Shape into Form

Abstract

The chapter includes a discussion of the imagery of the two moons and of the wind and their symbolic overtones: what they meant for Coleridge and the way they are handled here. The stanzas as they follow one another make up a kind of narrative but this stands in a peculiar relationship to their structure; put another way, they balance against each other in ways that do not synchronise with the story, such as it is. In the end, as the core of the argument is left hanging like a loose thread, so the poem itself hangs from a position outside itself: in equipoise but changing as a reader regards it from changing positions. This is again something never attempted or achieved by Coleridge before.