Page 63 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Elective English—IV

Notes 5. What accompanied the ship along with the Albatross?
(a) Fog and snow (b) Mermaids
(c) Wind and mist (d) Evil spirits
6. The ship sailed calmly and contently until:

(a) An albatross suddenly landed on the prow
(b) The sun began to set
(c) A ghost ship appeared on the horizon
(d) It crossed the equator

3.4 Summary

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England. He was
also a member of the Lake Poets.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a renowned English lyrical poet, philosopher and critic.
His father, a master of a grammar school and a vicar of a parish, married twice and had
fourteen children. The youngest in the family, Samuel was a student at his father’s school.
He was very passionate about reading.

Samuel came to be known as the poet of imagination, exploring the relationships between
the mind and nature as it exists as a distinct unit.
Poems such as “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan” exhibit Samuel’s
talent for creating strange, disturbing tales filled with magic and fantastic imagery; in
poems such as “Dejection: An Ode,” and “Frost at Midnight” he thinks openly on the
nature of the mind during its interaction with the creative source of nature.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the longest major poem written in 1797–98. It was
published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
is a poem that brings into light the experiences of a sailor who has returned from a long
sea voyage.
In all his roles, social critic, as poet, literary critic, psychologist and theologian, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge voiced a profound concern with explaining a fundamental creative
principle that is essential to both the universe as a whole and human beings.
A legend in his time, Samuel Taylor Coleridge died in 1834 after years of discomfort and
disappointment. According to his friends and family, Samuel failed because of early
expectations and because of hopes that got defeated by drugs and disease.
Written by Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is written in loose, short ballad
stanzas commonly about four or six lines long however, seldom, as many as nine lines
long.
The rhymes are normally alternated in an ABAB or ABABAB scheme. Here also there are
several exceptions; for example, in the nine-line stanza in Part III, rhymes AABCCBDDB
are used.
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a unique and exclusive poem written by Samuel
Taylor Coleridge. It is unique in its purposefully archaic language (“Eftsoons his hand
drops he”), its thematic vagueness, its strange moral narrative, its length, and its odd
scholarly notes written in small type in the margins, and the extended Latin epigraph that
begins it, relating to the multitude of unclassifiable “invisible creatures” that live in the
world.

58 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY