“The
earth, a ghost/ orbiting forever lost/ in our monotonous sublime.” Lowell in
1967, a year before the first earthrise photograph, describes our planet in
ways we could say are self-descriptive of Lowell, aged 50. For him, it seems,
the universe is the sublime in which we find ourselves and at which we gaze.
Coleridge in a letter of 1794, aged 22, writes good-humouredly, “My last ode
was so sublime that nobody could understand it.” There are many poems that fit
that category, though not usually Coleridge’s. He wishes to push past the
august in Augustan, the monotony of hours.
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