S.T.C.

Every school year, I look to the spring and the Romantic poets for academic, professional, and spiritual rejuvenation.  I bounce around the room and sing lessons about rainbows and the revolutionary spirit, moon phases and intuition, Nature and non-conformity--wild flowers that grow in the cracks of the sidewalk.  I urge my students (and remind myself) to listen to the morning, to ignore the commercials, to talk to themselves while they walk somewhere they would normally drive.  We examine the works and the lives of the big 5:  Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge is my favorite.

But this year, I've started to turn on my old friend.  I don't so much get it anymore.  Maybe cause I'm a father?  Maybe cause I'm getting older?  Coleridge (crazy crazy) is just not as much fun as he used to be.

from "Dejection: An Ode"

There was a time when, though my path was rough,
This joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:
For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
But now afflictions bow me down to earth:
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth;
But oh! each visitation
Suspends what Nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination.
For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all I can;
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man - 
This was my sole resource, my only plan:
Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.

I love the man, and I hate him too.  He probably wouldn't have had it any other way.