Metrical Feet (Coleridge poem) Essay Questions

In what ways does Coleridge illustrate and define the different metrical feet?

Throughout the first half of the poem, Coleridge occasionally suggests the definition of the metrical foot, illustrates the metrical foot in the line defining it, and also employs stress marks throughout. For example, the opening line, "Trochee trips from long to short," simultaneously defines the stresses found in trochaic lines, uses accent marks to indicate the stresses, and is also actually written in trochaics. Similarly, the poem's ninth line describing Amphimacers describes them as "First and last being long, middle short," which both defines the pattern of stresses found in them and is also actually metrically composed in them.

Why does Coleridge connect the act of writing poetry with winning God's love, a favoritism one would assume has more to do with moral and ethical achievements?

Coleridge believed writing could facilitate the moral and ethical development of an individual. Deriving much of his ideas from his wide philosophical readings, Coleridge considered writing to be a dialectic that put an individual in conversation with a written text and helped them come to terms with the larger social and natural framework in which they lived. This meant that a person who composed would enter into a dialogue with the world around them and also with themselves; thus, pushing them from egotism and towards an assimilation of the world's diversity. In this sense, then, Coleridge's assertion that Derwent could win the love of God, if he were to become a great poet, is meant to read something like: "If Derwent habitually converses with the world and learns to live in harmony with it, then he will be the kind of moral and ethical person God loves."