Coleridge's ode Dejection is a record of his mental depression. When Coleridge wrote it in 1802, his marriage with Sara Fricker was near collapse and he also feared that the poet in him was dying.
Coleridge is looking at the sky trying to find a symbol there for something in himself. But he is only dispirited by the noise of the wind-harp outside his room.
He attempts to analyze his inner wretchedness:
"A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear".
The grief finds no relief in word, sigh or tear. With a blank eye he can only see how "excellently fair" Nature is. But his "heartless mood" has no power to feel its beauties. These cannot lift the deadening weight from off his heart.
The poet's passions can be raised by promptings from within himself, if not from external sources.
Ah! From the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory . . .
The power of Joy lies within the soul itself. This Joy is the light, the glory, "the strong music in the soul", the "beautiful and beauty-making power".
The inner Joy is given only to those who, like Sara Hutchinson, his new beloved who was Wordsworth's sister-in-law, are "pure of heart". This joy Coleridge too experienced in his youth, mingled though it was with distress. The joy generated in him a buoyant hope. And, what is more, his Imagination had the power to create dreams of happiness even out of the very stuff of misfortune.
But those days are past, and now the poet's distress, along with his continued search for pain-relieving drugs, have repressed his birthright, his "shaping spirit of Imagination". Left as he is to "Reality's darkest dream", he turns away from it with disgust to listen again to the Eolian harp and the wind.
As the wind raves, the harp also screams. The poet turns his attention from the passive, suffering harp, and he likens the wind to an actor or a poet, expert in tragic art. The storm may express the wounds and groans of an army in rout, and then a more tender song of a lost and frightened child. But the destructive wind may turn out after all to be a mere nothing or a trifle that cannot disturb Sara Hutchinson's peace.
"And be this tempest but a mountain-birth".
It is, however, under the stimulus of this strong, creative wind that the poet's deepest self-analysis occurs, and also the fullest realization of power of joy as it is actually achieved by Sara Hutchinson herself.
Dejection is a poem about feelings - about sadness, love and joy. But it is also a poem about the creative imagination and its loss and recovery.
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