Till they are lost, and in that Beauty furled
Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world;
Scarce visible from extreme loveliness ...
may perhaps at first glance be elusive in its precise meaning, but it is not because of anything difficult or uncommon in the actual words, but because the poet’s mind is engaged with an almost indefinable emotion. Keats again, for all the emphasis of a clear literary influence upon his diction, was never anything but easily intelligible in his actual statement to the simplest reader. The Eve of St. Agnes and Isabella, even the odes, might have come out a little differently if there had been no Spenser or Marlowe or Chapman, but the reader of 1820 had no need to be a scholar of Elizabethan poetry to perceive every shade of their beauty as they were. Alone among the great poets of his time, Coleridge at intervals sounded tones in his verse that were archaic, or purely fanciful rather, not recognisably out of the English of daily use.
He holds him with his skinny hand,
“There was a ship,” quoth he.
“Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!”
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
Coming upon that at the opening of The Ancient Mariner, the first readers of Lyrical Ballads must have been conscious that something a little odd was here being done with language. But such things are incidents merely even in Coleridge’s style, and need not be stressed. In any case they were, it may be, done more than half humorously, and for the most part Coleridge—in the work of his that matters—was as sure as Wordsworth himself in the purity of his diction, in drawing it from the one wholesome source.
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,