Journal of  Ravishankar  University  Vol. 01  No. A   (Science) 1988   pp. 111-121  ISSN  0970 5910

The Theme Of Loneliness As  Reflected  In S.T. Coleridge's Poem's

S Chougule

Department  of English,

Night College of Arts ard Commerc;e,  Kolhapur

MS  received:  8 May 88

Abstract: Coleridge was born in the age whieh was clamouring for change in social, political and religious  fields. In the last decades of the eighteenth century the idea of personal  morality and social solidarity underwent a drastic change and they came to be replaced by individual freedom and dignity of man: This shift of attitude to a new set of values was popularized  by the French Revolution, and poetised by the Romantics. Coleridge Jived and fought for these new values and novel ideas; moreover, in his personal and public life he valued friendship, love, sympathy and freedom more than anything else.Coleridge was a favourite of both the parems.But was more attached  to his father By whom he was presumably  more loved. This·parental love resulted in envy and jealousy of the other children  in the family.  Sometimes he was bullied and sallied by his brother. Franck  and also received several bad names and thumps too from Molly the nurse. It was not surprising then that he  kept aloof  from them,  and suffered the acute pangs of alienation  in his childhood   itself.  The story of his life in the later years is the story of painful  isolation. of aching solir.ariness, of a lonely mind talking to itself in verse or the obverse of it, of a mind suffering, explaining and justifying. Coleridge seems  to have .grown the feeling of insecurity and emotional precariousness since his childhood. Later he disconcertingly   felt that he did not belong to the family where. he was born. felt a strong sense of  repulsion for il  When he left his home for school education,  he was so much disappointed   and disgusted  with bis parental home that he returned to it. only on holidays and wrote to his people  very rmely  : very strangely and surprisingly enough, he did not even go ro attend his mother's funeial in 1810. At Christ's Hospital he lived in poverty, went hungry on many occasions, suffered the pains of loneliness, and yet he made the most of the moments  in solilUde and ttanquility to which he dedicated  " the feeling heart, the searching  soul" 1   and kept the poet in him alive. Thus as a child, boy and youth  he lived a lonely life.Coleridge married Sara fricker on the ,advice  of the fellow-poet Roben Southey, Sara’s brother-in law. His premature marriage to her meant the abandonment of Evans,  whom  he sincerely loved and presumably wanted to marry.As husband and wife they were two poles apart and gave each other nothing but pains  and misunderstandings, which cast a deep shadaw on thai their life and resulted  eventually  their separation  and . isolation. He was avid for company. made friend with  many  men and  women. Loved them from the bottom of his  heart but  got in return nothing but despair and disappointment which are evidences by his poetic question. “why was I made for love and love denied to me.”2 His relationships with others always remained inconstant.

NOTE: Full version of this manuscript is available in PDF.