a seraph-man, On every corse there stood.”
Coleridge’s marginal gloss to these last stanzas is “The angelic spirits leave the dead bodies, and appear in their own forms of light.”
“The maid, alas! her thoughts are gone, She nothing sees—no sight but one! The maid, devoid of guile and sin, I know not how, in fearful wise, So deeply had she drunken in That look, those shrunken serpent eyes, That all her features were resigned To this sole image in her mind: And passively did imitate That look of dull and treacherous hate.”
What Wordsworth intended we have already heard from Coleridge, and Wordsworth confirms him. It was, says the Preface of 1802, “to present ordinary things to the mind in an unusual way.” In Wordsworth the miraculous inherent in the commonplace, but obscured by “the film of familiarity,” is restored to it. This translation is effected by the imagination, which is not fancy nor dreaming, as Wordsworth is careful to warn us, but that power by which we see things as they are. The authors of _The Ancient Mariner_ and _Simon Lee_ are justified in claiming a common object. It is to prove that the metaphysical in Shakespeare’s sense of the word interpenetrates the physical, and serves to make us see and feel it.
Poetry, if it is to be good for anything, must help us to live. It is to this we come at last in our criticism, and if it does not help us to live it may as well disappear, no matter what its fine qualities may be. The help to live, however, that is most wanted is not remedies against great sorrows. The chief obstacle to the enjoyment of life is its dulness and the weariness which invades us because there is nothing to be seen or done of any particular value. If the supernatural becomes natural and the natural becomes supernatural, the world regains its splendour and charm. Lines may be drawn from their predecessors to Coleridge and the Wordsworths, but the work they did was distinctly original, and renewed proof was given of the folly of despair even when fertility seems to be exhausted. There is always a hidden conduit open into an unknown region whence at any moment streams may rush and renew the desert with foliage and flowers.