After marrying Sara Fricker in autumn 1795, Coleridge left their home at Clevedon and began to travel throughout England in order to meet with various philosophers and political theorists.
As he wrote The Eolian Harp to commemorate coming to his home at Clevedon, Coleridge composed Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement on leaving it.
[6] The poem begins with an idealisation of a "Valley of Seclusion":[7] [...] In the open air Our Myrtles blossom'd; and across the porch Thick Jasmins twined: the little landscape round Was green and woody, and refresh'd the eye.
Was it right, While my unnumber'd brethren toil'd and bled, That I should dream away the entrusted hours On rose-leaf beds, pampering the coward heart With feelings all too delicate for use?
Yet oft when after honourable toil Rests the tir'd mind, and waking loves to dream, My spirit shall revisit thee, dear Cot!
Similarly, the compulsion to enter into the world and help humanity is included, but it is altered from being motivated by guilt to a warning message against a possible invasion from outside forces.
For, as God hears me, the originating, continuing, and sustaining wish and design in my heart were to exalt the glory of his name; and, which is the same thing in other words, to promote the improvement of humanity.
The poem expresses feelings of solitude and confinement, and there is a difference between the worlds inside and outside of the cottage in a similar manner to the focus found within Coleridge's Kubla Khan.
[19] In terms of Edenic imagery, including types of plant life, Coleridge's are connected to John Milton's Paradise Lost Book Four.
"[10] Richard Haven argues that the poem's image of the moral path is weak because "the returned traveller can only dismiss his ascent to another mode of being as a pleasant but useless memory".
[23] Anthony Harding believes "it is important to recognize that it steps outside the idyllic but circumscribed scene of 'The Eolian Harp', and admits the impossibility, in a fallen world, of human self-sufficiency.
[25] Richard Holmes points out that both Reflections and The Eolian Harp "mark a new stage in Coleridge's exploration of the sacred relations between man and nature, which gradually become more serious and impassioned as they carry increasingly theological implications behind his Romanticism.