To the River Otter - A Sonnet by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The last time I ever wrote a blog it was to answer discussion questions for a history class in my junior year of high school, and right now as I start to write this blog, I’m ambivalent about what is expected of me and which was easier: a history blog or one for English. Of course, because our grades in this class depend on it, I will give it my best shot. :-) Are smiley faces allowed??

I’ve decided to write the extra credit blog first. After reading several or Samuel Coleridge’s poems for class, which I will most likely write about later, I decided to look for another poem by Coleridge. Also, because it was the weekend, I looked for a short poem.

Another kind of otter...

Sonnet: To the River Otter

Dear native brook! Wild streamlet of the West!

How many various-fated years have passed,

What happy and what mournful hours, since last

I skimmed the smooth thin stone along thy breast,

Numbering its light leaps! Yet so deep impressed

Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes

I never shut amid the sunny ray,

But straight with all their tints thy waters rise,

Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows grey,

And bedded sand that, veined with various dyes,

Gleamed through thy bright transparence! On my way,

Visions of childhood! Oft have ye beguiled

Lone manhood’s cares, yet waking fondest sighs:

Ah! That once more I were a careless child!

At first when you read the title, you assume it is a sonnet to river otters...wrong! Only after research did I realize it was actually a sonnet about a river named Otter in Blackdown Hills, Somerset, England. Written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1793, this poem is part of a pattern. Around the same time, other poets such as William Lisle Bowles and Thomas Warton wrote similar sonnets such as "To the River Wensbeck," "To the River Itchen" and Warton's "To the River London." As stated before, this is a 14-line sonnet with what, I think, (I may be wrong) is the rhyme scheme: ABBAACDCDCDECE. The theme of this poem is the yearning of lost innocence. That's one way I can think of phrasing it. However, that is not to say that something terrible has happened to the speaker's innocence, rather he has simply grown up. So really, the theme is probably the yearning for the innocence of childhood.

The River Otter - Blackdown Hills, Somerset, England

The sonnet's purpose overall is to observe the view of the river Otter--a brook presumably from Coleridge's childhood--from the perspective of a child. Like "Tintern Abbey," the speaker thinks of the river as a memory revisited after "many various-fasted years have passed." The speaker specifically misses skipping rocks across the water and though he'd never shut his eyes against the sun, he could perfectly imagine the scenes--the colors--that are abundant around the river: "all their tints thy waters rise," "bedded sand that, veined with various dyes." What's interesting is that the only actual color he says is "grey," which is the color one associates with old age and depression, which gives one the idea that to long for youth and innocence means to acknowledge you don't have it. The last four lines are where the speaker returns to the present perspective of an adult. Again, we have that theme of the memory of a beautiful nature scene being a distraction from a "Lone manhood's cares." At the end, the speaker confirms the theme in wishing he "were a careless child!"

I guess that's it. Hope I did alright.

Photo Credits-
http://themetapicture.com/youre-making-me-blush/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:River_Otter_Devon.jpg