The allusions in "Dejection" connect this poem both to old tradition and to the speaker's relationships.
Coleridge's first allusions refer to the poem's epigraph, which consists of lines taken from the "grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence":
- This anonymous poem tells the tale of a Scottish lord who gets sent to sea in spite of his woefully limited seafaring experience. He and all his crew swiftly drown in a terrible storm, and the ballad closes with an image of all the forlorn ladies who'll stand on the shore for a long, long time, hoping for their lovers to come home.
- In alluding to this ballad, the speaker invites the reader to imagine him as a drowning sailor, someone who's out of his depth in stormy waters.
- But perhaps he's also one of those ladies, longing for someone who will never return. The ballad's timeless sorrow seems to sum up all of the speaker's struggles: thrown around by his feelings, he's also heartsick for an unreachable "Lady" of his own.
The "Æolian lute" that the speaker keeps returning to, meanwhile, refers to Aeolus, a classical god of the winds; wind-harps named for this god were a common parlor toy in the 18th and 19th centuries. The speaker seems to relate to this lute, seeing himself as similarly at the mercy of the "winds" of feeling.
But the poem's most important allusions are to the work of William Wordsworth, Coleridge's close friend and frequent collaborator. In fact, this whole poem is a response to Wordsworth's great "Intimations of Immortality" ode:
- In that poem, Wordsworth argued that people lose contact with the innate "glory" of the natural world as they grow up: children, he writes, see the world as magical and sacred, where adults get used to the world and thus only get fleeting glimpses of its holiness.
- Coleridge wrote this poem in reply to the first few stanzas of that one, countering that whatever glory nature has flows from the human "Imagination" outward, not the other way around.
In making its reply, this poem sometimes directly quotes the Immortality Ode:
- For instance, the beginning of stanza 6 starts with the same words as stanza 1 of Wordsworth's poem: "There was a time."
- And, sometimes, "Dejection" makes less direct allusions, borrowing imagery instead: the "luminous cloud" of joy this poem's speaker returns and returns to is a cousin of the "clouds of glory" that Wordsworth imagined the human soul "trailing" behind it on its journey to Earth.
- These allusions make it clear that Coleridge is honoring his friend even as he disagrees with him.
The poem's final allusion might also have more to do with Wordsworth than it would first appear. When the speaker imagines the winds telling the story of a lost "little child," he suggests that story sounds like the work of "Otway," a 17th-century poet and playwright. But that story sounds an awful lot more like the plot of another of Wordsworth's poems, "Lucy Gray," than anything Otway ever wrote.
The poem's allusions thus make it clear that Coleridge is dealing with matters both timeless and deeply personal.