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NOTES ON THE ANCIENT MARINER.

IN the manuscript notes which Wordsworth left behind him stands this record: "In the autumn of 1797, Mr. Coleridge, my sister, and myself started from Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon with a view to visit Linton and the Valley of Stones near to it; and as our united funds were very small, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour by writing a poem to be sent to the New Monthly Magazine. Accordingly, we set off, and proceeded along the Quantock Hills towards Watchet; and in the course of this walk was planned the poem of the Ancient Mariner,' founded on a dream, as Mr. Coleridge said, of his friend Mr. Cruikshank. Much the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's invention, but certain parts I suggested; for example, some crime was to be committed which should bring upon the Old Navigator, as Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution, as a consequence of that crime and his own wanderings. I had been reading in Shelvocke's Voyages,' a day or two before, that while doubling Cape Horn, they frequently saw albatrosses in that latitude, the largest sort of sea fowl, some extending their wings twelve or thirteen feet. 'Suppose,' said I, 'you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime.' The incident was thought fit for the purpose, and adopted accordingly. I also suggested the navigation of the ship by the dead men, but do not recollect that I had anything more to

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do with the scheme of the poem. The gloss with which it was subsequently accompanied was not thought of by either of us at the time, at least, not a hint of it was given to me, and I have no doubt it was a gratuitous afterthought. We began the composition together on that, to me, memorable evening. I furnished two or three lines at the beginning of the poem, in particular,

'And listened like a three years' child :

The Mariner had his will.'

These trifling contributions, all but one, which Mr. C. has with unnecessary scrupulosity recorded,

' And thou art long, and lank, and brown

As is the ribbed sea sand,'

slipped out of his mind, as well they might. As we endeavored to proceed conjointly (I speak of the same evening) our respective manners proved so widely different that it would have been quite presumptuous in me to do anything but separate from an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog. . . . The Ancient Mariner' grew and grew till it became too important for our first object, which was limited to our expectation of five pounds; and we began to think of a volume which was to consist, as Mr. Coleridge has told the world, of poems chiefly on supernatural subjects.” Says De Quincey in his Lake Poets: "

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"In the year 1810, I happened to be amusing myself by reading, in their chronological order, the great classical circumnavigations of the earth; and, coming to Shelvocke, I met with a passage to this effect: - That Hatley, his second captain (i. e. lieutenant), being a melancholy man, was possessed by a fancy that some long season of foul weather was due to an albatross which had steadily pursued the ship; upon which he shot the bird, but without mending their condition.

There at once I saw the germ of the Ancient Mariner :' . . . though it is very possible, from something which Coleridge said on another occasion, that before meeting a fable in which to embody his ideas, he had meditated a poem on delirium, confounding its own dream scenery with external things, and connected with the imagery of high latitudes."

Part the First. If this poem be compared for ballad characteristics with other sea ballads, as the " The Wreck of the Hesperus," "The Ship o' the Fiend," and, in Coleridge's own words, 'The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,'" it will be noticed how closely the first stanza of this last resembles in form the introductory stanza of the Ancient Mariner.'

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"The king sits in Dunfermline town,

Drinking the blude-red wine;

'O whare will I get a skeely skipper
To sail this new ship o' mine?'"

Part the Second: stanza fifth. In the "Sibylline Leaves" (1817), the second line is printed,

"The furrow stream'd off free,"

with the foot-note by Coleridge: "In the former edition the line was,

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'The furrow follow'd free;'

but I had not been long on board a ship before I perceived that this was the image as seen by a spectator from the shore, or from another vessel. From the ship itself the wake appears like a brook flowing off from the stern." But in later editions the earlier and more musical expression was restored. Part the Third: stanza tenth. Notice Milton's picture of

Death:

"That other shape

If shape it might be called that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb;
Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,

For each seemed either - black it stood as Night,
Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell,

And shook a dreadful dart: what seemed his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on."

Paradise Lost, II., 666-673.

Stanza twelfth. In the early editions this was followed by

the stanza:

"A gust of wind sterte up behind,

And whistled through his bones;

Through the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth,
Half whistles and half groans."

Part the Fourth: stanza fourth.

Compare Milton's

"Attended with ten thousand thousand saints; "

Paradise Lost, VI., 767.

and Spenser's

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"All these, and thousand thousands many more."
The Faerie Queene, II., XII., 25.

Stanza seventh, line fifth. The earlier editions have "cloud"

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Part the Fifth: stanza sixteenth. See poems to "The Skylark," by Shelley, Wordsworth, and Hogg.

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Stanza twenty-second. Notice this same echo-effect as a favorite device of Poe, in "Lenore, Ulalume," "Annabel Lee," etc.

Part the Sixth: stanza tenth. Compare Spenser's

"So soone as Mammon there arrivd, the dore
To him did open and afforded way;

Him followed eke Sir Guyon evermore,
Ne darkeness him ne daunger might dismay.
Soone as he entred was, the dore streightway
Did shutt, and from behind it forth there lept
An ugly feend, more fowle than dismall day,
The which with monstrous stalke behind him stept,
And ever as he went dew watch upon him kept.

"Well hoped hee, ere long that hardy guest,
If ever covetous hand, or lustfull eye

Or lips he layd on thing that likte him best,
Or ever sleepe his eie-strings did untye,
Should be his pray; and therefore still on hye
He over him did hold his cruell clawes,
Threatning with greedy gripe to doe him dye,
And rend in peeces with his ravenous pawes,
If ever he transgrest the fatall Stygian lawes."
The Faerie Queene, II., VII., 26-27.

Stanza sixteenth, fourth line. Compare Longfellow's
"I stood on the bridge at midnight,

As the clocks were striking the hour,

And the moon rose o'er the city,
Behind the dark church-tower.

"I saw her bright reflection
In the waters under me,
Like a golden goblet falling
And sinking into the sea.

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Stanza eighteenth, first line. Compare Coleridge's

"Hark! the cadence dies away

On the yellow, moonlight sea."

Remorse, Act III., Sc. I., Song.

Part the Seventh: stanza second. Compare Goldsmith's her

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