1816, the Year Without a Summer
In Our Time
00:00
The Dejection Ode to the Weather
The weather has always been part of British poetry, so it's a constant if you want in. And into the 19th, I think what happens to weather poetry is a gradual draining of confidence in benign patterns. It's all much more uncertain until you get a poet like Coleridge writing about the way in which the weather is something that you create yourself. The dejection ode starts off with a gentle English musing about the weather but then goes into this tempest of the mind and concludes that we receive at what we give. So the weather is almost wholly personalised and increasingly secularised as we move into the 19st century.
Transcript
Play full episode
