weep for adonais

What is it in this world of ours which makes it fatal to be loved?

Believe in the first Letters I wrote you. I assure you I felt as I wrote. I could not write so now. The thousand images I have had pass through my brain—my uneasy spirits, my unguess’d fate—all spread as a veil between me and you.

Let not day look on these lines, lest garish day waste, turn pale, and die. Seek a cypress grove, whose moaning boughs will be harmony befitting; seek some cave, deep embowered in earth's dark entrails, where no light will penetrate, save that which struggles, red and flickering, through a single fissure, staining thy page with grimmest livery of death.

I must remain some days in a Mist. I see you through a Mist, as I dare say you do me by this time.

But now at thirty years my hair is grey (I wonder what it will be like at forty? I thought of a peruke the other day)—

I will sit amidst the ruins and smile. Truly we were not born to enjoy, but to submit, and to hope.

The Soul is a world of itself and has enough to do in its own home.

All things that have been born were born to die,

Ill, most ill, with disjointed words, bare and weak, have I expressed the feeling with which I clung to them. I would have wound myself like ivy inextricably round them, so that the same blow might destroy us. I would have entered and been a part of them—

As noted above, Coleridge and his fellow students were dependent upon the school for everything from food to clothing, and, in Coleridge’s case, even their future occupations were in the school’s control. (...) While the boys may have entered the school voluntarily, the punishments for attempting to run away, as described by Lamb, show that once enrolled, they had little ability to separate themselves from the power and control of the school. This inability to leave voluntarily creates a particular type of captivity; as Herman notes, “the perpetrator becomes the most powerful person in the life of the victim, and the psychology of the victim is shaped by the actions and beliefs of the perpetrator”. The control over the students was underscored and exacerbated by the poor diet. (...) In this context, the school’s insistence that the children call themselves “orphans” as noted by Hunt, and the attempt by Bowyer to have Coleridge repudiate their families in favor of the school, take on a more significant role.

[She] shows her a knife. — "What feverous hectic flame burns in thee, child?"

If you wish me to live, take me from hence. There is something in this scene of transcendent beauty, in these trees, and hills and waves, that for ever whisper to me, leave thy cumbrous flesh, and make a part of us.

How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep! One, pale as younder waning moon with lips of lurid blue; the other, rosy as the morn when throned on ocean's wave it blushes o'er the world: yet both so passing wonderful!

In 1803, [Coleridge] writes: Night—My Dreams uncommonly illustrative of the non-existence of Surprize in sleep—I had dreamt that I was asleep in the Cloyster at Christs Hospital &  awoken with a pain in my hand from some corrosion/boys & nurses daughters peeping at me/ On their implying that I was not in the School, I answered yes I am/I am only twenty—I then recollected that I was thirty, & of course could not be in the School—& was perplexed—but not in the least surprised that I could fall into such an error. (CN 1, 1250) 

Cut Mercy with a sharp knife to the bone;