"The birds and the bees" is a colloquial expression referring to a rite of passage in the lives of most children when parents explain human sexuality and sexual intercourse to them. [1]
According to tradition, "the birds and the bees" is a metaphorical story sometimes told to children in an attempt to explain the mechanics and results of sexual intercourse through reference to easily observed natural events. For instance, bees carry and deposit pollen into flowers, a visible and easy-to-explain parallel to fertilization. Female birds laying eggs is a similarly visible and easy-to-explain parallel to ovulation.
While the earliest documented use of the expression remains somewhat nebulous, it is generally regarded as having been coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. [ citation needed ] Published in 1825, his verse in “Work Without Hope”, [2] refers to birds and bees.
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!
Kubla Khan: or A Vision in a Dream is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in 1816. It is sometimes given the subtitles "A Vision in a Dream" and "A Fragment." According to Coleridge's preface to Kubla Khan, the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium-influenced dream after reading a work describing Xanadu, the summer capital of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty of China founded by Kublai Khan. Upon waking, he set about writing lines of poetry that came to him from the dream until he was interrupted by "a person on business from Porlock". The poem could not be completed according to its original 200–300 line plan as the interruption caused him to forget the lines. He left it unpublished and kept it for private readings for his friends until 1816 when, at the prompting of Lord Byron, it was published.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets with his friend William Wordsworth. He also shared volumes and collaborated with Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Charles Lloyd.
Suspension of disbelief is the avoidance—often described as willing—of critical thinking and logic in understanding something that is unreal or impossible in reality, such as something in a work of speculative fiction, in order to believe it for the sake of enjoying its narrative. Historically, the concept originates in the Greco-Roman principles of theatre, wherein the audience ignores the unreality of fiction to experience catharsis from the actions and experiences of characters.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, written by English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1797–98 and published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, is a poem that recounts the experiences of a sailor who has returned from a long sea voyage. Some modern editions use a revised version printed in 1817 that featured a gloss.
Charles Lamb was an English essayist, poet, and antiquarian, best known for his Essays of Elia and for the children's book Tales from Shakespeare, co-authored with his sister, Mary Lamb (1764–1847).
Sara Coleridge was an English author and translator. She was the third child and only daughter of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his wife Sara Fricker.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was a British composer and conductor. Of mixed-race descent, Coleridge-Taylor achieved such success that he was referred to by white musicians in New York City as the "African Mahler" when he had three tours of the United States in the early 1900s. He was particularly known for his three cantatas on the epic 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha by American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Coleridge-Taylor premiered the first section in 1898, when he was 23. He married an Englishwoman, Jessie Walmisley, and both their children had musical careers. Their son, Hiawatha, adapted his father's music for a variety of performances. Their daughter, Avril Coleridge-Taylor, became a composer-conductor.
"Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" is a poem by William Wordsworth, completed in 1804 and published in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). The poem was completed in two parts, with the first four stanzas written among a series of poems composed in 1802 about childhood. The first part of the poem was completed on 27 March 1802 and a copy was provided to Wordsworth's friend and fellow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who responded with his own poem, "Dejection: An Ode", in April. The fourth stanza of the ode ends with a question, and Wordsworth was finally able to answer it with seven additional stanzas completed in early 1804. It was first printed as "Ode" in 1807, and it was not until 1815 that it was edited and reworked to the version that is currently known, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality".
Pantisocracy was a utopian scheme devised in 1794 by, among others, the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey for an egalitarian community. It is a system of government where all rule equally. They originally intended to establish such a community in the United States, choosing a site on the banks of the Susquehanna River after considering other places such as Kentucky. By 1795 Southey had doubts about the viability of this and proposed moving the project to Wales. The two men were unable to agree on the location, causing the project to collapse.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772. The youngest of 14 children, he was educated after his father's death and excelled in classics. He attended Christ's Hospital and Jesus College, Cambridge. While attending college, he befriended two other Romanticists, Charles Lamb and Robert Southey, the latter causing him to eventually drop out of college and pursue both poetic and political ambitions.
"Monody on the Death of Chatterton" was composed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1790 and was rewritten throughout his lifetime. The poem deals with the idea of Thomas Chatterton, a poet who committed suicide, as representing the poetic struggle.
Ode on the Departing Year was composed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1796. The poem describes Coleridge's feelings on politics and religion, and it emphasises an idyllic lifestyle as an optimal way of living.
The conversation poems are a group of at least eight poems composed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) between 1795 and 1807. Each details a particular life experience which led to the poet's examination of nature and the role of poetry. They describe virtuous conduct and man's obligation to God, nature and society, and ask as if there is a place for simple appreciation of nature without having to actively dedicate one's life to altruism.
"This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge during 1797. The poem discusses a time in which Coleridge was forced to stay beneath a lime tree while his friends were able to enjoy the countryside. Within the poem, Coleridge is able to connect to his friend's experience and enjoy nature through him, making the lime tree only a physical prison, not a mental one.
To William Wordsworth is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge written in 1807 as a response to poet William Wordsworth's autobiographical poem The Prelude, called here "that prophetic lay". Wordsworth had recited that poem to his friend Coleridge personally. In his poem, Coleridge praises Wordsworth's understanding of both external and human nature, at the same time emphasizing Wordsworth's poetic achievement and downplaying his own.
"To Fayette" was written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and published in the 26 December 1794 Morning Chronicle as part of the Sonnets on Eminent Characters series. Coleridge, like other Romantic poets, viewed Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette as a hero of liberty for his part in the American and French revolutions. The poem coincides with Fayette's imprisonment in Austria, and he is treated as a martyr for liberty. The language Coleridge uses within the poem to describe Fayette and revolutions appears in many of his later works.
"To Bowles" was written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and published in the 26 December 1794 Morning Chronicle as part of the Sonnets on Eminent Characters series. William Lisle Bowles's poetry was introduced to Coleridge in 1789 and Bowles had an immediate impact on Coleridge's views of poetry. The sonnet celebrates Bowles's status as a poet. It also discusses Bowles's political beliefs, which helped shape Coleridge's ideas on government and politics.
"To Mrs Siddons" was written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and published in the 29 December 1794 Morning Chronicle as part of the Sonnets on Eminent Characters series. It describes Sarah Siddons, an actress Coleridge became fond of during his visits to London during college. The poem celebrates watching Siddons perform her various roles on stage. The actual authorship of the poem is uncertain, since it was attributed to Charles Lamb in various works. It is possible that Lamb and Coleridge worked on the poem together, and, if so, it would be one of Lamb's earliest works.
"To Southey" or "To Robert Southey" was written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and published in the 14 January 1795 Morning Chronicle as part of his Sonnets on Eminent Characters series. Robert Southey became a close friend of Coleridge during the summer of 1794 and the two originally formed a plan to start an ideal community together. Although the plan fell apart, Coleridge dedicated the poem to his friend and emphasized Southey's poetic abilities. Following the poem, Coleridge further drifted from Southey and the poem was not republished.
Coleridge's notebooks, of which seventy-two have survived, contain a huge assortment of memoranda set down by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge from 1794 until shortly before his death in 1834. Coleridge's biographer Richard Holmes summarised the range of material covered as "travels, reading, dreams, nature studies, self-confession and self-analysis, philosophical theories, friendships, sexual fantasies, lecture notes, observations of his children, literary schemes, brewing recipes, opium addiction, horrors, puns, prayers." Some of this vast storehouse of material found its way into Coleridge's published works, and it is also believed to have directly influenced Wordsworth's poems. The notebooks have been described as "unique in the annals of Romantic autobiography", and as "perhaps the unacknowledged prose masterpiece of the age".