Samuel Coleridge, Constancy to an Ideal Object

I found Coleridge’s work to be engaging as if I were a character is his poems, or his poems were written as letters to me. The most fascinating poem that Coleridge wrote is Constancy to an Ideal Object because it left me wondering what objects are most enjoyable in life.
The speaker in Constancy to an Ideal Object seems to be a lover away from his love, tormented and pleased by the dreams of what his life will be. He seems frustrated with his persistent thoughts on a consistent topic and pines,
Since all that beat about in Nature’s Range
Or veer or vanish; why shouldst thou remain
The only constant in a world of change
Oh yearning Thought! That liv’st but in the brain?” (349).


He treats thought, with a capital T (line 4), as if it is a spirit that is formed in the mind, and as it grows, possesses the body. I believe Coleridge uses this device as a way to sublimely allow the reader to “feel” what the narrator is feeling. But how can thought be so powerful that it can possess your mind? I believe this question calls the reader to recall a time when a thought consumed them so that nothing else in life could surpass it. How was the reader able to move pass that point in their life? How did they conquer the thought?

I believe this is what Coleridge is asking his reader to do. He wants us to think about being overtaken by thought, and how that thought changed or affected our lives. I have had many thoughts that seemed untamable, a point the narrator has come to. Coleridge wants the reader to become empathetic with the narrator.

But why is it important for the reader to empathize with the narrator? If the reader doesn’t sympathize with the narrator when he says, “…Yet still thou haunt’st me; and thought well I see/She is not thou, and only thou art she…” (349) we would only think he was crazy, and not realize that it is what we think that defines who we are. Though our thoughts are not always reality, they can define what our reality becomes.