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To the River Otter
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To the River Otter
"To the River Otter" is a sonnet by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Though its date of creation is uncertain, it was possibly composed in 1793. It deals with the image of the River Otter, near Coleridge's childhood home in Devon.
Editions of Coleridge's works edited by James Dykes Campbell (1899) and by E. H. Coleridge (1912) determine that the "To the River Otter" is from 1793. However, J. C. C. Mays (2001) argues that there is no certainty for the earlier dating as the poem does not appear in Coleridge's 1796 collection of poems and was not described as "juvenilia" in his later collections. The first 11 lines were used in Coleridge's 1796 poem "Recollection" and published as a sonnet in the late 1796 Sonnets from Various Authors. The poem was eventually republished in Coleridge's 1797 collection of poems and in all of the later collections. "Recollections" was published 2 April 1796 in Coleridge's periodical The Watchman.
The sonnet portrays a view of the river Otter from a child's perspective:
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 vein'd with various dyes
Gleam'd through thy bright transparence! [...]
— lines 6–11
The final line ends with a regretful use of "ah" that is common to Coleridge's poems:
Ah! that once more I were a careless Child!
— line 14
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To the River Otter AI simulator
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To the River Otter
"To the River Otter" is a sonnet by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Though its date of creation is uncertain, it was possibly composed in 1793. It deals with the image of the River Otter, near Coleridge's childhood home in Devon.
Editions of Coleridge's works edited by James Dykes Campbell (1899) and by E. H. Coleridge (1912) determine that the "To the River Otter" is from 1793. However, J. C. C. Mays (2001) argues that there is no certainty for the earlier dating as the poem does not appear in Coleridge's 1796 collection of poems and was not described as "juvenilia" in his later collections. The first 11 lines were used in Coleridge's 1796 poem "Recollection" and published as a sonnet in the late 1796 Sonnets from Various Authors. The poem was eventually republished in Coleridge's 1797 collection of poems and in all of the later collections. "Recollections" was published 2 April 1796 in Coleridge's periodical The Watchman.
The sonnet portrays a view of the river Otter from a child's perspective:
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 vein'd with various dyes
Gleam'd through thy bright transparence! [...]
— lines 6–11
The final line ends with a regretful use of "ah" that is common to Coleridge's poems:
Ah! that once more I were a careless Child!
— line 14