Melancholy by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Melancholy. A Fragment.

Stretch'd on a mouldered Abbey's broadest wall,

Where ruining ivies propped the ruins steep—

Her folded arms wrapping her tattered pall,

Had Melancholy mused herself to sleep.

The fern was pressed beneath her hair,

The dark green Adder's Tongue was there;

And still as past the flagging sea-gale weak,

The long lank leaf bowed fluttering o'er her cheek.

That pallid cheek was flushed: her eager look

Beamed eloquent in slumber ! Inly wrought,

Imperfect sounds her moving lips forsook,

And her bent forehead work'd with troubled thought.

Strange was the dream——

Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Richard Garnett (London: George Routledge & Sons), 175.