Phantom (1805)

 Coleridge believed that a person may exist in distinction from their body, and  felt that the experience recorded here justified his belief: he is remembering a vision of Sara Hutchinson. Other notebook entries express comparable insights, eg: ‘O there is a form which seems irrelative of Space.’  CN II 3146; PW 347; before Apr 1804

All Look and Likeness caught from Earth,
All accident of Kin and Birth,
Had pass'd away. There seem’d no Trace
Of Aught upon her brighten’d Face
Uprais’d beneath the rifted Stone,
But of one Spirit, all her own
She, she herself, and only she
Shone through her body visibly.

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