Social Commentaries

Association of Ideas

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772–1834

From Complete Poetical Works, ed. E. H. Coleridge (1912)

Social Commentaries

I.--By Likeness

Fond, peevish, wedded pair! why all this rant?
O guard your tempers! hedge your tongues about
This empty head should warn you on that point--
The teeth were quarrelsome, and so fell out.
S. T. C.

II.--Association by Contrast

Phidias changed marble into feet and legs.
Disease! vile anti-Phidias! thou, i' fegs!
Hast turned my live limbs into marble pegs.

III.--Association by Time

SIMPLICIUS SNIPKIN loquitur

I touch this scar upon my skull behind,
And instantly there rises in my mind
Napoleon's mighty hosts from Moscow lost,
Driven forth to perish in the fangs of Frost.
For in that self-same month, and self-same day,
Down Skinner Street I took my hasty way--
Mischief and Frost had set the boys at play;
I stept upon a slide--oh! treacherous tread!--
Fell smash with bottom bruised, and brake my head!
Thus Time's co-presence links the great and small,
Napoleon's overthrow, and Snipkin's fall.

✦ ✦ ✦

? 1830

MLA

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Association of Ideas.” Poetry Codex, poetrycodex.com/poem/coleridge/380/.

Chicago

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Association of Ideas.” Poetry Codex. https://poetrycodex.com/poem/coleridge/380/.

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