By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Work without Hope’ is a poem by the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from 1825. A short poem, ‘Work without Hope’ is sometimes regarded as a sort of coda to Coleridge’s far more famous longer poem, ‘Dejection: An Ode’. A few words of analysis of this short poem about work – and hope – may help to illuminate its meaning, but first, here’s the text of the poem.