The poet is dead in me." And years afterward in a letter to an artist friend, W.Collins (December, 1818): "Poetry is out of the question.

The attempt would only hurry me into that sphere of acute feelings from which abstruse research, the mother of self-oblivion, presents an asylum." 95--*Reality's dark dream*! In the earlier forms of the poem the lines corresponding to 94-5 stood thus: "Nay, wherefore did I let it haunt my mind, This dark, distressful dream ?" He seems to mean, "This loss of joy, of poetic power, is, must be, only an evil dream, and I will shake it from my mind;" but he knows that it is a reality, and so turns to forget it in the sensuous intoxication of the wind's music.

Or perhaps--for Coleridge is already a metaphysician--reality is used here in opposition to ideality or imagination; the truth of philosophy (cf.ll.

89-90) and the metaphysic habit of mind that the study of it induces--what we call reality--is a dream that has come between him and the world of the ideal in which he had and used his "shaping spirit of imagination." The passage is obscure.
100--*Bare crag*, etc.

The scenery here is that of the Lake country where Coleridge and Wordsworth were then living--the former at Keswick in Cumberland, the latter at Grasmere, Westmoreland.
59, 120--*Otway*.