Critical Response to Timothy Morton’s

 “Of Matter and Meter:  Environmental Form in Coleridge’s ‘Effusion 35’ and ‘The Eolian Harp’

I must confess that at the beginning of the essay, I felt very upbeat that this article was going to be a great one, due to the fact that very early on it seemed Morton would point out a more effective manner in which literature could assume environmental concerns.  Perhaps this article did complete that mission, but not for the reasons Morton endeavored to point out.

            Morton tells us that “A truly ecological reading practice, then, would think the environment out of the box – it would include as much as it could of the radical openness of the ecological thought, the profoundest possible meditation on how everything is interconnected.”  While I totally agree with this line of reasoning, my challenge is the pathway through which Morton chooses to accomplish this feat. 

            We follow him down roads of thought about aperture and how Coleridge has left the poem open in such a fashion; how it was given a number with its title because Coleridge “treats the poem itself as an object;” brings up witchery and the fact that witchery is also sorcery, talks about vibrations, and suggests that the eolian harp was a symbol, so to speak, of automation and materialism, two outgrowths of the Industrial Revolution.  While I believe it is true that Coleridge was not favorable toward the Industrial Revolution, due to its effects on humanity, the environment, and life in general as it was known to him, I don’t see any undeniable evidence of any of those claims in Coleridge’s poem.

            I do not deny that the eolian harp is an excellent symbol of the beauty of sound and the potential it has for allowing the breeze to materialize in a way other than the obvious (feeling); and, that this can all be interconnected to show the wonders of the environment and its effect upon humanity.  It seems to me that in the poem, “And what if all of animated nature / Be but organic Harps diversly fram’d, / That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps, / Plastic and vast, one intellectual Breeze, / At once the Soul of each, and God of all?” Coleridge is assigning a reverential signification to the harp, not one attached to automation or materialism.

           Morton ends by telling us that “What ‘Effusion 35’ suggests, then, is a deeply deconstructive ecological view, a materialist view that is nevertheless spiritual, but not metaphysical.”  I do not agree with this conclusion.  Except for some very minimal suggestive words, as far as I am concerned, the poem may only have been the beautiful words he spoke to the woman he loved.

            Thoughts for discussion:  Does anyone agree with Morton?  Does anyone fully understand what Morton was endeavoring to say?