Coleridge, Mary Robinson, and the prosody of dreams.

Abstract

are two poets of the Romantic period whose poetry is ostensibly concerned with the experience of dreaming and the representation of dreams in verse. Both poets knew and admired the other, perhaps because of their shared experiences with opium and dreams. They both find the poem in his or her dreams but then fix the dream in poetic form. The metrical experiments of both poets in their dream poems are conscious acts of representing in verse the experience of dreaming. This is accomplished not merely through figurative poetic language but also through what I will call the prosody of dreams-the theory and principles of versification as they pertain to dream poetry. The prosody of dreams, then, refers specifically to the way these two Romantic poets use metrical effects to represent a dream world, suggesting that, for them at least, dreams can be understood through the self-conscious approximation of the dream experience in verse. Robinson and Coleridge use poetic form and metrical experimentation to explore in verse the unfathomed depths of the unconscious mind and the creative potentialities of dreaming. Their poetry suggests that each had an intimate familiarity with the work of the other, but their strikingly similar approaches to the prosody of dreams remains a compelling intersection that has yet to be discussed. A closer look at the poetic forms of dreams created by these two pioneering dream poets, in addition to illuminating some pertinent poems by Mary Robinson, will substantially inform our understanding of Coleridge and the way he understood his dreams and of the poetic practice of representing dreams in verse. KEY WORDS: poetics; prosody; meter; rhythm; dream poetry. "I plunge unfathom'd depths, amid the shades of night!" -Mary Robinson Late in the eighteenth century, Mary Robinson, a poet intensely interested in the imagination and the unconscious experience of dreaming, wrote about being