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    The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Illustrated Edition): The Most Famous Poem of the English literary critic, poet and philosopher, author of Kubla Khan, Christabel, Lyrical Ballads, Conversation Poems, Biographia Literaria, Anima Poetae, Aids to Reflection
    The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Illustrated Edition): The Most Famous Poem of the English literary critic, poet and philosopher, author of Kubla Khan, Christabel, Lyrical Ballads, Conversation Poems, Biographia Literaria, Anima Poetae, Aids to Reflection
    The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Illustrated Edition): The Most Famous Poem of the English literary critic, poet and philosopher, author of Kubla Khan, Christabel, Lyrical Ballads, Conversation Poems, Biographia Literaria, Anima Poetae, Aids to Reflection
    Ebook71 pages24 minutes

    The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Illustrated Edition): The Most Famous Poem of the English literary critic, poet and philosopher, author of Kubla Khan, Christabel, Lyrical Ballads, Conversation Poems, Biographia Literaria, Anima Poetae, Aids to Reflection

    By Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Gustave Doré

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    This carefully crafted ebook: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Illustrated Edition)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents.
    The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Poem relates the experiences of a sailor who has returned from a long sea voyage. The mariner stops a man who is on the way to a wedding ceremony and begins to narrate a story. The wedding-guest's reaction turns from bemusement to impatience to fear to fascination as the mariner's story progresses, as can be seen in the language style: Coleridge uses narrative techniques such as personification and repetition to create a sense of danger, the supernatural, or serenity, depending on the mood in different parts of the poem. Along with other poems in Lyrical Ballads, it was a signal shift to modern poetry and the beginning of British Romantic literature.
    Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834) was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets.
    LanguageEnglish
    Publishere-artnow
    Release dateMay 2, 2015
    ISBN9788026836162
    The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Illustrated Edition): The Most Famous Poem of the English literary critic, poet and philosopher, author of Kubla Khan, Christabel, Lyrical Ballads, Conversation Poems, Biographia Literaria, Anima Poetae, Aids to Reflection
    Author

    Samuel Taylor Coleridge

    Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher, whose Lyrical Ballads (1798), written with William Wordsworth, started the English Romantic movement. He was born in Ottery St Mary where his father was the vicar, and he was at school with Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt, and spent two years at Jesus College, Cambridge. He is best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, but his critical work, especially on Shakespeare was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. He also suffered from poor physical health that may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses. He was treated for these concerns with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium addiction.

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    Reviews for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Illustrated Edition)

