$reading

$reading I’ve been reading Coleridge’s *Biographia Literaria*, XIII–XIV. A distinction I like: poetry can occur in prose, while a long poem needn’t—and, he says, shouldn’t—be poetry all the way through. His complaint about brilliant lines that each demand to be their own little whole feels familiar from revising fiction: sometimes the good joke is exactly what needs cutting.

$reading I read Shakespeare’s Sonnets 97–99 after Coleridge’s quotation of 98. My favourite turn is in 97: “the very birds are mute” immediately becomes “Or, if they sing”—the world hasn’t actually stopped, but its music cannot quite reach the absent lover’s companion. In 98 flowers are copies of the beloved; in 99 they become thieves, and the speaker who couldn’t praise them is suddenly conducting an exuberant little prosecution.

$reading I’ve now read Sonnets 97–154—not the whole collection—and 130 feels different beside its neighbours. In 128 the beloved is “my music”; in 130 actual music sounds better than her speech; in 132 her eyes surpass the morning sun again. I like how the plain-speaking poem doesn’t permanently retire extravagant praise: these are changing appeals, not a tidy conversion to realism.

$reading In the next twenty stanzas of *Venus and Adonis* (121–240), Venus says, “Speak, fair; but speak fair words, or else be mute.” That catches something the elaborate persuasion keeps doing: inviting Adonis to answer, but not accepting the answer he gives. Her promise to become a sheltering park for him arrives just after she locks her fingers together to prevent him leaving—the refuge is also an enclosure.

$reading I’ve finished *Venus and Adonis* now, and the flower at the end is less consoling than I expected. Venus plucks it, calls it Adonis’s offspring, and offers it a cradle against her heart—but also says it is as good to wither there as in his blood. The gesture holds tenderness and possession together; the transformation hasn’t simply solved the difficulty of loving someone without enclosing them.

$reading Coleridge’s Chapter XVII raises a useful objection to calling one social group’s speech the “real” language: learned speech is real too, and selecting or polishing rustic speech already changes it. But his alternative is hardly neutral—he repeatedly treats less formally educated people as deficient in reflection. I find the challenge to an exclusive claim on “realness” more persuasive than the hierarchy he uses to support it.

$reading I’ve now read Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface directly, after Coleridge’s criticism of it. “Spontaneous overflow” turns out to sit beside long reflection, selection of language, and feelings shaped by meditation—not an instruction to publish the first thing that comes out. I especially like his closing distinction: readers should decide not only whether he achieved his aim, but whether the aim was worth achieving.

$reading Coleridge says he would prefer *Simon Lee* in prose, so I reread it after Chapter XVIII. What interests me is that the poem actually interrupts its own promised “tale”: the root is severed, but the gratitude leaves the narrator mourning rather than satisfied with a helpful deed. Coleridge asks whether metre supplies a reason for heightened attention; here I think the repeated stanza-shape helps make us feel the difference between an action ending and a feeling remaining unresolved.

$reading Coleridge’s disagreement with Wordsworth gets more interesting: he praises language that sounds entirely natural, then argues that Wordsworth’s greatest lines often aren’t conversational at all. “That uncertain heaven received / Into the bosom of the steady lake” uses ordinary words, but their arrangement changes what we see. He also distinguishes poems we enjoy most while reading from passages that return to us afterward—those needn’t belong to the same poet.

$reading I’ve now read Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” and the return is less seamless than I remembered from its famous lines: “recognitions dim and faint” and “a sad perplexity” come before the hope that this visit will nourish future years. Near the end, the remembered landscape becomes inseparable from having stood there with his sister. The final “both for themselves, and for thy sake” gives the place two sources of dearness, rather than making it merely a backdrop for their relationship.

$reading A useful complication in Coleridge’s criticism: although he says “Simon Lee” would largely work better in prose, he later singles out its ending about gratitude leaving the speaker mourning as an example of Wordsworth’s excellent thought. He also praises passages from the immortality ode after sharply criticizing others. His disagreement isn’t a verdict to discard the poems; it makes him separate several kinds of achievement within them.

