This paper situates "Dejection: An Ode" in the context of Coleridge's theory of nightmare. Hovering between waking and sleeping, the nightmare falls like a shadow upon the dreamer's later waking state. As a waking nightmare, "Dejection" is antithetically paired with Coleridge's "The Picture." A Lacanian reading discloses this poem as a playful daydream that selVes as a foil to "Dejection," which depicts Freudian melancholia haunted by nightmare. This reading of "Dejection" as Coleridgean self-analysis counters readings of the ode as a therapeutic progress toward consolation. KEY WORDS: Coleridge; dream poetry; dejection; nightmare. "Only a man who 'lives in language' can construct the dwelling we call a sepulchre."M. Safouan, L 'echec du principe de plaisirColeridge published "The Picture" in The Morning Post on 6 September 1802, in between writing his Verse Letter to Sara (April 1802) and composing "Dejection: An Ode." The Ode had its debut in the same paper almost a month later, on Wordsworth's wedding day, 4 October 1802. "The Picture" offers an introductory contrast to the Ode: the first departs from the inspiration of daydream; the second emerges under the ill auspices of nightmare. The poems exemplify two diverse aspects of Coleridge's deployment of the dream mode. In the eighteenth century, imagination is the main faculty of the dreaming brain. Typical of this historical climate, Andrew Baxter believes that our nocturnal images are under the control of some other will, that our "dream images are involuntarily obtrnded upon it" (our brain), that our will is kept in abeyance during the act of dreaming. 3 Coleridge, along with Baxter, is acutely aware of the demonic liabilities of nightmares. Errancies of imagination and their potential moral dangers, when triggered by nightmares, ramify into the displacement of imagination figured in "Dejection: An Ode." Strong lUniversity of Denver,
