Skip to main content
Mansfield College Oxford home
  • Home
  • About
    • « back
    • About
    • Principal’s Welcome
    • Values and Ethos
    • Environmental Sustainability
    • Our History
      • « back
      • Our History
      • 40 Years of Women at Mansfield
        • « back
        • 40 Years of Women at Mansfield
        • A Photographic History of Mansfield's Women: 1979 - 2020
        • Women at Mansfield: A Brief History
        • A Brief History of Mansfield's Women (For Screenreaders)
    • News & Features
    • Events
    • Mansfield College Public Talks
    • Emeritus & Honorary Fellows
    • Mansfield People
    • Explore Mansfield
    • Mansfield College Chapel
    • Public Documents & GDPR
    • Vacancies
    • Contact us
    • Press
  • Prospective Students
    • « back
    • Prospective Students
    • Why Apply to Mansfield?
    • How to Apply
      • « back
      • How to Apply
      • The Admissions Process
      • Information for Applicants
      • Feedback
    • Undergraduate Study
      • « back
      • Undergraduate Study
      • Subjects
      • Studying at Mansfield
      • Living at Mansfield
      • Student Life
      • Fees & Finance
    • Graduate Study
      • « back
      • Graduate Study
      • Studying at Mansfield
      • Living at Mansfield
      • Student Life
      • Fees and Finance
      • Graduate Scholarships
    • Visiting Student Programme
      • « back
      • Visiting Student Programme
      • Subjects
      • Living at Mansfield
      • Student Life
      • Fees and Finance
      • How to Apply
    • Open Days
    • Schools and Colleges Liaison
      • « back
      • Schools and Colleges Liaison
      • Digital Outreach
        • « back
        • Digital Outreach
        • Mansfield Isolation Conversation
          • « back
          • Mansfield Isolation Conversation
          • 3rd and 4th Century Social Distancing in the Desert (Jenn Strawbridge, Theology)
          • Avoiding an Empty Universe with Solitary Neutrinos (Steve Biller, Physics)
          • Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (Ros Ballaster, English)
          • Doing Community in Isolation: Mosques, Mecca and One Direction
          • Isolation and Revelation (Alison Salvesen, Oriental Studies)
          • Magnets in isolation (Stephen Blundell, Physics)
          • Oscar Wilde in prison (Michèle Mendelssohn, English)
          • Physically, but not socially, isolated: Insights from a small Micronesian island
          • Power and politics amidst COVID-19 seclusions—perspectives from geography (Amber Murrey, Geography)
          • Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Fears in Solitude’ (Ruth Scobie, English)
          • Social Distancing in Ancrene Wisse (Lucinda Rumsey, English)
          • Social distancing and quantum computing – are we all qubits now? (Jason Smith, Materials Science)
          • Thomas Nashe: ‘Plague’s Prisoner’ (Chris Salamone, English)
          •  Even buildings need isolation (Sinan Acikgoz, Engineering)
        • Resources to explore your subject
      • Visiting Mansfield
      • Visiting Your School or College
  • Current Students
    • « back
    • Current Students
    • Student Hub
    • The College Office
    • Student Handbook
    • Information for Graduates
    • Prizes, Scholarships & Grants
    • Library
      • « back
      • Library
      • Hours, access and conditions of use
      • Finding and borrowing books
      • Book suggestion form
      • The Library building
      • Special Collections and Archives
      • Assistive equipment & procedures and recommended self-help & study skills reading
      • Online and e-resources
      • Online library forms
    • Graduation
    • Welfare
    • Junior Deans
    • JCR
    • MCR
    • Reach Scholarship
    • FAQs
  • Alumni & Supporters
    • « back
    • Alumni & Supporters
    • Support Mansfield
      • « back
      • Support Mansfield
      • Making Your Gift
        • « back
        • Making Your Gift
        • Give Online
        • Give By Post
        • Give By Phone
        • Give By Bank Transfer
        • International Giving
        • Remembering Mansfield in your Will
        • Other ways to Support Mansfield
          • « back
          • Other ways to Support Mansfield
          • Gifts of Shares and Vouchers
          • Payroll Giving
          • Tax-efficient giving
          • Donating Time and Support
      • Mansfield Matters Fund
      • Student Support Fund
      • Access and Outreach
      • The Campaign for Teaching
      • Buildings and Environment
      • Scholarships
        • « back
        • Scholarships
        • The Adam von Trott Memorial Appeal
          • « back
          • The Adam von Trott Memorial Appeal
          • The Adam Von Trott Scholars
      • Recognising your Gift
      • Remembering Mansfield in your Will
      • How Your Gift Makes a Difference
      • Alumni and Supporter Promise
    • Alumni & Supporter Events
    • News & Publications
    • Latest alumni publications
    • Stay in Touch
    • Meet the Team
    • Mansfield Alumni Association
    • Online Shop
    • Regular Support
  • Conferences & Events
    • « back
    • Conferences & Events
    • Conferencing
    • Conference Facilities
    • Conference Accommodation
    • B&B
    • Fine Dining
    • How to Book

Top bar menu

  • Accessibility Statement
  • Contact
  • Meal booking
  • Student Hub
  • Vacancies
  • Home
  • About
    About
    • Principal’s Welcome
    • Values and Ethos
    • Environmental Sustainability
    • Our History
    • News & Features
    • Events
    • Mansfield College Public Talks
    • Emeritus & Honorary Fellows
    • Mansfield People
    • Explore Mansfield
    • Mansfield College Chapel
    • Public Documents & GDPR
    • Vacancies
    • Contact us
    • Press
  • Prospective Students
    Prospective Students
    • Why Apply to Mansfield?
    • How to Apply
    • Undergraduate Study
    • Graduate Study
    • Visiting Student Programme
    • Open Days
    • Schools and Colleges Liaison
  • Current Students
    Current Students
    • Student Hub
    • The College Office
    • Student Handbook
    • Information for Graduates
    • Prizes, Scholarships & Grants
    • Library
    • Graduation
    • Welfare
    • Junior Deans
    • JCR
    • MCR
    • Reach Scholarship
    • FAQs
  • Alumni & Supporters
    Alumni
    • Support Mansfield
    • Alumni & Supporter Events
    • News & Publications
    • Latest alumni publications
    • Stay in Touch
    • Meet the Team
    • Mansfield Alumni Association
    • Online Shop
    • Regular Support
  • Conferences & Events
    Conference & Events

    Mansfield College offers a range of conference, fine dining and corporate event facilities within one of the most attractive sites in Oxford. 

