Poetry of Isolation

Abstract

If, in ‘Frost at Midnight’, the imaginative vision of the poem was ‘a confession of need’, this was all the more true of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, the ballad which Coleridge completed just a few months after the conversation poem. ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’, as it was titled in 1798, arose from the language of the Wordsworth circle. It was one of the poems recited amongst the friends, and its form suggests that it was intended to be so. Not only does it relate how the mariner’s strange power of speech enchants the wedding guest, but it appears as an ancient ballad, using deliberately antiquated spelling and diction. Coleridge was renewing his claims to bardic status with a poem which affected a participation in the oral tradition, based on careful research into Percy’s history of ancient ballads.¹ He sought in writing to re-create tradition’s enchantment of its audience by speech, superstition and the supernatural, his task in Lyrical Ballads having been to direct his endeavours ‘to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic’ (BL, ii, 6).