SOURCE: "Coleridge's 'Hymn Before Sun-rise': Mont Blanc, Mon Frère, Mon Semblable," in Coleridge's Meditative Art, Cornell, 1975, pp. 144-72.

In the following excerpt, Parker explores the biographical, psychological, and textual influences at work in "Hymn before Sun-rise in the Vale of Chamouni."

["Dejection: An Ode," "To William Wordsworth Composed on the Night after His Recitation of a Poem on the Growth of the Individual Mind," and "Hymn Before Sun-rise in the Vale of Chamouni"] in varying degrees of explicitness, derive from what by all odds was Coleridge's besetting preoccupation as a poet during the period of roughly ten years following his first major successes in a meditative style, "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" and "Frost at Midnight." That preoccupation was, to put it simply, Wordsworth. More and more in the years following 1798 an increasingly anxious Coleridge turned to him for support, friendship, and a precarious self-definition….

The most...