SOURCE: "Natural Symbolism and the Conversation Poems," in The Singing of Mount Abora: Coleridge's Use of Biblical Imagery and Natural Symbolism in Poetry and Philosophy, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987, pp. 29-42.

Piper is an Australian educator and critic. In the following essay, he discusses the nature symbolism and the expression of religious experience in the poetry Coleridge produced between 1795 and 1798.

Coleridge's long inquiry for a religious faith that would satisfy him intellectually and morally began in Cambridge in 1794 and lasted all his life. There are two things to be kept in mind about this inquiry. In the first place Coleridge did not remain in any state of suspended judgment; he was always in possession of an active faith that he was anxious to preach. Secondly, it should not be thought of as a progress from unsatisfactory answers to a final solution. The later nineteenth-century belief that German idealist...