    • Conferencing
    • Conference Facilities
    • Conference Accommodation
    • B&B
    • Fine Dining
    • How to Book

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Fears in Solitude’ (Ruth Scobie, English)

View of the Quantock Hills

Ruth Scobie,
Lecturer in English

Like a lot of Romantic lyric poetry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Fears in Solitude’ is about a lone, thoughtful speaker-poet in a peaceful “green and silent spot”. But Coleridge was writing, as the poem’s subtitle tells us, “in April 1798, during the alarm of an invasion”. Britain had been at war for years and the papers were full of rumours of a French attack.[1] An awareness of this, and of other horrors around the world, constantly intrudes on the “calmness” of his isolation in the Quantock hills:

My God! it is a melancholy thing

For such a man, who would full fain preserve

His soul in calmness, yet perforce must feel

For all his human brethren – O my God!

It weighs upon the heart, that he must think

What uproar and what strife may now be stirring

This way or that way o’er these silent hills –

Some of Coleridge’s contemporaries attacked ‘Fears in Solitude’ as defeatist. More recently it has been read as a poem of hesitant patriotism: it calls on Britons to “Stand forth! be men! repel an impious foe”, and ends by shaking the speaker out of the “bodings that have well-nigh wearied” him, reminding him of the beauty of the English landscape and the nearby presence of his friends and family. Yet other readers have noticed that this conclusion doesn’t entirely overcome the feelings of dread which dominate the rest of the poem; like the speaker, we might still be distracted from the pastoral, cosy closing scene by the sheer weight of the grief and uncertainty which went before. The middle stanzas track Coleridge’s stream of consciousness as he frets, rages, and analyzes everything from the possibility of French invasion to state propaganda to atheism, the syntax and meter of the lines breaking down to suggest a rising panic – or, as the poet Algernon Swinburne put it in 1875, as Coleridge “wails, appeals, deprecates, objurgates in a flaccid and querulous fashion”.[2]

Swinburne meant that as a criticism, but this uncomfortable, unheroic passivity might also be what makes the poem feel most modern. Mary Favret argues that Coleridge’s lifetime saw the emergence of the now familiar experience of being helplessly distant from events which nevertheless overwhelm you via text – that is, the experience of being at home, reading the news.[3] For Coleridge, it was the newspapers which brought relentless updates, horror stories and speculation flooding into his rural isolation, but today it’s not difficult to imagine his speaker sitting alone among the “green and silent” hills, compulsively checking his phone. Perhaps, then, the poem is about Coleridge’s “solitude”, that huge but fragile distance between himself and “all his human brethren” which is threatened literally and imaginatively by the world’s violence and pain. Isolation offers Coleridge both peace and a space for reflection – it’s how his “heart / Is softened, and made worthy to indulge / Love, and the thoughts that yearn for human kind” – and a potentially paralyzing state of distraction and anxiety.

[1] For more detail, see Ildiko Csengei, ‘The Literature of Fear in Britain: Coleridge’s Fears in Solitude and the French Invasion of Fishguard in 1797’ in English Literature 5 (2018): 183-206.

[2] Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘Essay on Coleridge’ in Coleridge, Christabel and the Lyrical and Imaginative Poems of S. T. Coleridge (London: Sampson Low, 1869), xvii.

[3] Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

 

Professor Scobie

 

Find out more about Dr. Ruth Scobie here.

 

  • Mansfield Isolation Conversation
    • 3rd and 4th Century Social Distancing in the Desert (Jenn Strawbridge, Theology)
    • Avoiding an Empty Universe with Solitary Neutrinos (Steve Biller, Physics)
    • Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (Ros Ballaster, English)
    • Doing Community in Isolation: Mosques, Mecca and One Direction
    • Isolation and Revelation (Alison Salvesen, Oriental Studies)
    • Magnets in isolation (Stephen Blundell, Physics)
    • Oscar Wilde in prison (Michèle Mendelssohn, English)
    • Physically, but not socially, isolated: Insights from a small Micronesian island
    • Power and politics amidst COVID-19 seclusions—perspectives from geography (Amber Murrey, Geography)
    • Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Fears in Solitude’ (Ruth Scobie, English)
    • Social Distancing in Ancrene Wisse (Lucinda Rumsey, English)
    • Social distancing and quantum computing – are we all qubits now? (Jason Smith, Materials Science)
    • Thomas Nashe: ‘Plague’s Prisoner’ (Chris Salamone, English)
    •  Even buildings need isolation (Sinan Acikgoz, Engineering)

Footer menu

  • About
  • Prospective Students
  • Current Students
  • Alumni & Supporters
  • Conferences & Events
  • Student Hub
  • Vacancies

Mansfield College and University of Oxford logos

Facebook iconFacebook
Linkedin iconLinkedin
Twitter iconTwitter
Flickr iconFlickr
Instagram iconInstagram
Copyright Mansfield College 2019. All rights reserved. Site Design by Franks and Franks Development by Olamalu