‘Cold, Cold, Cold’: Loneliness and Reproach

Early June 1797: a cold wet summer illuminated by one famous meeting, crucial to our construction of Romanticism. A young man is running along a Dorset road. Suddenly, his end in view, he leaps ‘over a gate’ and, taking a short cut, he bounds ‘down the pathless field’.1 Coleridge has arrived at Racedown. The annus mirabilis has begun.