"Most musical, most melancholy" ! We see those words again in the Lyrical ballads and Coleridge uses them in his Effusion XXIII : To the Nightingale for a good reason. Coleridge writes about his experience with love. He writes about his encounters with the strangest and the most beautiful of human feelings. I think Coleridge, pushed around by his troubles and challenges of love life, compares love to a song of a nightingale. It is beautiful, pleasant or "musical" and brutal, sad, "most melancholy" at the same time. The author shows in this poem that the most beautiful and the most meaningful thing in human life can also be the most hurtful and sad. Just like the beauty of the Nightingales song or the beauty of a rose with sharp thorns, love is a multifaceted diamond. The deeper meaning dwells in the reason for which love is beautiful or the melancholic song of a nightingale is musical. Without the violent storms which tug the sail of love with its strong winds one wouldn't know how strong love can be and how beautiful it shivers when the winds of trouble calm down. Without thorns the beauty of the rose would be too easy to get, too common to experience up close . Without the melancholy in the nightingale's song no one would realize the beauty of his singing. This poem is a magnificent example of how the natural, or the wild can help with understanding something very human in nature, love.
"Most musical, most melancholy" is quoted from Milton. I like your coherent reading of the theme of love's ambiguity in the poem. Does the rest of the poem back you up?
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