Coleridge wrote poetry in a number of forms. He often used blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter, to reproduce patterns of everyday speech without being bound by rhyme scheme. His poems “The Eolian Harp” and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” are examples of this form. He also wrote odes in rhymed iambic pentameter, yet even within poems, the stanzas are seldom consistent in their rhyme schemes (for example, “Dejection: An Ode” has stanzas rhyming aabbcdcccdeefgfg and ababccddedefgfgghh, among other schemes). His widely read poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is in traditional ballad form, with quatrains in alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and trimeter that rhyme abcb.
One of Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s goals in their effort to revitalize English poetry was, as Wordsworth wrote in the 1800 “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” to use regular language to talk about “common life,” while adding “a certain colouring of imagination” that allowed readers to see universal truths about humanity hidden in the everyday. To this end, Coleridge wrote several “Conversation Poems,” including the famous “Frost at Midnight,” that combined his observations of the natural world with reflections on human nature. In “The Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” for instance, Coleridge remembers a time he burned his foot and was disappointed at having to stay behind while all his friends went for a walk. Sitting in a cluster of trees, he realizes that the presence of nature, which “ne’er deserts the wise and pure,” allows him to rise above his regret and “contemplate with lively joy the joys we cannot share.” The poem’s first line exemplifies Coleridge’s ability to couch casual language in verse: “Well, they are gone, and here must I remain.”
Some of Coleridge’s poems respond to struggles in his life. Coleridge suffered from recurring physical ailments, as well as anxiety and depression, and he was prescribed laudanum (an addictive mixture of opium and alcohol) to treat them. From 1800 to 1801, Coleridge’s rheumatism led him to take increasing doses of laudanum, to which he became addicted. “Dejection: An Ode” and “The Pains of Sleep” deal with his suffering from withdrawals and his anguished feeling that he has seen the last of his poetic creativity, health, and happiness. Several of his other poems, such as “The Picture; or, the Lover’s Resolution,” deal with the ebb and flow of inspiration and the mood swings associated with that process.
Reacting against the dominant Enlightenment ethos of humanism, order and empiricism, Coleridge drew on German philosophy to articulate the social value of imagination and creativity. He expressed these ideas in his best-known prose work, “Biographia Literaria,” and also channeled them into his poetry. For example, his blank-verse poem “To William Wordsworth” praises his friend’s poetry for its ability to move readers to value people for their own sakes: It speaks “Of more than Fancy, of the Social Sense / Distending wide, and man beloved as man.” The poet, “brows garlanded,” was a driving force “When from the general heart of human kind / Hope sprang forth like a full-born Deity!”