Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select PoemsColeridge, Samuel Taylor
General
Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
English poetry
This is the most noticeable of the "modifying colours of imagination"
in "The Ancient Mariner." The practice might be classed as a sort of
personification; but how utterly different in its effect from the
conventional "literary" personifications of the eighteenth century--of
Gray in the "Elegy," for instance! Grandeur, and Envy, and Honour, in
that admirable poem, are not real persons to the imagination; the
abstraction remains an abstraction. But in Coleridge's poem all nature
is alive with the life of men. Other elements of "that synthetic and
magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of
imagination," and which blends "the idea with the image" and "the sense
of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects" will be felt as
the poem is studied.
Wordsworth related in after years that the suggestion for the poem came
from a dream of a phantom ship told to Coleridge by a friend, and that
he (Wordsworth) proposed the shooting of the albatross, the revenge of
the "tutelary spirits," and the "navigation of the ship by the dead
men," and contributed the fourth stanza of the poem and the last two
lines of the first stanza of Part IV. He had been reading Shelvocke's
"Voyages," a book in which he had found a description of albatrosses as
they are seen in far southern waters. Other reading that may have
suggested some of the scenery is described in the "Notes" to the Globe
edition of Coleridge's poems. There are also passages and situations in
the last two acts of Wordsworth's play, "The Borderers," which Coleridge
read with great admiration in the summer of 1797, that have evident
kinship with "The Ancient Mariner," and Wordsworth's "Peter Bell"
(composed at Alfoxden, but printed many years later) suggests what the
story might have become if Coleridge instead of Wordsworth had withdrawn
from collaboration.
"CHRISTABEL" AND "KUBLA KHAN"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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