The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Herbert Bates
Hardcover
(Longmans, Green, and Co., Jan. 1, 1908)
This is the famous English Classic poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner which is the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. Along with other poems in Lyrical Ballads, it was a signal shift to modern poetry and the beginning of British Romantic literature. This poem relates the experiences of a sailor who has returned from a long sea voyage. The mariner stops a man who is on the way to a wedding ceremony and begins to narrate a story. The wedding-guest's reaction turns from bemusement to impatience to fear to fascination as the mariner's story progresses, as can be seen in the language style: Coleridge uses narrative techniques such as personification and repetition to create a sense of danger, the supernatural, or serenity, depending on the mood in different parts of the poem. In the introduction, Wordsworth says, "many men who have done wonderful things, but the only wonderful man I ever saw was Coleridge." There is a full introduction filled with explanations and example of what is to come in the story in the format of poetry, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in Seven Parts.