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Samuel Taylor Coleridge

What Is Life?


Resembles Life what once was held of Light,
Too ample in itself for human sight ?
An absolute Self--an element ungrounded--
All, that we see, all colours of all shade
[spacer]By encroach of darkness made ?--
Is very life by consciousness unbounded ?
And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath,
A war-embrace of wrestling Life and Death ?

1805, published 1829

(proofed against E. H. Coleridge's 1927 edition of STC's poems)

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