ABSTRACT
One of Coleridge’s earliest surviving poems is an ode on the destruction of the Bastille. The poem displays some features which are worth noticing because they are not merely the product of youthful incompetence in the use of eighteenth-century modes of personification. Coleridge combines the use of abstractions with conventional apocalyptic analogies in which violent political events are seen in terms of violent natural phenomena. A striking feature is the absence of transactive verbs, although the poet is overtly meditating on what he takes to be revolutionary human action and the transformation of society. In fact Coleridge presents the landscape, ‘a godly scene’, in a mode which makes even sheep-farming into something natural and timeless, divorced from any specific social practices. Most orthodox Christian authorities had seen private property as the product of the fall, but Coleridge adapts the idea to suit a Panglossian, partially secularized theodicy.
