Everyone encounters dejection in his or her life, and various people have various different ways to combat the feelings of gloom, depression, and hopelessness. Some choose to pursue through music, art, poetry, or television, while others choose food, talking about it, or perhaps just holding all of the feelings inside. The fact of the matter is that dejection is a mysterious thing and everyone has varying perspectives of it. In Romanticism, dejection is a topic that is considered very deeply, especially by the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Although their views are sometimes dramatically different, each poet has very intriguing thoughts on the matter of dejection ...view middle of the document...
Wordsworth begins this chain reaction by writing, "a single field I have looked upon, / Both of them speak of something that is gone." The "something" that Wordsworth is speaking of is the memories of immortality. He further says "the thought of our past years in me doth breed / Perpetual benediction." The past years that are spoken of are childhood memories; memories from when a person is closer to their natural, immortal state. Coleridge does not share Wordsworth's philosophy and shares several of differing ideas about dejection.While some share Wordsworth's view of dejection, others tend to think that there are no cures for dejection. A man who believed this particular idea was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge wrote "Dejection: An Ode" to counter, in some ways, Wordsworth's piece mentioned above. Coleridge was an unfortunate victim to an opium addiction and felt a great deal of depression, a symptom of opium abuse. It was Coleridge's belief that dejection has no panaceas, but rather needs to run its course. Coleridge understood depression as a lack of joy. In his view, joy was an aspect to human emotion that came and went, but could not be altered by remedies such as nature. He wrote, "I see them all [aspects of nature] so excellently fair, / I s...
