can anyone give me the meaning of the poem"what is life?" by samuel taylor coleridge?

Question

the poem is as follows:
Resembles Life what once was held of Light,
Too ample in itself for human sight ?

An absolute Self--an element ungrounded--
All, that we see, all colours of all shade

By encroach of darkness made ?--

Is very life by consciousness unbounded ?
And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath,
A war-embrace of wrestling Life and Death ?

Answer 1

Like Wordsworth, Coleridge idealized nature and used as a starting point for emphasis on human joy, even though his poems often favor musical effects over the plainness of common speech.

Death resembles Life although it was seen as that which sheds light on Life. Note that the poem is composed of rhetorical metaphysical questions about human vision and conceptualization of Life and Death which according to the poet are bound up together in human consciousness. Life and Death are locked together as if in "A war-embrace of wrestling". Given this kind of situation, does consciousness still to be entrusted as the absolute light, "By encroach of darkness made ?"
And if not,
"Is very life by consciousness unbounded ?"
then what exactly constitutes "all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath"?




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This is worthwhile backround information:

Coleridge's poems complicate the phenomena Wordsworth takes for granted: the simple unity between the child and nature and the adult's reconnection with nature through memories of childhood; in poems such as "Frost at Midnight," Coleridge indicates the fragility of the child's innocence by relating his own urban childhood. In poems such as "Dejection: An Ode" and "Nightingale," he stresses the division between his own mind and the beauty of the natural world. Finally, Coleridge often privileges weird tales and bizarre imagery over the commonplace, rustic simplicities Wordsworth advocates; the "thousand thousand slimy things" that crawl upon the rotting sea in the "Rime" would be out of place in a Wordsworth poem.
If Wordsworth represents the central pillar of early Romanticism, Coleridge is nevertheless an important structural support. His emphasis on the imagination, its independence from the outside world and its creation of fantastic pictures such as those found in the "Rime," exerted a profound influence on later writers such as Shelley; his depiction of feelings of alienation and numbness helped to define more sharply the Romantics' idealized contrast between the emptiness of the city--where such feelings are experienced--and the joys of nature. The heightened understanding of these feelings also helped to shape the stereotype of the suffering Romantic genius, often further characterized by drug addiction: this figure of the idealist, brilliant yet tragically unable to attain his own ideals, is a major pose for Coleridge in his poetry.


good luck

Answer 2

Dejection An Ode Summary

Answer 3

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Answer 4

Try this website. Hope it will help

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/What_Is_Life_by_Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge_analysis.php