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      I'm glad that Folio Society dedicated their efforts to such short work, and in a single volume. The wood engravings by Garrick Palmer have the same gothic tone even if they are a little too abstract for my taste. I think that Palmer also did the wood engravings for the Folio Society's Moby Dick as well. The poem itself is haunting and clever. I particularly like the moral of not hurting animals linked with the superstitions of sailors. I however fail to see all the connections to Christianity that other reviews mention. I think Coleridge was more fascinated by nature mysticism and old pagan believes and folksy form of story telling. Even though it took barely an hour to read slowly, the poem left me with a bit of a chill. Mainly because it leaves you wondering how much of the Mariners "rime" is a hallucination and how much is based in reality.
    • 5/5
      Many years ago I heard a radio broadcast of Richard Burton reading this which moved me very deeply. I still reread it every so often just as I reread scripture and other writings which remind me of God's pure love for all his creations-even me.
    • 5/5
      This is my all time favorite epic poem for many reasons, among them being the beauty of the words. Coleridge eloquently tells the rough and tough story of the sea with deaths and shootings in a refined manner. Not only is his choice of words well above the average cut, but the order in which he places the words delights the reader. This is a yearly read for me.
    • 5/5
      The Dover edition with Doré's woodcuts adds a whole new dimension to Coleridge's poem. The horror, sublimity, and poignancy are greatly accentuated by them in the Dover edition. If you've read the poem before, loved it or hated it, revisit it in this edition and your opinion will evolve either way. If you haven't read it before, this is certainly no a bad way to become acquainted.
    • 5/5
      Haunting and terrifying story. A poem, a story, a little of everything. Case in point. Don't take your life for granted. Some have it much worse than you. I feel that the author accomplished what many writers before him attempted to capture. He truly scares the crap out of you. Not for your sake but for the Mariners sake. STC truly brings out the chill in the fog and isolation of the world around us. I am an old sailor and I spent many nights out on deck during my off time thinking about this book and the character. It made my life experiences so much more realistic and enjoyable.
    • 5/5
      I mean, I guess it's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by ST Coleridge, but more like it's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Doré, libretto by Coleridge. Either way it's great, and occasioned some great conversations between me and my son on thoughtlessness and doom.
    • 4/5
      Beaton can’t be beaten. First read this one soon after published, to great delight, in cold New England weather that resonate in the Scottish snowstorms. Crofter cottages, illegal stills of course for Scotch, fishermen and the loch, salmon-poaching from streams of the great shooting estates, the barren city vs rich country, the seer firmly grounded in gossip: these populate the Hamish MacBeth novels. Especially the gossip, which “would have been running rife all over the Highlands. At first people would be discreet because the man as so recently dead, but…tongues would begin to wag”(68). Beaton writes with wit, Hamish himself often also witty, and irony: “As he took the long road to Inverness, putting on the police siren so he could exceed the speed limit, he reflected that it would be nice to be one of those private eyes in fiction before whose wisdom the whole of Scotland Yard bowed”(35) Ironically, Hamish is exactly this, a detective in fiction before whom the Scotland Police bow—the smartest ones, anyways, but not his boss, the drunken loudmouth DCI Blair.Under Blair is Jimmy Anderson, who looks to MacBeth for insights into suspects, and who over the course of the next few novels becomes a sidekick. He technically outranks MacBeth, but that’s because Hamish hates the bigger, barren city and refuses or avoids promotion, even crediting Jimmy with his own discoveries. Both Beaton and her avatar Hamish show irony, say about the great police-criminal divide. Researching where the deceased lived in a pretentiously named Culloden House, suggesting a country villa at least—and not what’s now called a villa, of condo’s—Hamish’s companion suggests, “ ‘You could say you were investigating a break-in.’ ‘So I could,” with one brisk blow he smashed the glass…leaned in and unfastened the latch. ‘So there’s the break-in, and here am I investigating it.’”(126)Beaton ironically includes American icons, like a picture of Billy Graham on a single lady’s wall, or this exchange between a young pub flirt and Hamish’s boss Blair: “Kylie, who was fed on a steady diet of American movies, plead the First Amendment. ‘This is Scotland,’ growled Blair, ‘and no’ Chicago’ (193). Although this is a failed love story, where MacBeth gains one night with a tourist, but also her hacking skills that make up for Blair’s not telling him a thing about the case, and she abandons him sans farewell, she did save his life by telling his city superiors his intent to visit the illegal whiskey distillery brothers, who turn out to have a large trade and no qualms. MacBeth satirizes the locale he loves. When people wonder what England was like in the thirties, he says, “Try the Scottish Highlands. Bad teeth, stodgy food, and the last corner of Britain where women’s lib had not found a foothold.”(81) (Astonishing to think that the Humpster-President’s party in the US is as backward as the Highlands about women.)
    • 3/5
      No doubt this reflects a tremendous lack in me, but I don't get it. I got the rhythm, which is drilled into my brain, but the point of the thing eludes me. Sailor kills an albatross, which is bad, the ship is becalmed and everyone except him dies. Now he travels the earth where every so often he meets someone he is compelled to tell his story to. Poor wedding guest is stuck listening to the story, and is moved by it, which makes one of us.

      I have no idea why killing albatrosses should be worse than killing anything else, no idea why he killed it in the first place, and no idea why everyone else should be killed thereby, nor why he is saved to tell the story. I'm going to guess it's something religious, or drug-addled. There are a few catchy lines, but there's a lot more that annoy me being so unnaturally stuffed into the scheme.