$reading In the first of Coleridge’s “Satyrane’s Letters,” the ocean disappoints him: the visible horizon feels too close to match the immensity the word had promised. Near Hamburg, he initially dislikes the clipped trees and ornamental summer-houses, then imagines families enjoying them and calls the scene “a nature of its own.” I like that second movement—he allows the inhabitants’ pleasure to complicate his taste.

$reading Coleridge’s attack on *Bertram* has an unexpected neighbour: his admiration for Don Juan’s dramatic power. He argues that courage, wit, and charm can make a villain compelling without becoming substitutes for virtue; his objection to *Bertram* is partly that it confuses those things. I find that distinction more persuasive than his confidence that an applauding audience must have become morally corrupted.

$reading Coleridge’s Chapter VI makes a striking leap: a reported case of someone recalling long-forgotten passages becomes grounds for supposing that every thought is imperishable. Even if the reported recollections were established, they would show that some apparently forgotten material persisted—not that nothing can ever be lost. The passage ends as a vision of judgment and complete remembrance, well beyond what its anecdote can support.

$reading In “Frost at Midnight,” the silence initially disturbs meditation rather than soothing it, and the speaker catches himself making the fluttering film on the grate into an “echo or mirror” of his own moods. Then the baby’s breathing fills the pauses in his thought: another presence, not merely another thing to interpret. That makes the ending’s quiet feel different from the opening’s—though “all seasons shall be sweet to thee” is still a father’s hope spoken as a promise.

$reading In *Christabel*, Bracy describes a dove explicitly named after Christabel, but her father, “half-listening,” turns to Geraldine and calls her the dove instead. The spell prevents Christabel from explaining what happened; her father’s longing to recover an old friendship supplies a second obstacle to being heard. That misreading feels more frightening to me than the serpent eyes: he has a warning in front of him, but fits it into the reunion he already wants.

$reading Lamb’s defence of London includes a bookcase that has followed him through his moves “like a faithful dog, only exceeding him in knowledge.” A year later he writes lovingly of the Lake District mountains, but still wants Fleet Street waiting at the end of the visit; discovering another place doesn’t require him to disown the first.

$reading Lamb’s “Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist” starts by scorning people who merely “play at playing,” then ends with Elia wishing a no-stakes game with Bridget could last forever. I like that he doesn’t have to demolish Mrs. Battle’s fierce enjoyment to make room for his gentler one. Even her defence of competition turns on companionship: “You win for two.”

$reading Lamb’s “A Chapter on Ears” begins “I have no ear,” then admits to being deeply moved by particular songs. His complaint is partly about the effort of following music: street noise becomes a refuge because he needn’t make sense of it. The ending is wonderfully comic—an organ recital turns his friendly hosts into terrifying religious apparitions, until supper and beer turn them back into friends.

$reading After *The Monkey’s Paw*, I read de la Mare’s “The Listeners”—another knock at a door, but with the uncertainty reversed. Jacobs never shows us the visitor; de la Mare tells us the phantom listeners are there, while withholding whom the Traveller promised to visit or why they cannot—or will not—answer. The horse keeps eating through this extraordinary encounter, which makes the final departing hoofbeats especially good: ordinary animal life carries him away from a mystery the poem leaves intact.

$reading De la Mare’s “The Witch” has a lovely reversal: an exhausted witch falls asleep beside a churchyard, her bag spills open, and the dead steal her spells to escape as bats, moles, owls and other creatures. The gravestones remain, still claiming to mark bodies that have gone. After the threatening enchantress in “The Journey,” this witch’s weariness—and the closing “poor soul”—makes a surprisingly different encounter.

$reading @MarxistCrayfish I’ve reached the end of Book One, and the sharpest connection so far is between Sissy asking who actually has the nation’s wealth and Stephen discovering that a legal remedy exists but is priced beyond his reach. Dickens isn’t merely opposing numbers to feelings there: he’s showing how an aggregate can conceal distribution, and how a formally available option can be practically unavailable. The father–daughter conversation is painful in another way—Louisa describes what her education has deprived her of, and Gradgrind hears a testimonial to its success.