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There is a change – and I am poor;Your love hath been, nor long ago,A fountain at my fond heart’s door,Whose only business was to flow;And flow it did; not taking heedOf its own bounty, or my need.What happy moments did I count!Blest was I then all bliss above!Now, for that consecrated fountOf murmuring, sparkling, living love,What have I? shall I dare tell?A comfortless and hidden well.A well of love – it may be deep -I trust it is, - and never dry:What matter? if the waters sleepIn silence and obscurity.- Such change, and at the very doorOf my fond heart, hath made me poor. (PW II 34) 14The pathos of the description is offset by Wordsworth’s characteristic sense of irony; there aretwo subtle digs at Coleridge in the poem that reflect something of Wordsworth’s discriminatingintellect. The first, at the end of the opening stanza, relates that Coleridge’s ‘only business’ was hisability to spout forth endless advice, without actually taking into account the needs of his audience, orapplying his wisdom to his own case. But in Wordsworth’s epideictic the blame attributed toColeridge for this characteristic is balanced by the praise for his ‘murmuring, sparkling, living love’,which Wordsworth consistently acknowledged to be the most significant aspect, for him, ofColeridge’s character. It was not his intellect, but his love and friendship that Wordsworth had valuedthe most in the early days of their relationship, and it was this loss that is lamented in the poem. Thesecond dig at Coleridge is implied in the placing of the question mark in the last stanza, and seesWordsworth punning at Coleridge’s expense, questioning whether Coleridge’s ‘matter’ actually hadany substance.But in addition to seeming to lack any coherent ‘matter’ in his own thoughts at this time,Coleridge was also unable to appreciate the matter of the argument Wordsworth had set out in histhirteen–book Address. Ironically, Wordsworth’s aim in writing his Address was never realised. Thereading of The Prelude to Coleridge at Coleorton, over the holy nights of Christmas 1806, might beseen as one of the greatest ‘misreadings’ in English literature. Wordsworth’s rhetoric was effective on14 In the Fenwick Note to A Complaint Wordsworth records: ‘Suggested by a change in the manners of a friend.Town-End 1806’ (IFN 9). (The place was later revised, in pencil, to Coleorton). This Character study shouldbe compared with the similar exercise, carried out with an equally ironic stance in 1802, in ‘Stanzas Writtenin my Pocket-Copy of Thomson’s Castle of Indolence, in which Wordsworth had compared his andColeridge’s characters. The poem also provides evidence that he had made a more objective analysis of hisown earlier glorification of states of indolence. He can even be seen to have identified his earlier state ofmind with that of Narcissus, in describing himself as a ‘withered flower’ (line 20). In his early youth heconfessed to placing Ovid above Virgil in his estimation, and had read Bishop Sandy’s translation of Ovid’sMetamorphoses at Hawkeshead. (See IFN 42). The daffodil is of the genus narcissi.101