ABSTRACT
The great theme of the last poems, first fully stated in the Dejection Ode of 1802, is unrequited love. A fall of poetic temperature is so general a fact among romantic poets that only a general answer will do. The subject of their major poems is a period of transition in early manhood, when some vital part of our instinctual life is forever lost. To ignore, for a moment, the differences between poems as exactly contemporaneous as 'The Ancient Mariner' and 'Tintern Abbey', or between the Dejection Ode and Immortality, the outline of an answer may present itself in these terms. In Edith Coleridge's case a good deal went right, and poems as notable as 'The Delinquent Travellers', 'Work without Hope' and 'The Garden of Boccaccio' survive to astonish anyone taught to believe that Coleridge ceased to be a poet after the Dejection Ode of 1802.
