Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Work Without Hope"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 1 February 2024

⏱️ 8 minutes

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Summary

If you had to live the same day over and over again, you may as well use the time to memorize some poetry. That’s exactly what Phil Connors does in Groundhog Day. Today’s poem is featured in the film and marks a significant turning point for the once-misanthropic weatherman.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the premier poet-critic of modern English tradition, distinguished for the scope and influence of his thinking about literature as much as for his innovative verse. Active in the wake of the French Revolution as a dissenting pamphleteer and lay preacher, he inspired a brilliant generation of writers and attracted the patronage of progressive men of the rising middle class. As William Wordsworth’s collaborator and constant companion in the formative period of their careers as poets, Coleridge participated in the sea change in English verse associated with Lyrical Ballads (1798). His poems of this period, speculative, meditative, and strangely oracular, put off early readers but survived the doubts of Wordsworth and Robert Southey to become recognized classics of the romantic idiom.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.9	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, February 1st, 2024.
0:13.1	Tomorrow, February 2nd, is, among other things, Groundhog Day.
0:19.3	And it is that chronological coincidence that has inspired in a roundabout way, the selection
0:25.6	of today's poem.
0:28.7	The beloved film, Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray, in addition to being an all-around enjoyable experience, happens to feature a number of poems.
0:45.3	References to poems or poetic quotations, one of which is today's poem, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's work without hope.
0:59.0	There is a scene in the film, there's a recurring scene in the film, where the main character, Phil Connors, emerges from his bedroom at the bed and breakfast where he's staying in Pungsatani, Pennsylvania.
1:13.5	And he meets a man on the landing who asks him good-naturedly if he thinks it will be an early spring.
1:22.4	And early in the film, as Bill Murray's character, he lives the same day over and over again.
1:29.1	He gives this man a succession of rude or dismissive answers.
1:35.2	But near the end of the film, as Murray's character starts to become a decent human being,
1:42.3	he actually embraces him and, in response to his question,
1:49.2	quotes from Coleridge's poem with a sincere smile on his face. It's a great moment. Here is
1:57.8	Work Without Hope.
2:08.1	The epigraph reads Lines Composed 21 February 1825.
2:32.1	All nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair. The bees are stirring, birds are on the wing, and winter slumbering in the open air, wears on his smiling face a dream of spring, and I the while, the soul unbusy thing, nor honey make, nor pear, nor build, nor sing.
2:36.2	Yet well I can the banks where amaranthes blow,
2:40.1	have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
2:43.9	Bloom, O ye amaranth, bloom for whom ye may.
2:46.4	For me ye bloom not.
2:49.4	Glide, rich streams away.
	...

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