I've been attempting to consume more writings by the Romantics, it's a neglected period of European, and in more particular terms, English, writing—by this meaning that curricula needs must perhaps focus on Enlightenment the Modernism. much of it is surprisingly thorough and soulful inspections of metaphysics-as-it-approaches-the-physical. I love mentions of animus and longing, of goodness, greatness, and depth—the Romantics made headway in understanding these things, which were then thoroughly destroyed by the modernists, and now mocked. or that is how the culture is taught, but there is truth in the words that even as a fairly well-educated man, I had never considered.

this is an excerpt from Coleridge's Frost at Midnight, which I have been struggling with the past few days.

This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.

at first read I could not follow the words at all; music in the background, thought lucid but fairly confused, moving at a pace too excited by stimulus to inspect the words. I made it some ways through the poem without any sort of meaning reaching me, accepting the nice words and letting the timbre and weight and muscle and sinew of the poem wash over me, but anything higher—or deeper—escaped me.

the image of being alone in a silent room, and your only companion being the fire, is beautiful, of course, and immediately evokes that dichotomy of creation and destruction of flame, the Sun's life-giving and a wildfire's wrath. but in the same breath he evokes this terribly lonely idea of the Spirit. I say lonely because it is apart from him, and in my reading, yearning for meaning. Spirit seeks an echo or mirror, it seeks a confidant and connection, an identity it can recognise—something we lack. it was imagined, perhaps, that by removing the spirit from man, or at least stripping it of its primary importance, that we would no longer have this dysfunction. the common refrain of those conscious people racked by postmodernism—some call themselves metamodernists—is that we have had meaning stripped from us, and only the last few generations have done, and it has been gradual, and now we are so isolated from history and people and spirit, and so connected globally and blurred to one entity, that we have become dysfunctional.

this is on my mind often, though it was the end of the excerpt that stopped me in my second reading. in the presuppositionally and propositionally rational world we have no choice but to inhabit, Thought cannot be mocked. not until we reach the very edges of the postmodern do we find those who deny thought its emphasis. in fact the mainstream of the new science movement deifies thought in an almost unsettling way. but in this, Coleridge writes that in searching for meaning, the Spirit makes a toy of Thought. that is my reading of it. and this sent a chill down my spine.

earnestly, Elliot