swound is a word from long, long ago, the age of oral poetry. For his retro-ballad of 1798, Coleridge recalls swound as a forgotten sound, an archaeology unearthed: it's swoon old-form (same etymology), [14] and (even better!) a variant of sound. Like noises in a swound is not after anything so mundane as mimesis. It is etymology, as if Coleridge were auditing Pope's tidy couplet, "'Tis not enough no Harshness gives Offence, / The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense" ( Essay on Criticism 364-65), to estrange the lesson, and propose the reverse: the genesis of sense from sound or as sound. However one speaks it, the stress of Swound hits the ear as a wounded sound. Coleridge must have been remembering this terrific sublimity of sound when he recalled, a decade on, a storm on the lake of Ratzeburg, in sentences so exquisitely tuned to phonics as to suggest an event still in the writer's ear: there was a storm of wind; during the whole night, such were the thunders and howlings of the breaking ice, that they have left a conviction on my mind, that there are Sounds more sublime than any Sight can be, more absolutely suspending the power of comparison, and more utterly absorbing the mind's self-consciousness of it's total attention to the object working upon it. (Rooke, ed. 2: 257) [15] And here, Coleridge may be remembering Burke on the "sublime passion" of "sounds": The noise of vast cataracts, raging storms, thunder, or