In the collection "Lyrical Ballads," the poet Coleridge participated with four poems, including the ballad "Rhyming verses for the Old Sailor" (1798). In it, he traces a strange journey around the world, situated between reality and dreams, the world of hallucinations. After an thoughtlessly killing an albatross, the old sailor cursed by his companions is doomed to the exhausting thirst, windlessness and suppression of rest that are described by Coleridge with the taste of a fate ordered by something high.

Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
'Twas sad as sad could be;
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea!

All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

Once the two mighty forces / Life in Death and Death in Life / play the dying game of the sinner's mortal soul, the ship suddenly "revives" and moves from the whims of invisible ghosts. The old sailor, enchanted by enigmatic excitement, is saved by the blessing he gives to horrifying animals emerging from the dead, stinking sea. He is returned to his native country by his dead companions, who are vanquished in a terrible disorder reminiscent of a strange rebellion. When he has landed, he is again doomed with wandering and persecuted by the curse of the killed bird. She reminds him constantly that he should not tell anyone about the other world he was in, the world of hallucinations. In this ballad, the poet introduces us to a strange world in which even the sun and the moon are wrapped in a disturbing halo of strange metamorphoses. Everything radiates some vague religiosity, one hardly accessible to the uninhabited spirituality, so much that the reader feels transported into a disturbingly unrealistic atmosphere. But the strangeness of the atmosphere does not conquer the fateful existential problems of man, which are set as an important message in this work. After doing unintentionally the villain, the old sailor understands to what extent a small visible human offense can disturb the harmony of the world. The killing of the albatross in this ballad acquires the symbolic meaning of the original sin of the biblical parable in the private fate of the old sailor. In his other famous ballad, "Cain's Wandering," Coleridge goes into reflection on the relationship between God of the dead and God of the living. In a dreamlike manner, the poet returns to another biblical parable about the two brothers Abel and Cain: one - the exile from life, the other - the exile from the world of men. The characters in both of Coleridge's ballads have fallen into stifling passivity, as if under the influence of a difficult-to-explain magic. Their souls are suddenly deprived of will. They begin to perceive themselves as intriguing ambiguous projections of the helpless man besieged by the exuberant existential anxieties. The loner, an outcast of society, brings to some extent a positive morality, submissive to the call of love, but does not cease to feel burdened by the curse encroached in his destiny, and loses his peace of mind because he can not discover the nature of the punishment awaits it. The symbolism of the journey gives the hero's mischief the appearance of mysterious events in a philosophical parable. Exoticism also undergoes profound metamorphoses in these two works of romanticism, Coleridge: search and escape lie in the perspective of the future, not the momentum of discovering a new world. The urge goes out in a series of difficult trials, which seemingly carry some "allegorical" meaning, but its meaning is not reached. The elusive meaning of this allegory demobilizes us to look for the obvious or hidden meaning of the symbols that make up it, which impress us only as bright images, the products of the poetic pathologically overloaded imagination.

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During his active creative period (1796-1802), the poet Coleridge created "Ode for the Year", the poems "Fears in Loneliness", "Frost at Midnight", "Ode for France", and" Ode for Discouragement ". Later, the Crystalbell poem appeared on which the poet continued to work for the rest of his life. In his poem "Crystalbell", this English poet returns to the inherent for his intellectual choices topics: dangerous and holy hospitality, the infectiveness of ugliness, evil and hatred in the characteristic of the Gothic novel. Coleridge once again shows to what extent he is possessed by the mystical nature of evil that corrupts human innocence. The heroine's name consists of two symbolic names, Christ and Abel, sacrifices to the impulse of the human mind, which is deeply in the consciousness of man, to kill his peer when he is superior to his spiritual height. The poet is intentionally followed by the contradiction between the simple-minded and pure-hearted maiden Christopher and her mistress, the possessed by the unclean forces of Geraldine, intentionally conceived by the author, but important for the insight into the meaning of the work. Describe the nightmares that arise from the pressure of the flesh to satisfy its wishes on the understanding underlying the worldly conventions. Coleridge ventures to present the lesbian attraction in English poetry, peeks into the terrible suspicions of the excited female instinct, and at the end of her unfinished poem she brings us an exciting lyrical apology to the preserved child purity in the mature woman Crystalbell. In the 1920s to the 19th century, Coleridge abandoned his poetic faith in the power of nature's purifying soul. He also loses confidence in the redemptive power of imagination. The enchanting beauty of a brilliant moonlit landscape (Ode for Discouragement) can not save him from the chilling bruises of apathy. He confessed that nature lives in us thanks to the openness and favor of our own soul to her. But when the soul is a deadly impulse to admiration, it can not respond to the multicolored and multi-lingual challenges of radiant nature. Thanks to the revitalizing color and sound tones of the romantic odd and ballad, Coleridge has long been able to resist the progressive paralysis in his spirit. Little by little his confidence in the healing power of imagination erodes, and he opposes annoyed against his friend Wordsworth's famous thesis of the healing power of human fantasy. Fulfilled with nostalgic memories and unsatisfied aspirations, his own imagination can not help him achieve a decorative sentiment. The phantastic ability has been obliterated by dedicating itself to increasingly unrealistic objects. In the poet's mind, the anxiousness of his constant creative dedication to the "dismantling of the world" in the images he created. The imagination of the poet is tempted to reproduce the strange metamorphoses of the forms that are created by the changes in ideas. Coleridge's poetic world is stirred by the crises of despair, the compulsive, tempting, thought of the crime, the remorse caused by the admitted voluntary or unwilling sin. He is constantly burdened by the anguish of separation and the risks of wandering and wandering. Coleridge has been honored by some historians of European poetry as a precursor to expressive lyricism, as his fantasy is often attracted by insurrectional situations situated at the boundary between the real world and the world of fantasy.

If you want to learn more about Coleridge you can read:

Aesthetic Views of the poet Samuel Coleridge

Samuel Coleridge's fate