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In humble trust mine eye-lids close,
With reverential resignation,
No wish conceived, no thought exprest,
Only a sense of supplication (6-9).
To understand the importance of Coleridge’s prayer on his self-proclaimed good night, one has
to look no farther than the eleventh step of the Alcoholics Anonymous recovery program:
“Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we
understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out”
(Alcoholics 59). The correlations are astonishing. Coleridge prays, something he is admittedly
unaccustomed to, but in that prayer, he forms no wishes or expresses any desires. He has simply
resigned himself to the purview of whatever power he is praying to. He has made himself, for
that moment, a servant. This ideal is inherent in his choice of the word “supplication” (9). To
finalize the picture painted of a peaceful night, the author admits he is “weak, yet not unblest”
(11) and references the “strength and wisdom” (13) all around him. In his state that evening
Coleridge almost stumbled upon a tenet discovered by each recovered addict when “We heard
story after story of how humility had brought strength out of weakness” (Twelve 75).
Next, he describes the previous night in detail that would touch the hearts of people who
have experienced addiction, recovered or otherwise, for they would know it well. To start there is
“Desire with loathing strangely mixed” (23). The notion of wanting something so badly that they
hate themselves for it is, sadly, an intimate relation to anyone who has suffered substance abuse.
Their lives have been filled with the realization that “Never was there enough of what we
thought we wanted” (Twelve 71) which inevitably made them “…apt to be swamped with guilt
and self-loathing” (Twelve 45). A few lines later, the author states that one of the things besetting

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