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Ode to France, according to Abrams

E n the "politics of vision: domain, bondage and freedom," chapter six of Romanticism: tradition and revolution , Abrams works the various transpositions of the imaginary Revolution fields not political, as "metaphors of the spirit that invade the discussion of perception, insight and imagination" (358). After considering a body of German philosophical texts, in which the relationship between subject and object, spirit and nature, is represented from the drama of liberation, that is, in terms of submission and freedom, servitude and command, control, tyranny or equality, Abrams investigates how the same transposition is also detected in literary texts of the English Romantics. In particular, it stops in the case of Wordsworth and Coleridge, who "identify the failure of the goals revolutionary France as an opportunity that made them transfer their quest for freedom of the revolution and wars of liberation to the experience of the spirit in perception "(364). ---
In the context of this pose, inseparable from the overall theme of the book, Abrams aims to analyze "France, an Ode" by Coleridge , under the assumption that it is only understandable if we accept that "revolves around conversion of the political concepts of slavery and freedom in metaphors of the spirit in their relationship with nature "(ibid.). The following is the textual analysis of the ode [we replaced the translation the poem in the book by our own ]:

Ode opens with an invocation to the clouds, waves, forests, sun and sky, elements "compelling" the natural scenario, since "only follow eternal laws "and are thus independent of any" control "out of his own being, function as a type of" all things that are and will be free "are qualified as" witness "the uninterrupted adoration of the poet's" spirit of more Divine Freedom. " "When France lifted its giant angrily members / ... and said he would be free ", he had turned in her and her "opponent of tyrants spear" their hopes for universal freedom, and even during británcica war against France and the Reign of Terror, had kept his faith in the imminence of a new land of freedom, love and joy. "And soon," he said,

Wisdom
show their knowledge in the low huts of those who work and moan
and conquest only with happiness, France
force other nations to be free, until
love and joy
look around and see the land in his possession.

But now France has invaded in turn Switzerland into a war of conquest directed against the "bloodless freedom of Montanez, "and that event has led him finally to recognize that freedom can not be won or imposed by external power, and that the revolution by people who are perpetually enslaved-that is, that the spirit of its citizens is confined by the limits of their physical senses-slavery simply replaced by another.

The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain,
slaves of their own compulsion. In a furious game
break their shackles and use the word
Liberation recorded heavy chains.
Oh, Freedom! ...
but you do not inflame the song of the winner and never breathed
your soul with form of human power.

The poem ends with a romantic situation in point: the speaker is alone on a cliff swept by the wind, facing the open landscape, and experiencing a freedom essential to the power of your joining the scene unfolds before him and hold it again in an act of liberated perception is an act of spontaneous love:

And there I felt the edge of that cliff ocean,
whose pines, just busy in the breeze,
come together in a single murmur at distant swell.
Yes, while standing admiring these things, his forehead naked and threw
my being for the land, by sea and by air,
embracing all the more intense love,
oh, freedom! there I felt my spirit.