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An analysis of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' which was published in the Lyrical Ballads collection in 1798. The poem is a lyrical ballad, combining personal experience and emotion with a story, and is considered an allegory of Romanticism. the poem's form, rhyme and meter, allegorical elements, and literary devices such as internal rhyme, inversion, alliteration, anaphora, irony, and personification.
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Remember: this poem appeared in a book of poetry called Lyrical Ballads, published in
Two friends wrote the collection together, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.
They didn’t intend to necessarily begin a new literary movement, but they did: Romanticism.
A ballad is typically a dramatic poem that tells a story. Ballads don’t tell the reader what’s happening but instead SHOW the reader what’s happening.
A lyrical poem is typically dedicated to personal experience and emotion.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is somewhat lyrical, but it’s mostly a story, right?
Thus why it’s called a lyrical ballad.
Most of the stanzas in this poem have four- lines, called a “quatrain,” and an ABCB rhyme scheme, so the second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme.
O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide, wide sea:
So lonely ‘twas, that God Himself
Scarce seemed there to be.
The meter is characterized by a lot of iambs
An iamb is a short beat followed by a long one (or, unaccented syllable followed by an accented one)
An extended metaphor in which a character in a story or poem represents an abstract idea...It usually involves moral or spiritual concepts which are more significant than the actual narrative.
Internal Rhyme
is rhyme that occurs in a single line of
verse.
End rhyme is when a poem has lines
ending with words that sound the same.
Inversion
For poetic effect, Coleridge inverts the word order from time to time.
Alliteration
The repetition of sounds, especially initial consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words (as in “she sells sea shells”).
Although the term is not frequently in the multiple choice section, you can look for alliteration in any essay passage. The repetition can reinforce meaning, unify ideas, supply a musical sound, and/or echo the sense of the passage.
Alliteration
He holds him with his skinny hand (line 9)
The merry minstrelsy (line 36)
The furrow followed free (line 104)
Anaphora
The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around. (line 59-60)
Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy (lines 190-
Irony
(1) verbal irony – when the words literally state the opposite of the writer’s (or speaker’s) meaning
(2) situational irony – when events turn out the opposite of what was expected; when what the characters and readers think ought to happen is not what does happen
(3) dramatic irony – when facts or events are unknown to a character in a play or piece of fiction but known to the reader, audience, or other characters in the work.