Written in 1795 at Clevedon in North Somerset, during the honeymoon phase of his marriage to Sarah Fricker, Coleridge rewrote this poem throughout his life. He considered it a model specimen of a short, conversational style of blank verse poem that would be used to great effect by Robert Southey, Charles Lamb, and William Wordsworth.
The main idea of the poem is that consciousness behaves like an Eolian Harp. The mind is an instrument whose music is thought. Coleridge attributes intellectual agency not to the individual as such, but to the outside influence of an “intellectual breeze” (48), which is the “wild and various … random” (43) intelligence of God, who plays the mind of man like an instrument.
Coleridge also introduces the idea of “the one Life” (27) which both animates all Nature and exists outside of it and beyond it. This poem is widely considered to be a milestone in Coleridge’s aesthetic and philosophical development.