"Contemplation", a Coleridgean ditty

Being very intrigued about Coleridge and especially "The Rime" (which I wrote both of my papers on), I decided to compose an original song. Based on my E1 Philosophical Contemplation of Invisible Things, I used this lens to focus on the rhetorical disjunction and the problematic gloss in the "Rime". My aim was to have lyrics that were reflective of my work in the formal paper, while using the creative medium of the Mac program Garage Band to both coherently portray my lyrics while incoherently reading the gloss over a dense layer of ambient music.

The program of Garage Band is both very interesting and fun. I plugged my guitar and microphone into a preamp which was directly connected to the program. In the beginning of "Contemplation", I have a very roots-rock, minimalistic sound that is just my guitar and voice. This portion of the song is representative of the "Rime" before Coleridge added the gloss in 1817, which obfuscated the poem in my opinion (this viewpoint is also posited by the scholar Ferguson.)

After the second verse, I say: "Here comes the Spectre Ship with the gloss onboard; We're going into the abyss of confusion; its very spacy." The latter portion of that statement is more in reference to the subsequent music, which is electronic and supernatural compared to the raw sound of the first folky segment. In the heavily synthesized portion of the song, I made two vocal tracks with ambient effects, spaced apart by 2 seconds. This creates a confusion collage of sounds, especially when in conjunction with the massive amounts of synthesizers, which intentionally drown out my voice to nonplus the listener. Essentially, I think that the gloss tries to rationalize a very irrational poem; Coleridge attempts to guide the reader through his maze, but this is an act of futility. Because the "Rime" is meant to provoke contemplation, as Coleridge notes in his letters (sorry for the nonlinkage), the presence of the gloss is unnecessary.

Tbe third verse, which starts with the line, "Now we're back to where we started", notes the circumambulation of the poem. Originally, the audience of the 19th century was utterly baffled by the "Rime", openly declaring the enigmatic nature of the work. I posit that the addition of the gloss, rather than clarifying the nebulousness, brings the reader back to a state of confusion (which might even be greater than in the beginning).