If we look at ‘The Eolian Harp’, we find that the poem is deeply embedded in Hartley’s philosophy. As already seen, the poem is concerned with a vision about the unity of the universe, but this vision is crucially associated with the external world in the sense that the poet tries to read the vision in a natural environment. Accordingly, the relationship between the vision and the physical universe can be articulated within the context of Hartley’s thought. First of all, nature becomes an activator for a mental process. As, for Hartley, the functions of the mind are determined by physical stimuli, the awakening of a poetic mind in ‘The Eolian Harp’ is dependent upon the harmony of a natural landscape. One
120
HOM I.114; Quoted by Haven, Patterns of Consciousness, p. 106.
of the main features in the Conversation Poems is their circular structure, one which they open with a landscape description, and move into inner meditation, and finally return to an initial landscape. Likewise, ‘The Eolian Harp’ opens with the invocation of ‘My pensive Sara!’ and the description of the setting, and it turns to the mind of the poet. Finally, it returns to the initial surroundings. In order to establish a link between nature and the poetic mind, the poet uses the image of the harp. Abrams first called ‘attention to the wind-harp as that favorite romantic toy, which he read as a serious analogy of the relationship of the poetic mind to nature in the late Eighteenth century’.122 As
the harp, being struck by the wind, produces music, the imagination of the poet is activated by nature. Thus ‘Coleridge transformed the harp into an image of inspiration in which the poet was a harp over whom the winds of inspiration blow.’123 It seems to be a feeling that the harp brings about first after being
struck by the wind. Coleridge wrote a letter to Southey in 1803 which alludes to Hartley’s enduring influence in terms of the dynamic of feeling. Recalling the room in Bristol that he shared with Southey in 1795, Coleridge says:
It argues, I am persuaded, a particular state of general feeling — & I hold, that association depends in a much greater degree on the recurrence of resembling states of Feeling, than on Trains of Idea [. . .] I almost think, that Ideas never recall Ideas, as far as they are Ideas — any more than Leaves in a forest create each other's motion — The Breeze it is that runs thro' them / it is the Soul, the state of Feeling — . If I had said, no one Idea ever recalls another, I am confident that I could support the
122 Richard Matlak, ‘Swift’s Aeolists and Coleridge’s Eolian Harp’, The Coleridge Bulletin: The
Journal of the Friends of Coleridge, New Series, 20 (2002), 44-53 (p. 46); See, M. H. Abrams, the Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 51.
assertion.124
According to this passage, it is the feeling [the Breeze] that evoked ideas. As the feeling of pleasures and pains is inherent in each idea in Hartley’s associationsim, feeling, for Coleridge, plays a crucial role in conjuring up ideas.125 ‘The Breeze’ from this passage reminds us of ‘the desultory breeze’ in
‘The Eolian Harp’ which caresses ‘that simplest Lute’ and creates a sense of love in a ‘coy maid half yielding to her lover’. 126
Then ‘its strings boldlier swept’ to the extent that it produces the pictures of ‘Fairy-Land’, and eventually his poetic imagination bears the vision of ‘the one Life’. In other words, the mental process leads to a philosophical and theological speculation through physical stimuli. What is significant here is the relationship between the physical stimuli of landscape and the vision of ‘the one Life’. If the breeze belongs to an external world, the vision is part of an internal sphere of a poetic imagination. The question is whether the experience of an external world is separated from that of an internal sphere and the vision exists only in a poetic imagination, or the former is correlated with the latter. The first case causes the problems of dualism and solipsism, but the second one suggests a sense of unity. There are two reasons that allow one to contend that Coleridge tries to achieve a unity between them.
First, the experience of the one life takes place not only in a poetic imagination but also in an external world. Coleridge tries to describe the unity of the one life through the harmony of two images, light and sound, which
124 CL II
, p. 962.
125
For Hartley, all our other internal feelings may be called ideas.
conveys ‘varying manifestations of a single identity’: ‘A light in sound. A sound- like power in light’ (ll. 28).127 This harmonious world is full of ‘joyance’, and it
is ‘impossible not to love all things’ (ll. 29-31). Intriguingly, this world is also found in the description of a landscape at the beginning of the poem in the sense that the poet feels the wholeness of a natural environment around his Cot. In a late afternoon, ‘the clouds were rich with light’, and ‘the stilly murmur of the distant Sea / Tells us of silence’ (ll. 6, 11-2). At the same time, in the middle of this harmonious landscape, the poet and his ‘pensive Sara’, whose ‘soft cheek reclined on his arm’, generate the blessedness of love with ‘white- flower’d Jasmin, and the broad-leav’d Myrtle’, the emblems of ‘Innocence and Love!’. Secondly, he extends the vision of the one life to a religious thought by associating the presence of God with the one life. The one life is not just a universe of harmony and love, but also a universe of God’s presence because God is ‘the Soul of each, and God of all’ in this universe. Accordingly, we can sense the presence of God in a natural environment as the poet identifies God with ‘one intellectual breeze’. As the vision of the one life is found in a physical experience as well as in a poetic imagination, the presence of God is experienced not only in the immaterial sphere but also in nature. In this respect, like Hartley, Coleridge attains a unity between physical events and mental events by showing that the experience of the internal worlds of the mind and religion fundamentally corresponds to the experience of the external world.