    • 5/5
      ‘I closed my lids, and kept them close,And the balls like pulses beat; For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the skyLay dead like a load on my weary eye,And the dead were at my feet.’ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is, inarguably, one of the five or six most important poems ever recorded in the English language. And while Samuel Coleridge may have abhorred the Gothic excesses nourished to increasingly baroque heights during the years he was busy writing literary criticism, a younger Coleridge—perhaps, even, a more naïve and spiritually-aware Coleridge—managed to pen the only one of those five or six paramount poems to feature the supernatural as more than a passing reference: and certainly the only one to regard it with the mingled aura of terror, awe, and beauty that we have come to define as ‘Sublime.’ With this, Coleridge gave birth to Romantic literature (particularly the Romantic as we define it today: the Romantic as it breathes in the works of Mary Shelley, James Hogg, and—later—Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville).The poem is so familiar, that I will avoid summarizing it in detail: suffice it to say that the story of the Ancient Mariner, who kills the albatross and is cursed to suffer at the hands of a Nature that is at turns mournful, spiteful, and furious, is one of the more archetypal scenarios in Romantic literature (and perhaps English literature, and popular culture, as a whole: the tale of the man who underestimates the forces that protect the natural world, and their contingent retribution, has been retold through lenses as diverse as comedy, horror, high fantasy, pulp adventure, and children’s television). Any underestimation of its impact, similar to Shakespeare, can be dispelled with examples of its gifts to popular culture and the popular lexicon: the notion of an ‘albatross hanging about one’s neck’ is a common enough allusion that it borders, nearly, on the cliché; meanwhile, lines like ‘Water, water, everywhere/Nor any drop to drink’ have become references so pervasive that many who have never even read the poem are aware of them. This parallels, say, the aggressive influence of a novel like Frankenstein on the popular imagination; unlike that novel, though, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has not entered the zeitgeist through the vehicle of cinematic adaptation or references in a body of literature that bears little relation to it (although, coincidentally, Frankenstein makes numerous references to Coleridge’s poem, and is one of the earlier works of literature to truly embody the full scope of its impact—aside from operating as an extrapolation upon its central, supremely Romantic theme).I have neatly avoided the relationship of Coleridge to Wordsworth, or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’s inclusion in Lyrical Ballads: these details bear little relation to the concerns of this journal. I will, however, dwell for a moment on the initial details of the poem’s publication: as most are aware, the poem was originally presented without a gloss and utilizing the most arcane variety of spelling; this was corrected in a later publication (which has since become standard) largely because the format was not in keeping with Romantic ideals. That said, though, this return to an earlier, more esoteric device and the mysteries suggested by avoiding comment or explanation, are very much in keeping with the ethos of the Gothic, both as an extension of the Romantic imagination and a separate set of motifs. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’s early concern with itself as a text, by utilizing a unique (and antique) format is both indebted to the early Gothic of Radcliffe, Beckford, and Walpole, and influential on the later Gothicism of the Shelleys, Maturin, and Poe. Reorganized, with gloss and modern spelling, the poem takes on a new, more obvious, concern with itself as a text, which in its own right has become influential on the ‘epic’ poetry of later authors. Interspersed throughout this review (see the original post at therealmoftheunreal.blogspot.com) are several of Gustave Dore’s illustrations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: but this is only the tip of the iceberg: the weight of allusion to Coleridge’s masterpiece over the past two centuries has been so incredible that to list even a dozen of them here would take more space than is permissible; needless to say, the breadth of this fascination with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is not relegated merely to fine art and literature: again and again, up to and including the present day, the poem resurfaces in allusions and analysis both obscure and immediate in forums as diverse as popular music, animated television, and even video games. Still, it must be said, the most impactful and haunting of these references and homages to Coleridge’s famous poetic conceit rest in those that have taken illustration as the nature of their devotions: Dore’s images, while possessing a value to art uniquely their own (and, in many ways, remaining the standard illustrations to Coleridge’s opus), are, as I said, merely the tip of the iceberg. And this, in my eyes, remains the measuring stick by which we judge the canonicity of a given work of literature: not merely how often it is read—nor by whom—nor the nature of its subject matter, nor its ability to stand as a document of its time and circumstances, but by the degree to which it propels Art, and hence Imagination, as a whole, towards higher and higher atmospheres: both by stimulating the creative faculties of other artists and by drawing forth these faculties in the minds of those who have not yet developed them. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is, indeed, one of the great works of English poetry; but it is also one of the great works of world literature in its entirety, standing confidently among works as diverse as The Arabian Nights, Hamlet, and the Bible as a major influence on the art of those who have yet to even experience it first-hand. And for this, Coleridge was a prophet—and a guide.
    • 5/5
      Already having an edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner illustrated by Gustave Doré, I bought this one for the illustrations by my favourite book illustrator, Mervyn Peake.Where Doré beautifully catches the gothic mood of Coleridge's verse, Peake catches the macabre, tenebrous quality of the Mariner's feverish nightmare. In her introduction, Marina Warner tells of how Peake's commissioning editor found his illustration of the Night-mare Life-in-Death too horrifying for its intended 1940s British readership and her portrait was dropped from the first edition, though much reprinted since and included here.Much as I love Peake's work, I wish for an edition printed on better quality paper to present them in the fashion they deserve.As for the poem, what can I say that hasn't been said before and more eloquently?
    • 5/5
      Great setup for Moby-Dick!
    • 5/5
      It's magnificent--a true English epic. I 'cannot choose but hear'. (10/10)
    • 5/5
      The artwork is worth it alone. But of course the poetry is great, too.

    Book preview

    The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Illustrated Edition) - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

    Part the First.

    Table of Contents

    It is an ancient Mariner,

    And he stoppeth one of three.

    "By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,

    Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?

    "The Bridegroom’s doors are opened wide,

    And I am next of kin;

    The guests are met, the feast is set:

    May’st hear the merry din."

    Wherefore stopp'st thou me?

    Wherefore stopp'st thou me?

    He holds him with his skinny hand,

    There was a ship, quoth he.

    Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!

    Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

    He holds him with his glittering eye —

    The Wedding–Guest stood still,

    And listens like a three years child:

    The Mariner hath his will.

    The Wedding Guest

    The Wedding Guest

    The Wedding–Guest sat on a stone:

    He cannot chuse but hear;

    And thus spake on that ancient man,

    The bright-eyed Mariner.

    The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,

    Merrily did we drop

    Below the kirk, below the hill,

    Below the light-house top.

    The Sun came up upon the left,

    Out of the sea came he!

    And he shone bright, and on the right

    Went down into the sea.

    Higher and higher every day,

    Till over the mast at noon —

    The Wedding–Guest here beat his breast,

    For he heard the loud bassoon.

    Red as a Rose is the Bride
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