Coleridge- "On a Discovery Made too Late"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1794 sonnet entitled “On a Discovery Made too Late” is a lament about making a bad decision. Coleridge acted on an amorous notion, only to find out that his feelings were not reciprocated. This poem, written after he was rejected by Mary Evans, his first love, is a sonnet written to his own heart. It treats the heart as a separate entity from Coleridge himself, personifying the heart in a way that must have eased the pain of rejection at least a little bit. Coleridge first berates his heart, angrily asking it a broad question: Why? He then moves on, in the last six lines, and tells his heart what it should have done in the situation. Not once does the author consider the fact that maybe he, not his heart, was the one who made the bad decision.
The poem begins with two quatrains written in ABBA form. In these two quatrains, Coleridge laments the bad decision his heart made and angrily asks why his heart had to listen to “Hope’s whisper bland.” Coleridge’s hope appears to have been that Mary Evans would marry him, which obviously didn’t happen. These first eight lines, written after the rejection, berate the heart for not knowing that the Hope was merely a bland whisper, thus unrealistic and not likely to work out. Coleridge describes his jealousy that Evans would be taken by someone else as a “maniac’s hand” jarring the fibers of his heart. His tone is angry, almost like he is yelling at his heart, asking why it acted on what he now considers to be “feverous fancies.”
The last six lines of the sonnet, in which an ABBA quatrain is followed by a non-rhyming AB couplet, mark a turning point between a question and an answer. The first big question, “Why?” asked in the first two quatrains, is followed by an answer, not to the first question, but to the question “What should the heart have done?” Coleridge’s answer is that his heart should have hung on to the hope that Mary Evans loved him and cherished that thought rather than actually acting on it. This hope, according to the author, was “fair and sooth’d with many a dream the hour of rest.” What Coleridge means is that thinking about Mary Evans made him feel good and satisfied, thus, the heart should have just played along with that feeling and embraced it, “nurs’d it with an agony of care”, rather than actually acting on the feeling. Coleridge acknowledges how pitiful this sounds, but presents an argument for doing so, in the last non-rhyming couplet. He compares cherishing the feeling of hope that Mary Evans loved him to a mother nursing her sick infant: Although the idea, like the baby, is weak and does not hold up to any sort of examination at all, it is dependent upon its creator and thus deserves to be taken care of.
The first eight lines of the poem show a clear distinction in Coleridge’s thinking between his heart and his head. His brain, though unmentioned, is the author of this poem, written after the fact with the clarity of hindsight. His heart, on the other hand, was the rogue actor, escaping from under the sway of his brain and foolishly offering Coleridge to his love, only to be rejected. This way of thinking explains the big question in the two quatrains, which can be summed up as a general “Why did you do that?” The last six lines at the end of the sonnet then attempt to tell the heart what it should have done instead of acting on the hope. Coleridge’s bipolar scheme of heart vs. mind probably helped him ease the pain of the rejection and the shame of his false hope by placing the blame on his heart rather than his brain, which represents his rational self.