Chapter 1 follows the ascent from the technical understanding of a poem and its processes toward a sense of ‘spiritual contemplation’. Slow-reading a short Coleridge poem, ‘First Advent of Love’, representing lifelong concerns, Mays describes the meditation involved in both reading and writing the poem. He contrasts such meditation with the different, analytical process involved in Coleridge’s prose writing. He reveals how in ‘First Advent’ feelings adjust through a web of sounds, images, and allusions (to neo-Platonic ideas about love mediated through Renaissance and contemporary German authors). Inquiry into what is most important in the poem involves the matter of how the poem works: a matter of ‘Understanding’. Mays then looks to higher, numinous qualities in the poem that go beyond the understanding, and are properly imaginative in terms of Coleridge’s diagram of the ‘Order of the Mental Powers’, mediating between ‘Understanding’ and ‘Reason’ in terms of enérgeia.
